Page 374 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 1990
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land are called "the Yahoos" - that is where the word comes from. This is how he describes them when he first meets them:
The females were not so large as the males; they had long lank hair on their heads, and only a sort of down on the rest of their bodies, except about the anus and pudenda ... The hair of both sexes was of several colours, brown, red, black and yellow.
What he really is describing is people.
Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.
One of them approaches him and this is how he handles it:
I drew my hanger -
that is, a flat broad sword -
and gave him a good blow with the flat side of it;
So what we have now is a description - remember, they did not have videos 300 years ago - of a violent situation.
When the beast felt the smart, he drew back and roared so loud, that a herd of at least forty came flocking about me from the next field, howling and making odious faces; but I ran to the body of a tree, and leaning my back against it, kept them off, by waving my hanger. Several of this cursed brood getting hold of the branches behind, leaped up into the tree; from whence they began to discharge their excrements upon my head.
So the notion in a video of urinating on people is not so different from Jonathan Swift's satire where he has the notion - in fact, the somewhat more repulsive notion - of people excreting on one another. Would that be banned? Would we be looking to ban the political satirist Jonathan Swift? I am sure many of us would like to ban many political satirists.
As for the misunderstanding, let me refer to some comments made by Andrew Peacock in just the last couple of days. This is part of the problem. On the Diana Warnock show in Perth he was asked about X-rated movies. He spoke about the barbaric elements that relate to children, both sexual and in terms of the horror element. He clearly does not understand what X-rated movies are. He finished by claiming: "Thank goodness censorship is not an issue in Australia". Well, perhaps it is not, but perhaps it will be. But certainly he clearly does not understand and one cannot help wondering whether the Attorneys-General, when they made their decision a few years ago to ban the sale
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