Schoolkids Oz was No. 28 of Oz magazine. The issue was, on a special occasion, edited by 5th- and 6th-form children. It was the subject of a high-profile obscenity case in the United Kingdom from June 1971 to 5 August 1971, [1] the longest trial under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.
The trial of Oz editors Richard Neville, Felix Dennis, and Jim Anderson, for No. 28, Schoolkids Oz, was conducted at the Old Bailey, under the auspices of Judge Michael Argyle. Of particular significance is the adaptation by Vivian Berger of a Robert Crumb cartoon to include the Rupert Bear cartoon character in an explicitly sexual situation.
The defence lawyer was John Mortimer, QC, later the writer of the Rumpole of the Bailey television series. He was assisted by junior counsel Geoffrey Robertson, later to become a prominent barrister in his own right.
The defendants were found guilty and sentenced to up to 15 months' imprisonment. This was later quashed on appeal by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Widgery.
In her "Oz Trial Post-Mortem", which was not published until it was included in The Madwoman's Underclothes (1986), the magazine's contributor Germaine Greer wrote:
Before repressive tolerance became a tactic of the past, Oz could fool itself and its readers that, for some people at least, the alternative society already existed. Instead of developing a political analysis of the state we live in, instead of undertaking the patient and unsparing job of education which must precede even a pre-revolutionary situation, Oz behaved as though the revolution had already happened.
Geoffrey Robertson later adapted the transcripts of the trial into the television drama The Trials of Oz (1991). Hippie Hippie Shake , an unreleased 2010 feature film directed by Beeban Kidron, is about Neville, the creation of UK Oz, and the obscenity trial.
Sir John Clifford Mortimer was a British barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. He is best known for short stories about a barrister named Horace Rumpole, adapted from episodes of the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey also written by Mortimer.
Lady Chatterley's Lover is the last novel by English author D. H. Lawrence, which was first published privately in 1928, in Italy, and in 1929, in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex and its use of then-unprintable profane words. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.
Felix Dennis was an English publisher, poet, spoken-word performer, and philanthropist. His company, Dennis Publishing, pioneered computer and hobbyist magazine publishing in the United Kingdom. In more recent times, the company added lifestyle titles such as its flagship brand The Week, which is published in the UK and the United States.
Oz was an independently published, alternative/underground magazine associated with the international counterculture of the 1960s. While it was first published in Sydney in 1963, a parallel version of Oz was published in London from 1967. The Australian magazine was published until 1969 and the British version until 1973.
The Obscene Publications Act 1959 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament that significantly reformed the law related to obscenity in England and Wales. Prior to the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions for artistic merit or the public good. During the 1950s, the Society of Authors formed a committee to recommend reform of the existing law, submitting a draft bill to the Home Office in February 1955. After several failed attempts to push a bill through Parliament, a committee finally succeeded in creating a viable bill, which was introduced to Parliament by Roy Jenkins and given royal assent on 29 July 1959, coming into force on 29 August 1959 as the Obscene Publications Act 1959. With the committee consisting of both censors and reformers, the actual reform of the law was limited, with several extensions to police powers included in the final version.
His Honour Michael Victor Argyle, was a British judge at the Central Criminal Court of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1988. Earlier, as a barrister, he defended Ronnie Biggs and, as a judge, presided at the Oz obscenity trial.
The Hicklin test is a legal test for obscenity established by the English case R. v Hicklin (1868). At issue was the statutory interpretation of the word "obscene" in the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which authorized the destruction of obscene books. The court held that all material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit.
Geoffrey Ronald Robertson is an Australian-British barrister, academic, author and broadcaster. Robertson is a founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers. He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London.
David Britton was a British author, artist, and publisher. In the 1970s he founded Weird Fantasy and Crucified Toad, a series of small press magazines of the speculative fiction and horror genres. In 1976, Britton and Michael Butterworth co-founded the publishing house Savoy Books.
Richard Clive Neville 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. He was educated as a boarder at Knox Grammar School and enrolled for an arts degree at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Australian political magazine The Monthly described Neville as a "pioneer of the war on deference".
Jim Anderson is a British-Australian editor and novelist. He edited OZ Magazine and later wrote the novels Billarooby and Chipman's African Adventure.
Emma Booth is an Australian model and actress from Perth, Western Australia. The former teen model and TV actress played a significant role in the film Clubland (2007).
Deyan Sudjic is a British writer and broadcaster, specialising in the fields of design and architecture. He was formerly the director of the Design Museum, London.
An obscenity is any utterance or act that strongly offends the prevalent morality and social politics of the time. It is derived from the Latin obscēnus, obscaenus, "boding ill; disgusting; indecent", of uncertain etymology. Such loaded language can be used to indicate strong moral repugnance and outrage, vile, vigilance in conservation, or revenge. In expressions such as "obscene profits" and "the obscenity of war," ; misdirection. As a legal term, it usually refers to graphic depictions of people engaged in sexual and excretory activity, and related utterances of profanity, or the exploited child, human being or situation on display.
The Trials of Oz is 1991 video-taped BBC television drama shown in the UK on 9 November 1991 as part of BBC 2's Performance anthology series of single plays.
Charles George James Burge, was an English criminal law barrister, remembered for his defence of Stephen Ward in the Profumo affair in 1963. He is also remembered as John Mortimer's original inspiration for the fictional barrister Horace Rumpole in Rumpole of the Bailey.
R v Penguin Books Ltd, was the public prosecution in the United Kingdom of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for the publication of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The trial took place over six days, in No 1 court of the Old Bailey, between 20 October and 2 November 1960 with Mervyn Griffith-Jones prosecuting, Gerald Gardiner counsel for the defence and Laurence Byrne presiding. The trial was a test case of the defence of public good provision under section 4 of the Act which was defined as a work "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern".
Marsha Rowe is an Australian-born journalist, writer and editor now living in the United Kingdom. In 1972, she was co-founder, with Rosie Boycott, of the leading feminist magazine Spare Rib.
The most influential and popular music-related Australian publication of the 1960s was the weekly magazine, Go-Set, which was published from 1966 to 1974. It published the first Australian national singles chart from October 1966 and the first national albums chart from May 1970. The magazine also presented a popularity poll of readers, which led to the King of Pop Awards. Its local competitors during that decade were Everybody's (1961–1968), Oz (1963–1966), Albert Sebastian (1966–1968), Gas (1968–1971) and Revolution (1969–1971).
Richard Walsh is an Australian publisher, editor, company director, media consultant, lecturer, broadcaster and journalist. For many years he ran the publishing and bookselling firm Angus & Robertson and later he headed the media company Australian Consolidated Press. In those roles he was "one of the most dominant figures in Australian publishing from the early seventies".
