Richard Neville (writer)
| Richard Clive Neville | |
|---|---|
| Born |
15 December 1941 Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | 4 September 2016 (aged 74) Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation |
|
| Nationality | Australian |
| Notable works | Oz Magazine editor (London, UK); Hippie Hippie Shake; Play Power, Amerika Pyscho; Playing Around, Out of My Mind: From Flower Power |
| Children | 2 |
Richard Clive Neville (16 December 1941 – 4 September 2016) was an Australian writer and social commentator who came to fame as an editor of the counterculture magazine Oz in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was educated as a boarder at Knox Grammar School and enrolled for an arts degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Australian political magazine The Monthly described Neville as a "pioneer of the war on deference".
In late 1963 or early 1964 Neville, then editor of the UNSW student magazine Tharunka met Richard Walsh, editor of its University of Sydney counterpart Honi Soit, as well as artist Martin Sharp. Neville and Walsh wanted to publish their own "magazine of dissent" and asked Sharp to become a contributor. The magazine was dubbed Oz.
Oz hit the streets on April Fool's Day 1963. Its radical and irreverent attitude was very much in the tradition of the student newspapers, but its growing public profile quickly made it a target for "the Establishment," and it soon became a prominent cause during the so-called "Censorship Wars".
During the life of Australian Oz, Sharp, Neville, and Walsh were charged twice with printing an obscene publication. The first trial was relatively minor but they pleaded guilty, which resulted in their convictions being recorded. As a result, when they were charged with obscenity a second time, their previous convictions meant that the new charges were considerably more serious.
The charges centred on two items in the early issues of Oz — one was Sharp's ribald poem "The Word Flashed Around The Arms", which satirised the contemporary habit of youths gatecrashing parties; the other offending item was the famous photo (used on the cover of Oz #6) that depicted Neville and two friends pretending to urinate into a Tom Bass sculptural fountain, set into the wall of the new P&O office in Sydney, which had recently been opened by the Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
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