'Men and women are born free, ladies and gentleman,' he said, 'but today we are everywhere in chain stores.'
Last Sunday, Richard died. He was only 74. We have relived the founding of Oz Magazine, the court cases, the willingness to challenge the norms of the 1960s. For those of us who were too young to read Oz when it was first published, last year the University of Wollongong digitised it and, with Richard's blessing, made it available online for non-commercial purposes. Now we can read it and think about why it created the furore it did.
I, though, have been reliving that event at the Press Club. It turns out that the National Library of Australia (full disclosure: my employer) recorded the lecture. You can listen to it online. And there is Richard Neville's voice, his humour, his willingness to be a disruptor before 'disruption' was a thing. He argued for a 'Buy Nothing Day', saying that 'as long as we go on consuming it is the world that is going to die'. In less than an hour, he mashed up conspicuous consumerism, the Princess of Wales, Reeboks, Hey, Hey It's Saturday, the Body Shop, the Berlin Wall, poverty, wealth and cannabis.
Ruby Hutchison, after whom the lecture was named, was a disruptor too. Although if you compare photos of Ruby with her curled hair and cat's eye glasses with those of a young Richard Neville, it seems unlikely they would have anything in common. In 1954, she was the first woman to be elected to the West Australian Legislative Council. In her long parliamentary career, she argued for education, child welfare, and electoral reform. She was also a founder of the Australian Consumers' Association, publisher of Choice Magazine. When Choice Magazine was born in 1960 (three years before Oz), there was no consumer legislation as we know it today. Arguably, Ruby Hutchison's work helped to change Australian life as much as Richard's, paving the way for the passing of the Trade Practices Act in 1975. She died in 1974, a year before the legislation was enacted.
There is so much about the day at the Press Club that I've forgotten - but the recording of the lecture brings the memories back. Introducing Richard was the then Minister for Consumer Affairs, the Hon Jeannette McHugh MP. She launched a new resource for Australian school children, Consumer Power, the National Primary School Consumer Education Project. I sweated over that resource, working with colleagues in consumer affairs agencies across Australia and the ABC to produce a CD-rom, education kit and television series. There was a long evening in the State Library of South Australia, a few of us working on edits. I can see us hunched around a table in the reading room, searching the shelves in the children's section for references. What I can't see is what we were working on. Were we editing scripts, the education kit, the text for the CD-rom?
Consumer Power was distributed to every primary school in Australia. I still have a copy and there's one in the National Library too. But before we knew it, CD-roms were old technology, although the accompanying tv series was still being broadcast by the ABC in 2005.
I worked for the Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs and its many incarnations until 2000. By then, it had changed shape significantly. It moved from under the umbrella of the Attorney-General's Department, eventually being absorbed into Treasury. But that's a story for another day and I wouldn't trust my memory to get the story right.
And it seems my memory is faulty in other ways too. For there was no cream linen suit. A photograph of Richard Neville published in The Canberra Times the next day, clearly shows him wearing a dark suit - and a tie covered in large white polkadots.
Richard Neville and Ruby Hutchison have both died. The Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs is possibly only remembered by those of us who worked there. But Choice and the Australian Consumer Association still exist. So too does the Ruby Hutchison Memorial Lecture. Supported by Choice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it is held on the eve of World Consumer Rights Day (15 March). And perhaps the creators of The Checkout, which has brought consumer education into the home, heard Richard Neville's Ruby Hutchison Memorial Address and are carrying the flame.
There is so much about the day at the Press Club that I've forgotten - but the recording of the lecture brings the memories back. Introducing Richard was the then Minister for Consumer Affairs, the Hon Jeannette McHugh MP. She launched a new resource for Australian school children, Consumer Power, the National Primary School Consumer Education Project. I sweated over that resource, working with colleagues in consumer affairs agencies across Australia and the ABC to produce a CD-rom, education kit and television series. There was a long evening in the State Library of South Australia, a few of us working on edits. I can see us hunched around a table in the reading room, searching the shelves in the children's section for references. What I can't see is what we were working on. Were we editing scripts, the education kit, the text for the CD-rom?
Consumer Power was distributed to every primary school in Australia. I still have a copy and there's one in the National Library too. But before we knew it, CD-roms were old technology, although the accompanying tv series was still being broadcast by the ABC in 2005.
I worked for the Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs and its many incarnations until 2000. By then, it had changed shape significantly. It moved from under the umbrella of the Attorney-General's Department, eventually being absorbed into Treasury. But that's a story for another day and I wouldn't trust my memory to get the story right.
And it seems my memory is faulty in other ways too. For there was no cream linen suit. A photograph of Richard Neville published in The Canberra Times the next day, clearly shows him wearing a dark suit - and a tie covered in large white polkadots.
Richard Neville and Ruby Hutchison have both died. The Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs is possibly only remembered by those of us who worked there. But Choice and the Australian Consumer Association still exist. So too does the Ruby Hutchison Memorial Lecture. Supported by Choice and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, it is held on the eve of World Consumer Rights Day (15 March). And perhaps the creators of The Checkout, which has brought consumer education into the home, heard Richard Neville's Ruby Hutchison Memorial Address and are carrying the flame.
This post was written as part of the 2016 Sydney Story Factory Pen to Paper Challenge. I'm inspired by the work of Sydney Story Factory. I'd like to help them grow so that, one day, Martian Embassies will be all over this country. So during September I'm putting pen to paper - and hopefully rebooting my blog. If you enjoyed this post, please give whatever you can. Let's help the Sydney Story Factory grow.
