They don't make filth like they used to. I was at a loose end in my favourite part of town the other day – the English part, by the High Court of Auckland, opposite the stately grounds of Old Government House where the Queen once lay her young head, the streets an index of colonialism (Parliament, Waterloo, Princes) – and decided to hoof down to the Davis Law Library in the Auckland Law School, where I inspected two bound volumes of the Indecent Publications Tribunal Decisions.
They used to make filth that exercised some of the finest minds in New Zealand. The tribunal gathered in rooms and bent their heads to the task of adjudicating whether the public needed to be shielded from such publications as Modern Sunbathing Quarterly and The Alphabet of Copulation.
It existed from 1964 to 1993, and its decisions ranged from ruling whether a publication was either indecent, not indecent, or indecent in the hands of minors under the age of 18. It read filthy magazines. It read filthy comics. It read filthy novels. It had a filthy mind.
They used to make filth that had a vague resemblance to literature. Much of the tribunal's work was occupied with trash. It read an erotic novel which really was titled Some Like It Black.
It notes with terrific disdain that another erotic novel, The Nude Who Never (never what?), "is written by one Ted Mack". So many awful novels, with hectic and improbable narratives, but so what? They provided wild excitement. The tribunal's ruling that The World is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins was indecent can be taken as a recommendation.