On St Patrick's Day, 1946, in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the Crown Prosecutor, Leo Little KC, once more rose to his feet before the presiding judge, Sir Edmund Herring, Chief Justice. It had been a long case, a trial for the rare offence of obscene libel. Counsel and judge had delivered their final addresses, and the jury had retired to consider its verdict, which most observers anticipated would be favourable to the accused.

More was at stake than the fate of the defendant, a former seaman named Robert Close. The struggle to control the future is always a struggle to interpret the past, social and personal. In this struggle, culture generally and literature in particular are crucial. They determine our understanding of who we are and whence we come, and thus set the limits within which we can imagine who we might be. In this case, the bewigged judge and prosecutors beneath the royal coat of arms represented a belief in Australian tradition as a continuation of British forms and, behind them, of the values of European civilization. Close stood for the right of the author to tell his story in words that shaped life as he saw it. The working men who provided his characters and the ship that gave him his setting belonged to the tradition of social realism that valued the experience of ordinary men and women, particularly workers, above the forms of a traditional order.