Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Nicole Moore Previous histories of Australian literary censorship have asserted that federal Customs withdrew from literary censorship in the early decades of the century, after its first court case became a public laughing stock in 1901. Peter Coleman’s influential Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition (1962) asserts that in 1928 ‘the complete list of banned works of literature was made up of three books’. This conclusion seems to have been reached on the basis of the paucity of Customs records, however, rather than on positive evidence of more liberal practice. Coleman himself suggests that Customs records were destroyed on the move from Melbourne to Canberra in 1927 and Ina Bertrand’s history of Australian film censorship records a destructive fire in the Sydney Customs House in 1926, where much censorship administration was conducted. Broader evidence suggests that, although its contents varied considerably from 1902, the banned list was much more extensive than three titles before 1928, and publications did not circulate more freely. It was maintained as Customs General Order 890 for most decades of the twentieth century. Expanding upon research for the Banned in Australia bibliography (Austlit 2008), and a forthcoming new history of literary censorship, this paper details instances of the banning of literary titles by federal censorship from 1901 to the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1929. Moreover, it elaborates on the endeavour to reconstruct General Order 890, as an archival impulse in itself determined by contemporary empiricism in bibliography and a return to positivist materialism in histories of the book. What can General Order 890 tell us about the ordering of censored meaning in Australia, both its suppression and reproduction?
