Orsralia: A Punk History

Author Tristian Clark explores the history of punk and hardcore in Australia across these two volumes.

Book 1: 1974 - 1989 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 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.

This volume is 384 pages.

Book 2: 1990 - 1999 Within its more concealed history, the opening of the decade saw punk in Australia experiencing a transitory lull. Populated mostly by the diehards and remnants of the 1980s, its sound and style were in danger of being subsumed, or at least diluted, by grunge and alternative music through a resurgent interest in guitar-driven bands. Able to maintain its own identity and networks against the challenge, as the decade progressed punk evolved into even more diffuse subgenres.

Now, twenty years after its relatively inauspicious birth in Australia, punk, in one of its multivarious forms, topped the national music charts. But though the decade brought if not respectability then a new saleability to punk, it was an era still prone to its tumult, tragedy, humour and audacity.

Through a further 70 interviews, Orstralia: A Punk History 1990-1999 continues the disclosure of its first volume, covering bands from the most obscure to those who reached the very apex of Australia's music industry.

This volume is 224 pages.

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