Censorship...

FitzGerald, Edward (trans.), The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam – Fitzgerald Translation, Gornall the Publisher, Sydney NSW, nd. (c.1946).

Duodecimo; paperback, staple-bound with decorated snakeskin-embossed paper wrappers in a yapp binding; 80pp., all decorated, with 4 monochrome plates.

Moderate wear; covers rubbed and edgeworn with some marks; some light spotting to the text block top edge; light spotting to the preliminaries; previous owner’s contemporary ink inscription to the first page, along with the retailer’s ink stamp; “Caboolture Historical Society” ink stamp to several points within the text block. Very good.

The history of publishing in Australia abounds with occasions of censorship, especially in the Twentieth Century. There are instances of well-known infamy of which most people are aware, and which seem - to the untrained eye – to be standalone occurrences rather than irruptions of an entrenched policy, locked firmly into place. The importation and dissemination of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, was squelched within these borders (no surprise there – it was suppressed in most parts of the world), but it caused extra tension here due to the fact that he also penned another book entitled Kangaroo, set amongst union organisers in Sydney: why then, it was asked, can we print this book and not that one? The arguments went back and forth… Ulysses by Joyce was also unremarkable in being targeted for suppression and spent time here in limbo, along with Lolita by Nabokov.

Some incidents became stellar news events. When Sir Eugene Goossens returned from Europe with a bunch of material in his luggage deemed to be “pornographic”, his sexual and mystical preoccupations were dragged screaming into the light of day by the Fourth Estate - he lost his job as the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and was hounded out of the country. His time in the spotlight highlighted the works of Sydney witch Rosaleen Norton (with whom Goossens had an intense association) which had also been withdrawn from sale, denied distribution rights and subsequently censored. Later, in the 1970s, the debacle surrounding the publication of “Oz” magazine emerged – a lampooning journal founded, ironically, in the spirit of that bastion of Australian periodicals “The Bulletin” – which led to court cases and headlines and (with the passage of time) guaranteed the future careers of those who produced it as leaders of the Australian art and publications scene. Time apparently does heal all wounds…

These few instances, while shaking the headlines, were the stressed expressions of a more far-flung and pervasive policy. In the post-World War Two era, Australia was wary of being financially bitten, as it had been by Mother England after the First World War – British demand for War reparations at that time crippled the country economically and drove it deep into the Depression. Decisions were made that were aimed at preventing money leaving the country, in order to prop up the local economy in the post-War boom. Comics, pulp fiction – both books and magazines – women’s journals on cooking and craft: it was deemed judicious to prevent such material coming into the country from overseas, with the idea that, if the punters wanted to buy this stuff badly enough, they would create homegrown versions of it, inside Australian borders. There were many ramifications from this decision.

Many standard genre fiction magazines, showcasing works by up-and-coming writers, suddenly developed “Australian editions” with local entrepreneurs buying the re-print rights for local manufacture. Companies like Gordon & Gotch, quickly snapped up Australasian rights for things such as Marvel and DC Comics, “Archie” and “Katy Keene” magazines, even Donald Duck comics, and produced cheap (often only black-and-white) versions from printing bases in Singapore. Local author “Carter Brown” – penner of over 300 pulp titles of exploitative gumshoe fiction - became so popular that his work began to be exported overseas, especially to the US. Anything brought into the country that was deemed a competitor to homegrown versions was quickly denied distribution. The sector most affected by these strictures was the "trashy" end of the literary scale - comics, pulp, ephemera - and so, for the most part, went unnoticed as MIA by the general populace.

However, there was an extra layer to this process as well. On top of considerations about the local economy, there was also a moral tone to these events, and it was these wranglings which invariably hit the headlines. Norman Lindsay spent his last years railing against “wowsers” in Australian artistic circles, referring to those people liable to be shocked by liberal attitudes in personal expression and who, contrarily, prudishly seek it out in order to quash it and deny others their own opinion. The censorship regime which took over Australian print media in the post-War era was laced with this wowser attitude and the times when it was seen to over-reach its ambit were usually the times when the public became pointedly aware of its purse-lipped moral crusaders.

With this particular version of the Rubaiyat, we can see the process in action. To kick off with, the format is quite a cheap one: many publishers looked at this poem as a cost-effective item in their stables. The poem was hugely popular; people would always be prone to shell out for a nice pocket copy of it, for themselves, or as a token of affection for some significant other. As well, it was literature, lauded at the highest levels of academia and considered one of the Western canon’s great works – who could object to its dissemination? Publishers could make small cheap copies of it in ongoing sizable print-runs and still recoup their overheads – we have to remember that there were strict restrictions on paper usage during the War, and for quite some time afterwards too. It was a solid cash cow essentially, and every publisher worth the name was doing it.

As we’ve seen already, the poem lends itself extremely well to illustration and decoration. It costs little more to add two-tone colour effects to the pages, or to insert plates at various points along the way; even to shell out for a fancy cover effect, such as the one utilised here. The only thing you really have to keep an eye on is your illustrator.

In this instance, the artist is simply referred to as “O’Brien”, either because they were well known in magazine circles (possibly a newsprint illustrator*), or because they wished to retain a sense of anonymity. Their illustrations for this edition are somewhat racy it has to be said (given the time period), and this might have caused the publisher some concern. As we’ve seen before, often an artist creates a whole suite of images for the work and these are published in a deluxe edition; subsequent, usually smaller, editions, edit out some of the plates as the size format dwindles. That might have happened here – I’m not sure. The plates that remain are somewhat orgiastic, in that they mainly depict drinking parties peopled with mostly naked individuals, and in the post-War censorship atmosphere, that might have been a headache for the publisher.

That’s not to say that the publisher might not have approved of the artwork or the illustrator; quite the contrary: they might even have been wishing to create a stir by bringing this version out on to the market, with its risqué doodlings. Equally, there might have been many tortuous discussions as to which plates could be included and which ones would have to go by the wayside: it’s just not clear. What is clear though, is that the publisher decided to whack the following trademark on the back cover:

This imprimatur – “Gornall Instructional Publications” – seems to me to be deliberately designed to take the curse off the whole venture. Gornall could easily claim that “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was literature and, as such, they had every right to get it out there to the masses – for “instructional” purposes. So, their artist got a little carried away with the theme – was it that bad? It could surely have been worse, like that stuff that Lindsay bloke comes up with, say. This is clearly a strategy, and many Australasian publishing houses were probably dancing this little two-step at the time.

I have a bunch of these kinds of editions of The Rubaiyat cheaply made in large quantities to serve the market demand, which was surprisingly high. Interestingly, the most ‘edgy’ of them (including many spoofs of the poem) seem to have originated from Queensland: this one, while published in Sydney, has a Brisbane retailer’s stamp on the first page, so maybe there was a concerted effort to flout censorship from up there? Who can say? Regardless, this one seems to have squeezed its way past the notice of the censorship board and to have made its way out into the light on its “instructional” rationale.

The days of the censorship of printed material for economic (and, just quietly, other purposes) has passed us by – it all came undone in the early 80s – but its impacts upon the Australian readership cannot be understated. Maybe it did become the spur for many local authors who - due to the presence within the local market of foreign versions of the stories they wanted to tell - might never have put pen to paper. Maybe, though, they would have started writing regardless. Magazines like “The Women’s Weekly” might never have grown as much as they did, in the face of imported journals like “Better Homes & Gardens” and “Town & Country”. If foreign journals, foreign thinking, foreign writing had been freely available here, we might never have experienced the 60s 'brain-drain' which saw many of our greatest minds - Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes - flee these intellectually-deprived shores for greener pastures. The whole issue goes to prove that our freedoms of printed expression are often not as free as we like to believe and that they’re certainly worth keeping an eye on.

*Actually, her name was Kathleen O'Brien, a well-known comic strip artist of the day...