Richard Neville's memoirs mainly cover his time as editor of the alternative magazine Oz, both in Australia and in London, from 1963 to 1971, ending with the trial of the Oz editors for obscenity, a period in his life that was packed with enough drama to make a dozen films or plays. There are many amusing vignettes in this book. mostly to do with sex. Take, for instance, the female students at his Sydney campus who were 'forbidden to wear red' because the Education Department claimed the colour incited lust; or the surfer groopies who 'put on queues' behind the sand dunes, with the last boy in line said to be 'stirring the porridge'. Then there was the ITN crew in free-sex Copenhagen trying to spike Mrs Whitehouse's Ovaltine with strong sleeping pills so that they could sneak out to sample the city's nightlife. And the hippie Neal in Ibiza with his harem of women and his non-stop erection from his daily tablets of the drug Yohimbine. Or the half-crazed Judge Argyle at the Oz trial discussing the proper name for a dildo: 'I think we'd better call it an imitation male penis'. 'Your honour,' Neville replied, 'I think the word male is unnecessary.' The poor judge asks the defence witness George Melly 'what do you mean by this word, cunnilingus?' 'In future', Melly replies, 'I will try to use a better-known expression. Perhaps I am inhibited by the architecture. "Sucking", or "blowing", or "going down". I remember an expression from my naval days, Your Lordship, "yodelling in the canyon" '. 'Do they run this every year?' asks an amazed American onlooker in the visitors' gallery.
The judge gets his revenge by sentencing Neville to 15 months in jail - the equivalent, The Listener magazine remarked, 'to 22 malicious woundings or 14 deaths by dangerous driving'. Neville's eventual release on bail is confirmed on appeal, but for him it marked, he said, 'the end of the Underground press as we know it'. He was anyway disillusioned with hippies - at the top there were people like Timothy Leary for whom happiness had become a warm gun, and the happenings artist Otto Mühl, wanting to decapitate a goose on stage so he could use the head as a dildo; and at the bottom there were 'those who burnt you with bad dope, bounced their cheques, jumped your sureties, wrecked your crashpad'.
He'd never been a 'heavy trips' person himself ('less is more' sums up his advice about drugs for his kids), and nor was he interested in unlocking the mystical secrets of the universe. He was more an observer from the sidelines, someone articulate and unstoned enough to act as a spokesman to the media. 'Please don't confuse the media image of me as a sex-crazed freak with the real me,' he wrote to his sister in Sydney. 'Underneath it all I'm conventionally minded, a bit of a headline junkie and [still the] spotty immature boy ...' His mother sends him occasional gently critical reports on his progress through life in case he should need bringing back down to earth. And Neville seems indeed to have survived the ruination of fame relatively unscathed, taking neither himself nor his times too seriously.
Not seriously enough, in fact. As a journal of events the book is excellent, but it lacks at least a final chapter to assess in more depth the historical significance of those days, if any. Was it simply, as Thomas Wiseman argued, an entire generation 'stuck in the playpen' - no danger to society but to themselves - their talents, their brightness, their bodies? Or was it in essence a spiritual revolution with psychedelics as its holy communion, one that spiralled out of control, spreading too fast beyond the artistic bourgeoisie to the working class youngsters who mixed their psychedelics with mogadon - a premature spiral that nevertheless energised the feminist and environmental and cultural revolutions, and that has come around again, for a new young generation of drug-taking ravers? And to what extent are they making the same mistakes all over again?
Neville is an honest social commentator much needed on this voyage. I am saddened by Germaine Greer's report as I write this of Neville's serious car accident in Majorca. May he make a full recovery. The car, enemy of the human race, spiralling out of control, has claimed another victim. [The latest news is that Richard Neville is back in Australia, with eight broken ribs and a broken sternum, but pleased to be home.]
Previous / Next / Table of Contents