Red Love as Seditious Sex: Bans on Proletarian Women’s Writing in Australia in the 1930s

Abstract

Compared to the rest of the English-speaking world, Australia was a severe censor of books throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Under the 1901 Customs Act, which restricted the importation of obscene, blasphemous, and seditious goods or articles, including publications, Australian Customs most assertively targeted obscenity, in the varied representation of sex of all kinds. Blasphemy was a less frequent offense but a live one, while increasingly, in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, political offense, termed sedition, galvanized concern. Drawing on wartime statutes, sedition was defined by the 1920 Crimes Act as “to advocate the overthrow of civilized government.” Political censorship of literature, including novels, reached its peak in the 1930s, as Customs and the Attorney General’s department under the conservative United Australia Party’s government acted to curtail, obstruct, and prohibit the importation of English-language, identifiably leftist writing from the publishing hubs of New York, London, and Moscow. By the mid-1930s, the list of titles banned as seditious numbered more than two hundred.¹