Shooting from the hip

Is Richard Neville, the author of a new book about life during the 1960s, forever doomed to live his life in the past? Larry Schwartz reports.

HE PAUSED in mid-mouthful at an Indian restaurant in fashionable inner suburban Sydney to let out a short, sharp squeal of mirth at the outrageous suggestion that he might be cashing in on the ’60s.

This was incredibly unfair. How could you possibly predict what the fashion might be? For all he knew when he began writing his latest book on the ’60s more than two years ago, shoulder pads and digital phones might be flavor of the month. If only I had been there to see the agonising over the book!
To make matters worse, I had suggested it could be said he had not moved on. As author Robert Drewe noted recently, the famous 1971 Oz trial at the Old Bailey, with its attendant media fanfare, was “a great big nail in censorship’s coffin and a defining moment in the administration of British justice.

“This was young Richard’s Big Moment and you can’t blame middle- aged Richard for wanting to relive it. Quite often.”
For all his fascination with the past, it would be wrong to dismiss him as some hip Peter Pan stuck in the ’60s.

“I think the sort of joint-rolling, ageing hippie caricature of me is quite amusing,” says Neville. “I’m not angry about it.”
Neville makes the point that it was not until he started researching `Hippie Hippie Shake’, his memoir of the ’60s, that he opened two trunks of press clippings, letters, diaries, court records, photos and journals that provided valuable source material.

He is a busy man. He does an irregular column for `The Guardian’, writes for a British underground magazine, `Resurgence’, and gives seminars to organisations such as the Australian Wheat Board and New South Wales Tourist Commission.

“I guess I can describe myself as a feral futurist,” he says of his interest in what he calls corporations with a conscience, ones that go beyond compliance with environmental regulations and seek to set an example.

“We always thought of business as the enemy in the ’60s . . . The guy at the water cooler making fun of the Vietnam demonstrators in the street below him . . .”
But times changed. Neville, if no less passionate now than when he thought a magazine might change the world, has inevitably mellowed.

We had arranged to meet beneath the clock at Central Station.

Looking every day of his 53 years, Richard Neville was hungry after a two-hour train journey from home in the Blue Mountains.

He had had no breakfast. A meal in the city was a bit of a novelty, he said. So we gave coffee a miss and traipsed around Asian food outlets, looking for one that was not too noisy. Finally we took a cab to Paddington where we were almost alone in an establishment with a waiter who calls patrons “buddy”.

We had met to discuss his new memoir that, but for delays in production, was to have been released on April Fool’s Day at a function Neville had hoped would be attended by touring Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

`THE Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw-ups . . .

the ’60s.’ This is the subtitle of a book that started out as a modest yarn about his exploits with the likes of Sydney artist Martin Sharp, and burgeoned into a riveting 366-page memoir of the times.

Neville came to attention as a controversial editor of university magazines including `Tharunka’ before founding the counterculture magazine `Oz’, with Sharp and Richard Walsh, now director of Kerry Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press.

A year after the 1963 launch, `Oz’ was the subject of an obscenity trial and Neville received a six-month prison sentence, later quashed on appeal. With the trial came a taste of celebrity.

“Students wanted our speeches,” he writes. “Glossy mags wanted our portraits, girls wanted our good vibrations. Maybe our little mag was mightier than we thought.”
In the latest `Australian Book Review’, Drewe characterises Neville as “perfect for the times: arty and floppy-haired, with a Jaggerish, big-lipped self-confidence; a skinny smart-alec when that seemed confrontingly un-Australian . . .

“He became a member of the local and then British and international hipoisie, a chum, according to his book, of John and Yoko and Mick and Michael X . . . and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. He spatted and made up and spatted again with Germaine and disagreed with Clive. He beat Jagger and the Stones, Eric Clapton and Roger Daltrey (but not Lennon) to Jenny Kee’s bed . . .”
Was Kee upset by his revelations? “No, she loved it,” Neville says. “Jenny Kee’s reaction was immediately positive.”
He moved to England in 1968, relaunching `Oz’ in London with English illustrator Felix Dennis, now a publishing tycoon whose personal wealth is estimated at $340 million, and an Australian lawyer, Jim Anderson.

The three were charged in 1971 with issuing a publication likely to corrupt public morals and, in a celebrated trial, found guilty and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment before being released on appeal.

Though some of the protagonists are dead Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989; Jerry Rubin died after being struck by a car last year most are still around. Neville, who had fictionalised New Age sexual politics in his 1991 book, `Playing Around’, gave 12 movers and hippie shakers of the ’60s, mentioned in the book, a chance to scan it and suggest changes.

“I set myself the challenge to do a book that the people would like,” he says. “I think that if you are dealing with people of sufficient intelligence, we are all arseholes some of the time and we are all ridiculous some of the time . . .”
The Magnificent Twelve, as he calls them, include: Jim Anderson; painter Caroline Coon; Felix Dennis; fashion industry identity Jenny Kee; lawyer Andrew Fisher; Neville’s sister, Jill; Geoffrey Robertson, QC; and moviemaker Albie Thoms.

Martin Sharp provided “a swag of documentation, the use of his cartoons and midnight-to-dawn reminiscences”. Neville’s former girlfriend Louise Ferrier was consulted over each draft. Walsh provided additional detail.

“I shall not read it,” Germaine Greer wrote back. “Ever.”
Greer listed people “who have had nightmare endings” after writing about her, he says. “She said: `If this doesn’t put you off, you are a fool’.

`I will not read the book ever. But I will not invoke my legal rights . . .’ “I considered her letter very carefully and I thought: `Do I have an ethical right to mention her?’ Germaine constantly wrote about people using their real names as long as I’ve known her . . . So I don’t think she has a right to say, `Hide me from history.’ ” One of the more appealing aspects of the book is the extent to which Neville was willing to examine his own motives, even at the risk of revealing his own egotism at the time.

He laments his inattentiveness to his loyal girlfriend, Louise: ” `Oz’, obscenity and me, me, me took centre stage, crushing all else.”
Was it just attention he sought? “I was producing a monthly magazine without any money whatsoever. There were no investors. So the magazine was living off its sales. And I think that, as editor and publisher and so forth, I was my own PR officer.”
Richard Neville jokes that he has kept bound copies of the earliest issues of `Rolling Stone’ in lieu of superannuation. He says a Sydney second-hand bookshop has a set of Australian `Oz’ for sale at $1400 or more, and London editions auctioned at Sotheby’s go for as much Ë15,000 ($A33,000).

`Oz’ had been fairly unique among underground publications of the time in that it did not toe a Maoist, feminist or any other specific line. “Ours was a self-questioning underground organ.”
If Neville, married with two daughters, sees himself as more effective at parenting than his own parents were, it is only in being less remote. He was tickled when the elder girl, 11, recently chose her first bit of jewellery, a peace sign, at a market in Byron Bay.

Professing to be wary of being tagged an ageing hipster at youth festivals he says he would rather be mistaken for a security guard Neville is nevertheless to see the way in which some ’60s values have exerted an influence on environmental and other issues. He reveals an empathy with the contemporary counter-culture.

“They are not repeating the ’60s,” Neville says of the idealism encountered among people living in tepees in the rainforests of north Queensland. “They have taken elements. They have taken chiffon, tie dye, astrology, and groups like the Doors,” Neville says.

“But there are quite a lot of new things as well. Their idealism makes me feel rather nostalgic and rather moved. I admire what they are doing.”
Nor is there any hint of bitterness. Not at those such as Richard Walsh who comes across as quite priggish, or Felix Dennis, now part of the Establisment against which they once railed.

“This is not a mean-spirited attack,” he says. “This is not a revenge book by any means. Any richness the book has derives from the fact that I got a lot of fantastic feedback by sending it out to people and getting corrections and comments.”
Nor is he at all despairing that the idealism “didn’t really lead to a pulsating countercultural community” such as was envisaged then.

Happy to have been in the thick of it, he points to a 1972 quotation from the `New Statesman’, with which the book ends, that even the delusions of hope among radical intellectuals were of more benefit to society than the realistic assessments of the
evils of human nature “by those who are wise in their times”.

The turmoil of those times contributed to much change for the better. “For all our own self-illusions and our arrogance and hedonism there was a lot of action.”
But to say that he was forever in its thrall? He quotes a Sydney bohemian poet who died in the early ’60s, who had said: “Be cruel to your past and those who would keep you there.”
“If you say that’s still wearing a kaftan and smoking drugs and being at a Rolling Stones concert, so be it. I don’t think it’s true to say that I haven’t moved on.”
`Hippie Hippie Shake’ by Richard Neville. Published by WHA.

THE SUNDAY AGE, 23-Apr-1995