It was a rather shocking revelation, that the long-serving Clarence Alderman, David Traynor, had been charged with the possession of child abuse material. When the matter came to court, there were two items attached to the charge. One was a cartoon and the other a novel.

The cartoon was thrown out, but the novel wasn’t and on the basis of this written text found in his computer’s hard-drive, because it had been deleted, Mr Traynor was found guilty, put on the sex offender’s register and placed on a two year good behaviour bond.

The next day the truth of the matter began to bubble to the surface. The novel was called ‘The Pearl’ and had been first published 130 years ago. It had no classification and could be borrowed from libraries and purchased in book shops, as well as down-loaded over the internet.

Mr Traynor subsequently appealed the court decision and a few days before the hearing Tasmania’s Chief Magistrate, the Honourable Ewan Crawford, commented on the case that he was about to hear and was referred to in the Mercury newspaper as saying, “it was relevant that ‘The Pearl’ could be bought in bookshops if it was indeed child pornography. Its free availability was irrelevant.” (27 July 2011)

One may wonder if it was appropriate for the Chief Justice to be commenting on a pending legal appeal that he was about to hear.

After the appeal, the Mercury reported on 11 August that, “In setting aside the conviction, Chief Justice Ewan Crawford said ‘The Pearl’ was a work of fiction “arguably of historical interest”..... no child was exploited, there was no suggestion Mr Traynor was a pedophile and the impact of a conviction on his economic and social wellbeing and employment prospects were considerable.”

When asked about the outcome, Mr Traynor said, “I do feel very much relieved about what’s happened. Obviously it’s been a very long road and you know there’s some concerns about what’s happened.” When asked if the appeal result had come too late for his career, he said, “Of course it has.”

Now that the dust is settling on this case, it may be wondered how an 1880 work of fiction, which was legally available, could be viewed as illegal in the first place. Why was the classification of the novel not checked before a charge was laid? Why did the Police undertake a fishing trip into a stolen computer that had been retrieved? As the work was not on any list of banned publications, how could it possibly be used to pursue a conviction?

To obtain an answer to this riddle would require extensive research into the whole social, cultural and legal context and how this environment could result in a legally available novel resulting in a conviction and the ruination of an individual’s life, reputation and career. It is as if the law has gone mad, become the criminal and stolen an individual’s life.

We may wonder if we have entered a new age of witch hunts, with a revival of the old Inquisition inspired by zeal for vengeance rather than justice.

In this environment we have seen attacks on the internationally respected photography artist Bill Henson, even by the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Henson’s work was subsequently found to be totally legal.

In recent days the cartoonist Robert Crumb cancelled a visit to Australia, after a local newspaper ran a story attacking his work. His wife became fearful that this hostile environment in Australia might lead to aggressive acts against her husband, so Crumb cancelled his visit.

If Australia continues down this highway, attacking artists, declaring legal works of fiction to be illegal, legally burning the reputations of people in public, what have we become?

When the Vladimir Nabokov novel ‘Lolita’ was first published in the 1950s, it was declared to be pornographic and banned. The work later became acknowledged as a classic, made it onto a list of the top 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century and was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962.

Are we entering an age where ‘Lolita’ will again be banned, burned and people imprisoned for possessing a copy?

It is one thing to protect children, as we must and respect the journey of young adults as they approach the age of consent, but if we end up creating a social mine-field in the name of protection, we may do far more damage to the minds of the young, because they will have no idea about living in a mature and cultured society.

They will know all about forbidden fruit and the secret worlds that are created when society seeks to coat itself with a puritanical sheen. Worse may be the neglect that results when adults avoid children out of fear of being labelled, or finding themselves on the sex offender’s register for doing no more than looking at a legally available 130 year old novel.