The Censor's Library

Lost History of Australia's Banned Books

Banned in Australia

Australian censors kept a reference library of banned books from the 1920s to the late 1980s, but after this period the collection mysteriously disappeared. ¹

Customs officials just had to look at material and think, 'oh that looks a bit off, that looks a bit naughty'."They had the power to ban things on the spot if they thought it had no claim to literary merit or artistic merit or scholarly merit."² Banned books included Brave New World and many by George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer and Honoré´de Balzac.

J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was banned in 1957 causing national embarrassment when a copy was found in the Parliamentary Library and it was discovered that the U.S. ambassador had presented copies as an example of his country's fine literature. After this embarrassment the censorship system was overhauled. Before this, even booksellers were not privy to the list and often ordered books that were popular overseas only to have them seized on arrival. ³

It wasn't until 2005 that the Censor's library - all 793 boxes and 12,000 titles of it - was rediscovered in the basement of one of the branches of the National Archives of Australia in western Sydney— unnamed deposit in an uncatalogued file series, pertaining to the Customs department.⁴

1. Moore, Nicole. The Censor's Library: [Uncovering the Lost History of Australia's Banned Books]. St Lucia, Qld: Univ. of Queensland Press, 2012.

2. Censor nostalgia: Historian uncovers Australia's banned books. https://www.abc.net.au/ March 23, 2012.

3. Murphy, Damien. Array of banned books shows Australia on a more innocent page Sydney Morning Herald. January 26, 2013.

4. Osborn, Jennifer. 2014. “The Censor’s Library.” (review) Transnational Literature 7 (1): 1–2.