Archive Treasure: Astro-gurrl Zine

First up from the linked sections of Pig Meat's Zine List we have Astro-gurrl (AG), a zine the brainchild of Helen from Sutherland, NSW. Helen started AG in 1996 at the age of 15,

The earliest archive of the main page is from 1999, where Helen describes her zine as such:

astrogrrrl is a small fanzine done sporadically by me, helen a 17 yr old grrrl in australia... my zine is small and i like it that way.. zines are whatever you want so there are no design rules etc etc.

Typos, liberal use of Comic Sans and an almost stream-of-consciousness approach editing typify what I'm increasingly labelling 'Web 1.0 earnestness', a delightful pre-social media naivety about web design and content.

For a 17 year old (at the time), the author appears somewhat insightful about the contemporary culture of the period:

recently i have realised the futility of despising commercial youth culture(Australian example=recovery US equivalent=mtv) and that it should follow that the logical thing is not to adopt other peoples ethics, morals, culture but to make yr own.. yay.

Although I actually rather like Recovery (despite the zaniness and occasionally cringe-coolness of the hosts). Probably my own personal grass-is-greener para-nostalgia acting up. They looked like they put so much effort into it, it looked FUN. I digress.

There are some darker portions of the site, as evidenced in the intro blurb:

so this zine is by me for my friends and like minded people who know that kids belong in the world and get pissed off in cyberculture when you search for "teen" or "girl" all you get is a list of porno sites. boring.

And the poodle poem sets off alarm bells:

  my poodle is suicidal.
i can tell by the slash marks on her paws.
her down trodden disposition and her
general loss of enthusiasm whilst eating and chasing her gold plated stick.
i think she wishes that she was not fed fried mince every night.
mabey she is sick of being treated like a fashion accessory.
i am sick of her lack of cheerfulness and want her put down.
anyway, dalmatians are fashionable now.
i wonder if they come in lime green.
.............grumpy.

But on the whole, the page is a good example of teenage zine media, which is all too lacking in today's creative climate seemingly dominated by hipsters in their late 20s who bombed out of their arts degree and have been bonging on ever since. I'm just kidding, I made that last bit up, but it fits everyone I've ever met in the past two years that print zines. Well, the ones I don't like anyway. Shut up Iso, you're talking rubbish.

The links section is another veritable portal of period info. There's a link to Thunderpussy, another grrl zine that I've come across that I'll likely profile on here at some point. The zine also tipped me off to the band Earth To Nigel, a charmingly Sebadoh-ish noise pop group entirely made up of Kram's cousins. They will receive their own feature on here in due course.

Miss Helen seemingly continued on the same pathway and later stepped up the effort into the more sophisticated Astro Publishing, a portal for her own and associated works. Sadly, almost all of the links are unarchived. This is a massive shame. The Spycorp 3 zine ('the wheneverly journal of the suburban riot kid underground') sounds enormously promising.

Worth a dig around!

One final note. The Cynical Youth Coalition sounds absolutely badass.

P.S. dog photos