One of our staff members is contributing considerably to a News Archiving service at Mu. Any well educated (Masters, PhD or above) users who wish to make comments on news sites, please contact Jim Burton directly rather than using this list, and we can work on maximising view count.
Richard Neville
Richard Neville (15 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. Neville first published the magazine in Sydney in 1963, launching a parallel version of Oz in London from 1967.
In both Australia and the UK, the creators of Oz were prosecuted on charges of obscenity. In particular, No. 28, Oz: Schoolkids Issue became the subject of a high-profile obscenity case conducted at the UK's Old Bailey in the summer of 1971. The defendants were initially found guilty and sentenced to up to 15 months imprisonment, but their sentence was later quashed on appeal. At the time, the case was the longest trial under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, lasting from June 1971 to 5 August 1971.
The Schoolkids Issue had been edited by 20 British teenagers, 5th-and 6th-form students (usually aged 15/16-18). Among various aspects discussed in media and raised in Court, sensitive items included a cartoon montage of Rupert Bear having sex (created by Vivian Berger, aged 16), and a "Jail Bait of the Month" photo page featuring Berti Graham (aged 15).[1] Vivian (16) was been named in the trial indictment,[2] and of the six editors who were interviewed, "all were enraged by the sentences." Berti (15) said that "The charge of corrupting minors is a fallacy [...] We were the minors, and we did it." Anne Townsend, 16 when she contributed the article "I Wanna be Free" which had defended public sex - a "plea for spontaneous copulation" - reportedly "found it crazy that we were in the nick for what she and the others had written." In his memoir (2009), Neville described Berti as "a fifteen-year-old from Aldershot who was sweet and pretty, and dreamed of living in a commune." "Beside her," he wrote, "was Vivian Berger, sixteen, the wildest of the bunch, a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed to have smoked pot at nine and tripped at eleven."[3]
References
- ↑ "‘Fuckin’ great,’ said Felix, as a papier mâché Honeybunch Kaminsky, Robert Crumb’s nubile comic strip character, hove into view on the back of a truck. She was twenty feet high, bare-breasted, wore hot pants and had her hands in her crotch. Honeybunch was a personal favourite of Felix’s. In the Schoolkids issue, one of Jim’s full-page jokes had been to have Berti, the youngest of the editors, pose as Honeybunch and label her, in a parody of the original Crumb poster, JAIL BAIT OF THE MONTH." - Quoted in Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake (London; New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2009).
- ↑ Oz Publications conspired together with Vivian Berger and certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing divers obscene lewd sexually perverted articles, cartoons, drawings and illustrations with intent thereby to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and young persons within the Realm and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires. - Op. cit.
- ↑ Neville. Op. cit.