Extract from ABC News
Updated
Photo:
Richard Neville (centre), with James Anderson (L) and Felix Dennis (R), pictured in London in 1971. (Getty Images: Dennis Oulds)
Australian author and social commentator Richard Neville has died at the age of 74.
Neville
made a splash in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s as the
co-founder of counterculture magazine Oz, which was known for its use of
satire and pop art alongside serious journalism.The magazine, a partnership with artist Martin Sharp and editor Richard Walsh, specialised in dissent and challenged Australia's censorship laws.
Photo:
Oz magazine tackled social issues such as abortion, gay rights and immigration. (Supplied, file photo)
The first issue of the magazine sold 6,000 copies by lunchtime on the first day it hit the streets.The magazine's targets included Australia's abortion laws and the White Australia policy.
Neville, Sharp and Walsh were charged twice in Australia with producing an "indecent and obscene publication".
Undeterred by the charges, Neville went on to establish a new version of Oz in London, leading to the notorious "Oz obscenity trial" in the UK which saw him given a prison sentence — a decision that was eventually overturned on appeal.
In an interview with ABC Radio National in 2013, Neville said the heady mood of the times that led him to become part of the controversial project.
"There were lots of kind of stuff going on in the ether that was beginning life quite a lot different from the life of our parents, and I guess you could say sex, drive-in movies, rock and roll, the pill, great music all over the world," Neville told the Big Ideas program.
"And somehow I just had the feeling that going to university would teach me something, but there was even something more than that. What's the word for a sort of paradigm shift or something?
"We were going to leave the '50s forever and something interesting and new would take place in the '60s."
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