Censorship in Australia - The Case of Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover has courted controversy ever since it was first published in Paris in 1928. Banned from the outset in Australia, its ultimate release proved to be a seminal moment in the country’s secretive censorship regime. Detailing the affair between a frustrated aristocratic housewife and her invalid husband’s gamekeeper, few novels have elicited such scandal upon polite society. Reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover nowadays, the modern reader may find it hard to see what all the fuss was about. Yet, while this subject matter may seem relatively inoffensive by today’s standards, Lady Chatterley’s Lover must be considered within the context of the puritanical Australia of the 1920s-1960s. At this time, Australia had the strictest censorship of any democratic nation. Publications of all kinds were kept under surveillance, and thousands of works were banned as seditious, blasphemous or obscene. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which ironically enough D.H. Lawrence intentionally wrote to confront the censors, was banned in its original form and instead released in seven different expurgated versions (Moore, 2012: 108). In this essay I will chart the history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Australia , from its initial banning to its final release, in light of the environment of censorship.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover fell prey to censorship in both the United Kingdom and Australia. Following the novel’s initial publication in Paris, it was sanctimoniously banned in Britain (Lee, 2011a: 28). Australian censors were quick to respond to the uproar and the Customs service was duly alerted to watch out for it on importation. Resultantly, it came as no surprise when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was intercepted in September 1929. In a ploy to elude censors, the novel was disguised as part of a parcel addressed to a W.A. Webb, South Australian Commissioner for Railways (Lee, 2011a: 28). It transpired that Webb had been sent the package from a Chicago bookseller with whom he had a regular arrangement. Their risk went unrewarded when the novel was declared a prohibited import upon discovery (Lee, 2011a: 30). When Webb, requested his copy back in order to return it to the bookseller, Customs refused. Rather, he was instructed not to become involved with ‘books of that nature’ in the future (Lee, 2011: 30). Not only did importers risk having such works seized at Customs, but to publish them within Australia was punishable under state obscenity laws. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was part of a rush of bannings between 1929 and 1930 of ‘modern’ novels by established authors with strong claims to literary merit, who deliberately pushed the boundaries of the representation of sex (Moore, 2012: 108). In seizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and other scandal prone titles, the Customs Service acted in the belief of protecting everyday Australians from moral contamination (Lee, 2011: 30). Little did they know that this was to be their first sighting of what was to become the world’s most famous banned book (Moore, 2012: 108).

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned upon import to Australia on the precedent that it was labelled obscene. Customs Regulations prevented the importation of any publications that were seen to fall foul of certain criteria, namely those of obscenity, blasphemy and sedition (Coleman, 1962: 30). Of these three measures, works of an obscene nature were considered particularly offensive. This was due to the fear that obscenity had the power to threaten the very moral fibre of society (Lee, 2011a: 31). So prevalent was this concern that the war against obscenity extended far beyond the reach of Customs. Literary censorship functioned on both State and Commonwealth levels (Griffith, 2001: 7). Just as the importation of books was regulated federally under the customs scheme, so the censorship regimes in place under State legislation governed all locally produced publications (Griffith, 2001: 7). While Customs banned books on importation, at state level the police force kept abreast of local publications and raided bookshops that were suspected of holding obscene works (Lee, 2011b: 112). In fact, all that was needed was a single complaint for authors to find themselves on trail for obscenity (Lee, 2011b: 108). Yet the concept of obscenity is arguably entirely subjective and as a result difficult to define. According to the censoring authorities of the time, an obscene work was one that had the apparent power to corrupt readers’ morals and supposedly lead them astray (Lee, 2011b: 108). This sentiment was supported by 1946 Comptroller-General of Customs J.J. Kennedy:

‘The Department has a definite duty to protect the morals of the community by exercising censorship ...There is an insidious campaign to glorify promiscuity and make light of sexual offences. This must react unfavourably on immature minds and does, I fear, create desires which lead to unnatural offences’ (Moore, 2010).

Considering that obscenity is defined by the moral standards of the time, it is no surprise that Lady Chatterley’s Lover fell foul of censors. Not only did the novel depict numerous scenes of a sexual nature, but it also centred on an adulterous relationship. While this was contentious enough in itself, the affair between the aristocratic Constance Chatterley and a lowly gamekeeper acted as a commentary on the archaic class system.

In order to comprehend the furore surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Australia, the novel must be considered within the confines of the moral standards of the time. The main area of contention appeared to be that the novel’s heroine, Constance Chatterley, embarked upon a passionate affair with a man who was not of her class. What was once so shocking, no longer resonates in a modern society that has been shaped by feminism, the dissolving of class barriers and the sexual revolution. Yet, so fearful were the authorities of the persuasive powers of Lawrence’s novel that they promptly labelled it obscene and kept the ban in place until 1965. In The Censor’s Library, Nicole Moore (2012: 104) explains that modern literature had been experimenting with challenging versions of sex and gender for some time by the early 1930s. She argues that the rejection of such modern culture was a defining feature of the interwar period in Australia, where highbrow modernism was rejected as a threatening foreign impulse (Moore, 2012: 105). As a result Customs were suitably horrified by the explicit representations of sex as an essential part of the “full representation of subjectivity, or character and experience”, evidenced in novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Moore, 2012: 108). Additionally, it was the potent combination of sex and social class that proved to be so threatening and subsequently lead to D.H. Lawrence being considered to be the ‘most hounded British author of the 20th century’ (Travis). Such was the level of hysteria surrounding the novel in Australia, that Minster for Customs from 1956-1964, Denham Henty, explained on national television that 'normal healthy Australians would not be interested in the works of D.H. Lawrence...anyway' (Bacon, 2011:202).

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