‘He was wrong fourteen times on points of law, and sixty-four times on points of fact.’ The essentials of the case were reiterated. ‘We say that the judge misdirected the jury as to the definition of obscenity. He misdirected them as to the weight of the expert witnesses, and the lack of likelihood of the magazine depraving and corrupting young people.’ Mortimer argued that the ‘aversion defence’ was never put to the jury – the cartoon of the masturbating teacher fondling a pupil, far from making homosexual practice desirable, rendered it repulsive, dissuasive and subversive.
On the question of drugs – several items warned against the dangers of hard drugs, including a long letter that castigated David Widgery for his views on heroin.
Lord Widgery mentioned that all three judges had read Oz in full, to familiarise themselves with the grounds of appeal. Justice Bridge wondered why he had never noticed Oz at his railway bookstall.
‘It is sold in just the same way as the New Statesman,’ Mortimer assured him.
‘The most serious and vital defect’ in Argyle’s summing up was when he relied on the dictionary definition of obscenity as ‘filthy, loathsome, lewd or repulsive’. These were ‘totally misleading’, and had no weight in law. The merging of the meaning of obscenity with that of indecency left the jury confused.
Next came Argyle’s highly prejudicial treatment of defence witnesses, usually derogated as ‘so-called experts’. Numerous examples were contained in the transcript, some of which Mortimer read to the court. At the adjournment, we were greeted outside by a media swarm, many of whom we had come to know on a first-name basis. To keep them amused, we hurled our wigs in the air.
Since the trial, the three of us had begun to move in different directions, signalled by our courtroom outfits. My designer handknit jumper advertised INK. Jim had returned from Morocco hippier-than-thou, with a beard, dancing shoes and a hand-embroidered waistcoat from the Rif Mountains. Felix wore a leather car-coat trimmed with fur, over a tailored double-breasted suit, and he was negotiating to buy a flat in Soho. If the appeal was upheld, Felix was off to New York on business – he had adopted and adapted the insignia of Rolls-Royce as his trademark, and the masthead of our mag for his new venture: Cozmic Comics. Neither Jim nor myself had ever mentioned Argyle’s inaccurate swipe at his intelligence, but we knew it cut him to the quick. Before another judge, however, Felix had scooped the honours.
In Suck 6, Didi Wadidi reported on her London ‘fucktrip’. With Jim Anderson, her time was relaxed and tender, ‘even though he hadn’t fucked a girl for a long time’. She lay in his arms, kissing and touching, without the tense urge to instigate intercourse – ‘when it happened it was a sweet surprise’.
Didi described her encounter with me as ‘pleasant’. Pleasant, huh? In her sequel to Groupie, Jenny Fabian likened a night in the sack with me to ‘being in bed with a bomber pilot’. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
Didi’s spree with Felix, on the other hand, was ‘a miracle’. This man knew how to give a girl an orgasm in the nicest possible way. He was ‘gentle and kind, with tenderness and many kisses’.
In the morning, shots of the Oz defendants playing around with their wigs were on every front page in Great Britain.
On Thursday, it was Brian Leary’s turn. Still tanned from his extended vacation in Acapulco, and less at ease than he had been with the melodrama of the Old Bailey, Leary argued that Argyle, despite his recourse to the dictionary, had accurately quoted the Obscene Publications Act. Throughout, he had been anxious to ensure that the three of us received a fair trial – for example, we had been able to call any witnesses we liked. ‘The Crown never argued that large parts of the magazine were obscene – we accepted that they were not – just that particular items broke the law.’
‘If the Crown had specified those parts from the outset,’ suggested Justice Bridge, ‘the trial may well have been different in character, and shorter.’
That afternoon, as we left the court, the Strand was lined with Evening Standard bill posters promoting a new feature. The name of the author was as large as a declaration of war: RICHARD NEVILLE SLAMS BRITISH JUSTICE. The Alternative Voice was off and running. The writer, aged twenty-nine, was hailed as the ‘leading voice in the so-called London underground scene’, though the Evening Standard wished to make clear it did not endorse his views in any respect. My full-page attack on the legal system, particularly on judges – ‘hopelessly out of touch’ – was both humourless and hysterical.
As I rode back up to Primrose Hill on the tube, two long-hairs in the next seat began discussing my new column. ‘He’s writing for the capitalist pig press now.’ ‘Yeah, comrade, what a sell-out . . .’
Friday was the Day of Judgement. That morning, an item appeared in the Daily Express, revealing that the playwright and barrister John Mortimer QC was being sued for divorce, on the grounds of his alleged adultery. Mortimer’s recent appeal against the conviction of The Little Red Schoolbook had been turned down.
During the lunch adjournment, when we met with lawyers and friends at the Law Court café, the mood was less ebullient than on the first day of the appeal. Waitresses in apple green uniforms fussed at our table with servings of the ‘Daily Special’, and my sister Jill worried that all was not well – she had a premonition. ‘Widgery seems grim today.’
Later that afternoon, the Lord Chief Justice remarked to Mortimer that he was troubled by Argyle’s summing up. ‘I feel he finds time far too often to have a dig at witnesses.’ On the other hand, given the great mass of evidence, Widgery felt every sympathy for the judge.
‘It would not be right to take these remarks out of context,’ put in Brian Leary.
‘If it was only one witness, I would accept that,’ Lord Widgery said. ‘My trouble is . . . that this is a repetitive exercise. One seems to find it so frequently.’
‘Of course, M’Lords, expert witnesses as a race are apt to be . . . confusing.’
‘But because of the mass of evidence, it is incumbent on a trial judge to be brief. One might say he can’t afford the luxury of such comments.’
After a spell of this to-ing and fro-ing, Lord Widgery embarked on the judgment of the court. It was a case which had aroused enormous public interest, as no doubt would his decision. ‘We are not here to clear Oz or condemn Oz – our attitude to the subject is unimportant.’ Their only function was to review the proceedings in the lower court.
A great many perfectly serious articles appeared in Oz 28, and many illustrations were ‘charming and humorous and would not cause a flutter in a well-conducted Victorian household’. Others, however, were quite different, like the Suck ad, ‘which sticks out a mile, if I may use the expression’. The gallery chuckled and he begged it to desist. His task was difficult. The prosecution had thought it right to consider the magazine as a whole, which did the defence no harm. But in the judgement of the court, this was wrong. It was quite clear that if one item was obscene, it was enough to make the whole magazine obscene.
I glanced nervously at my fellow defendants. This conclusion was opposite to the one reached by the NSW Court of Appeal, in the case of Sydney Oz 6.
The Lord Chief Justice softened his tone. ‘The main point of mentioning it today is to ensure it is not done in the future.’ Lord Widgery referred to the denigration of witnesses, which indicated a ‘bias against experts as a group’, and he dismissed the Crown’s argument that Oz was aimed at schoolchildren – ‘It was intended for the usual readers.’ But what really mattered was how the judge had directed the jury.
It was a roller-coaster ride, sitting back in the courtroom gods, where the acoustics were poor, not knowing which way the judgment would fall. Widgery raised his voice: ‘Because of the serious and substantial misdirection of the jury by Michael Argyle QC, we consider the verdicts unsafe and we quash the convictions under the Obscene Publications Act.’
Cheering and clapping erupted from the public gallery. The three of us hugged and shook hands. The appeal
against the convictions for sending indecent articles through the post was dismissed, not that we cared, even though the original sentence stood – six months’ jail, suspended for two years.
Outside the Royal Courts of Justice, it was drizzling. We were mobbed. As the crowd of a hundred or so encircled us and cheered, I hugged each and every one of our lawyers, and blew kisses at random, even to Brian Leary, who came and shook my hand. Nothing seemed to mar the festive mood, although to the press I still managed to sound like a slighted revolutionary.
‘We escaped prison by the skin of the Lord Chief Justice’s teeth,’ I told them. ‘I feel like a fish off the hook, knowing that next time they’ll use a net.’ In future, without the proviso of ‘taking it as a whole’, a magazine like Oz would be much more difficult to defend. ‘It is the end of the Underground press as we know it,’ I told Arnold Latcham, whose ‘wailing weirdies’ of last August would, in the morning editions, be transformed into ‘happy hippies’.
Some in the gypsy crowd threw off their shoes, lit sparklers and danced around the three of us, waving their wands of light at the rain, twirling them into a manic two-letter afterglow – OZ . . . OZ . . . OZ . . .
Louise materialised on the edge of the circle. She stood there with Marsha, smiling her congratulations. She blew a kiss, she waved, Marsha waved, and then they were gone.
The sodden bill poster from the previous day’s Evening Standard – RICHARD NEVILLE SLAMS BRITISH JUSTICE – slithered into the gutter. As I walked away a free man, the joke, once again, was on me.
In three more weeks I would be celebrating my thirtieth birthday; the end of my youth. Maybe it was time to settle down.
EPILOGUE:
MIDNIGHT at the OASIS
1995. The hills of Byron Bay, New South Wales.
Festive groups pour from camper vans at the edge of the rainforest. Foliage filters the light of the full moon as I follow them up a track scented with macadamia blooms. At a log barricade on the edge of the clearing, my wrist is stamped with an indelible pass, 4, proceeds to protect the wilderness.
Glowing teepees dot the field, flickering with the silhouettes of forest ferals, the romanticised defenders of the future. A feral at a laptop, I imagine, is surfing the net, organising a portside blockade of a shipment of woodchips.
‘No, thanks,’ I reply, to an offer of magic mushrooms. Tonight already feels like an acid flashback. Or a flash forward. Standing in the shadows, I see that this time the boys are making the tea. The dreadlocked wraith at the chai tent spices his brew with a flourish, then presses his palms in a Hindu greeting. The girls are the jugglers and the clowns, dressed in striped tights, top hats, striding on stilts. Musicians at campfires listen and play with peaceful intensity. The mystical didgeridoo combines with a dulcimer, tabla and other instruments from Asia and Africa. In hair-dos and robes worthy of Marrakesh on Mars, the kids stroll towards the dance field, delineated by a ring of ultra-violet neons, bales of hay and slide screens splashed with psychedelic images of endangered species.
At this nineties knees-up for eco-dreamers, bodies are bared and tribally painted, dolphin charms play around suntanned necks, eyebrows and navels are pierced and decorated with amulets and the costumes of a hundred cultures, from punk to Pakistan, from an Edwardian circus to The Arabian Nights, are combined with stylish wit. Strangers smile, friends hug. This is a happy tribe, I realise, and they deserve their happiness, working together for a cause beyond themselves.
Ping, poing, ding-dong, OM! Techno percussion merges with the chanting of mantras, the tinkling of handbells. Hips shake, fluorescent symbols glitter from foreheads. Ferals sit in a circle with vines in their tresses, circulating a scoob, not overly verbal.
‘It’s happening all over again,’ says another gnarled veteran of the sixties, ‘with bells on.’ He smiles, relishing the role of elder.
The mood is enhanced by the news from the court that Club Med, poised to invade the area, has been stopped in its tracks. For the moment.
‘The TV crews would love this,’ I remark, as an acrobat and a bare-topped fire-eater prance on the dance field. The networks had asked to come, but the ferals voted against it. ‘Publicity kills the vibe,’ says the elder, ‘and the last thing they want is a media label.’
I sit on a hay bale and drink my chai, sensing the familiar rhythm surface with a fierce and moving creativity; the kids stomp in the dust, jumping at the moon, ecstatic because they’re going to change the world. These beautiful children dance in a way I have seen them dancing before – outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, on that amazing rainy day in the Strand so long ago.
A slide of planet Earth is projected on to a high, fluttering screen, as I leave the forest and return to the quiet house where my own children are asleep.
Afterword: The Fruits of Flower Power
While few of us were full-time flower children back then, a whiff of the cosmic left its indelible glow. As we tried to ‘grow up’, the light still flickered in a remote cranial alcove. ‘Die young’ was the cool mantra and some of us did. Most of us didn’t. Hippies hit on the head by the cops woke up as yuppies, and capitalism became the main game. Some new entrepreneurs were alert to nature’s decline and the need for ethics in business. Inevitably, the Protest Generation seeded itself into the mainstream, bringing with it a slightly civilizing influence on business, politics and cultural life.
Former dropouts adapted to mortgages, school fees and a high-consumption lifestyle. The despised shopping mall was suddenly convenient; disposable nappies were a godsend. The Subaru stationwagon equipped with CD player and cup-holder rarely broke down. We still supported Greenpeace and Adbusters and dabbled in the mystic, but the focus was on raising the children. Our white goods got shinier and our blood pressures rose, along with our intake of drugs. Boring drugs. Cholesterol-reducing statins have zilch capacity to intensify orgasms.
Through these breathless decades it became obvious that something was amiss with the officially sanctioned winner-takes-all, shop-till-you-drop lifestyle, and that what we called profit usually involved the destruction of natural capital treated as income. As far back as 1963 the brilliant but lonely French Situationist Guy Debord foresaw the domination of nature as ‘the central, indisputable issue that encompasses all other issues’, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring kick-started environmentalism in that same year. At the end of the decade, Kenneth Rexroth warned with blistering clarity that an ‘extractive, accumulative society will trigger human extinction’. He proposed an Ecological Revolution in which the use of fossil fuels ‘would be brought to a complete stop’ and the possession of too many goods would be treated as a disease.
In 1973, finding myself numb and disoriented in the aftermath of the Oz trial, I accepted an invitation to the Aquarius Festival in the remote rural town of Nimbin, Australia, where thousands of alternative types chewed the fat, blew joints, took off their clothes and tried to avoid such eco-atrocities as soaping themselves in the in the creek or driving cars. Crude solar saunas rose from the river bank. Rubbish was lugged to the depot and manually sorted into glass, metal, compost, paper. After tossing an apple core into the wrong bin, I spent forever trying to retrieve it, which showed how Nimbin could get to you. But the effect wasn’t long-lasting.
So why did it take another thirty-five years and a thousand scientists to ram home the message that the earth’s ecosystem was ailing? Because hippies lacked power and politicians lacked foresight. As intimations of catastrophe dawn on Earthlings, my generation asks itself, and will be asked by others, ‘If you were sniffing the ill wind so long ago, why didn’t you do more to stop it?’ Good question. Those who did make it their life’s work were labelled extremists, including eminent climatologists whose research was suppressed by the Bush administration.
The quest for a low-carbon-emission future is being waylaid by a possible fiscal meltdown. A crash will curb the excess of the shopping religion, but it will also deter investment in renewable energy. E
co-economists have long stressed the need to leapfrog ‘beyond growth’ and to nourish a lifestyle that promotes self-reliance, carbon neutrality and the desire to help each other succeed. What other choice do we have? Humanity’s consumption already exceeds the capacity of the earth to regenerate its resources by 30 per cent.
By the mid-nineties, countercultural notions that had taken root in the sixties and early seventies had spread into the hearts and minds of suburbia: holistic medicine, recycling, organic food, meditation, yoga, chemical-free products, muesli, alternative energy, vegetarianism and living lightly on the land. These days, high school students turn quadrangles into market gardens, create wildlife corridors, install water tanks: a new generation inspired by regeneration.
In 2007, San Francisco columnist Mark Morford found there was only one conclusion he could draw from the ‘astonishing’ impact of an ecological mindset on the bigwigs of Washington – the hippies had it right all along. ‘You know it’s true. All this hot enthusiasm for healing the planet and eating whole foods and avoiding chemicals and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies. Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical pot? Non-GM seeds? It came from the alternative worldviews, from the underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and it’s about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology.’
That’s sweet, but let’s not get too carried away. When I revisited the hipster fantasy movies Easy Rider and Hair, about which I was so excited at the time, the pungent whiff of sexism and self-satisfaction made me cringe, and my teenage daughters collapsed on the floor in chortling dismay.
One strange and little-understood aspect of the sixties was the widespread consumption of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, which I resisted until a tab was dropped in my teacup. Although I remember every trip I took, you’ll be spared the details. Some swallowed too much and suffered, others proceeded cautiously and flew. In a 1996 survey of its readers, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review asked, ‘Have you ever consumed mind-altering drugs?’ The overwhelming response was, ‘You bet!’. LSD launched a thousand seekers of enlightenment: it was a siren that lured the reckless into hell. It wasn’t only about searching for a guru in the Himalayas. LSD-fuelled activists of my acquaintance protested the felling of a forest in New South Wales with such audacity that the disputed copse was hastily declared a National Park. Today the forest is a money-spinning tourist attraction.
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