'Australian authors who published in London were occasionally caught in the Customs’ censorship net when their books were sent to Australia. One such was Norman Lindsay, whose novel Redheap was published by the prestigious London firm of Faber. In 1930, acting on a tip-off from London, a Customs official discovered 2000 copies in Sydney, bound for bookshops throughout Australia.
'The novel was described as containing ‘serious reflections on the morality’ of a fictitious Australian country town that bore a striking resemblance to Creswick, where the author spent his childhood. In 1930, the minister announced that the novel was a prohibited import. It was the first time an Australian novel had been banned. There were protests about the ban and Lindsay was quoted in the press as saying that if such actions were allowed to continue, there ‘could be no hope of culture here’.
'Redheap remained on the prohibited list until 1958, though it was freely available in Britain, the USA and other countries. Ure Smith eventually republished it in 1959.' (Publication summary)
Redheap
( dir. Brian Bell
)
Australia
:
ABC Television
,
1972
Z869036
1972
series - publisher
film/TV
Nineteen-year-old Robert Piper has spent all his life in the country. He now starts a new life at university in the city.
Every Mother's Son : A Comedy in Three Act
1932
(Manuscript version)x401473
Z1209539
1932
single work
drama
'...[Norman] Lindsay's novel Redheap, first published in Britain in 1930, was promptly banned in Australia for some three decades. This made Lindsay a hero in the eyes of some younger writers...
With the advantage of hindsight, some critics have wondered what the fuss had been all about, arguing that Lindsay's writings were little more than a kind of adolescent caper, and have now outlived whatever subversive quality they might once have possessed.' (p. 139)
'All serious art breaks the rules-there can be no innovation without some form of transgression. Yet the breaking of rules is not enough to produce serious art, and while the very focus of erotic writing seems to invite transgressions, these are not necessarily liberating or creative. When transgressions lie for the most part in the subject-matter, their translation into literary break-throughs is problematic, and they can in fact be undermined by writing that is bland, conventional and predictable. Literature, it bears perhaps repeating, is not the thing itself but a representation and thus a re-creation of it. Modes of representations are always ideologically loaded and, while the contemporary period has invented very little in terms of sexual practices, it has been able to innovate significantly in terms of representational practices. It remains to be seen what kind of articulation can be found between the two.' (p 39)
