Oz Magazine (1963-73)

“Having outraged the Australian establishment with a satirical magazine called Oz, the editor and founder Richard Neville and artist and cartoonist Martin Sharp hightailed it to swinging London. They immersed themselves in the alternative culture of artists, activists, writers and musicians who operated underground of the mainstream.

This underground fuelled by the optimism and excitement of the time and financed largely by the rock aristocracy and dope dealing wanted to change the world. Richard Neville relaunched Oz magazine in the same satirical style as the Australian version, it was not long before L.S.D. altered minds and Oz exploded into a riot of colour and along with the already existing IT newspaper became a mouthpiece for the underground. Oz lasted for 48 issues from the start of 1967 to the end of 1973.” (Source)

“Oz was a focal point for many confrontations between progressive and conservative groups over a range of issues including the Vietnam War, drugs, the generation gap, censorship, sexuality, gender politics and rock music, and it was instrumental in bringing many of these concerns to wider public attention. Above all, it focused public attention on the issue of free speech in democratic society, and on how far short of the ideal Australian and English society actually was at that time.

Through both its lives, the two key figures in Oz were Neville and Sharp, but the ‘honour roll’ of Oz alumni includes many famous names like Robert Hughes, Richard Walsh, Germaine Greer, Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Charles Shaar Murray.” (Source)

Published in Sydney, 1963-69, and London, 1967-73

Wikipedia

PDFs of Oz’s precursor, The Arty Wild Oat (2 issues, 1962)
PDFs of Sydney version (42 issues)
PDFs of London version (48 issues)
OZ & Yellow House Collections, gallery (1960s-70s)

Jeff Nuttall: Bomb Culture (1968/1970)

“Jeff Nuttall’s book, Bomb Culture, an idiosyncratic and semi-auto-biographical account of the build-up to 1968, was written in 1967 and first published just before May 1968. It remains a key primary source for the emergence of international counter-culture in the 1960s. Nuttall played a key role in the London underground scene and coordinated a network of connections with European and American avant-gardes through correspondence and the instigation of a number of small journals and pamphlets, publishing William Burroughs, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Carl Weissner and Michael McLure in his My Own Mag between 1964-67. Through a diverse body of practices, Nuttall – a performance artist and poet – advocated the insurrectionary power of spontaneity and persistently articulated a connection between the power of the imagination and collective revolutionary political consciousness.” (Gillian Whiteley, 2008)

First published by MacGibbon & Kee, 1968
Publisher Paladin, London, 1970; 1972 reprint
252 pages
via filboid

Interview with the author (John May, 1984)
Wikipedia

PDF (no OCR)

Rosalind Williams: Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, new ed. (2008)

The underground has always played a prominent role in human imaginings, both as a place of refuge and as a source of fear. The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet’s deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.

Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today’s technology-dominated society. In a new afterword written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness—an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls “the human empire on earth.”

New Edition
With a new afterword by the author
Publisher The MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262731908, 9780262731904
283 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)