Now Mullins has applied his skills in thorough research, forensic examination of evidence and a light wit to the numerous trials in different States which, in 1970-71, determined whether sales of Portnoy's Complaint should be permitted in Australia. That novel, an early one by Philip Roth, was ostentatiously obscene, most notoriously in scenes involving a glass-topped table and a roll of liver. If they lost on a count of obscenity, the book's distributors, Penguin, needed to prove redeeming literary merit.

Would that such a crucial test case had involved earlier bans of worthier books, by Balzac, Hemingway, Remarque, Joyce, Huxley or Salinger. Each of those examples is superior by most criteria of literary merit to trite, silly Portnoy. Even Don Dunstan, a true libertarian, was said to be bored and disgusted by the novel. To confess, so was I. Nonetheless, if you think Portnoy is repugnant, indecent or corrupting, turn on the Internet on any given day.

Even an unlikely and unlikeable item may serve as a symbol. Portnoy became the marker for shifts in community attitudes and emerging resistance to Australian wowserism. The police raids, criminal charges and court trials enforcing censorship were one of the last flicks of the tail from the wowser dinosaurs. Those bullies had inflicted on us early pub closing, a ban on footy on sacred holidays, deference to snobby English ways, and censorship of R-rated films. Mullins is studiously polite in characterising such nonsense as "moral guardianship writ large".

Norman Lindsay, himself accused of obscenity and a gifted drawer of voluptuous women, eloquently condemned the wowsers' "ostrich" policy. That was designed, Lindsay rightly contended, to keep Australia "an ignominious little mental slum". Penguin and Portnoy drove a stake through the heart of sanctimonious, puritanical, bossy-boots Anglo-Australia. Both still deserve our thanks and praise for doing so. After Portnoy, wowsers won few victories even if they managed to hold the line for a while, whether in persecuting gays, prohibiting abortions or sustaining affection for Britain's ruling family.

Mullins happily immerses a reader in the minutiae of his story. We are told about the clothing of three folk in a bookshop queue as well as the precise time at which one of the trials started (10.12am, on the dot). Mullins notes that Patrick White, surely in a self-parodical mood, turned up to testify wearing a homburg hat. Minor players are given their due, especially David Marr (in his remarkably brief legal career) and William Deane QC, as he then was (marshalling and delivering arguments for the defence).

A few slivers of this detail might have been culled; Mullins' reports of some of the trials are allowed to drag on a little too long. Some more commentary on the wider social context - land rights, say, or conscription, or green bans - might have illuminated the setting of the Portrnoy case. For some time now, historians have acknowledged the extent to which, in the years before Whitlam's election, Australians were adopting a more open, tolerant, modern view of the world. Menzies did not die until three years after the Dismissal, but much of his legacy was dead and buried before the ALP's win in 1972.

The narrative is lifted by its cast, particularly by those who cast themselves on the side of convention and conservatism. Wowsers succeeded in making themselves look like ridiculous. As figures of fun, retro bullies, whether Arthur Rylah in Victoria or Eric Willis in New South Wales, were no less obnoxious but far less dangerous. Don Chipp, the ostensibly liberal Commonwealth Minister, is placed in the middle ground, expressing disquiet about the absurdities of censorship yet only belatedly shifting ground on Portnoy. Chipp's equivocation contrasts with genuine liberalism in a fellow Commonwealth country. Only a few years before, Pierre Trudeau in Canada had insisted that "the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation". Nor, he might have added, in its bookshops.

On the other side of the ledger stand publishers willing to take risks and accept costs, but more particularly, a talented team of defence lawyers. Mullins recounts how Deane's cross-examination of a police witness left the copper "like a cockroach flipped on its back". Wowserism generally suffered the same fate. It might seem odd that to use a distinctly American subject and theme to shift attitudes in Australia. Surely, though, our adaptation of Black Lives Matter to the tragic Indigenous deaths in custody is another compelling example.