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"We published a poem to highlight hypocrisy. Then all hell broke loose."

Many years have passed since Wendy Bacon's university days. But when you're taking on a government it's something you don't forget too easily.

"We didn't set out to campaign against censorship, we just really valued an opportunity to put our ideas out there."

This act of defiance publishing a profanity-ridden poem was one of many. It would plunge the now-investigative journalist in the midst of a campaign against Australia's strict censors.

And while 2020 presents a completely different world to that which she originally rallied against, Wendy has a warning: censorship is something we should still be concerned about.

Australia has a long and controversial relationship with censorship.

"By the time Australia federated in 1901," Patrick Mullins writes in his new book, The Trials of Portnoy, "there existed already a thicket of laws to prevent publication and dissemination of the indecent and the obscene."

Within 10 years of Federation, Australia was one of the most censorship-heavy nations in the world.

Customs officials were given speed-reading courses and tasked with weeding out blasphemy, sedition and obscenity from Australia's bookshelves.

"One of the things we do in this country is we forget about our history, Mullins told The Drum.

"We look back on change and regard it as inevitable, we regard it as easy. In this case, overcoming the censorship system was a long battle."

A 1969 Roy Morgan poll showed 60 per cent of the public supported maintaining or increasing censorship in the country.

"This idea of protecting the decency of Australians was a really strong one," Mullins says.

Famous works of fiction like DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses by James Joyce were blacklisted in 1929.

Two decades later, Catcher in the Rye and James Baldwin's Another Country joined them.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, against a backdrop of activism and changing attitudes, publishers challenged censorship boundaries.

New South Wales courts were being clogged with cases relating to breaches of obscenity laws, thanks in large part to UNSW student newspaper Tharunka and its editor, Wendy Bacon.

"There'd been an awful lot of self-censorship in Australia leading up to the early '70s and in fact literary journals wouldn't publish anything that was too risky," she told The Drum.

"So we had a view that censorship had to be broken down by direct action. That is, publishing material."

Naked bodies and coarse language featured prominently and often in Tharunka's pages.

Ms Bacon's campaigning continued into the courtroom, and on two occasions even landed her in prison.

In one instance, she and others turned up in nuns' habits emblazoned with sexually explicit poetry. They were accompanied by a man in a gorilla costume, handing out copies of the poem that was the subject of the court case.

"We really believed that the court had no place at all in limiting what we were publishing, so we sort of turned the court into a theatre," she says.

In the courtroom directly next door, another censorship battle was taking place, albeit in a different form. It would go on to change the Australian censorship landscape forever.

Publisher Penguin Books was facing off against the authorities, after illegally publishing Philip Roth's 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint.

The book, which chronicles the therapy sessions of a compulsive masturbator, is salacious even by today's standards.

It was an instant bestseller in the United States, selling 200,000 copies within two months of its release.

But in Australia, "the censors looked for sex and four-letter words," writes Mullins, "and they found them in abundance".

Portnoy's Complaint was added to Australia's list of prohibited imports. Penguin decided to publish it anyway, printing and distributing the books in secret, and coordinating their release on one day in August 1970.

Mullins describes it as the boldest act of censorship defiance in Australian publishing history.

"This was a moment where the cream of Australia's literary elite, where journalists, writers, academics and publishers stood up and said 'enough is enough'."

Ultimately the Publications Classification Board took control of censorship in Australia, and its attention pivoted from literature to imagery.

Following the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972, restrictions were loosened further.

Half a century on, Bacon says the publishing landscape has changed, but the issue of censorship persists.

"There are really serious issues that we certainly wouldn't have been concerned about in the 1970s. Secret trials, raids on the ABC a huge array of national security laws that really do limit the capacity of journalists to investigate," she says.

She cites a recent incident, in which a mural depicting a police van in flames was painted over by police almost immediately after it went up on a wall in a Redfern alleyway.

"When we look at the Black Lives Matter movement and the issue of deaths in custody, I was shocked it would be painted over," Bacon says.

"Political censorship is alive and well in Sydney today."

The chair of Deadly Inspiring Youth Doing Good, Samara Jose, told The Drum First Nations People continue to have much of their history written out of school curriculums.

"We've been censored for such a long time," she says.

"In our schools, our histories aren't being taught Young people still struggle with understanding First Nations histories, and they're fresh out of high school.

"This is why the Uluru Statement from the Heart asks for a Makarata Commission to specifically talk about truth-telling."

Bacon says she still believes the best way to tackle censorship is through direct action.

"You have to do it," she says.

"It involves risks, but where possible, you should just publish."

The Drum airs weeknights on ABC and News Channel.

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The little book, Portnoy's Complaint, that changed censorship and the pioneer activist who says we should still be concerned - ABC News