Zines
I’m no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates.
Because I want to live forever in wonder.
The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream.
I do not see, for there is no I to see. This is what the pirates know.
There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
Kathy Acker
Pussy, King of the Pirates
Because I want to live forever in wonder.
The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream.
I do not see, for there is no I to see. This is what the pirates know.
There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.
Kathy Acker
Pussy, King of the Pirates
I discovered zines in the mid-90s, when I was a suburban teenage punk living with my mum in Earlwood, on Gadigal country. The first zine I made was called ‘Judgemental Bitch’. It was a booklet of A4 photocopied pages stapled together along one edge, with ultra-limited circulation (shared only with my friends at Kingsgrove High, even the one who called me a judgemental bitch in the first place. He may have had a point, but that’s another story). This would have been 1995 or 1996, when I had a picture of Courtney Love on the cover of my school diary – it was the picture of Courtney sitting on the ground drawing a big heart between her outstretched legs, and the words ‘PROPHET PROFIT’ in the middle. There was only one issue of ‘Judgemental Bitch’. Next I made a zine called ‘Telly Narcosis’. The cover of the first issue had a photo of then-Prime Minister John Howard scratching his head, with a monkey-ish expression on his face. The pages were full of collages and rants of the sort you’d expect of a suburban teenage punk at the turn of the millenium. By the time I got to #4 of ‘Telly Narcosis’ I’d developed a style I was proud of, and which has informed my art ever since. I spent hours and hours cutting and pasting text typed on an electric typewriter then reduced or enlarged on the photocopier at my dad’s work in Marrickville. Twenty-odd years later I still make zines. I imagine I will keep making them till the day I die, or when photocopiers cease to exist, whichever comes first. The images above are cover scans of a small selection of the zines I’ve made over the years.