Orstralia: A Punk History 1974–1989

by Tristan Clark

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.

Genres: Music

330 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 9, 2024

Reviews

[Nik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deep dive into an interesting time in Australia and music

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does job #1 for any music book: turn me on to some great songs and bands I’ve never heard before. Clearly a labor of love, Orstralia is great for what it is: an exhaustive compendium of colorful stories about the heydays of Aussie punk. It’s a borderline oral history, relying heavily on quotes from contemporary interviews with the participants. But its structure (one city at a time, one band at a time, through to their breakup and the members’ current day lives) doesn’t really give you any sense of the overall story of the scene’s evolution. We hear about the Saints’ rise and decline before we even meet Radio Birdman. Key moments (like the first meeting of those two bands) are treated lightly and quickly in one band’s section. A grand narrative of Aussie punk, with the drama and sweep of Jon Savage or Simon Reynolds, has yet to be written. But it’s great to have this as a reference, and as a kaleidoscope of anecdotes about a wild and woolly scene.

[Kanako Okiron]

No rating because I feel like this book was very much an antithesis of what punk is about. Call me cliché, but I think 320 pages about drunken fights about masculinity, violence and allegations of r*pe, and the lack of female (let alone LGBTQ+/trans) representation led me to the conclusion that punk (or Ozzy eighties punk, at least) was just a mere incoherent mess of attitudes, bAd bOyS and illusions.

[Brad Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous, a deep dig into the more obscure Australian punk as well as the known. Highly recommended 👌