The banned June 1970 edition of GRIFFIN
The cover of the GRIFFIN June edition featured a dark grainy photograph of a naked woman sitting on the floor illuminated by candlelight. It’s an exploration of shadows and light, blurry and indistinct.
The Melbourne Teachers College banned the distribution of this edition on the grounds it was pornographic.
There is discussion about this event in the VOX-GRIFFIN July edition (pages 4 &5). The editors considered the picture to be ‘art photography’, the College rationale described on page 5 deemed it to be pornographic (pubic hair shadow?) and associated it with ‘poorly written’ articles that were preoccupied with sex. The ‘Vice Squad’ was also invoked in this view, and the potential community reaction to the College and the Education Department. In that response GRIFFIN is criticised for poor content and ‘editorial failure’ for ‘most of the year’. This is not unfamiliar territory of playing the issue (invoking rules), and moving to the personal attack on the competency of the editors (play the person).
Other respondents make secondary comments that the age of College students range from 17 – 50 years (that is adults), and also that the Melbourne Teachers College conducted the Secondary Art and Craft teacher training course where the human body was ‘studied in life drawing and photography’.
The GRIFFIN editors with the support of their SRC decided to reprint the entire addition completely blacked out on every page (with the exception of some social pictures in the middle spread).
This response to the Teachers Collage censorship was intended to make the college students aware these events and actions.
From a broader perspective this incident represents the general community environment in Victoria in 1970 (government, intuitions, law, personal freedom and expression).
Other ‘naked’ pictures were published later in the year (cover of GRIFFIN October edition, and the cover of the VOX October edition), however these did not elicit any College response, possibly because they did not include any blurry suggestion of pubic hair.
The GRIFFIN archive on the VOX page includes both the original banned edition, and the published redacted blacked out edition of the July GRIFFIN.