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by Tristan Clark (Author)
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.
