Round 1
What was the name of the author whose book Slave Ship was banned in Australia in 1971? I also need to know why it was banned.
Question posted Monday May 25, 2009
Jane B's answer
Austlit is a database that specialises in Australian literature and is produced by the University of Queensland so I thought that this would be a good place to start this search. I entered “Slave Ship” into the Quick search box and scrolled down the list and found that No. 5 had the entry for Slave Ship with a “banned” symbol next to it.
The author of the book was Eric Corder, the pseudonym for Jerrold Mundis. The biography says he was born in the Midwest USA and is the author of seventeen popular fiction titles, thirteen non fiction books, numerous pseudonymous novels and over 100 short stories, essays and articles. His book Slave Ship was banned in Australia in 1971.
One of the censors wrote that: ‘This is a gruesome, horrifying and apparently semi-factual account of an American slave-ship in the slave trade of the early 19th century. It gives a detailed account of the killing, violence, flogging, torture, rape, brutality, bestiality, sadism and inhuman savagery of the traffic. Most of the book is extremely well written in a tough staccato style, obviously by a professional, and this increases the nauseating effect of the horror.’
The book was released on 29 July 1973.
Access to Austlit is available free from the PCs in Mosman Library.
Ken D's answer
“Slave ship” returns too many results in Google to be of much use. Adding keywords like “novel” and a variety of year dates didn’t help to narrow it down.
I did find an interesting panel discussion Banned books in Australia: from moral crusaders to national security available as a transcript from ABC Radio National but it didn’t shed much light on this particular book.
I changed tack and started searching for lists of banned books in Australia. A cached discussion list email pointed to the government’s Classification Board archives but a search on their database came up blank.
I returned to searching for the author and entered “Slave Ship” in book places like Library Thing and Amazon. Again, too much to sift through, so to get the year, I googled up help on how to find a book that led me to COPAC, combined catalog of the British Library and UK and Irish research libraries …
A quick search showed that the only book from the early 1970s with that title was by Eric Corder.
Then I ran out of time.
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