P – T | Take Care

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.

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!

Plastic Knife #9 / YOU

$3 A5 (approx) 140p 208g

Description coming soon.

Prison in Macedonia

$4 A5 28p 37g

“In prison, in Macedonia, you have to take your own bowl and cup and spoon. This is because, in Macedonia, it is your own or your family’s responsibility to provide you with the tools with which to eat. Your cutlery and crockery is not the problem of the state, the state feels.” Prison in Macedonia is a story from Tamara’s travels to her almost-homeland, Macedonia. It is a sad and happy story, and makes a great accompaniment to Tamara’s other recent, equally powerful, zine, I am Natasha, which you can find elsewhere in this catalogue.

Raining in my Room

$1 A6 32p 24g

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.

Rav 5

$7 A5 68p

Coming soon.

Rhetorical #8

$3 A6 16p 11g

I find zines difficult to make. Well, to finish – I keep ripping them apart, starting over, re-writing & then giving up after getting too self-conscious. But I enjoy maing them & I kinda need to make them; to create rather than to passively consume.” The introduction to issue #8 of Chiara’s Rhetorical zine sums up the problem of zine making. The problem that is also the purpose, maybe. In this issue Chiara writes about Reading Ellen Willis’ recent essay collection Out of the Vinyl Deeps and seeing Wild Flag play in Sydney. It’s about more than those things, too, but they’re the starting point, and it’s illustrated in Chiara’s distinctively cool/school notebook-scratchy style.

Rhetorical #9

$3 A6 16p + foldout 16g

“I’m not a singer. I was kicked out of school choir in year 5 (I snuck back in), failed at Singstar in high school (barely able to register any notes) and still mime my way through any rendition of Happy Birthday…” In issue #9 of Rhetorical Chiara writes about setting herself the challenge to sing in her band and more notes about pop/unpop music, with a special focus Mary Timony.

Rice & Peas #1

$1 A5 16p 30g

Rice & Peas is a short but sweet reggae fanzine. This, the first issue, looks at the history of sound systems and how they evolved the reggae sound and culture. There are also short pieces on dance styles and women in reggae (a really interesting subject that the zine’s editor, Robin, promises to explore in greater detail in another zine).

Rice & Peas #2

$1 A5 20p 40g

Subtitled ‘the independence issue’, this issue of reggae/dancehall fanzine Rice & Peas takes a look at Jamaica’s fiftieth anniversary of independence celebrations, a history of the Festival Song Competition, film and book reviews and a series of interviews with Jamaican men who cook (an activity still generally thought of as woman’s work in Jamaican culture).

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.

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!

Sex Industry Apologist #2

$3.70 A5 32p 42g

“I’m a white queer feminist with a degree in sociology and gender studies and a general interest in marginalised and misrepresented groups. I should note here that my zine, like my previous work, focuses on prostitution rather than porn, stripping, or other forms of sex work. I’m interested in those too, but they’re not my area of expertise so I’m not talking about them here.” The second issue of Nine’s zine that aims to bust your misconceptions, prejudice informed opinions and general wrong-headedness about sex work and sex workers.

Strange: Seven Times with You

$2 A6 24p 15g

“I saw his profile on gaydar. He was cute. A small build and a cheeky face. IN one image he’s wearing white underwear and reclining strangely. I can’t tell if it’s serious or not. I message him. he replies. I don’t remember what was said but at some stage I gave him my number…” An account of a love affair that was never meant to last, but that the author can’t help but feeling emotional caught up in.

Stuffed Turtles: A Childhood Memoir of Darwin in the 1950s

$7 A5 24p+vinyl/fabric cover slip 51g

This is Bertievan’s second confident foray into zine making. As the sub-title says, it’s a childhood memoir of Darwin in the 1950s. “The other thing the photograph doesn’t give you is its smell. Darwin’s smell. I’ll close my eyes and tell you – damp, steamy, fruity, mangoes, paw-paws, heady flowers, frangipani, green ants, sweaty, Mum’s perming lotion – all combined.”

Suicide Psychosis Live at the Temporal Lobe!

$2.50 A5 24p 43g

“Until very recently I considered my past experiences with psychosis to be rare brain farts confined to the exceptional cicumstances of usually stressful events. But now that I’ve clocked up psychosis number three I’m having to confront the prospect that these hallucinations and disordered thoughts are not simply seldom stress related occurances but a recurring theme.” Skully writes openly about two of her episodes of psychosis in this zine, with the aim of promoting better understanding of what psychosis is and what it can be like to experience.

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. 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 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.

Skinned Heart #3

$3 A5 32p 39g

“I have decided that all I can be is the change that I want to see in the world. My contribution is my critique and artistic contributions as a Brown working class woman in a privileged american society. I want to continue living on the fringe, avoiding mainstream living. So this zine is just that, observation in my personal life and interactions. I still have so much to learn and grow.” Nyky writes about competing for male attention, inequalities within the punk/activist ‘scene’, losing white friends, gardening and growing.

Swampland

$1.50 A6 56p 38g

An ambiguous, melancholy love letter to Sydenham, the (soon to be?) 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.

Taking Things Too Far

$3 A6 40p+cover 30g

“An anarchist zine about feelings & monsters. A feminist zine about violent protests & the song ‘Love is a Battlefield.’ An excessively constructed personal zine… This zine is about the same things I’ve been making zines about for however long. Anger, & how to use it without burning off all other emotions. What it is to move through this world in this body. What it is to live as a woman & an anarchist. The collective projects of trying to learn to live.”

Telegram Ma’am #20

$3 A6 46p 35g

In this issue of Telegram Ma’am Maranda writes directly about her mental health, and her experiences with mental illness. She writes about the diagnoses she has received, her therapist, spells spent in hospital and peoples’ attitudes towards being on a disability pension and ‘not having a job in a conventional sense’.

Telegram Ma’am #22

$3 A6 34p 22g

A zine chronicling some of Maranda’s adventures from 2010, her ‘Year of Change’. It starts with a trip to Halifax to participate in the Roberts St Social Centre residency, where she proposed (then followed through on) a project to make a zine. She also writes about returning to her home town, going to Portland for the zine symposium, going to a writers fest to take a workshop with author Cordelia Strube and joining a Derby team.

Thank You For Your Love

$3 A5 36p 46g

“Gender is a thing that is immensely personal and individual: no one can tell you what your gender is; it’s something you feel. But it’s also a thing that relies on interactions with other people – you need to be ‘seen’ by others to be real… This is a zine of words written by others and myself, assembled to show you my vulnerability and my need for your support, but also to share with you the pride I have in my identity, the joy I feel being free to live my life and be authentic while allowing myself to grow and change.”

The Idea of North

$2.50 A5 24p 31g

A zine by Skully Adams about “a testing time in 2010, when the [recurring] dream appearances of a character from the hit BBC TV series Spooks, Lucas North, over a 12 month period played a pivotal role in how I came to process and come to terms with a diagnosis of cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar disorder.”

Three Essays on the WikiLeaks Saga

$3 A5 24p 38g

From Skully Adams, author of Suicide Psychosis, The Sugar Horse and other zines. Contains three thought provoking essays titled Julian Assange and the Smear of Effeminancy, Bradley Manning’s Sexuality is Relevant and Wikileaks: A New Modus of Radical Journalism.

The Wolves at the Door

$0.50 A5 28p 38g

“We are some anarchists writing and living in Sydney. We are interested in exploring the particulars of our situation here while remaining connected to struggle everywhere. We are interested in reflecting on the spaces we inhabit within capitalism, on what cracks appear and what opportunities for resistance are present. When we return to anarchism, it’s not as an identity or a creed but as a space we move through, a point of abstraction, an accumulation of ideas of liberation and attack.”

They Want To Socialise You

$3 A7 20p + fold out 11g

“So instead of studying and writing essays, I’ve been re-visiting Sleater-Kinney. Now, classical sociological theory and Sleater-Kinney lyrics have belended in my tired mind.” A short, funny and perceptive illustrated analysis of the Sleater-Kinney song ‘Call the Doctor’ by an essay-weary 3rd year sociology student (Chiara of Rhetorical zine).

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. You can hear someone (with a male north American accent – a bit different to how I actually sound, but no matter) do a reading of it here!

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. To quote a nice review of it that Thomas wrote for Three Thousand: “Of the thousands of articles written about both parties, I have read few that delve quite so deeply; the whole zine only discusses a mere twelve words from one Fall song, but never seems to be scrabbling around for new things to say about them. Even if you’re fairly well-versed on the two wordsmiths, Tomorrow’s Machines Today #2 is great window into the fanaticism they can both still provoke.” Thanks, Thomas.

Tomorrow’s Machine Today #3

$3 A5 36p