19 Mar 09 | Uncategorized
Whistleblower site Wikileaks, winner of last year’s Economist/Index on Censorship New Media award, seems to have disappeared.
The site hit the news this week when it published a secret list of sites blocked by the Danish government. In response, Australia blocked Wikileaks.
Inevitably, Wikileaks then published the Australians’ list of banned sites. And now, no one seems to be able to access Wikileaks.
Global censorship? Or just too much traffic?
Update: it’s back, seemingly intact.
18 Mar 09 | News and features
Australia has blacklisted a webpage from the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks containing an index of URLs censored by Danish authorities.
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08 Dec 08 | Uncategorized
‘An appeal judge in Australia has ruled that an animation depicting well-known cartoon characters engaging in sexual acts is child pornography.
The Internet cartoon featured characters from the Simpsons TV series.’
The rest is on the BBC here
28 May 08 | Comment, News and features
The censorship of an exhibition in Sydney says more about the infantilising impulse of the authorities than it does about art, says Binoy Kampmark
‘A barrier of illiterate policemen and officers stands between the tender Australian mind and what they imagine to be subversive literature’
HG Wells
Art exhibitions can be a hazardous business, especially in Australia. Australia was, at one time, banning more art and literature coming in than going out. The only thing the authorities did not do was burn books and slice canvasses. In terms of ‘western’ democracies, only Ireland pipped Australia to the post of conservative, censoring hysteria.
The work of photographic artist Bill Henson has been added to this registry of ‘indecencies’ that have troubled the Australian conscience. Twenty Henson photographs featuring ‘naked children aged 12 and 13′ were confiscated on 22 May from the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney.
The police are proving rather enthusiastic in prosecuting the case. Victoria’s Assistant Commissioner Gary Jamieson, fancying himself as budding art critic, promises to ‘go through the process of evaluating those works’.
Galleries are being hounded into removing pictures by the new moralists. Some are digging in for the moral onslaught. The Monash Gallery of Art is backing Henson, who, in the words of its director, Jason Smith, ‘has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood’.
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