1.

In 1975, when I was fifteen and in grade 10, my mother told a reporter from the Courier-Mail that the books I was reading in high school would teach me, in her words, 'to be a permissive rebel'.1 Her comments appeared in the paper the next day: 'Mrs. Angel Rendle-Short, of Brookfield, said yesterday that a book given to her daughter, Francesca, as an English textbook at school would teach her to be a permissive rebel/ It also said that I was willing to sit out of English classes in order to protect myself from the danger of being corrupted. The particular book she was complaining about that day was English Today Book 3- do you remember it?

My mother was a morals crusader, a self-confessed 'anti-smut' campaigner and book burner (as I discuss elsewhere).2 She was on a mission from God to save the children of Queensland. It was not only English Today that she wanted to ban: she had a long list of objectionable books, more than one hundred titles, including such books as The Catcher in the Rye, Lady Chatterley's Lover, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Mrs Dalloway, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Gone with the Wind and, the jewel in any censor's crown: Lolita.

So good was she at making a fuss, her regular letters to the editor appeared in the newspaper. She circulated pamphlets and was a regular on talkback radio. She wrote letters to the Governor-General of Australia pleading with him to do something. She was mentioned in Hansard, applauded by the conservative politicians of the time- Joh BjelkePetersen and his mates. She was an active member of STOP and CAREthe Society to Outlaw Pornography and the Campaign Against Regressive Education- as well as a member of the Queensland League for National Welfare and Decency. Her agitation did not go unnoticed.

She was labelled a crazy reactionary and a ratbag; 'anti-professional' by the press and by those who wanted to defend the best of English and American Literature. In a letter to the editor under the heading 'Literature and morals' we read: 'One can only feel concern for the children of such imperceptive parents [ie these moral campaigners], who it seems will 'never never' have much opportunity to develop their own set of values'.3 This was because she took me with her in her campaign, insisted on holding me to ransom when confronting librarians and principals of the schools I attended, and called me 'uneducated at 17 or 18' when she appeared before a parliamentary inquiry into the state of education in Queensland.4

'This is not education/ she insisted, 'this is defilement.'

When I left home to go to university, intent on finding out what a 'never-never' 'permissive rebel' could do under the circumstances, she warned me: 'Whatever you do, don't do English literature,'

2.

My mother is dead now, buried at the foot of the Big Pineapple in Queensland outside a little town called BIi BIi. My mother's name is Angel, and sometimes she was so agitated she was on fire; I could see smoke and flame coming out of her ears, her mouth. The shame I experienced being her daughter colonised my body and my imagination. I felt implicated; it was visceral. I thought: I am my mother. I admit: I was ashamed of her.

Because what we're talking about here are words, the power of words. As Humbert Humbert might venture: 'Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with'.5 My mother too, and oh, how she loved to use them.

In a letter to the Governor-General I found in the National Archives in Canberra, she reminded Sir Paul Hasluck of the meaning of the word 'pornographic'. She wrote: 'To prevent misunderstanding, we accept the Oxford English Dictionary meaning of that word where it is defined as, 'the description of manners of harlots; treatment of obscene subjects in literature', and the OED definition of the word obscene is 'repulsive, filthy, loathsome, indecent or lewd".6

My mother mustered a great list of words to describe her objections to the books on her 'deathlist': 'salacious, undesirable, amoral, repulsive, third-rate gutter trash, blasphemous, moral pollution, seditious, pernicious'. She would be pleased, for example, with the title of a recent conference on books and writing and censorship held in Melbourne: 'To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books/7 She would exclaim: 'Bang on, exactly right,'

In fact, if she were alive today, she would have gatecrashed that conference, demanding to be heard, grabbing the microphone if she could out of hands of the speakers, calling out 'Shame! Shame!' She did not mind creating spectacle. She loved the word 'shame' and shouted it out quite freely whenever and wherever she could. According to the record, she was able to close down meetings of hundreds of people in ten minutes flat.8

'I want to put a motion, I want to put a motion/ she would have cried out.

'Switch her off, switch her off/ would have come the certain response.

3.

In writing about my mother and her 'anti-smut' work, the challenge is to find softness, to find breath. To locate a counter archive; to sing a different kind of song: 'Mrs Angel Rendle-Short of Brookfield said yesterday that a book given to her daughter Francesca as an English text would teach her to be a permissive rebel,'

So I look up the words 'permissive rebel' (like my mother, I, too, like looking up words in dictionaries): 'permissive' meaning tolerant, liberal, especially in sexual matters, from the Latin permissio as in 'permit'. And 'rebel' meaning a person who fights or resists control and authority from the Latin rebellis or bellum as in 'war,'

Permissive rebel. Permissio rebellis. Permit war.

permissive rebel

I like the way this newspaper 'rebel text' is cut out, cut up.9 1 like the way this clipping looks, inserted and pasted into this page, how there are smudges suggesting clouds of meaning: the dirty, rough feel. What delights is the last letter 'e' in the word 'permissive', how it separates from the rest- the way it drops below an imaginary bottom line as if it is being set free and riding away. Like the way the end of my name slides off too with the last three letters- subtly I know.10

daughter, Francesca, as an English text.

There is something to be gained from seeing your name in print.

4.

The house I grew up in, in St Lucia, was a big rambling old Queenslander with lots of rooms to fit us all in.

I still think of my mother sitting on this porch in bare feet and in her favourite housecoat buttoned up to the throat, with a big bible open on her lap. She liked to guard the world this way. I imagine her here now, pixilated in this Polaroid, as though she were a phantom, even though the house where we lived does not exist like this any more due to rezoning, even though my mother is dead.

The house we called 'Durham Street7 was on stilts with a big space underneath. Things went on there- under-the-house. It was where I went to hide and cry as a child and where I did secret wees after school when I was busting and could not get to the toilet upstairs in time. David Malouf calls this thing Queenslanders call under-the-house 'a sinister place and dangerous', but he asserts there can be few Brisbane children who do not associate under-the-house as a break-out of themselves, guiltily he says, because of their first touch or taste of sex.11

In our house, my mother went underneath to pray. In the far comer she had a special room behind a padlock and key, with red velvet curtains inside, pulled across a wall of shelves running ceiling to floor, full of books. Private reading, secret stuff. Everything to do with her agitation. I never dared go into her room without being invited, without asking.

I can see her there now, in her study, secretly reading books, transcribing passages with the typewriter and pasting them onto roneoed foolscap sheets ready for distribution. She made up pamphlets addressed to parents- 'confidential, for parents only'- also to politicians, with lists of suspect books and reasons for her objection, and with transcripts of what she thought were the filthy bits. This, from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: '. . . if you want to know the truth I'm a virgin, I really am ... If you really want to know the truth when I'm horsing around with a girl I have a hell of a lot of trouble finding what I'm looking for, for God's sake if you know what I mean/ And this, from Cider with Roste by Laurie Lee: 'So when, in due time, I breathed the first faint musks of sex, my problem was not one of guilt or concealment but of simple revelation. The early exploration of Jo's body was a solitary studying of maps. The signs upon her showed the way I should go, then she was folded and put away.'12

I helped her collate the pages around the kitchen table and then we would head out onto the streets of Sunnybank, Inala, Rochedale and Wynnum to do a letterdrop- I never did know why she chose those particular suburbs. It was reported at one point that the Queensland police were so concerned about this practice of distribution they thought they might need to arrest her and others like her for possession of pornography.13 Dean Wells, in his book The Deep North, asserts the Queensland police did stop Rona Joyner, the director of STOP and CARE 'in one of their more inspired moves'. He argued: 'It takes a dirty and obsessional mind to go poring over schoolbooks to isolate such passages, as the Queensland police rightly saw'.14 It is a certainly a story that harbours sweet irony. Interestingly, as I write, the Christian Democrat MP Fred Nile is engulfed in an online pornography scandal where he has been identified as one of the biggest viewers of Internet pornography by a NSW audit of parliamentary computers. The claimed reasons: 'for research purposes'.15

5.

There is a photograph my mother kept in her study of us both, taken when I was not yet one year old, taken before my parents migrated to Australia and in happier times- she gave me a copy years later. It reminds me of her, reminds me of her special room underneath the house in St Lucia. It sits on a small wooden bookcase, which houses a collection of all those books she wanted to burn. I have been collecting her 'deathlist' over time, reading the books she objected to, wondering with each one why, exactly, she took issue.

This photograph is the first one I know that exists of us together, just her and me.

Looking at photographs is a bit like reading books. They invite such acute feeling, such intimacy- you want to laugh and cry. I imagine her hands now holding me, the smell of her hair too, the artificial sweetness of hairspray, and her laughter. She is very beautiful, don't you think, has the smoothest of skin?

Looking more closely, I see and feel something else- there is a bridge between the two bodies. See the child's left hand resting on her mother's face, her fingers flat across the chin, fingers close to her mother's open mouth. I fancy I feel my mother's breath puffing across the space between us both to blow warm on my skin. I feel my hand steady on her body- she does not resist either. Her face inclines my way; her chin reaches out to me. Is she showing me love? Is there return longing on her part, does she respond to my touch? Can I read it as 'return desire'?

Desire. I look up the word. In the Shorter Oxford Dictionary the word desire sits between 'de-sip-ient' on the top side meaning 'trifling, foolish or silly' and 'de-sist' on the bottom meaning, 'refrain, abstain, discontinue'. Desire: a word which brings me back to books and reading, back to finding my mother in the archive and her disgust of so many books I have since learned to love, and back to Lolita in particular.

Before investigating my mother, as an adult and as a writer, I always thought she had fixed views on her 'deathlist' of books, views that were easy to dismiss. How wrong I was. The first variation I discovered was that she had a capacity for tenderness. I found a Letter to the Editor she wrote for the Courier-Mail in which she described literature- quoting someone else- as being 'the very breath of society'.16 Then, I read what she thought of Lolita. To quote Humbert Humbert again: 'the beastly and beautiful merged . . . and it is that borderline I would like to fix'.17

6.

Still, when I think about it, I find it really hard to imagine my mother reading Vladimir Nabokov's famous book Lo lita- perhaps others on her list, at a pinch, but not this book. When Lolita was first published in 1955, in the same year that Graham Greene nominated Lolita as one of his favourite three books of the year, it was denounced as 'filth' and 'sheer unrestrained pornography'. When I read it, as an adult, wondering as I did what my mother would have thought, there were certain passages that took on special significance: 'Please, reader: no matter your exasperation with the tenderhearted, morbidly sensitive, infinitely circumspect hero of my book, do not skip these essential pages! Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me'. I try and imagine my mother reading these words. I try and imagine her imagining Humbert Humbert and his Lo-Lo. Lee. Ta.

My mother was a medical doctor, educated at Queens in Belfast, her university education cut in half by World War Two. She had six children and stayed at home to look after them. She supported my father and his medical practice and followed him across to the other side of the world when he was offered a professorial chair in Queensland. She confessed herself that she was never a great reader of literature, until, in 1971, as the story goes, she was provoked to start reading. This what she told Sir Paul Hasluck. Not only did she correspond with him in letters, she also sent him those pamphlets I helped collate with her around the kitchen table.20 She signed these manifestos in her distinctive hand, with our home address on the bottom.

She confesses to Hasluck to being 'thoroughly aroused and anxious and inquisitive' when she set out on what she called 'a long and laborious path of literary research', provoked by a letter to the editor by a senior student.21 She says she was deeply moved by her reading and in response, the Governor-General wrote back, in sympathy: 'Personally I share your deep concern and would wish to encourage you and likeminded people to continue your efforts to maintain the traditional moral and social standards of Australian life.'22

She had done her research on Lolita, too, knew it contravened the Indecent Publications Act in New Zealand, found out it had been 'thrown out'. She wrote: 'Rejected! Vomited! Must we in Australia watch [Lolita] being spooned to our children, and sit back complacently, silently? For silence gives consent.'23 The stakes were high. In her view, if children read this sort of material, even those children from 'upright Christian homes' like her own, they would be 'sucked into the whirlpool of sex, revolt against their parents, drugs, violence, vice and crime.'24

7.

My mother would never have tolerated Lolita staying with us in the main house to corrupt her family of young girls, not upstairs, to lodge itself in our everyday life. No- if she did read Nabokov's Lolita, she would have done this illicit activity downstairs, underneath the house in her study with the red curtains and behind lock and key. I begin to imagine her there, reading by the light of her lamp, surreptitiously, while the family sleeps above. Then, I imagine her trying to understand what it was that she had just read, ordering her wild and 'anxious' thoughts. And it is to these, now, that I turn, her particular way of putting things, the register and tone, her notion of causality, cadence, and breath. Her views expressed in her own voice:

I discovered that boys of 16 and 17 from our great Church schools were reading "The Group" and "Lolita" - both of which have come under national censorship in Australia and New Zealand. Parents reading this should obtain from their local library both these books, and read the second chapter of "The Group", and the first few chapters of "Lolita". The theme of "Lolita" by Nabakov - a prescribed author for English undergraduates at the University of Queensland - is the passional attachment of a middle-aged man for a lovely little girl of twelve. Because one sin leads to another, the book ends in murder. There is no pornography in this book, moreover it is beautifully written. But it is a rotten book, and fit only to be burned. 25

She would have taken her time to compose this response too: 'Because one sin leads to another, the book ends in murder'. But look again, there is no mistaking, she really did think Lolita was good writing. 'There is no pornography in this book, moreover it is beautifully written/ I love the way she puts beautifully and rotten in bold. Do you think when writing this it brought her pleasure? Did she take writing lessons from Vladimir Nabokov? Did she satisfy her inquisitiveness enough? Indeed, was she aroused, as she crossed her t's and dotted her i's? I like to think so.

Images other than those with permissions courtesy of the author.

Notes

1 Courier-Mail, 7/2/1975, 3.

2 See Francesca Rendle-Short, 'Illicit Desire', Overland, #188, September 2007, http://web.overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-188/feature-francesca-rendleshort/; Francesca Rendle-Short, 'The Pig's Head7, Mixed Nerve, July 2010 http://mixednerve.wordpress.com/

3 Courier-Mail, 29/1/1972, 2.

4 Queensland Parliament, Queensland Legislative Assembly, Transcripts of Public Hearings to the Select Committee of Inquiry- Education (Chairman, Mike Ahern), Day 14, 5/9/1978, 11.31am: 795-800. Records [ca. 1978] [manuscript], UQFL81, Box 9 (81/12), Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

5 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, London: Penguin, 2006, 35.

6 Dr Angel Rendle-Short, Letter to The Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck, GovernorGeneral of Australia, 7/8/1971, Ms, August 1971-June 1972, 'IndividualsRequests and Complaints Received From People Within Australia-Dr A Rendle-Short7, National Archives of Australia: A2880, 2/1/3913,

7 BSANZ 2010 Conference, Melbourne, 14-16 July 2010.

8 Sunday Mail, 9/11/1975, 16.

9 Courier-Mail, 7/2/1975, 3. Permission courtesy © Newspix / News Ltd.

10 Ibid.

11 David Malouf, 'First Place: The Mapping of a World7, Southerly 45.1, 1985, 3-10.

12 Dr Angel Rendle-Short, 'Sowing the Wind: Reaping the Whirlwind7, Ms. August 1971-June 1972, 'Individuals- Requests and Complaints Received From People Within Australia- Dr A Rendle-Short7, National Archives of Australia: A2880, 2/1/3913.

13 Courier-Mail, 21/3/1975.

14 Dean Wells, The Deep North, Collingwood: Outback Press, 1979, 99.

15 http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/02/3000349.htm

16 Courier-Mail, 28/12/1971, 3.

17 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 152.

18 Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawon B. Sova, 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature, New York: Checkmark Books, 1999, 304.

19 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 146.

20 Dr Angel Rendle-Short, 'Moral Pollution of Children Through Literature: Information for Christian Parents7, Ms. August 1971-June 1972, 'IndividualsRequests and Complaints Received From People Within Australia-Dr A Rendle-Short7, National Archives of Australia: A2880, 2/1/3913.

21 Ibid.

22 The Rt Hon Sir Paul Hasluck, Letter to Mrs A Rendle-Short, 18/8/1971, Ms, August 1971-June 1972, 'Individuals- Requests and Complaints Received From People Within Australia- Dr A Rendle-Short7, National Archives of Australia: A2880, 2/1/3913.

23 Dr Angel Rendle-Short, 'Sowing the Wind7. As a footnote to these cries of alarm- 7silence gives consent7- while writing this paper I was deeply shocked and disgusted by an offensive advertisement that is currently running on YouTube for the American right-wing, 'creation science7 organisation Answers in Genesis, an organisation my father helped to set up in Queensland in the 1970s. It is of a white boy on a deserted country road with a gun pointing at the viewer, and an over-voice: 'Believe in God or this kid will shoot you in the face7 (http :// w ww.youtube. com/watch? v=miULdI-qocg&NR=l ) .

24 Ibid.

25 Dr Angel Rendle-Short, 'Moral Pollution of Children Through Literature.7

Author affiliation:

Francesca Rendle-Short is a novelist and essayist who loves to write about Queensland, amongst other things. She is the author of the novel Imago and the novella Big Sister (Redress Novellas), as well as short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, and co-wrote the short play Lis. She is the Program Director of Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.