My memories of Oz were triggered as I was browsing through the many profiles of antiquarian booksellers by Sheila Markham, created for the periodicals Bookdealer and The Book Collector. The profile in question is that of Carl Williams, a specialist in counterculture. He relates having sold a collection of protest posters to Felix Dennis, art director of Oz (UK) and that he used to catalogue his collection of books on trees. “He also collected trees, and established the Heart of England Forest that stretches from the ancient Forest of Arden to the edge of the Vale of Evesham. The entire profits from his very lucrative publishing company went into trees. I remember him saying, ‘Don’t worry about leaving the gate of the arboretum open, they can’t run away.’ By the time of his death in 2014, Dennis had planted over a million trees.”
I had no idea.
I definitely have or used to have one issue of Oz but I cannot find it and so sadly cannot illustrate it here. The original Australian version ran to 41 issues between 1963 and 1969, edited by Richard Neville, Richard Walsh, Martin Sharp and others. Martin Sharp was a prolific creator of unmistakeable psychedelic artwork, for example the album covers for the Cream albums Cream and Disraeli Gears. Think Grateful Dead. A complete run would today cost well into four figures. The UK version ran from 1967 to 1973 in 48 issues, edited by Neville, Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Roger Hutchinson. There is just one complete set on the market today at £13,750, whilst individual issues will cost between around £100 and £350 depending on how early they are and other factors. Germaine Greer was a major contributor. I had a vague memory of a very explicit photograph of her but that turns out to be have been for another ‘underground’ magazine, SUCK, published in Amsterdam and elsewhere, edited by Bill Levy, Germaine Greer, Jim Haynes and Heathcote Williams et al., “The first European sexpaper, for adults only”, now available at £150 or so per issue (there were only eight, plus two books and two festivals) and not far short of £1,000 for a complete run. Whilst Oz was at heart satirical, SUCK was more of a celebration of free love, feminism and gay sexuality. The latter was banned in the UK before the first issue was even published. Photographer Anne Beeke recalled “Suck’s philosophy was that sex should be totally free, and you should be able to have sex with whoever or whatever if you and the other person(s) wanted it. However, the most important thing for me was that it should never have any commercial aspect. Neither the sex, the writing, [nor] the images. Sex should be fun and for free. Therefore, it had nothing to do with pornography. On the contrary, it was a statement against pornography. If there was more freedom that way, there would be less need for women and men to exploit sex.”
I have met Germaine Greer a few times and did not find her easy, although she could be very charming when she felt like it. She was not the first and will probably not be the last customer to seek my free advice about a book or a manuscript and then use it to sell things herself. I visited her at home on one occasion with a representative of an Australian library which was considering acquiring her archive. I wrote a rather scathing report for the library. There were no manuscripts or typescripts of The Female Eunuch for example, and very little correspondence. I asked her about correspondence with other authors and she replied that there wasn’t much because she invariably fell out with them after just one letter or two. The archive was eventually purchased for a very large sum by the University of Melbourne, reportedly A$3m, and it seems that for reasons best known to herself, Germaine had not deigned to show us anything of substance. We certainly did not get to see what became the contents of 487 archives boxes as described by the University of Melbourne. Neither were we offered so much as a cup of coffee, indeed she barely spoke to us except to comment rather childishly and provocatively on a work of art in a book she was perusing.
In amongst the papers was a 30,000 word love letter to Martin Amis which was never sent. She furiously objected to plans to publish it which has always intrigued me. She must have sold copyright along with the papers, which is never usually the case, otherwise the university could not have contemplated it. Even if the letter had been sent and subsequently sold by Amis, the copyright would have remained hers. It rather fits with all of this that she resigned from SUCK when her naked photograph was published on the grounds that the other editors had not posed similarly as promised. She has courted controversy consistently and some might say cantankerously, usually not winning her any popularity contests, amongst the transgender community and Me Too movements to name but two.
Oz is available online in its entirety courtesy of the University of Wollongong:
OZ magazine, London | University of Wollongong Archives
Renowned artist Robert Crumb contributed numerous cartoons. He was especially famously responsible for the cover of Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills. All of this pretty much perfectly spans the era of the 60s as we think of that period now. I was way too young to experience and enjoy it but have always felt it would have suited me. I have been told more than once that I must have the “hippy gene”.
Various obscenity charges were raised against Oz and two became highly controversial court cases. The police were not keen on the magazine’s reporting of police brutality and the British trial resulted in ludicrous sentences of three to six months in prison with hard labour, overturned on appeal. The editors were accused of producing an issue for schoolchildren whereas the truth was that it was produced by schoolchildren. The prosecution came up with the charge of “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”, which would be comical if it had not held the potential threat of life sentences. They were defended by John Mortimer QC, a regular visitor to our bookshop whose archive we sold in tranches over many years. The charge has me imagining the editors sitting around a table wondering what they were going to do that day. “I know, shall we corrupt public morals?” “You mean a conspiracy? Great idea, let’s do that.” It is reminiscent of the “Lady Chatterley Trial” of 1960 when Penguin Books were sued under the Obscene Publications Act. Prosecuting, Mervyn Griffiths-Jones ridiculously asked, “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” As is usually the way, censorship and the banning of books had the opposite effect to that intended. The circulation of Oz increased dramatically if temporarily after the trial and the failure of the Chatterley prosecution can be seen as the beginning of the ‘permissive’ era. It all provides a fascinating portrait of British mores, that buttoned-up, stiff upper lip, sweep it under the carpet mentality.
This is a mish-mash of a post, but I have written on the subject of Crufts in this blog and in Animal Trust:
Certainly the Kennel Club and Crufts need to get their acts together as far as pedigree inbreeding and breeding for exaggerated traits is concerned. There’s a lot of suffering, for example with arthritis and breathing difficulties. A man called Wally Conron was the ‘designer’ of the Labradoodle (a Labrador Poodle cross). Many have problems with their eyes, hips and elbows and epilepsy is not uncommon. He has since recanted: “I opened a Pandora’s box, that’s what I did. I released a Frankenstein. So many people are just breeding for the money. So many of these dogs have physical problems, and a lot of them are just crazy. You know that American president Obama announced he was thinking of getting a Labradoodle. So I wrote him a letter saying what the pitfalls were. I said ‘If you are going to buy a Labradoodle, check both of the parents, make sure they have a certificate. A lot of them are untrainable, and a lot of them are no good for people with allergies.’ I don’t know if he was listening to me but he didn’t get one in the end.”
See also:
Protest news in brief March 2024 – Animal Wild
Crufts and flat-faced dogs – Animal Wild
So it was awful to read that at this year’s glorification of the grotesque, two peaceful protesters were violently assaulted by security staff. One of them, Robert Groves, had this to say: ““As a wheelchair user, I especially object to its glamourisation of animals with disabilities. Whether they’re Breathing Impaired Breeds like bulldogs and pugs, suffocating behind unnaturally flat faces, or dachshunds and corgis whose too-short legs cause lifelong back and knee pain, these “frankendogs” are engineered for human aesthetics, not the animals’ quality of life.” PETA urges us to ask Channel 4 to stop televising it as the BBC decided years ago.
On the subject of penguins, I happened to catch a tv advertisement for the drink Red Bull, which the cartoon characters claim is needed if they are to fly, since penguins don’t have wings. I was so surprised at the ignorance that I had to double-check. Of course they have wings, they have just evolved to serve a different purpose. Was there no one at the ad agency or Red Bull doing a little basic fact-checking? The advert seems to be aimed at children, although there is a widely held view that energy drinks like this can be very bad for them indeed (most supermarkets in the UK have brought in a voluntary ban on sales to under-16s), and they are disseminating misinformation to boot.
I felt rather virtuous having taken part in a village litter picking event yesterday morning. We were given hi-viz and pickers and assigned various routes. My fellow picker and I were sent along a pretty busy road with no pavements and covered a mile in each direction. It was a great deal more rewarding and satisfying than I had imagined. In that short distance we recovered three full sacks, tin cans, bottles, cigarette lighters (I picked up at least ten, one wonders what people are thinking when they find their ‘disposable’ lighters have run out and decide to chuck then out of their car windows) and other detritus. It was galling to find a plastic water bottle at the side of the road on our return which had definitely not been there as we made our way out, but it was very touching that half a dozen or so groups of cyclists greeted us and thanked us for what we were doing and a few car drivers slowed down to do the same.
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