Orstralia

Auteur

Tristan Clark is a Melbourne-based educator, musician, and writer. His involvement in punk has spanned over three decades and encompassed a near gamut of roles: band member, roadie, merch person, show organizer, Food Not Bombs volunteer, community radio DJ, as well as having written sporadically for local zines and other publications. He now routinely encounters the young students he spends his week working with at local DIY shows and is heartened by punk’s continued ability to self-reproduce.

Texte du rabat

With appeal to more than just punk history obsessives, Orstralia offers an unprecedented snapshot of an underacknowledged segment of Australian life and history.

Far
 from punk’s more modish North Atlantic core in the late 1970s, 
discontented youth in Australia were enacting similar musical and 
cultural reckonings. Yet in spite of the Australia's purported “laid-back” national demeanour, punks there were routinely met with insult, fist, or the police baton.

More subterranean than the national scandal that was punk back in “homeland” Britain, Australia’s own bands nonetheless came to be heralded internationally. Orstralia
 represents the first definitive account of the country’s initial years,
 from progenitors the Saints and Radio Birdman in the mid-70s, through 
the emergence of hardcore in the 1980s, to the stylistic diffusion that 
accompanied transition to the 1990s.

Based on over 130 interviews, Orstralia
 documents the most renowned to the most fleeting and obscure acts the 
nation produced. Included are equally engrossing and shocking personal 
narratives befitting such a passionate and intemperate cultural form, as
 well as punk’s placement within broader Australian society at the time.