JIM Hamill is a bloke you would least expect to be dragged into this infernal election campaign. Ol' Jim lives in retirement on the Queensland central coast, but it is his startling experience as a home-grown manufacturer 40 years ago that has suddenly earned him a starring role.

Jim features in the Parliamentary Information Guide to the "adult retailing" industry, a lobbying tool produced by the champion of the local sex industry, the Eros organisation. Eros has been hammering the major parties over censorship, professing that "a small political elite (Liberal or Labor)" had aligned itself with the church to defy "2 million years of hot-wired human instinct".

That's where Jim, as an early victim, comes in. According to the guide, sexual vibrators were a prohibited import in the 1960s so Jim, then a young Lane Cove lad, built his own from a Coles-brand Embassy torch, a slot-car motor, electric wiring and a rubbery copy of his own pubic magnificence.

"He made over 1000 pieces," says Eros, "which he sold mainly to soldiers. After buying a new car and putting a deposit on a house with the proceeds, Jim's business started attracting unwanted attention.
"One night at a military establishment in south-west Sydney he had just begun his sales pitch to a group of young soldiers when the doors burst open and two of Premier Robert Askin's vice squad detectives entered. They told everyone to leave except Jim, then put a gun to his head and told him he was straying into their territory and that if he ever sold another vibrator he would be in serious trouble."

Thus ended Jim's fledgling business. Today his prototype sits forlornly in the National Museum of Erotica, a sad reminder of hot-wired human instinct denied. The good news is that it still works.