Anson Cameron wrote one of the best Australian novels since Peter Carey’s Bliss. Silences Long Gone didn’t sell. Why? It simply wasn’t PC. It talked about Aborigines with a sense of humour, outback characters, asbestosis, middle class inner suburban values and more. Not exactly fodder for the inner urban cultural left. When I read it in the late 1990s, I fell off my chair with laughter. Cameron’s article is quoted in full below.

“Step into the bookshop of 2050. Don’t be afraid, it’s not the vicious tumult of bigots it once was. Books can’t bite now their teeth have been pulled.

Over there, under R, is Remarque’s All Quiet on The Western Front, in which you will find no mention of war. And over there is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which a rainbow cast of Oompa Loompas labor away – one as tall as Mason Cox. On the middle shelf, under L, is To Kill a Mockingbird set in a 1930s Maycomb Alabama of perfect racial harmony. Does it expose the horrors of racism? Highlight America’s hereditary illness? No. But it’s nice. White folks holler endearments to their black brethren across the street as they pass.

And look over yonder, Shakespeare without the hubris, death, bigotry and name-calling. None of that “Frailty, thy name is cisgender woman”. And if the Bard’s plots neither make sense nor have relevance without the dark, elemental human traits that drove them, then we must concede that precluding sense and relevance is a small price to pay for eliminating the possibility of giving offence. Over there, look, a biography of James Cook in which he never sets sail and the reader is spared the horrors of colonialism. Just his home life.

And there’s Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, once a quintet of prepubescent privileged white busybodies, now five genders, sexualities and races, and none capable of voicing a heterodox thought. Over in the Ws is Patrick White’s Voss. Every sensitivity sheriff who’s had a grievance with it for a century has chipped away at it like a conga line of Puritan vandals at David’s marble member, until it isn’t so much Voss as the dross that was Voss. Agatha Christie? That old hate-monger’s work’s had to be eviscerated to where they’re mere mental massages, little more than platforms for happy endings.

At the back of the bookshop is a door covered by a beaded curtain and watched by CCTV. Either side are signs. To the left: WARNING: THIS ROOM CONTAINS ORIGINAL, UNREVISED WORKS.

To the right of the door: DANGER. BEYOND THIS DOOR, THE PAST EXISTS. WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO WERE THERE.

The books in the back room are wrapped in plastic to prevent browsing. Because in this room Orwell’s pigs still behave as they’ve always behaved. It’s a frightening thought, Orwell’s pigs behaving just as he bid them behave. They seem almost, well, totalitarian. And it hurts to read about them.

What right-thinking parent would let a child wander into that backroom? For all we know it might offer an unredacted Bible or Koran for sale. Those holy books are happily mere brochures now, out here, in 2050, since sensitivity readers sanded their rough bits smooth to make them safe for tomorrow’s believers.

“Every piece of writing is a time capsule. It assembles fragments of its own world and sends them onward to a reader who exists in a different one…” That’s a quote from the Californian writer Jenny Odell that the Sydney Writers’ Festival is using to promote itself this year. Perhaps it was true when she wrote it. It’s not now. Censorious zeitgeist pixies are nibbling away at great works like termites at churches.

One of the sillier diktats of woke culture is that authors ought stay in their own lane, whitey shouldn’t write a person of colour, nor a heteronormative writer write a gay or trans character. But what is a censor doing when bowdlerising historical texts? The past is a foreign place and living folk are alien there. Today’s censors arrive in the past as conquistadors stepping off Spanish galleons among the Aztecs, ready to re-educate natives, convert them, and change those old worlds into simulacra of their own.

Censoring classic works of literature is colonisation of the past by the future. “We are more advanced than you. We are enlightened. You are savages. But we can reeducate you; we can change what you were. Strip Roald down and dress him in these futuristic britches.” (Which won’t fit tomorrow.)

Owners of literary works should be custodians, not co-authors. Sadly, it’s a custodianship ever more skewed by capitalism, in which today redesigns yesterday so as to sell it to tomorrow. People in favour of censorship generally invite its incursions because they imagine a goodhearted, right-thinking person like themselves as Chief Censor. But soon enough it’s generally some Orwellian pig doing it for money or power, knowing you can only own tomorrow by owning yesterday.”