P – T
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Pieces #6
$3 A6 86p 45g
This zine documents Nichole’s experience of getting a job 55 miles from home and the long commute she took every weekday for 3 months (after which point she moved house) to get to and from that job. She describes her daily routine – the rigid sleep and wake pattern, the lack of social life, gradually getting to recognise other regular commuters and attempting to start conversations, and so on. A nice thick zine that would make a very good accompaniment to a long train journey.
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Plastic Knife #6/Black Paint Gold Wire #8
$3 A5 88p 128g
Awesome, awesome: by now you probably know what to expect from an issue of Plastic Knife. This time round it’s teamed with the equally enigmatic Black Paint Gold Wire to serve up a lovely wedge of obscure stories, clippings from trashy magazines and newspapers, things which look like they’ve been picked up off the street but arranged in such a way as to suggest there must be some purpose behind it all. This is an ‘art zine’ in the best sense: it doesn’t document an artwork, or describe one, it is one. It’s a dense, messy, uneasy, knotty collection of ideas that’s hard to describe categorically, but it seems to assume that you, the person reading/looking at it, are clever and imaginative enough to draw your own meaning from it. I was a fan of previous issues of Plastic Knife, but this one has made it officially one of my favourite zines that is currently around.
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Plastic Knife #7
$3 A5 84p 100g
The latest issue of Plastic Knife contains the usual strange little stories and a special sealed section on Yukio Mishima!
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Raining in my Room
80c A6 32p 24g TEMPORARILY SOLD OUT
A zine made in one day one October that felt like it could be getting to be winter again, and therefore that some zine-making, Temptations-listening and cut-n-pasting was in order. The next day was hot and sunny again, and life resumed as usual.
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Rhetorical #4
$2 A6 16p 10g
The latest issue of Chiara’s sweet, musically oriented zine. This one is subtitled ‘A Small Guide to Small Genres of Music’, and she asks us to treat it as a ‘kinda light, kinda scruffy introduction’ to some of her favourite sub-genres of music, such as twee-pop, cow punk, baggy and more. Each page is a sort of ‘spotters guide’ for said genres, complete with a sketched drawing, list of bands and fashion signifiers to help you identify members of each niche subculture! Testament again to Chiara’s total obsession with music and music history.
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Rink
$2 10x12cm 24p 13g
Another beautiful zine form Vanessa. As with many of Vanessa’s zines, an excursion to a place that time seems to have forgotten is a chance to visit old memories. Whenever I read Vanessa’s zines I’m reminded of a quote from the band Electralene that Amanda, another Sydney zine maker, used once in one of her zines: ‘what will I do with a life turned to memory?’. Vanessa’s answer seemed to be to seek out experiences that trigger those memories and to write them down. In this instance a visit to the Macquarie ice skating rink is a chance to remember children’s parties and growing up in the northern suburbs.
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Robot Etiquette: A Handy Guide to Surviving the Human World
$2 A6 20p 8g
An informative guide for robots and humans alike, this zine by the Robot Humane Society Press is back in stock and well worth your attention, especially if like me, humanoids leave you feeling confused and awkward.
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Scribbler #3
50c A6 18p 7g
Yet again, it does what it says on the box – a mini zine by Hannah of Chasing Hot Air Balloons zine, with little pictures and thoughts. Courtesy the Snapdragon zine fair Absent Zinester Table!
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Sex Industry Apologist
$2.50 A5 24p 37g TEMPORARILY SOLD OUT
‘From 2002 – 2009 I worked at a project for sex workers. I wanted to work there because it was non-judgemental about sex work and was user-led…’ So begins this wordy, very interesting zine documenting some of the author’s views on sex work and experiences with working for sex workers. It includes a critique of the (British TV show based on the blog) Belle de Jour, writing on sex work and racism, on organising a dialogue to bring together feminists from both side of the sex work debate and more. It’s written in the tone, and obviously from the perspective of, someone who has invested an enormous amount of time and energy into their work and has nearly more ideas and opinions about it than they could fit in this zine, which is no bad thing. Let’s hope there’s a follow-up!
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Strange: Seven Times with You
$2 A6 24p 15g
This is a simple but very effective account of a brief love affair that was never meant to last. Although the author sees signs of its brevity at the outset, as illustrated in exemplary descriptions of the differences between the two lovers, it doesn’t make the inevitable end any less painful.
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Sutures
$2 A5 35p 54g
Sutures is by Amanda of Tiny Paper Hearts, who also writes Ampersand after Ampersand, Epitaph for my Heart and Panacea for Loneliness, all fine zines, as I’m sure you’re well aware by now. It seems pretty pointless to try to pick a favourite out of such a quality output, but Sutures is especially special, as I’ve attested elsewhere. It’s the story of Amanda’s heritage, of having a Lebanese mother and father of Scottish extraction, and the story of her parent’s flight from Lebanon, just before her birth, to escape the escalating civil war. It features a lot of reflection on culture and identity, memory and nostalgia, all written around the time Amanda’s mother is to return to Lebanon for work, for the first time since Amanda’s childhood. The kind of zine that sort of single-handedly justifies the medium, in my opinion.
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Songs of Protest #4
$3 A7 16p 3g
This is another zine that found its way to us via the Snapdragon zine fair Absent Zinester Table. Nicholas draws pictures of people holding placards with unusual messages of ‘protest’ on them: ‘I say what I think but I don’t think too good’, ‘I don’t want to be the better me’. Each zine is hand-bound with thread and printed in full colour.
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Swampland
$1.50 A6 56p 38g
An ambiguous, melancholy love letter to Sydenham, the former industrial suburb of Sydney. This cut and paste style zine features a mix of original writing and quotes juxtaposed with images to explore identity through place.
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Telegram Ma’am #16
$2.00 A6 24p 15g
This issue of Telegram Ma’am sees Maranda in something of a low mood. Her writing focuses on her life in a small town she’s called home for a long time, which is undergoing the types of changes we usually associate with big cities: the erasure or removal of landscapes that have been important to us, the creation of new, cheaply built and poorly planned housing. We follow Maranda as she bikes her way around town, haunting the sites of memory, questioning why she chooses to remain. The feeling of isolation is intensified by descriptions of living alone and generally feeling low. This isn’t the happiest zine that I’ve read, but the happiest rarely touch so close to home.
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Telegram Ma’am #20
$3 A6 46p 35g
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Telegram Ma’am #22
$3 A6 34p 22g
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The Plural of Deer is Deer
$2 21x8cm 32p 22g
Ouch, stop it, my heart is breaking. An anonymous zine, but the more eagle-eyed readers of Australian zines will recognise the drawing, writing and design of this zine as belonging to one particularly prolific and talented Melbournian zine maker. The Plural of Deer is Deer is a short story following the adventures of two deer that escape from a deer farm to take up residence in a share house in inner-city Melbourne. Their idea of freedom doesn’t exactly turn out as they’d imagined, unfortunately.
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Tomorrow’s Machine Today #1
50c 10x10cm 12p 8g
A new serial zine from Emma D. The idea initially was to pick a song or musical encounter that has influenced her in some way and to write about that, but as this is the first issue it remains to be seen whether it will continue in that vein. This issue’s about hearing songs by US punk bands like DKs and Black Flag for the first time via the unexpected educational portals of Dolly and Girlfriend magazines.
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Tomorrow’s Machine Today #2
$2.50 A5 16p 20g
This issue of TMT uses UK band The Fall and author H P Lovecraft as an excuse to talk about class and other things. Someone wrote a very nice review of it here… Sorry to be so lazy, but I’m rubbish when it comes to describing my own zines!
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To Praise is the Thing
$5 A5 12p (single sided) 50g
Another zine by Tamara, who also wrote Briefly, Birds and House. To Praise is the Thing is a series of poems inspired by Tamara’s experience of fruit picking in 1996. She praises the hard work she did and characters she met, and the memories she kept.
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Tower of Journal
$3 A5 28p 39g
Emma Markala’s new zine is full of towers constructed from words and pictures borrowed from old women’s magazines, as well as some of Emma’s own prose and poetry. These towers are monuments to many things: to anxiety, work, finding a job, love, friendship that succeeds, friendship that fails. Emma’s last zine Department of Forgiving proved how good she is at making found text and images speak profoundly; Tower of Journal is in some ways even more satisfying because it’s longer and more densely packed with ideas, like a zine bomb.
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Tutu Mocha #1
$1.50 A6 20p 6g
‘Hello! I’m MissPickle and this is a part of my life in a zine!’ MissPickle is French Canadian and she sent us her sweet little zines for the Snapdragon zine fair Absent Zinesters Table. Issue one of Tutu Mocha contains drawings of ‘strange creatures’, diary entries and favourites lists.
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Tutu Mocha #2
$1.50 A6 28p 10g
The second issue of MissPickle’s art zine contains more cute line drawings that illustrate short diary-esque notes from her daily life.
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