Will forever be associated with the Oz trial, but wrote a couple of decent books, Play Power and Hippy Hippy Shake – useful for reminding you about the Sixties if you were there.
We saw his arse pumping up and down when he and his girlfriend also had sex for our delectation in a documentary called The Body in 1971, before he returned Down Under…
Anything else? I know he was quite a prominent figure latterly in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-05/oz-magazine-cofounder-richard-neville-dies/7813448
mikethep says
Spotcheck Billy says
I still have my copy of Playpower. Several years ago I opened it up and found a dried marijuana leaf.
I liked Walsh’s comment that he, Neville and Sharp had found a hole in the fence and were the first to squirm through it. RIP
Junior Wells says
He also wrote an excellent and best-selling book on serial killer in India Charles Sobhraj.
For quite a few years he positioned himself as a futurologist, featured regularly on day time talk shows and the occasional corporate gig. After a while I’d think just shut up for a second but nonetheless he was a figure to be respected. A friend of mine David Peperell who started an early Melbourne import record shop Archie n Jugheads posted a nice tribute on Facebook. (Tecoma is a small town in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne)
“I only met Richard Neville once or twice via my friend Martin Sharp, after first seeing him give a talk at the Sydney Poetry Festival in 1965, but he formed a large part of my life. I subscribed to Oz Magazine from its second issue – I am sure I was the only Oz subscriber in Tecoma! – and it showed me a world I really wanted to be part of. I had aspired to be a Beatnik (and still do I guess) after reading Kerouac but Richard seemed to speak of a different kind of society based on Rock Music and hedonism that seemed lots more fun than the kind of serious world the Beats inhabited. Armed with his vision I was able to live the life I had always wanted to and become part of a culture that dominated the 60’s and 70’s in Australia and indeed the World. He was a strange, opinionated, contradictory man but when he spoke it was always from the heart and made lots of sense. As a spokeman for his generation he had no peer in this country and indeed not many overseas either. Vale Richard. We were lucky to have you living in Australia and changing all our lives so much for the better.”
Junior Wells says
And here is Richard Walsh’s obituary from today’s Australian newspaper
OBITUARY.
Richard Neville. Born December 15, 1941. Died, Byron Bay, September 4, aged 74.
Richard Neville was the most charming man I ever met. He didn’t possess the superficial charm of an actor or politician; he was genuinely interested in people and curious about life in all its manifestations. When I first met him, his charm and his raw visceral appeal combined to make him a legendary babe-magnet (a term not yet in existence, but which might have been coined specifically for him). He sat at the epicentre of a vast network of male and female friends, many of whom remained close to him all his life. I was one of those people — part of a Neville diaspora spread in thinning ranks across the planet — who have had to endure in recent times the devastating decline of his boyish enthusiasm and now his death.
Richard and I first met when we were both 21; he was editor of the student newspaper at the University of NSW and I was co-editor of the student newspaper at Sydney University. He had arranged for his friend, Alex Popov, to drive him to an Adelaide student editors’ conference in Adelaide; he wondered whether I and Peter Grose, my co-editor, would like to join him. It was typical of his generosity of spirit; our road trip was of course a rambunctious journey, but it had a very productive outcome. By the end of it we had agreed to jointly produce a satirical magazine aimed at a wider, non-university readership.
We launched Oz on April Fool’s Day 1963 and that became the launch pad for our adult lives. Its first issue was prosecuted for obscenity and we copped it sweet, pleading guilty. But when the sixth issue (published in February 1964) was again prosecuted for obscenity and we were each sentenced to six months hard labour (our brilliant cartoonist, Martin Sharp, being younger, was regarded as being under our vile influence and only given three months’ jail), we fought like tigers and ultimately prevailed. We toured the country raising money for our defence; with two QCs acting for us and a Who’s Who of high-profile defence witnesses, the conviction was overturned.
I never met Richard’s mother, Betty, who lived at Mt Victoria and was a former journalist, whom he occasionally visited. By the time I met him, Richard was living at Mosman with his father, Clive, a World War II veteran who was managing director of Country Life newspaper and whom we affectionately called “the Colonel”. Richard had suffered an unhappy education, mainly as a boarder, at Knox College on Sydney’s north shore. After that he was an advertising trainee at Farmer’s, the department store, while studying commerce at night, before finally switching to arts fulltime. As Oz began to take off, he joined the ad agency Jackson Wain as a copywriter, having been recruited by Donald Horne, who was for a time the creative director there. He also became The Sydney Morning Herald’s film reviewer.
Richard’s sister, Jill, was nine years older than him and no doubt something of an inspiration. In post-war Sydney she had made a mark both as a young writer and as a bewitching bohemian with “older man” escorts such as the cricketer Keith Miller, the journalist Murray Sayle and literary icon Max Harris, before she sailed in 1951 at the age of 19 to London, where she began to establish herself in the literary firmament. At the beginning of 1966, Richard, freed from the trammels of the Oz case, decided to head for Swinging London, accompanied by Martin Sharp and planning to meander in Asia along the way. On arrival in London he and his girlfriend, Louise Ferrier, shared Jill’s Holland Park flat at the very moment when her literary career was about to take off with publication of her highly regarded novel, Fall Girl. After a time Richard and Louise moved out and established themselves at Notting Hill Gate.
Richard told many times the story of how London Oz began. Essentially it started with him being interviewed for the Evening Standard’s Diary and then later being seated at dinner next to Paul Johnson, the then influential editor of the New Statesman. To justify his presence in London he told the newspaper’s diarist that he was in London to start a local edition of Oz; goaded by Johnson, he boasted that he would produce “something between Private Eye and New Statesman.”
Through a combination of his inherent charm and Jill’s excellent contacts, London Oz first appeared on 24 January 1967. Although the magazine took time to establish itself, the next few years were an extraordinary adventure as the British establishment harrumphed in petulant reaction to the magazine’s provocations. There was the infamous “Oz Guide to Taking LSD”, the fold-out poster called “Plant a Flower Child Today”, a special issue on “The Pornography of Violence” and Germaine Greer’s startling homage to groupies titled “The Universal Tonguebath”.
Both Richard and Martin reigned as rock stars in a world of drugs, free love and psychedelic art. Richard became a ubiquitous celebrity, eloquently quotable in the press and appearing regularly on TV; Martin’s iconic posters proved wildly popular. Richard was commissioned by the esteemed publisher, Jonathan Cape, to write a guide to the magical world for which the underground press spoke — that book ultimately, after much sweat and angst, became Playpower (published in 1970).
In an eerie re-run of the Oz trials in Sydney, the so-called Schoolkids Edition of London Oz, published in May 1970, was prosecuted for obscenity. This issue was not specifically aimed at a young readership but it was edited by a group of highly imaginative schoolkids. Nonetheless Richard and his two co-editors (Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis) were held responsible for this new outrage and charged not merely with obscenity but with “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Jim and Felix were represented by John “Rumpole” Mortimer, assisted by a young Geoffrey Robertson; Richard represented himself. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among public demonstrators against the prosecution and they recorded God Save Us to raise funds for the defence, whose witnesses ranged from Marty Feldman to Edward de Bono.
The trial was at the time the longest obscenity trial in British legal history, and possibly the most diverting. At the committal hearing the defendants turned up in schoolgirl uniforms and at the trial the bizarre interventions by the judge, Justice Michael Argyle, caused considerable hilarity. But in the end Richard was sentenced to 15 months in jail (Felix, who later became a media tycoon and a squillionaire, was given a lesser sentence because the judge deemed him “very much less intelligent”).
As had happened in Sydney, the appeal process ultimately quashed these convictions completely. But, disappointingly, over the next two years London Oz’s popularity faded and its last issue appeared in November 1973. Twenty years later The Trials of Oz was turned into a BBC television drama, adapted by Geoffrey Robertson from the actual transcripts and starring Hugh Grant as Richard (it was first screened on ABC-TV on 16 October 1991; Richard and I and our wives watched it at home, amid much joshing, over a pizza and wine).
At the time when London Oz was petering out, I was the editor/publisher of the weekly paper, Nation Review, in Melbourne. I persuaded Richard to come home and join our merry band to launch in October 1973 the Australian counter-culture weekly, Living Daylights. Its mission, as he expressed it, was “to forge a fusion of community action, spiritual desire and individual aspiration”. He produced a lively and memorable paper, to which he contributed his “Harry Gumboot” column; but unfortunately it was up against an entrenched rival, The Digger, which had been launched the previous year by Philip Frazer and others as a collective, in which Helen Garner soon rose to prominence.
When we were forced to merge The Living Daylights with Nation Review in May 1974, Richard continued with “Harry Gumboot” as well as fronting Radio National’s Lateline. It was at this time that he first met Julie Clarke, star reporter on ABC-TV’s GTK, who interviewed him for that program. As she recalls, it was “instant attraction”:
“Soon after we met, Richard went as close as he could ever get to declaring eternal love when he said that someday he thought we should put our books together on the same bookshelf! However I quickly twigged to what kind of promiscuous rake I was dealing with, not to mention he was still with Louise, so I figured it was time to leave the country for the classic overland hippie trip I had been saving up to do. Bizarrely there was a scintillating letter from Richard waiting for me at Poste Restante in every small Himalayan hamlet or Afghani backwater.”
Richard and Julie ended up living together in New York. He was correspondent for London’s Punch magazine, and freelancing for High Times, Soho News and The New York Times. In 1977-79 the two of them collaborated to write the best-seller, The Life & Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, about a serial killer who preyed on pot trail backpackers.
In 1980 he returned to Sydney and joined Mike Walsh on Channel Nine’s Midday Show as a social commentator, travelling the world in search of the offbeat and the significant. He married Julie in December that year and they established a magical home in the Blue Mountains; called “Happy Daze”, over the years it hosted an extraordinary guest list, from Jack Nicholson to Salman Rushdie and Bob Geldof. Richard and Julie raised two wonderful daughters, Lucy and Angelica.
In 1986, he created Extra Dimensions, for the Ten Network, focusing on human potential and green business, before returning to the Midday Show until 1995. In the 90s he wrote a number of books, including his only novel, Playing Around, in 1991 and his memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake, in 1995. The latter was made into a film, which was never released due to the threat of litigation from Felix Dennis and Germaine Greer, who objected strenuously to Emma Booth’s portrayal of her (Sienna Miller played Louise). I have never viewed this notorious stinker and never heard anyone, not even Richard, speak highly of it.
By the mid-90s Richard had emerged as a leading futurist. In 1996 he co-founded the Futurist Network, which he described as “a brainstorming centre for shaping the 21st century” and he was writing for The Bulletin a column called “Beyond the Bottom Line”, in which he explored workplace change. In 1997 he co-launched the Futures Foundation “to provide specialist resources to a growing network of practical futurists, and promote the theory and practice of futures studies”. In 2002 he founded The Neville Freeman Agency with former book publisher, Oliver Freeman, and wrote Footprints of the Future and Amerika Psycho.
He was one of the first people in Australia in the 90s to comprehend the revolutionary changes of the imminent computer age, and to grapple with its social consequences. While some foresaw doom and gloom, he faced the future with his trademark optimism and lifelong positivity.
In the end, Richard was forced to live with what at first was a tightly held secret, that he was in very early-stage dementia. To a man who had always been intrigued by the possibilities of various states of consciousness, he seemed to accept stoically his final journey into Dr Alzheimer’s dark tunnel. His ebullience, his mischievous spirit and his capacity to laugh and create laughter accompanied him to the very end of the Yellow Brick Road, along which this charismatic charmer had insouciantly skipped and entertained for more than half a century.
Kaisfatdad says
Two excellent pieces Junior. What a fascinating chap. Thanks.
A strange fact. His biography, Hippy Hippy Shake, which has been praised before on the AW, was made into a film which never reached either cinemas or the video market. The victim of film conpany polticis, it lurks in some kind of celluloid “purgatory” never to see the light of day.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/jun/02/not-coming-soon-david-o-russell-accidental-love
The trailer looks rather naff but it had a quite decent cast.
Baron Counterpane says
My cultural compass must be misaligned today. I looked at the thread title and thought, “Is it the anniversary of the battle of Barnet or something?”
mikethep says
There’s actually far more on YT about that Richard Neville than this one, or so it seems.
Baron Counterpane says
YT?
mikethep says
YouTube.
Johnny Concheroo says
Time to dig this out. The only one I still have – Issue #46, Jan/Feb 1973. The second-to-last issue before it folded.
Yes, it’s the one with the photo of Germaine Greer with her ankles behind her ears.
http://i.imgur.com/46dNMsG.jpg
mikethep says
As well as a handy selection of the lyrics of Cole Porter, weirdly.
Johnny Concheroo says
In true Oz style, this is the opening line of the Ry Cooder Boomer’s Story review in that issue:
“Bottleneck guitar is rather like speed: used with decorum it can make the world a little bit brighter: used recklessly it strangles the user and bores the listener”
Vincent says
Oz was a good read. RIP.
I do wonder how many folks will pass on a decade or so earlier due to phases of inhaling Camberwell Carrots, smoke not being great for lungs whatever the derivation, the really long term effects now being open to examination in longitudinal effects. The next few decades will tell. Same for three-letter-acronym chemicals. Fun, though. At least for a while.
Junior Wells says
Just watched the ABC news and not one mention of his Alzheimers.
Johnny Concheroo says
I bought OZ on and off from 1967 – 73, including the notorious Schoolkids issue #28. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but the shit hit the fan some time later.
For me that issue was notable not so much for the cartoon of Rupert the Bear sporting a ginormous phallus, but for the first time we ever saw the work of Charles Shaar Murray (one of the schoolkids) in print.
Actually Issue #28 appeared in May 1970 which means CSM (born 1951) would have been 18 or 19, pretty old for a schoolkid. Hmmm….
mikethep says
I sold all mine on eBay (plus a box of International Timeses and one solitary copy of Gandalf’s Garden) to a bloke in the States about 10 years ago. The shipping costs were humungous, but he didn’t seem to care.
Johnny Concheroo says
We/I took it for granted at the time, but looking back I remember that the underground press – especially Oz and It – contained some rather suspect, not to say flat-out dangerous, advice re. sex and drugs.
Kaisfatdad says
I don’t doubt it, JC. But as 50% or so of the content of Oz was illegible thanks to the wacky layout, it probably didn’t do too much damage.
Johnny Concheroo says
Yes, that red lettering over a blue photographic background was always a challenge
Vulpes Vulpes says
It’s mentioned in the first paragraph of their story on the website, that’s odd.
Junior Wells says
perhaps it got edited out
Johnny Concheroo says
It was a good item on the ABC news I thought. Tastefully done.
garyjohn says
Or maybe they just … forgot.
Twang says
“Hippy hippy shake” was a cracking read.
Vulpes Vulpes says
The “oppressive conservatism” against which he railed has weathered the decades rather too well, sadly.
RIP Richard, your writing has always delighted me. Keep the freak flag flying, wherever you are now.