The judge in the Equity Court in an early hearing ruled against Gareth Powell, and said in his summing up: "I am not sure what Barbarella was about but I suspect lesbianism."
If this had not been the case and the customs officers had been made to give evidence, they would have been forced to either commit perjury or accept the magazine was not in breach of community standards.
[8] In the early 1970s, Gareth Powell sold Chance, and other magazines he published including POL, and moved his operations to Hong Kong.
The magazine also published articles and short stories from new authors of note such as Frank Moorhouse,[10] Kit Denton, Gwen Kelly, Robert Williamson and Karl Shoemaker.
[11] Writer and critic Michael Wilding would later record that "mavericks ... Jack de Lissa, Ron Smith and later Gareth Powell had been publishing good, exciting and new fiction in Squire, Casual and Chance International in the late 60s" and added that "[those magazines] provided outlets for the new writing" as "[t]heir editors didn't have that orientation to particular traditions of the short story that the literary magazines seemed stuck to.