"With appeal to more than just punk band obsessives, Orstralia offers an unprecedented snapshot of an underacknowledged segment of Australian life and history. Far from punk's more modish North Atlantic core in the late 1970s, discontented youth were enacting similar musical and cultural reckonings. Australia was another of the eager participants at its periphery. Yet despite its purported 'laidback' national demeanour, punks in Australia were routinely met with insult, fist, or the police baton. More subterranean than the national scandal that was punk back in 'homeland' Britain, Australia's own bands nonetheless came to be heralded internationally. Orstralia represents the first definitive account of the country's initial years, from progenitors The Saints and Radio Birdman in the mid-70s, through the emergence of hardcore in the eighties, to the stylistic diffusion that accompanied transition to the 1990s. Based on over 130 interviews, Orstralia documents the most renowned to the most fleeting and obscure acts the nation produced. Included are equally engrossing and shocking personal narratives befitting such a passionate and intemperate cultural form, as well as punk's placing within broader Australian society at the time"--