“South Australia has one of the finest governments of the eighteenth century.” So said the satirist Tom Lehrer when the Playford government banned five of the songs he planned to sing at the 1960 Adelaide Festival. Ken Inglis reported on the controversy for the fortnightly magazine Nation.
A few days after the Vice Squad stopped a Festival wine-tasting in Adelaide’s most civilised cellar, Mr Tom Lehrer was sent a letter by the chief secretary, Sir Lyell McEwin. If he wanted to appear, as planned, at the Town Hall on 28 March he must sign an undertaking not to sing “Be Prepared,” or “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” or “An Irish Ballad,” or “When You Are Old and Grey,” or “My Home Town.” This instruction was issued under a clause in the Places of Public Entertainment Act, which empowers the chief secretary to ban a performance, or any part of it, when he thinks this necessary “for the preservation of public morality, good manners and decorum, or to prevent a breach of the peace or danger to any performer or other person.”
“An Irish Ballad” had been sung already by Mr Lehrer in a television program shown in Adelaide. The Sunday Mail now sent naughty bits from two of the other banned songs into most South Australian homes. “The ban,” said the News, “(as always is the case with bans) has also had the effect of creating much wider attention for Mr Lehrer’s songs than they would otherwise have received.”
It was too much for even the Advertiser, which interviewed Mr Lehrer before the concert, reviewed it sympathetically, reported on Mary Armitage’s page what the ladies wore (“HOT NIGHT AT TOWN HALL”), conducted a street quiz of young people (“AGAINST BAN ON SONGS”), printed three letters against the ban and one for it, and made it the subject of an editorial. “Not everyone can appreciate Tom Lehrer’s brand of humour. But it is a sad soul who cannot get a laugh out of the fact that he has been forbidden to sing some of his best-known songs in Adelaide.” The Advertiser thought that “Be Prepared” was “most unfair to a fine movement,” but that the chief secretary had “made us look slightly ridiculous.”
Leaders of local theatre groups wrote in protest to the News. “Mick,” of Largs, wrote to that paper: “The restrictions placed on Tom Lehrer justify SA’s reputation as a wowser state, but also indirectly reflect on Princess Margaret, who enjoyed his show.” A lady from Toorak Gardens implied in the Advertiser, however, that some royals are more royal than others: “Although he boasts of singing before royalty, I am sure our much-loved Queen would not listen to those which have been banned.”
On the day parliament opened, [the premier] Sir Thomas Playford said that the ban was proper. “I notice,” he said, “that similar action was taken in Queensland, so this action was not peculiar to SA.” This was untrue; in Queensland action was threatened by the police commissioner if Mr Lehrer sang “Be Prepared.” He sang it, and nothing happened. Nowhere else in the world, Mr Lehrer says, had a performance of his been censored.
One pleasant effect of the decision was to give a kind of imprimatur from the chief secretary (who is also our chief Scot) to the material that remained. So, with the approval of Sir Lyell McEwin and in the presence of an inspector and two research assistants from the Vice Squad, Mr Lehrer treated a young and crowded audience to a song about Oedipus and his mother (“the most offensive of the lot,” in the author’s view, “but the censors never object because it goes right over their heads”); to the “Masochism Tango (in which one of the milder passage, is: “Go put on your cleats and come and trample me”); and to the “Old Dope Peddler.” Just before interval he swung into the first bar or two of “Be Prepared,” stopped suddenly, and explained that he just wanted to keep the Vice Squad men on their toes. He plugged his record, which he said was banned in Adelaide but on sale at a joint, just past the fourth church down, which had illicit wine tastings. When he sang, in “Merry Little Minuet,”
There’s rioting in Africa,
They’re starving in Spain,
There’s censorship in Adelaide…
the audience clapped, as it were, their hands off.
The last song, which Mr Lehrer called a survivalist hymn, was a sardonic rhymed tract about nuclear disaster, which on this night ended:
When the world is one big ruin
You and I and Lyell McEwin
We will all go together
Wherever we go.
Then came the most popular item of all, a lecture. He hoped this had been “a fitting anti-climax to the Festival of Arts.” It did seem to him that there was a lot of immorality in this town under our very noses. “My Home Town,” he thought, was not as shocking as a newspaper published in our home town, “called, for reasons that escape me, Truth.” A quick content- analysis of the current issue followed. (The next issue of “Truth,” whose poster said GIRL, 12, POSED IN NUDE,” had no reference at all to Mr Lehrer.) From what he had heard about two intimate revues put on during the Festival, the songs in them made “When You Are Old and Grey” sound like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He was puzzled that a song about a severed hand should be forbidden, while [opera singer] Joan Hammond could not only sing to a severed head, but carry it around the stage, and do a dance clearly intended to arouse illicit passions. Not that he wished to be unfair to our community: “South Australia,” he allowed, “has one of the finest governments of the eighteenth century.”
In a television interview Mr Lehrer said that these days “it’s very difficult to do anything but laugh, if you’re really bothered…” The remark is a clue to his whole act and to the demand for it. The audience in Adelaide would have laughed anyway, but the censors made them laugh all the more. They savoured Mr Lehrer and took part in a joyful demonstration against the sour and mindless Puritanism of their rulers. •
First published in Nation on 9 April 1960
