|
|
Women working in government departments, and for some companies, had to resign once they married.
For the Commonwealth Public Service the marriage bar was not lifted until 1966. It was lifted in 1969 for the Queensland Public Service.
In both cases campaigning and representations were required to end the ban. |
 |
Until 1945 University of Queensland staff had to sign an agreement not to engage in political activity.
Until protest in 1949-50 overturned it, there was a requirement by some faculties for students to wear academic dress to classes.
Women could not wear slacks to classes until 1966. Men were required to wear coats and ties. |
| UQ students in the fifties really did do things like stuffing into telephone booths. It did not just happen in American movies. More seriously, there were college rituals bad enough to provoke media attention and University enquiries. |
| In Queensland, from 1969, there was a rash of prohibitions and charges over books, records, art, and the performance of plays, most of which were not prohibited in other states. Books such as a dictionary of sex, An ABZ of love, were banned. In response a Queensland University Committee on Censorship was formed and rapidly gained support from 200 academics ( FVF348 and Censorship News ). Bans, raids, charges and arrests continued into the seventies over material providing sexual advice. Finally in 1982, public outrage forced the government and police to back down over threats to arrest male actors who appeared nude in a very smoky and obscured conclusion to Flowers, a musical version of a Genet play. |
 |
In Queensland marches required police permission. Fees could be levied on placards. Leafletting was banned. Protesters on any issue frequently had to endure shouts like "Go back to Russia!", "commo's" and the like. Abuse and intimidation of activists featured in the first years of protest on campus (e.g. surrounding an activist and pushing him from person to person). As student protests picked up around 1966 Queensland police reacted with violence. Though this declined as the demonstrations got larger it re-emerged at times and continued to do so into the seventies. A notorious incident was a police riot during the 1971 South African football tour which precipitated a strike at UQ. |
- The Cold War stand-off was based on a nuclear strategy called MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction.
- People feared a third world war with total destruction of populations.
- On the beach, a post-nuclear war novel set amongst people in Melbourne waiting for the radiation to reach and kill them, was an international best seller in 1957, and a major Hollywood film in 1959.
|
Australia's list of banned books was more like that of church dominated Ireland than those of other advanced democracies. Literary censorship loosened through the sixties but literary works continued to be prohibited.
Sometimes scholars were allowed access, but under conditions such as having to return the books to Customs after six months. In 1970 NSW, Victoria, WA and Queensland publishers and bookshops were prosecuted over Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (number one on the NY Times best seller list in 1969). |
 |
The ethos of prohibition was extended to politics. For example, Society for Democratic Action had a Vietnamese report, American War Crimes in Vietnam, seized by Customs on the grounds of "undue emphasis on horror and violence".
Another report on the same topic republished from an American magazine was also banned. This ban was defied and 30,000 copies distributed around Australia. |
|
|
