Dimensions
154 x 225 x 35mm
A history of book censorship in Australia – what we couldn't read, didn't read, didn't know, and why we didn't.
For much of the twentieth century, Australia banned more books and more serious books than most other English-speaking or Western countries, from the Kama Sutra through to Huxley's Brave New World and Joyce's Ulysses.
The Censor's Library is the first comprehensive examination of Australian book censorship, based around the author's discovery of the secret 'censor's library' in the National Archive – 793 boxes of banned books, prohibited from the 1920s to the 1980s.
As it has for much of Australia's history, censorship continues to attract heated debate, from the Henson affair to the national internet feed. But federal publications censorship has been a largely secret affair for most of the century, deliberately kept from the knowledge of the public.
The Censor's Library is a provocative account of this scandalous history. Combining scholarship with the narrative tension of a thriller, Nicole Moore exposes the secret history of censorship in Australia.
