The link below is to a book review that I didn’t write. The book being reviewed is ‘The Censor’s Library,’ by Nicole Moore. This book is about the banned books of Australia, stored away in an archive and making up some 793 boxes of books. It looks into the history of censorship of imported books in Australia.
For more visit:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/contains-adult-themes-20120316-1va3t.html
At the BookShelf 
This is a very strange list. I had a copy of songs that were banned or at least not played by the BBC during The Gulf War. Rock the Casbah by the Clash makes sense I suppose, but Joan Baez’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ much less so. I seem to recall the song ‘Louie Louie’ was banned in the states because nobody could understand the words so they must be obscene. The invented poet Ern Malley had one of his poems banned in Australia because it described a couple climbing over a gate to get into a park at night. We all know what that was about, don’t we? Pathetic.
It is indeed difficult to fathom why some things are deemed dangerous to society by censorship boards – certainly, there are some things that should be banned and thrown out because of their vileness, subversive nature and the like. Some things just leave you wondering ‘why?’
I think some people just don’t have enough to do with their lives – they have to invent problems to solve. Or not. I’m not sure I believe in censorship at all, but then there are some things, like what goes on in war zones, that nobody should ever see. Hmmmm
I am not a huge fan of censorship either, though I do understand why it is sometimes done. At other times – less so.
Censorship seems to be not about control but about discouraging intelligent thought, which in some ways is worse. We are adults and deserve to be treated as such, including chosing what we see or read etc.