Out of My Mind: From Flower Power to the Third Millennium: the Seventies, the Eighties and the Nineties
By Richard Neville
Penguin, 1996. 216 pp., $16.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Take one ageing hippie from the '60s, add three decades of post-flower-power malaise, and the result is the latest book by Richard Neville, one-time scourge of the establishment, now writing safe pieces for the establishment media.
Neville was the Sydney lad who launched a counter-cultural broadside in Australia with Oz magazine in 1963 before transplanting this hippie-sheet to London, where he featured in a famous obscenity trial which turned the restrictive censorship laws of the western world on their head.
He was back in Australia by 1980 as a Blue Mountains resident. Time has cooled the radical core of Neville-the-hippie, leaving quirky and mostly harmless outcroppings on the surface.
The early '70s articles in this collection of his journalism show a Neville still wanting to swim in the culture of protest, still wanting to "propagandise the Movement" but, unable to "sign on the dotted line of any ism", he is "now adrift", searching for anchorage with new age deep ecology (the Aquarius Festival, the psycho-drama and rolling in mud of the Council of All Beings) whilst jetting off to "soulless convention centres in tacky resorts" to exhort entrepreneurs to become globally enlightened and socially responsible.
"Capitalism with a conscience" will "boost staff motivation, productivity and thus corporate performance", promises the '90s Neville.
An uneasy voice inside him, however, tells Neville that he may be just another "hippie leftover drearily reverting to class after a decade of denims and defiance" and that, although former radicals have now all changed, "the world we all wanted to overthrow has not" and still cries out for system-smashing rebels and revolutionaries. But, as the articles flow from his pen, this voice of radical conscience becomes harder to detect.
Apart from his utopian quest to green and otherwise ethically rejuvenate business values, Neville's articles cascade with entertaining but politically insipid accounts of domestic fathering, tourism, motor car reviews, restaurants and much hippie-patter on spiritually subverting dominant paradigms. The occasional political ember glows red — hoeing into the "lies and cruelty" of the US and its allies in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq — but the trend is downwards to the "trash and trivia" of the establishment media which Neville elsewhere lambasts.
Some redeeming one-liners crop up ("the value of wilderness is beyond measure, which confuses the economists and the politicians", "wars sanitised and processed by CNN") but having the likes of Asian Business Review, Australian Business Monthly and Women's Weekly as his publication territory does not reflect at all kindly on the subversive political merit of Neville.
In reviewing a film, Neville writes that "the director is gifted but what is he saying?" and asks, "What is the film's insight into the human condition?". By the time the reader gets to "Egg on my Lacoste" or "Zen Master Neil Armstrong", one is asking the same questions of Neville.
Missing are any articles on the labour movement issues that were a matter of real inspiration or concern to the working class during the last three decades. The assault on workers and their trade unions by the new right and the Accord, unemployment, political organising — on these is total new age silence. Of course, it's easy for "social commentators" to dismiss bits of reality like class struggle, and socialist strategies for political liberation, with simple, handy, all-purpose denigrations about "Bolshevik nonsense".
Should we be surprised by the whimper-not-a-bang end of the hippie-vision? Neville himself, in his better '70s mode, notes that the "drop-out lifestyle" becomes "vapid and boring when unaccompanied by political thrust".
Anyone who saw the '60s hippie way as a solution to the evils of capitalism had bad eyesight. Hippies were just froth — albeit very colourful and exuberant froth — on the wave of a much more significant worker and student movement of political protest and revolutionary social transformation. One asks whether Neville is all froth, now. Don't be caught out of pocket with Out of My Mind.