Richard Neville

Richard Neville, the co-founder and editor of the magazine Oz, who has died aged 74, remains unassailably linked to the late Sixties and early Seventies movement known variously as the “underground”, the “alternative society” or, most realistically, the “counterculture”.

For all its vaunted equality and disdain for “straight” hierarchy, the counterculture produced notable leaders, and Neville, at least within Britain, was perhaps the most outstanding. That he had come from Australia proved no bar; of the movement’s leading lights, a good number were born overseas.

In 1966 Neville and his friend Martin Sharp, lured by tales of “swinging London”, set off, in an East-West reversal of the usual “hippie trail”, to Britain. He launched London Oz (having already attempted a similar magazine in Australia) in early 1967, along with Sharp and Jim Anderson, a fellow Australian and former lawyer. In time they would be joined by one of their street sellers, the former rock drummer Felix Dennis.

Neville wrote for the magazine, but his true skills were editorial. If much of the “underground press” gazed too hard at its navel, Neville, with an expat’s perspective and an entitled rejection of old country shibboleths, looked wider.

He commissioned writers such as Clive James, Alexander Cockburn, Stan Gebler Davies and Colin MacInnes. He promoted untapped talent: notably the political analyst David Widgery and, most presciently, Germaine Greer. Born December 15 1941, died September 4 2016