Access Denied 2021

Book collector and scholar Dr Geoffrey Cains wrote this groundbreaking bibliography of suppressed Australian books after frequently reading in rare book catalogues that certain books were ‘suppressed’.

This word raised several questions: What lay behind the suppression? Who instigated it? And who benefitted from it? Over a period of thirty years, he sought out these books, delving into the circumstances of their suppression and collecting 184 that had a credible and interesting back story.

Until Access Denied, there has not been a bibliography or even a listing of these works. They do not have catalogue entries in any of the state libraries in Australia. Indeed, there appears to be no international database of suppressed books in existence.

Certainly, censored books are listed and have bibliographies devoted to them, but censorship is a state–based and politically driven action that, when modified by changing community standards and mores, may be relaxed over time. In contrast, suppression seeks to permanently remove a book from access by the average reader. Access Denied is the story of these near-invisible books.

About the Author

Medical doctor and bibliophile Geoffrey Cains has worked in the private practice of Clinical Dermatology in South Western Sydney and in public hospitals in New South Wales. He was Head of the Department of Dermatology at Liverpool Hospital, conducted medical clinics, taught undergraduates and postgraduates, and undertook research at the Ingham Institute of Applied Medical Research. He currently has an academic appointment with the University of Wollongong, where he lectures to medical undergraduates in dermatology. As Australia’s leading private collector of Australian literary manuscripts, he established the annual National Biography Award for life-writing in 1996 and the annual National Biography Award Lecture in 1998. His important collection of Australian literary manuscripts and literary letters was acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 2013.

Geoffrey Cains was awarded a PhD in Australian Literature from Monash University in 2016 for his thesis on suppressed Australian books, which lead to this bibliography, Access Denied. In 2018, he was appointed as the inaugural Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales. He is currently working on a bibliography of Cornstalk Books, an imprint of Angus & Robertson.