Oz and the 1960s

The sixties was probably the most significant decade of the last century: British society started to shift and change its shape in the 1950s when the young and the working class began to find a voice. The dead hand of the authoritarian status quo began to be prised loose in this country, while in America the more repressive, quasi fascist state had to be confronted more directly, and with bloody consequences. The American fifties were often depicted as a booming middle class Nirvana, but as David Lynch shows in his chiiling opening sequence in ‘Blue Velvet’, beneath the white picket fences lay a seething corruption that would tear the country apart in the next decade.

Continental Europe had not just a cultural war to fight, but a genuinely political one with the communist presence a genuine threat, and not just the paranoid fantasy that was infecting the United States. While Europe spent over two decades fighting the brutal, life destroying communist state,  America pursued a bloody, ideological pogrom against a perceived enemy, as vicious and pointless as any in history. It lost, but at an appalling cost. While slaughtering and degrading a distant part of the world, America also found time to demean its own constitution, and supress and kill its own citizens, all in the name of democracy and the rule of law. 

While other countries confronted their demons, the UK experienced conflict only as an intermittent, post-colonial spasm, but was otherwise a repressed, static country, gradually declining as we recovered from a ruinous War that left us poor, but with the deluded sense that we were still a great power and, as such, entitled to a place among the powerful and dynamic countries that would shape the rest of the twentieth century. We had the appearance of power still, but it was all a dream from which we have never really awakened.

 
The 1960s focussed this festering aftermath of the Second World War and did bring societal changes, but it never ushered in the revolution that the excitable sub-culture I’m concerned with, always think is just a protest away. ‘The Sixties’ didn’t start in 1960 or end in 1969; it gave birth around 1966, was most vibrant in 1968/9 and burned itself out by about 1973. This is the period when the publication I’m celebrating held sway in the febrile zeitgeist, and created a voice, style and personification of the times. 

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OZ magazine was started in Australia in 1963 by Richard Neville and Martin Sharp and suffered the same kind of abuse from the authorities as did its more famous incarnation in London in its turn. In 1966 Neville and Sharp left Australia and followed the cultural exodus to London, where, in 1967, The London OZ was born. Almost from the start it outstripped its origins and became a major element of the counterculture that was finally flourishing in London. 

As I’ve argued elsewhere on this site, the years from the mid fifties to the mid sixties saw an upsurge of theatre, film and literature that that gave a voice to the anti-establishment, working class rejection of the old order, and changed the face of Britain forever. As a result of this loosening of the old order, another cultural revolution was taking place at the same time, and which for a few volatile years gave an image to this country that swept the world. It didn’t have the roots or substance of the first wave, and was essentially a middle class inspired movement centred in London. The so called ‘satire’ boom in the early 1960s gave us David Frost and TWTWTW, and Private Eye among others, but these were essentially Oxbridge inspired middle-class movements, which were prepared to poke the establishment, but never actually spat in its face.

Interestingly the succeeding embodiment of the changed culture was also academic and middle class, but much of it from the exodus of Australians to London. This high profile cadre of intellectuals included Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes, who all helped inform the era that became known as ‘Swinging London’, but were always semi-detached from it: Clive James worked for the Observer and the BBC, but never really contributed anything to the era but social comment, very elegant and witty though that was. Robert Hughes was a major art critic, writer and documentary maker operating in the mainstream art world, who recognized the ephemeral and essentially shallow nature of the counter culture, but still contributed to Oz on occasion, and much admired the ‘Magic Theatre’ issue. Germain Greer was an academic and intellectual who was also happy to get her hands dirty by sampling the freedoms of the new era, including an enthusistic excursion into ‘groupiedom’ which she ecstaticised about at length in Oz; she contributed to the magazine extensively, but was always well aware of its superficial nature of the society it described.

The real driving force that gave the era a face were two of the Australian influx that were also University educated middle class, but who didn’t take their place in the mainstream. Their passions were street publishing and pop art, and with a fellow Australian, Jim Anderson, they brought the example of the Sydney OZ to London and turned it into the face of the anti-establishment, psychedelic counter-culture. The music that was the soundtrack to the sixties was largely home grown, but the driving force that formed the image and the ideology of the times was imported from the Australian academic middle class. There must be a thesis lurking there somewhere.

OZ was a product of its era, but also helped shape that era, and is I think one of its most important elements. It was often insubstantial, chaotic and facile, much like the times it operated in, but it picked up on all the core elements of repressive, stultifying post war society and engaged with them head on, no holds barred. It took on a monolithic moribund society and exposed a corrupt inner core that embraced state censorship, the persecution of homosexuals, police corruption, race relations, drugs, sexual freedom and the Vietnam War. 

OZ took on the prevailing orthodox State culture, and the State fought back – and won. But it was a pyrrhic victory that galvanised the rest of the more mainstream culture that had often despised OZ, into coming out in support. The State, the establishment and the media dismissed OZ and the counter-culture and tried to destroy it, but found that Bob Dylan had it right when he said, ‘the times they are a’changing’. The psychedelic culture was insubstantial and shallow and faded with the sixties, but it was built on a real movement that would not be denied, and by the seventies the freedoms that it had espoused and fought for were largely won. This didn’t usher in a new age of peace and love, just the opposite, as nobody had any idea how to handle the new freedoms and we simply entered a new, but different, era of uncertainty and angst. 

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OZ was the creation of a radical editor, Richard Neville, and a brilliant graphic artist Martin Sharp. They had cut their teeth on Sydney OZ, and transformed the second incarnation into a symbol of the new era in London. It dealt with all the issues that were still holding back the post war generation that was changing society, and was rabidly anti-establishment. It had some fine contributors and some incoherent ones, but was always worth reading just to wake up and smell the coffee. It was groundbreaking in its use of graphics and used all the latest printing techniques and materials to produce copy as a work of art. Martin Sharp was responsible for the look of it and he and Neville produced some issues that were unlike anything that had been seen before and rarely since. 

The magazine was published from 1967 to 1973, and issues are very collectable, and in some cases very scarce. They also play into the collector's dream by often including loose inserts and posters, which can be collectable in their own right, but are often missing. They  often incorporate fold out sections or other non standard printing techniques which can make them very prone to damage, and so increase their collectablity. There were occasional issues which used different colours for the cover, but many dealers and collectors are not aware of the difference, and it is not considered essential to have the variations as part of a complete collection. Some are impossibly rare and correspondingly expensive, and play into the completist side of collecting which can detract from the essential purpose of the collection itself.

What follows is a complete collection of all 48 issues; it isn't perfect, I've never seen one that is, but it is as close as most collections get, and I think provides a complete inventory of the magazine, more so than I've seen anywhere else.

I will be adding another section in the coming weeks that will contain OZ and other underground publications material, and I will revisit the main site as new material or information about the magazines comes to my attention and seems relevant