KEEP AUSTRALIA CLEAN!

Forget the bomb. Ban the internet.

My native country of Australia doesn’t figure often in international news. When it does, it’s usually for its menacing fauna; crocodiles, sharks, spiders, and snakes so toxic they can kill you with a single bite and, for good measure, the horse you’re riding.

All this tends to obscure an area where Australia truly excels. I refer to censorship and repression, where it can hold its own on the world stage with North Korea and the former German Democratic Republic.

It has once again shown star quality in this area by leading the international campaign to ban teenagers from accessing the internet. Since December, it’s been illegal for someone under sixteen in Australia to have an account on YouTube, Facebook, Intagram, SnapChat or any other on-line service. Other countries, including France and Great Britain, are considering similar legislation.

Australia is a victim of its geography. On islands where points of entry are limited, censorship comes with the territory. The isolation that created the kangaroo, koala and platypus led to Britain making it a penal colony for lesser criminals (including an ancestress of mine, as it happens, who was “transported” for stealing an empty bucket. Had it been full, she’d probaby have been hanged.)

The same isolation encouraged the establishment of a cordon sanitaire. Hardly had Captain Cook disappeared over the horizon than the scissors were out. By the twentieth century, legions of civil servants were occupied in cleansing literature and cinema of sex and sedition.

Not only were Ulysses, Lolita ,Tropic of Cancer and Lady’s Chatterly’s Lover banned but Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and James Baldwin’s Another Country . So-called “head” comics by such artists as Robert Crumb, as well as science fiction and fantasy magazines, were routinely seized, along with items even mildly critical of the church, the government or….well, anything the relevant minister disliked.

Film censors were particularly busy. Some cuts showed the niggling precision of those physicists who assay cigarette ash and compute the weight of the smoke. A couple of frames trimmed from Darling saved us from a subliminal flash of Julie Christie’s nipples as she fell forward onto a bed, and BUtterfield 8, while retaining Elizabeth Taylor’s confession to Eddie Fisher that she’d been molested as a child, omitted her admission that she enjoyed it.

Any film regarded as ”horror” was banned, or at least shorn of anything even mildly alarming. I had to wait until I left Australia to see uncut versions of King Kong, Dracula and Frankenstein. As for screen violence, you couldn’t show a switchblade or a broken bottle used as a weapon…You get the point – or, in those cases, not.

So this new ban just picks up where the others left off. Its architect, the government’s eCommissioner, is, ironically, an American.; Julie Inman Grant, a former Microsoft executive from Seattle. In photographs, she displays that steely resolve reminiscent of the robotic matrons of The Stepford Wives. Keeping kids from SnapChat and other occasions of sin is, she says, her “life’s work.” I wish I thought suppression rather than education was the answer to internet misuse. But has censorship ever succeeded in stamping out anything?