Book banning is again all the rage in the United States, with the extreme left and extreme right seemingly unified in wanting to be the ones who decide what we should and shouldn’t be allowed to read. But Australia, in at least one famous instance, went way beyond us.
While Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s celebrated and controversial 1969 novel, was banned by some American libraries (explicit language, masturbation, etc.), in Australia it was declared a “prohibited import,” and its publication became a landmark court case. Penguin, the novel’s Australian publisher, got around the ban for a little while with secret printings but was eventually stymied by the courts. That’s when the bootleg copies started to appear, secretly printed in Melbourne until 1971, when the ban was lifted. (Portnoy’s Complaint remains the last book to have been banned in Australia.)
