Oz Magazine

Oz was a short-lived, highly controversial underground magazine that sprang up in the post Chatterley period in the United Kingdom and was the subject of a notable trial. It derived its name from the fact that most of the editors came from Australia, where an initial period of publication (1963–1969) was marked by a prosecution for obscenity in 1964. Between February 1967 and the winter of 1973 forty-eight numbers were produced in the U.K. More than simply “permissive,” Oz was openly “alternative” in advocating sex and drugs as forms of liberation, as well as being satirical and subversive in its campaigns against the police, the judiciary, and the establishment in general. Using the same tactic as radical movements in the United States, Oz used four-letter words in a provocative fashion. Some prime examples are to be found in the quotations from Germaine Greer in the entry for Swearing in Women and in her collection The Madwoman’s Underclothes (1986).

“The statement of our values is ‘dope, rock’n’roll and fucking in the streets’. We know what we mean by this even if straights don’t,” wrote Warren Hague in Oz 42, 54. In an article entitled “Here Come De Judge” in Oz 38 by one “Ned Ludd,” the writer attacked the supposed injustice of “the system”: “Such, however, is the skill of legal brains that 90 percent of the actions of the ruling bastards to steal the wealth from the workers is law” (22). Also alleged is complicity between the judiciary and the police, between “his lordship mafia in ermine” and the “piggies”: “pigs are sexually repressed, politically ignorant, psychologically stunted persons who do a very good job of being automations [sic] of state repression” (23). Numbers of the magazine had such thematic titles as Acid Oz, Gay Oz , and Cunt-power Oz, edited by Germaine Greer.

A prosecution for “conspiring to corrupt public morals” was brought against a particularly outrageous number of the magazine, Oz 28, the “Schoolkids Issue,” published in May 1970. Ironically the number had been largely edited by invited younger readers between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. In an article on the case, Keith Botsford summarized some of the contents:

pp. 8-9 , continued guerrilla action [against the schools] with cartoons whose balloons include “cunt” and “bollocks” [balls]. pp. 10-11 , school atrocities including schoolmaster and schoolboy post fellatio (?) … pp. 14-15 , exams, sex freedom and Rupert Bear in congress with Gypsy Granny. (1971, 68)

The last reference would be the British equivalent of, say, “Charlie Brown in congress with Marge Simpson.” It was a collage or montage juxtaposing Rupert the Bear, a British cartoon symbol of innocence and Gypsy Granny, the creation of Robert Crumb, the American underground cartoonist.

The verdict of the jury on the main charge was not guilty, but they found the defendants guilty of publishing an obscene magazine and of sending indecent articles through the post. More surprising was the severity of the sentences, in which Judge Michael Argyle, Q.C., meted out a prison term of fifteen months for the editor, Richard Neville (and twelve months and nine months respectively for his associates), provoking outrage from many quarters, including several authors and commentators not sympathetic with Oz itself. Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, the moral crusader, took the view that “it is a very good thing that the line has been drawn,” but Kenneth Tynan, the notable drama critic, producer, and literary head of the National Theatre, used a different metaphor: “The battle has been joined between Judge Argyle’s England and a free England.” (Both views were quoted on the front page of Oz 42 .) The sentences were, however, revoked by the Court of Appeal. Although many saw the trial’s significance as being political rather than linguistic, Botsford argued that “The real martyrs” were not the editors, but “the words we use, which in the Ozzian mouth become meaningless” (1972, 72). Oz ceased publication not long after the trial.