Hand in hand with the development of much music in our era of focus was the proliferation of ZINES. I've yet to scratch more than the surface when it comes to 90s Australian zines (not just indie/punk zines either) but as you might guess information is rather scant. My first two ports of call were the Warm Cola and Beanz Baxter web pages from the late 90s/early 00s.
Pig Meat, a rather unusual web portal maskerading as a Tripod homepage, contains a trove of such useful info, specifically their epic Australian Zine List (still live! Archived version here). Pig Meat was a zine itself, making its way onto the internet at the dawn of the modern era (1996). Unfortunately, the archive of the zine doesn't look like it was ever finished (correct me if I'm wrong)
The doctored John Howard image on the landing page immediately sets the setting. Selecting 'no frames' (of course), you're soon greeted with a beautiful illustration in lieu of a textual site map, surrounded by links. I recommend exploring some of these, there's a wealth of info on countercultural activities of the day, as well as even a few live recordings and an apparently Nirvana radio interview (in .rm format, regrettably).
I recommend trawling the archived page for links, as most of them are defunct and this eliminates the extra step of having to enter dead URLs into the Wayback Machine.
Another note regarding the Zine List - home addresses publically listed for zine correspondence! Unthinkable in this day of inscrutable paranoia! What a beautiful example of Web 1.0 Earnestness and Naivete.
I'll be slowly going through the Pig Meat zine list and evaluating these pages for Archive Treasure posts in the future. Stay tuned!
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