How Oz Became The Most Controversial Magazine Of All Time

Pre-Oz, Western society heavily operated on traditional post-World War II values. In other words, the status quo was staunchly conservative and rigid, with substantive dissent either intolerable or criminalised.

Staying deferential wasn’t merely a choice for the mainstream press; it was driven by routine censorship. It’s a climate that saw Britain’s Lord Chamberlain vet stage plays before they could be performed, Australian customs officials screening books and films, homosexuality outlawed, and obscenity trials happening as late as 1960.

Despite this hostility to the underground press, Oz thrived for a decade (1963-1973), and across continents. It proved that a market existed for anti-establishment satire.

Oz Magazine Established Itself by Breaking Taboos

The first step toward controversy is to stand out, and in media the surest way to do that is to publish what everyone else avoids. Long before Oz became famous for psychedelic London posters or the “Schoolkids” trial, it built its notorious reputation in Sydney, Australia, by printing what polite society only whispered about.

The debut April 1963 issue tackled the largely avoided subject of illegal abortion head-on, exposing underground abortion clinics and the corrupt police system that protected and profited from it. Included in the mix were incendiary takes on homosexuality, then both criminalized and deeply sensitive, along with provocations such as bodily tattoos, chastity belts, and Australia’s White immigration policy.

Oz added deadpan hoaxes that mocked public authority and symbols of sacred cultural status, such as a report of the Sydney Harbour Bridge collapsing. That was the equivalent of Parisians waking to (fake) news that the Eiffel Tower had crumbled, or New Yorkers reading on the front page of The New York Times that the Brooklyn Bridge had fallen.

If that doesn’t seem audacious enough, consider the cover of Oz’s Issue No. 6 in February 1964. It featured a photo of editor Richard Neville and two friends pretending to urinate into a newly unveiled wall fountain designed by prominent sculptor Tom Bass, a work that had just been inaugurated by Prime Minister Robert Menzies.

Oz’s early work in Sydney set the tone for its shock-and-satire identity. It also showed readers that public authorities and the mainstream press could fool them just as easily as the magazine did with its hoaxes.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction was as polarized as it was immediate. Newsstand bans did nothing to dissuade buyers who cleared all 6,000 debut copies. Establishment institutions hit back fast: advertisers pulled their contracts, writers’ jobs were threatened, and the editors were evicted from their government-owned Sydney office.

Visual Rebellion Was a Key Tactic with Oz’s London Audience

Oz had jolted Sydney’s readers, but more than 10,000 miles away in London, its 1967 relaunch as Oz London hit even harder. And it was a huge success: circulation doubled from Sydney’s 40,000 peak to 80,000 copies.

Much of the credit goes to Martin Sharp, who harnessed photographic offset lithography, freeing designers to experiment with neon colour, spiral layouts and collage. In modern terms, it was like leaping from a plain-text newsletter to a neon, meme-saturated TikTok feed.

Rather than arguing solely in neat columns as in Sydney, Oz London utilized countercultural provocations, especially with revered art and public faces. Nothing moves mouths quite like a magazine with the Mona Lisa smoking a joint, Bob Dylan as a swirling psychedelic portrait, or Vincent van Gogh as a modern hippie on its cover. That’s exactly what Oz London did.

For the average 1960s British youth, the radical art was bedroom wall poster-worthy. And a copy in hand (laden with topics such as feminism, drug laws, and the Vietnam War) became tantamount to being the cool, rebellious mind the age grade so relished.

The “School Kids” Issue Crossed a Red Line

Audacious as it was, the May 1970 issue of Oz was downright impudent. Bored with their own output, editors Richard Neville, Jim Anderson, and Felix Dennis handed the reins of an entire edition to under-18s, to test the limits of the rawness and rebellion of British adolescence. Pitch that to a modern magazine today, and the legal department would hyperventilate.

Predictably, the teenagers’ finger and mind prints were all over the resulting 48-page Issue No. 28. However, the nude cover and explicit personal ads in the back were entirely the adults' idea.

The juveniles aired their grievances, attacking the British school system’s authoritarian headmasters, corporal punishments, uniform rules, and exams. Alongside these critiques were their unfiltered views on teenage sexuality, contraception, recreational drugs, and countercultural music. Far from an orderly debate, their confrontation was chaotic and deliberately juvenile. It peaked with what is now infamously known as “The Rupert Bear incident.”

In that same issue, 15-year-old Vivian Berger made a notorious collage: she pasted the cheerful head of children's icon Rupert Bear onto a sexually explicit body of an X-rated comic by American underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, with the nursery rhymes clearly still visible underneath.

Vivian Berger’s shattering of the innocence associated with Rupert Bear (the ultimate symbol of wholesome, middle-class British childhood) was rude at best. To British authorities, though, this crossed an unforgivable line. By indulging teens in the magazine's production and publishing Berger’s explicit collage, Oz had committed cultural sacrilege in a deliberate attempt to corrupt Britain’s youth.

The police, who had hitherto restricted their raids to Oz’s offices, arrested Neville, Anderson, and Dennis and confiscated all printing materials at the Oz headquarters. This set the stage for the historic 1971 Old Bailey obscenity trial.

The Old Bailey Obscenity Trial Turned Oz Into Free-Speech Heroes

Anyone in London (the wider British public and International counterculture inclusive) who hadn’t heard or been bothered by Oz did so following the “Schoolkids Issue.” And the few still unbothered couldn't ignore the resulting trial that began on June 23, 1971, inside Court No. 2 at London’s Old Bailey.

This six-week trial was the longest obscenity trial in British legal history. And it was a public affair, so much so that thousands rallied in support outside the courthouse and John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a charity single, "God Save Us,”

Even with such a high-stakes trial, including a “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” charge that carried a life sentence, the defendants did what underground counterculture did best: mock authority. They arrived at court rocking psychedelic shirts, in schoolgirl uniforms, and having Richard Neville defend himself in court while wearing a long, flowing velvet jacket.

More importantly, it was a cultural clash between the British establishment, wielding the 1959 Obscene Publications Act under which the defendants were tried, and counterculture, represented by defendants Richard Neville, Jim Anderson, and Felix Dennis. In the end, both sides won and lost, though to varying degrees.

Neville, Anderson, and Dennis lost when they were acquitted of conspiracy but convicted of publishing and posting an obscene article, receiving sentences of 15, 12, and 9 months respectively. This was not before they were remanded for psychiatric evaluation and their signature hairs shaved.

The law’s victory was short-lived and pyrrhic. Following intense public outrage, the convictions were overturned on appeal in November 1971, and the trio walked free. Subsequently, the British justice system lost the political appetite to prosecute obscene publications, even as Oz itself buckled in 1973 under the weight of legal debt.

In the end, though, the real winner was Oz. They emerged as free-speech folk heroes whose legal victory permanently broke the back of British print censorship and paved the way for modern media freedom. Wealth flowed from it too: lessons learnt from Oz were vital in Dennis establishing a publishing empire.