RICHARD NEVILLE
INSPIRING OZ PROVOCATEUR
BORN 1941
Sydney-born writer and editor Richard Neville was a protagonist in a series of now-risible obscenity trials which helped hasten the erosion of deference in the 1960s and ’70s. The first of these involved the Australian edition of his taboo-busting counterculture magazine Oz, which Neville edited with Richard Walsh and designer Martin Sharp: sentenced to jail time for disrespect of authority and making light of urinating on government buildings, they were acquitted after public opposition. Neville set up the glaringly psychedelic UK Oz in London in 1967 and in 1971 he was in court again, charged with corrupting public morals, outraging the establishment and printing a vulgar mash-up of Rupert The Bear and Robert Crumb. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded the God Save Us single in the magazine’s support, and the defendants were again acquitted on appeal. After Oz expired in 1973, Neville continued to write on culture, technology and later the environment, and worked in television in Australia. An attempt to adapt his 1995 memoir Hippie Hippie Shake for the screen, with Cillian Murphy playing Neville, would prove unsuccessful.