Henry Mayer, the libertarian academic, told him of a Customs archive no outsider had ever examined. Coleman got access and was able to catalogue the whole sorry business of confiscations at wharves and airports. The first book banned by the new Commonwealth was Balzac's Droll Stories in July 1901. Banning really got under way in the Depression and there was still a substantial list of forbidden literature when Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition first appeared. J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 and a hundred or so other titles were still being confiscated at airports.
Censorship always involves targets.
From the 1930s, a perpetual target was Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre. Customs had released the book in the late 1950s but it was immediately and successfully prosecuted by police in Victoria. We Were the Rats, had just been republished but in an expurgated edition. Up in Queensland the Literature Board of Review was busier and sillier than ever, banning an edition of Weekend magazine because a bottle-blonde Jayne Mansfield was on the cover. Ahead lay the prosecution of Oz magazine, the heroic dismantling of Canberra's censorship by Don Chipp, the trial of Portnoy's Complaint, which was the death knell of police supervision of literature, a second, more radical liberalisation in Canberra under Lionel Murphy, the skilful rearguard campaigns of pro-censorship forces and the federal compact that established today's Office of Film and Literature Classification.