This historical record of the youth music scene, also known as the Subscene, was first compiled in 2024 with the assistance of many individuals, and it has been rebuilt here with the assistance of many more. The Brisbane Music Spew, Deadtrigger Records, Antidismal and the people of the scene were key to the first edition. This one owes its debts further back as well, to the people who wrote things down when nobody asked them to, because almost nothing in this book would be recoverable without them.
The first edition was written in September 2024, when the scene was declining but still alive, and it stopped at the present because the present hadn't finished happening. It became the most read thing this magazine has ever published. It was also incomplete in ways I could only see later. It skimmed the decades before 2019 because I hadn't done the digging yet, and it left one organisation out of the record entirely because its founder didn't think he'd earned a place in it. Both of those are fixed in this edition. The history now runs from 1950 to the middle of 2026, which means it covers the death of the scene it was originally written to celebrate, and the first signs of what comes after.
I was inspired to write the original by Charles Bean, who wrote the 'Official History' of Australia in the First World War, a work I found ridiculous and dense and weirdly moving, mythology dressed up as record-keeping with a straight face. This is still our version of that. It is as accurate as I could make it, the conflicts in the record are flagged rather than smoothed over, and where the scene's memory disagrees with the official version of events I have kept both, because if this scene has one tradition older than any band in it, it's that the official history and the lived one never quite match.
There is one more thing to say about why this edition exists now. It got written in a quiet stretch, with not much going on and the scene I knew being slowly forgotten, by someone who is not getting any younger. At my age Kaleb had already been running Casualty for years. George was a scene legend. Ixara was recording and studying at Music Industry College, Braxton had the YMCA on the phone, and I was in my room with roughly the same problems and insecurities I arrived with two years ago, while most of the people who once mentored me have moved on to other things, gone quiet, got busy, or aren't really in my life the way they used to be. I'm saying that plainly because the record should show what it costs to keep one. A history like this needs a circle of people behind it, and this edition was written alone. The liner notes of a record I love say believe, belief, beyond. That is roughly the state it was written in.
The genesis of the all-ages scene can be traced back to the origins of the broader Brisbane music scene.
During the 1950s and through to the 1960s, the only venues where live music was performed, outside of concert halls and orchestras, were high schools, weddings and dances. Bands were not part of a scene. The word 'scene' didn't really exist. There was no community of bands and their fans. Bands played for money, and with Australia still firmly tethered to mother Britannia, the ambitious ones moved down south to Sydney or Melbourne, or went straight to the United Kingdom. There was a lack of recording studios, venues, and people interested in rock and roll. Brisbane was a conservative, overgrown country town, and it was about to spend two decades being governed like one.
The wider world wasn't helping. New York was burning, London had stopped swinging, the hippie dream had curdled into caricature, and rock and roll itself had gone soft, progressive and polite, the soul and the roll taken clean out of it. The pushback came from the garages, The Sonics, The Stooges and the MC5 out of Detroit, the New York Dolls and Television in New York, and Bowie inventing Ziggy Stardust, an over the top rockstar destroyed by his own fame, as a eulogy for the whole business. Punk existed before the word did.
From 1968 the state was run by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a man so fascist that African dictators would fly in to gain inspiration from him. He held the police portfolio personally for a stretch, banned street marches outright in 1977, and kept a Special Branch that compiled dossiers on student radio volunteers. Walking through the city in a group of three could get you arrested for inciting a riot. The Valley had stopped being a shopping district and become a strip of empty buildings. The pubs had no live music to speak of; they were just regular old pubs except with more violent people, and women weren't allowed in the front bars. You could have fired a cannon down Queen Street on a Saturday afternoon and not hit a living thing. For a teenager there was nothing to do and nowhere to go, and that combination turned out to be the most productive force in this city's cultural history.
The first bands formed in suburban bedrooms and garages, kids imitating the harder rock and roll coming out of Detroit and New York. The Leftovers and Tex Deadly & the Dumdums from Sandgate, The Hardons, Kicks and Razar from Mt Gravatt, Colours, Pinups, Toy Watches and Skeletones out of Ipswich, and from Corinda, a band of state school kids called The Saints, who had been playing together since about 1973 under the name Kid Galahad and the Eternals. Ed Kuepper's family had emigrated from Germany, Chris Bailey's from Kenya by way of Belfast; they met at Oxley High in detention for having long hair and built their sound in a rented house at 4 Petrie Terrace. The city's first response was not a review; at one early show a punter took enough offence at the sound to knock Bailey out cold onstage, and the band kept playing. None of these bands had a venue, a label, or anyone's permission.
So they made their own. Rejected by the few mainstream venues that existed, the bands played converted houses and repurposed community halls that normally hosted tea dances. Rent was cheap; bands could hire half an empty warehouse floor for as little as $25, and the owners were usually so horrified by what they heard that a room, once gigged, was rarely available twice. The Saints turned the front room of 4 Petrie Terrace into a venue of its own, and after a disgruntled neighbour put a brick through the window, they boarded it up and painted CLUB 76 across the boards to make it official. The room barely fit the drum kit. The police station was across the road, and gigs were shut down constantly until the club was finally closed over a technicality about toilet counts. The early venue map filled out around it, The Curry Shop and the 279 Club in the city, Romeo's and The Silver Dollar in the Valley, Paddington Hall up on the hill.
Here is the accident the whole story runs on. Queensland's liquor laws were so strict that almost none of these rooms could operate as licensed venues, which meant there was nothing legal to stop a fourteen year old walking in. Nobody designed an all ages scene. A draconian licensing regime left a door open, and fifty years of kids have been walking through it since. The other piece of luck arrived in December 1975, when a Whitlam-era community radio program put 4ZZZ on air from inside the University of Queensland, behind the one fence the police couldn't easily cross. The station was broke from the day it launched, paid its staff in nothing, gave its announcers complete freedom, and started running gigs on the university grounds. A Brisbane kid could now hear the records the rest of the city had banned, and find out where the bands were playing, on the same frequency.
'(I'm) Stranded' itself was older than its session; Kuepper had the first verse and chorus by early 1974, written around the train trip out to his parents' place in Oxley. In June 1976 The Saints booked a session at Bruce Window's jingle studio in West End with their own money, two hundred dollars, and miked the guitars down a concrete hallway to get the wall of sound they were after. They pressed five hundred copies of '(I'm) Stranded' on a label they invented called Fatal Records and posted them to every music paper on Earth, the press kit carrying the band's own motto, it's better to be a Saint than a sap. That was September 1976, weeks ahead of anything the Sex Pistols had managed to get into the shops. The UK paper Sounds ran it as 'Single of This and Every Week' and called Australian record companies idiots for passing on it; John Peel played it on the BBC in December. At home the reception was thinner, and the record of it survives in the station's own paper. Triple Zed had pledged in the first edition of Radio Times to support 'Australian bands in general and local bands in particular', and the Saints sorely tested that pledge; within months the station was at war with itself over punk, one side hearing the future, the other hearing 'incoherent, aggressive rubbish', and a full year after 'Stranded' the announcers' best-of list still ran to Steely Dan, Joan Armatrading and Linda Ronstadt. In fairness the station may genuinely have been the first in the world to put punk to air, off test pressings a former station-hand posted home from London. The Saints themselves it played late and grudgingly, whatever gets remembered now. Four kids from the western suburbs, ignored by every label in the country, had cut one of the first independent punk singles in the world and been declared the future of music by the British press before most of Brisbane knew they existed. 'This Perfect Day' went to number 34 on the UK charts the following year. In April 1977 The Saints played an iconic co-headline show with Radio Birdman at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney, and within the year both bands had decamped to the UK. What they left behind read like a death knell for the first wave of Australian punk, and Brisbane went back to being ignored.
The UK adventure burned fast. Kym Bradshaw was gone within months, pushed out, a replacement conveniently within arm's reach; he resurfaced in a mod outfit that turned down every label that came knocking, and is forgotten now. Three albums came inside eighteen months, each stranger and better than the last, and when the touring stopped the original band effectively ended with it; Kuepper was back in Brisbane by that December. Hindsight has settled where the peak actually was; the boarded-up front room on Petrie Terrace and the two hundred dollars at Window's, the stretch when nobody knew what they had and everybody there somehow did, which is why that era is the stuff of legend and the London years are a footnote to it. The Saints lived up to the name, burnt out and never faded away, and because they had posted those five hundred singles to every paper on Earth, the story survived to be retold, which is the only way any scene survives its founders. Some delinquents from the wrong side of town had proved it could be done. Radio Birdman proved it again, the Birthday Party after them, even the Go-Betweens' UQ art kids, and nearly every one of them learned the same thing too late, that the real peak was at home, starting the revolution nobody got yet.
But the scene they started didn't leave with them. From 1978 to 1980 it was arguably at its peak, with Razar, The Leftovers and The Sharks playing to crowds that now looked recognisably punk. The police responded in kind. The Task Force, plain-clothes squads who never quite dressed right for the gigs they were raiding, ended as many as nine gigs in ten before the last song; in January 1978 thirty officers with dogs raided a Hamilton Hall show with thirty punters in it. Audience members spent nights in the watchhouse for the crime of attendance. Rocking Horse Records was raided for stocking Sex Pistols records, and when the Dead Kennedys came through, their drummer was arrested for the colour of his skin. Razar wrote 'Task Force' about the squad sent to shut them up, which means the unit's most permanent achievement is a punk single named after it. Brisbane was the only city in Australia where going to a gig could get you arrested, and it did not kill the scene. There is nothing a sixteen year old wants more than the thing the police are scared of.
Information about the scene after The Saints left is harder to find, and most of what survives comes through 4ZZZ and the people around it, so the record of this era is tinted by the one institution still keeping one. There wasn't a unified scene anymore, just cliques and groups attached to this bar or that pub. The fun had died down.
What happened is the trade that quietly ends every wave of this story. Pubs worked out that rock and roll pulled crowds, and started paying bands to play. Once a band can get paid at a licensed venue there is no reason to rent a hall and run your own door, so the people old enough to take the money took it, punk softened into pub rock, and the only people left outside were the ones the pubs legally couldn't let in. The under eighteens went back to having nothing, and the all ages scene went quiet for the first time. It has gone quiet the same way every time since.
The decade wasn't empty. The Go-Betweens, formed by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan out of a UQ drama class, made indie pop that shimmered like the light through the venetians, and the sound got a name, the Striped Sunlight Sound. Even they started DIY, pressing 'Lee Remick' on their own Able Label in 1978 before Brisbane had any idea what it had produced. A goth culture spread through the alternative cliques in the 80s, the swampies, dressed in head to toe black through sweltering summers, holding down territory outside the Hungry Jacks on Queen Street Mall, which caused petty rivalries with the punks who had previously laid claim to that hangout spot, and running club nights that moved venues every few months and left almost no record behind. Stories of the old scene became almost legendary, which is what happens to scenes that don't write anything down.
The institutions took their hits. The Queen's Hotel in Spring Hill, the era's main live venue, shut in March 1979, and the all ages Joint Efforts gigs moved to Cloudland Ballroom in Bowen Hills, the white dance hall on the hill where half the city's parents had met each other. In November 1982 the government sent the Deen Brothers in at four in the morning and Cloudland was rubble by sunrise, no heritage process, no warning, the most famous demolition in Brisbane's history and the clearest statement of what the place thought its own culture was worth. The Bjelke-Petersen government fell in 1987 under the weight of the Fitzgerald Inquiry; in December 1988, four am again, a group led by Victoria Brazil, president of the UQ Young Nationals, stormed the 4ZZZ building in an attempted eviction, and the station's supporters occupied it until the broadcast was safe. 4ZZZ moved to Toowong in 1989, then bought the old Communist Party building on Barry Parade in the Valley, where it broadcasts from to this day on 102.1. Under the Liquor Act the default never changed, under eighteens stayed barred from licensed premises, an all ages gig needed an exemption to exist at all, and as gig venues funded by alcohol became the standard, the wall between young people and live music reached its full height.
A more recognisable demographic emerged in the 90s. City rats, as they were called, congregated near the record shops, King George Square and Queen Street Mall, the city being the easiest place for young people from different schools to meet. They skated, hung out, got moved on, came back. All ages gigs happened where the kids already were, in the parks, Paddington Skatepark among them.
The 90s also produced the thing this book owes its existence to. In 1990 a bloke named Mark Donahoe, who everyone called Batsy, started a photocopied zine called BUMS, the Brisbane Underground Music Scene, on the theory that Brisbane was full of brilliant bands getting ignored and somebody ought to put out a little paper, even a photocopied one, that treated the local stuff like it mattered. He described what he was making as a primary source document of the city's culture, written with enough empathy that a reader would know what it felt like to be there. It ran on the only economy the underground has ever had, benefit gigs, bands playing free, venues buying bigger ads when an issue nearly sank it. Thirty years before this magazine existed, BUMS had already written its mission statement, and the conditions it worked against, no rooms, no money, a street press looking the other way, have not changed since.
The hall gigs never stopped entirely either. One submission to this edition remembers the 15th of October 1995, a local community hall, a first band called Dead Gypsies playing post punk that was half Cure and Joy Division covers, 'first gig as a band and could probably tell'. He was nineteen. Thirty years later he wrote it down for this book.
The all ages infrastructure of the decade was thin but real. Livid began in 1989 at the University of Queensland in front of between 1,500 and 2,000 people and grew into the city's alternative festival at Davies Park in West End. 4ZZZ ran Market Day in Musgrave Park, a sprawling annual gathering of bands and stalls. On 19 October 1996, Market Day became the scene's next collision with the police. A storm hit the park without warning around 8.20pm and knocked out the PA, a melee followed, and police cleared the park in sweeps with mounted officers and riot gear; 71 people were arrested. The scene remembers it as a police riot. The Criminal Justice Commission investigated for over a year and ruled that the crowd had become an unlawful assembly and that the police response was neither excessive nor unreasonable. Both versions are still on the record, and they do not agree, which is about as Brisbane as history gets. Market Day was never annual again and stopped entirely after 2006.
West End in those years was becoming the hipster urban village it was before it got gentrified, re-gentrified, and then became whatever you want to call it; students moved into cheap deindustrialised streets, and out of the share houses and the Valley's quieter nights an emotional offshoot of the band scene took shape. In the back half of the 2000s Brisbane had a proper emo wave, midwest emo before anyone here called it that, indie rock made more technical and more felt; the rhythm of the life was the Valley on weekday nights and house shows on the weekend. The Red Room out at the uni was the main venue, and the spiritual centre was a weird shed in Coorparoo that the emo kids used as a cheap recording studio and gig venue. The bands were Arrows, The Paper and the Plane, In Sepia and Inside the Whale, plus names like Space Between Trains, Francis and Intimate With Emily that survive now only in the memories of the people who were there. It was Club 76 again with different haircuts, the same cheap forgotten venues pressed into service because the 'proper' ones wouldn't have you, and it was in perfect timing with the rise of the mall goth subculture, swept fringes and MySpace networking, sightings in every Garden City and Myer Centre, and all ages crowds sneaking into venues or listening from the footpath.
In 2008 Campbell Newman's council razed the fountains and gardens of King George Square, and when it reopened the next year people were appalled by how hideous it was. The new ramp became the hangout anyway, along with the spot behind the church across from it, and it even held the odd gig for the emo crowd. Kids met at Rocking Horse after school, to the lasting irritation of the owner, while Queen Street Mall took to blasting classical music to move them on; they headed to Chermside, 'late nights at Chermy', and spent Friday nights at the Botanic Gardens, which they, and we still do, call Botangs, or Bat Park. The scene's social map was as alive as it had ever been. The music underneath it was dying, and the cause of death is worth recording precisely because it repeats. The Valley venues that hosted emo shifted club-centric as the nightlife economy consolidated; by 2011 one bar next to a cabaret club was carrying what was left. Without venues there was no way to recruit new people, the friend groups that remained hardened into cliques, and the wave ended the way the first one had, not with a raid but with a door that quietly stopped opening.
What followed was the longest quiet in this history. Through most of the 2010s the youth scene simply did not exist. The Lab at Woolloongabba ran from 2013 to 2017, the artist-run initiative Outer Space put on shows out of a Montague Road warehouse in West End through to 2020, and neither broke through to the young, because there was no network of young people for them to reach. The 2016 tightening of Queensland's licensing laws squeezed venue economics harder in the precincts where live music actually lived, and an unlicensed hall show meant insurance, liability and council paperwork that no teenager could navigate alone. If you were a young person in 2015 you were lucky to know the ramp existed. Otherwise you had nowhere to go and nobody to go with, unless you already had alternative friends, which was the one thing the city offered no way to find.
A whole generation grew up inside that wall. One of them, a primary schooler in the leafy suburb of The Gap, would spend the back half of the decade learning instruments in his bedroom and listening to the bands his parents' radio station played, with no idea that any of this had ever happened, or that he was about to restart it.
In December 2018 two teenagers named Kaleb Collings and Darius did the 4ZZZ youth announcer training at the Barry Parade studios, on the same frequency that had carried the scene through every era it had survived. Kaleb had been practising and recording demos with his band Absolution since 2018, when he was fourteen. Their first gig and their first EP both happened at Tym Guitars, with Phase 4 Records the other unconventional venue that would have them, and Kaleb later described Tym and his sound engineer Carter as the first adults apart from their parents that saw their passion for music. Many adults had stressed the importance of all ages music while simultaneously doing nothing about it. That sentence is the entire reason this chapter exists.
Wanting to release Absolution's music properly, Kaleb formed an entity to do it through. Casualty Records released the band's song 'Shit Day' on 12 April 2019 and was formally dedicated on the 20th. The name came from 'Casualty' by The Chats, the first song Kaleb and Darius had ever learned together; Darius would go on to found the Late Night Collective on the hip hop side of the same youth world. The first logo was Donald Duck with his eyes crossed out. The one everybody remembers came later, a cartoon mousetrap, a tiny label called Casualty with a trap for a face.
Absolution's debut album 'Queensland State of Mind' arrived on 21 March 2020 with an all ages afternoon release party, songs about Brisbane punk figures, living in Queensland and being a student in the education system. Two weeks later the lockdowns hit, the venues that had given them a stage went under, and Kaleb found himself at home with an abundance of time. He spent it falling in love with the founding of the Brisbane scene in the 1970s. He was the same age Kuepper had been, in a city gone just as quiet, and he decided to do the same thing, deliberately, fifty years on. Through 2020 Casualty ran a newsletter, sold CDs and stickers, and on 12 April 2020, a year to the day after its first release, began signing other artists.
The first Casualty Records gig was held at King Lear's Throne on 27 June 2021, a benefit for the Bravehearts featuring Gunt with Private Function headlining, small, intimate, launch-style. More gigs followed and began propelling acts like The Chimpeltons, Loose Cannon and Kaleb's new band Artie and the Rantans to scene stardom, with plenty of bands forming and dissolving around them, nothing taken too seriously yet. The venue that made it a scene was the Woolloongabba Substation, chosen for the least romantic reasons imaginable, easy to clean, central, right on the train lines for kids who couldn't drive. There was no bar, so there was no bar take; the door was the whole economy, which is why an all ages ticket cost more than a pub show. The kids were paying for the room, the PA and every band on the bill themselves, and they did, month after month.
The bands the Substation made are half the story of everything after. In those thin early crowds, the ones the label's own newsletter described as low attendance and nerdy appearing audience members, stood Arran McKenzie and Johnnie Campbell, two Brisbane Grammar boys who had started Piss Off in June of 2021 with Asha Stewart, a family friend of Johnnie's, on a still broken bass and a shitty drum pad. Their big break, in Arran's own words, was through Casualty really; the label put on a gig for their debut album, a lo-fi record called Gormless, straight shed rock in The Chats' coinage, taped fast and live on a phone in drummer Johnnie's home studio, full of exaggerated songs about being bored in a library and hating Geography class, that sounded enough like a joke that new listeners regularly took them for a comedy act until it dawned that every word was meant. George of the future Project Punk played in Shock Value, a band that came together at school around songs written for a side project that mercifully never launched, found Isaac at a Casualty substation gig, tried him on bass and then on guitar, decided two guitars sounded shit, and put Krystina on bass instead, at which point, by the members' own telling, they stopped calling themselves a band and started being one. The Subscene's second generation was standing in the first one's crowd.
The era around those first Substation gigs is the one the people who came later still talk about in golden terms. The King George Square ramp came back to life as the scene's open-air hangout, and you could go in on a Saturday knowing nobody and come home with ten new friends, because nobody had established cliques yet and the entire machine ran on letting new people in. The first scene press appeared, a small magazine called Censure, in early 2022. On 12 February 2022 Casualty and the Late Night Collective co-ran the first Shedfest in a converted taxi repair warehouse in Albion, fourteen acts deep, school bands and cover bands included, Videocouch, Sunday Service, the audience mostly other bands, their mates and their parents. Most of the era's bands lived and died inside it, Cannon Limba, female-fronted, among them; the Chimpeltons were among the few that carried through to 2024. Watching the footage now, the attendance looks thin and the interconnection total, members of one band playing in two others the same afternoon. It was during this period that the scene began calling itself the Subscene, a community of musicians subverting the general Brisbane music scene, which had been relegated to bars and pubs and was more about profit than community; a proper noun, the kind people reach for when the thing is moving so fast it feels like 1976 starting again. Nobody wrote that definition down as a creed. They didn't have to.
In April 2022 a fifteen year old named George Roberts, who had watched Kaleb work and wanted something with a lot less rules and regulations, founded Project Punk. Its first gig, at the Albion Peace Centre, came within days of the news that Chris Bailey of The Saints had died; The Rantans answered with a Saints cover, and the people who were there still describe the timber floors shaking under the stomping; maybe it was a sign from Chris Bailey himself. The first Project Punk has been described, by multiple people, independently, as insane. It drew a more characteristically alternative crowd than the school band kids of the Substation, and it marked the moment the scene got serious. The Peace Centre itself revolutionised things, spacious, central, right on the train station, an oasis in the desert, and when Casualty installed a proper stage with a backdrop and lights it stopped feeling like a shed and started feeling like a venue. George's founding rule, announced from the stage at the first show, was that you can do whatever you want, but your actions have consequences, so have fun but do not ruin other people's fun. As constitutions go, the scene has never needed a longer one.
In May 2022 Ixara Dorizac, fourteen years old, newly arrived at Music Industry College, founded Antidismal. She had been performing at Casualty events with her band Sunday Service and producing her own music, but couldn't play licensed venues herself; her mother, rooted in traditional Filipino and Catholic values, wanted her to quit music altogether. With help from her aunt and her school she built the label anyway, oriented toward a more indie, Triple J pop sound, and it expanded the appeal of the youth scene to a broader and more mainstream audience than punk alone was ever going to reach.
Growth brought the first hurdles. Kaleb moved his operation to the Peace Centre to follow Project Punk, and by the third Project Punk a string of noise complaints from a neighbour named Sonia had built up until the scene's response entered folklore as a chair with FUCK SONIA taped to it; in December 2022 the Peace Centre banned gigs outright, and the gigs moved to Paddington Hall, praised for its hardwood floors, the same hall the first wave had played in the 1970s. Nobody planned that symmetry. The 'proper venues' that will take under eighteens in this city are so few that the scene keeps cycling back through them just like The Saints did, until they said fuck it and started their own place.
The peak needs dating honestly, because it sits earlier than the big crowds do. Famous things peak before their fame, and the people inside can feel it even when the numbers say otherwise. Oasis felt it at Maine Road, the ground they'd grown up dreaming about, their mother and Alan McGee up in a box, the Union Jack guitar brought out for that night, and Knebworth a few months later was already the victory lap. The Subscene's Maine Road was the Peace Centre, from the first Project Punk that April to the December 2022 night the venue banned gigs outright; the stretch when the scene got serious and outgrew Casualty, when Subscene meant something you were in rather than something you attended, and the whole machine still ran on letting new people in. Its Knebworth came on 12 March 2023 at BackDock Arts, an Antidismal mini-festival called Project Subscene, borrowing Project Punk's name-recognition and openly raising it, eight iconic bands of the Subscene on one day's ticket, the movement now an event you could sell by name. Hardly anyone clocks the difference from inside it. The years that followed, 2023 and 2024, played as the encore years, bigger and busier and a little further from the point every month, and the people who were actually there for 2022 already talk about it the way the first wave talks about Petrie Terrace.
By 2023 Antidismal was gaining real momentum, Ixara fronting her own band Ixaras with the former Sunday Service members, picking up Triple J Unearthed airplay and press attention, seeking out indie pop and TikTok pop acts, drawing mainstream teenagers and even adults from the bar scene into the all ages gigs, hiring staff, running shows at AHEPA Hall in West End, becoming, in its founder's own trajectory, something more like a business. At the same time the cracks were showing. Casualty had slowed. The ramp turned toxic with drama and established groups, and the era when a stranger could collect ten friends in an afternoon ended the way it always ends, with the cliques hardening and the new people finding a wall where the door used to be. The scene was bigger than it had ever been, and the thing that had made it worth joining was already going.
The heart of the scene has never stayed still, Corinda, the Valley, West End, Woolloongabba, and by 2023 it had moved to the bayside. Wynnum-Manly produced Findaway, PIMP and The Amphetamines, and a new metal-fuelled sound came to dominate as the punk bands that founded the scene aged toward their twenties and the all ages clock that comes for everyone.
In March 2023, at a Youth Week event supported by YMCA Queensland, a fifteen year old musician from the Redlands named Braxton Hunt-Nissen, of The Amphetamines, worked out his version of the founding move. The gigs he wanted were all an hour away in the city, so rather than commute he founded Deadtrigger Records through a partnership with The Link YMCA at Victoria Point, which gave him funding, resources and a room ten minutes from home, and held his first gig in June 2023. Deadtrigger championed the Redland Bay bands relentlessly, and in April 2024 it staged the purest event in this whole history, the first SkatePUNK at Capalaba Skatepark, completely free, entry, food and drink, two hundred people on a Monday watching Civil Disturbance, None The Wiser, OK-36, Findaway, PIMP, The Chimpeltons and Palinola. Strip every dollar and every age limit out of a gig and that's what's left, the open door rebuilt by a teenager because his mates couldn't get to the city.
In December 2023 a sixteen year old named Natasha Ellis, who had downloaded Instagram to talk to her friends and found the scene through Findaway, started the Brisbane Music Spew Zine, writing about local musicians, gigs and releases. It began with little attention and grew on the support of the bands themselves. Whether she knew it or not, she was picking up exactly where Batsy's BUMS had left off three decades earlier, the scene writing itself down from the inside, and for a while the Spew was the only consistent written documentation the Subscene had.
Kaleb's exit, when it came, was quieter than the legend that grew around it. In April 2024 Casualty Records posted its farewell, a note that opened with words to the effect of I don't know how to say this, and this feels weird. He'd started Casualty, he wrote, to release his first band's shitty music, and never expected it to go as far as it did; he was glad for what it gave him, Shedfest, the Peace Centre, the memories, and he was stepping back for now. He made a point of saying that Braxton, then still barely known, was doing good things with Deadtrigger Records and that people could expect to see his name come up a lot. They did. He wasn't leaving music either; he'd keep drumming in Bubblegum Haircut alongside bassist Java, and he teased a project called Miss Middle that people would just have to stay tuned for, though nothing much ever came of it. The scene flooded the post with thanks, five years almost to the day from 'Shit Day'. A better story went around afterwards, that he'd been scouted by the Broncos off a furious goal-kicking session and signed; it was a hoax, fed to this magazine during the research for the first edition by someone claiming to be a close friend of his, and the first edition printed it in good faith. It stands corrected here, because this record would rather be right than look right. Casualty described itself as paused rather than dead, which feels accurate; founders age out, all the way back to Kuepper boarding the plane, and the thing Kaleb built had long since stopped depending on him.
The wave he left behind kept building through 2024. Findaway released their debut album Intertwined in July. Yellow Fever formed in June, bassist Dylan Ferreira messaging guitarist Iggy Bitburg, drummer Ethan joining after, Type O Negative running in their veins, part of a younger metal-influenced generation alongside Act Dumb, with Natasha Ellis on vocals, Corrosion Girls, Konjura and Vaider. Gormless Records, founded by the members of Piss Off, put on bills that read like the scene's all star team. Harper Thomas, fifteen, started pulling crowds with indie folk. Antidismal signed distribution partnerships with GYROstream and DistroDirect, which made it a more real record label than anything the scene had produced. And in May 2024, days after attending his first proper gig, a fourteen year old aspiring guitarist started a magazine.
Breakbone was founded in May 2024 by a southside kid rechristened Iggy Bitburg, a pen name taken to keep himself out of reach, given how personal the writing was going to get, that ended up becoming a scene name in its own right. He had stood in the crowd at the Big Takeover at Paddington Skatepark on 4 May--one day before his birthday--the all ages show PIMP organised, and decided within the week that what he'd seen needed documenting. The name came from the city itself, Bris from a Gaelic word for break, bane from an Old English one for bone, a coincidence sealed at that first gig when two bands pulled out over what the crowd swore was a broken bone. The logo was a hammer and a bone drawn on an iPad, the masthead typeface lifted from the spirit of Sniffin' Glue, and the motto was Document, distribute, demonstrate. Its first issue went up on 13 May 2024. In September 2024 it published the first edition of this history, which became the most read piece in the magazine's existence and the closest thing the Subscene had to a record of its own existence. The magazine's editor would be the first to tell you it did not consistently live up to the motto, and the proof is that the first edition of this book left Breakbone out entirely. It belongs in the record, so this time it's in.
The history that edition told ended in September 2024 at a low ebb, no gig in weeks, the next a month away, and its author called the scene quite dead at the time of writing. He was early, but not wrong. What followed over the next year was the fall, and because this is a history and not a eulogy, here is the sequence as plainly as it can be stated.
Project Punk had already gone in July 2024, last gig and out, a self-described rock and roll suicide in the Ziggy Stardust tradition, burning out on its own terms rather than fading. Antidismal held Happy Feet Fest at the Bardon Bowls Club in September 2024, a bill leaning indie pop and BIGSOUND, the scene's Be Here Now moment, enormous, polished and slightly beside the point, before Ixara left to tour nationally supporting Aleksiah, and as her career took off the label completed its long drift from its punk roots toward indie pop; through 2025 it stopped holding gigs in the scene it had helped build. Deadtrigger scaled up before it slowed down, the second SkatePUNK in April 2025 drawing around five hundred people across two stages with council funding behind it and Braxton speaking on a BIGSOUND panel, and then DeadFEST, SkatePUNK rebranded after the 2025 edition moved indoors and this magazine observed in print that the name no longer fit, was cancelled, and Braxton stepped back, and the machine that had carried the bayside went quiet. Gormless Records was the scene's last stand, and it ended quietly and early. The community halls had worked out they could jack rental fees and bonds on a captive scene, the crowds got harder to manage, and the official explanations pointed at both, and Cyclone Alfred flattening the calendar that March didn't help, but the honest core was simpler and older: Arran and Johnnie were starting university, and the all ages clock that comes for every founder had come for them. Their last all ages show, at a Spring Hill hall on the 1st of March 2025 with Heavy Liquid and Bubblegum Haircut on the bill, was a good one, strong turnout, good night, George of Shock Value sending everyone off by buttering the doorknobs. Gormless still exists on paper and now mostly carries Piss Off's pub bookings and releases. The band's own records map the arc. After the shed-rock debut came Slab, the famous one, the original lineup at their peak powers, proper production carrying the comedy, the grunge tinge evident every second song; and then Cut Tongues, recorded at a 'proper' studio and sounding like it, midtempo, a riff per song with the noise baked on, the urgency gone, which is what happens, and has always happened, when the people carrying the unpaid version age into the paid one.
The middle of that fall has a primary source, an unpublished review sitting in this magazine's own archive, of a gig called School's (Almost) Out on the 9th of November 2024, Chimpeltons and Ambrosial across the bill with The Amphetamines and Konfess. It reads like the era. Fifteen bucks on the door, a crowd of pop punk and mall emo kids mostly under eighteen, watching from their friend groups and swaying a little instead of moshing; Heath McTegg working the stage banter; Ambrosial by then a wall of sound in a league of their own, not punk, not indie, not metal; and the Chimpeltons, the act the reviewer had come for, sounding more metal than the shedrock of their Casualty days, playing to a floor half-emptied by people leaving for another gig. The review ends honestly, the deep yearning just wasn't satisfied, and it never ran. One submission to this edition remembers the same night from the floor, and since it was given anonymously it can speak for everyone; the dyed-hair kids on the train and knowing yep, we're going to the same place, someone walking you to the station afterwards saying be safe, a gig as somewhere that felt safe in a year when not much else did. Both of those are true at once, and that is what the fall actually felt like, the machine winding down and the door still worth walking through.
The bands themselves were changing shape under the surface. Piss Off, Shock Value, Heavy Liquid and the short lived Night Boys had always shared and swapped members, and by the start of 2025 neither Piss Off nor Shock Value had its original lineup; Krystina, Shock Value's bassist, crossed to Piss Off rather than tour Europe, chasing a botany degree instead. Nobody announced the old scene's end. The lineups just quietly stopped being the ones on the old posters.
The venues went with the organisations. The Woolloongabba Substation, the spiritual home of everything since 2021, held its last gig at the end of January 2026, Piss Off on the bill one final time, and then gigs there were banned outright, the liability and the police callouts having finally outrun the goodwill. Communify's ban pushed one Ithaca Hall show to be booked under the guise of an art exhibition, which is either a low point or the most punk venue booking in this history depending on your mood. The crowds changed too; the criticism that had peaked in 2024, that hedonism had become the standard, that subcultures had been dumbed down to black hair and piercings, that a contingent came to gigs to fight, film themselves or sit outside, did not get less true in 2025. What had made 2024 feel like a tribe was that you could trace anybody's degrees of separation, who they knew, whose photos they stood in; by 2025 you could pick the new crowd by the opposite signs, the pins without the lineage behind them, the filming, the congregating outside, the names at the gigs no longer connecting to anything you knew. The scene had centralised around Redland Bay and hardened into circles of friend groups, and if you weren't from the bay it was getting hard to meet anyone at all.
And the documentation nearly stopped. Breakbone went dark in February 2025 and stayed dark for seven months, a cyclone, school and its editor's own disillusionment with what the gigs had turned into all doing their part. When it came back in September the issues ran partly on archival material, and the writing, by the editor's own later verdict, was polished and bloodless, a magazine posting in its sleep. The Spew slowed with the scene it covered. By the start of 2026 a gig still happened here and there, built around one band's own followers and friends, but the connective tissue, the thing that made strangers into a scene, was gone, and everyone quietly knew it. Gigs as background noise. A kid turning fourteen that summer, holding a guitar in a bedroom in a suburb nobody writes about, had no way of knowing any of this had ever existed. That is the actual death of a scene, not the last gig, the forgetting.
This chapter is being written from inside the events it describes, which is exactly the failure of objectivity Charles Bean would have approved of, so let the record show what 2026 has actually contained.
In February, this magazine woke up properly for the first time in a year by declaring the scene dead in print, loudly, and being argued with, which in hindsight was the first sign of life; nobody argues with the obituary of something that's actually gone. Through autumn, the evidence started accumulating that the obituary was premature. On 9 April, Breakbone put on its own gig, The Big Break, an all ages show split across two rooms, Dublin Rose, Elle Payne, Fucken Oath, Heavy Liquid and Palinola on the bill, with fifty five people through the door, scene veterans from the Casualty days standing next to kids at their first ever show. On 25 April, Babylon Music Events, run by two young organisers named Zac and Lily, staged an all ages festival at the Sherwood Magpies clubhouse. And on 15 May, four bands, Mandala, Ember, Axis and Rupture, hired Coorparoo Hall themselves, ran their own door, took no grant money from anybody, and packed out May Metal Mayhem, seven years almost to the week from Casualty's founding. The night after May Metal Mayhem, Lightning Fuze's Alex Cestari hired the same hall for a first bill of his own. That same month Findaway, by now one of the biggest bands in the scene, played their comeback show at the Warrego Revue after months away writing and recording, and the same venue hosts another gig this month with Heatstroke on the bill. Nobody at any of these shows needed the cycle explained to them. A scene that had died in 2025 was doing the only thing this scene has ever done with death, which is fail to take it personally.
Guy Di Mattina of Findaway, interviewed in September 2025, had already called it. The scene had a lull, he said; everyone was in Year 12, everyone was busy, and now they'd graduated they had time to do shit again. That is the engine of fifty years of this history in three sentences, the lull is the cohort studying, the revival is the cohort coming back, and the death only becomes permanent if the next cohort never finds out the door exists. The old hands know it too. Arran McKenzie of Piss Off, the elder statesman of the revival era, has said plainly that once you turn nineteen or twenty it gets a little bit weird hanging around all ages gigs, give us a year or two and you won't see us at them at all. The all ages scene is the only scene on earth designed to lose every member who loves it, on a fixed schedule, forever. It survives anyway, or it has so far, by one mechanism only, somebody slightly older handing the door key to somebody slightly younger before they go.
The torch is mid-handover as this goes to print. The bands of the moment, Rupture and Ember and Whitt's End and Heatstroke and Heavy Liquid and Liasis and a dozen others who will have changed names by the time you read this, are booking their own halls in the Casualty tradition without ever having seen a Casualty show. Then, on the 13th of June, Deadtrigger came back. Punk in the Park was its first gig in eight months, four hours on a patch of public concrete at Thornlands skatepark with no grant and no YMCA behind it, and when the rain killed the amps the whole show finished on a single power cable. More than a hundred turned up, and the closing band's singer said the only sentence this scene has ever run on, that you don't need bars to have a good night, you can go to your local park and play. Call it the new scene's Maine Road, the same moment the first wave had fifty years ago and the Casualty kids had in 2022, playing again to people who had never seen either; Casualty lit it in 2019, Project Punk and Antidismal carried it in 2022, Deadtrigger took it to the bayside in 2023, and the kids in that skatepark are the wave after that, the door handed down the line one more time. New and old organisers, Spark Foundation, Schema Collective, Worldrot, Imagine Music, are filling pieces of the space the trinity left, even if none of them yet feels like the youth running it for the youth, and the gigs have drifted toward licensed rooms, an Afterdark in Milton rather than a hall with a hired key. Rooms like that can host a gig; they are not homes for the scene. They wear 'community' the way a landlord wears it, and underneath there is always the pitch, some pipeline to the 'industry', an industry that died when physical music died, sits a thirteen hour flight away, and does not know your name. Fifty years of this record say the same thing; nobody here ever needed that permission. And a new organiser called Run Amok has appeared on the bills, with Bubblegum Haircut and Night Boys on its gigs; anyone who knows whose drumming carries Bubblegum Haircut can draw their own conclusions about who might be behind it. The scene talks about Kaleb like he went quiet, and the bills say otherwise. Antidismal went genuinely dismal, the trigger got pulled on Deadtrigger, and the man who named his label Casualty seems to have felt he became one himself, a casualty of his own success; he is also, on the quiet, still moving. The Substation stands empty with the 2032 Olympics works circling it, and some of the bands already talk about chaining themselves to it if the wreckers come, which would be the most Brisbane ending imaginable, the city tearing down the scene's holy ground for a stadium, fifty years after it tore down Cloudland for flats.
When Andrew Stafford closed the tenth-anniversary edition of Pig City he wrote that the scene was now stronger than it ever was, and that documenting it was 'for another, younger writer'; he'd kept his own book a snapshot on purpose, and he warned that the faint echo of history repeating itself might make for eerie reading. This book is that attempt, made by someone who got to the scene late, loved it anyway, watched it die and is watching it come back. The Saints' wave died in 1977. The emo wave died in 2011. Kaleb's wave died in 2025, and the kids hiring halls this autumn are proof of what the whole record keeps saying, that the scene always existed, and that it only ever needs two things to keep existing, somebody letting the new people in, and somebody writing it down.
Every torchbearer in this book left a message behind in their own words. Batsy said a scene that doesn't document itself with empathy just disappears. Kaleb said the whole mission was somewhere safe to go on a Friday night. George said have fun but don't ruin other people's fun. I used to think I was an outsider to all of this, a misunderstood genius, a pariah, and looking back at how my friendships fractured, a fair share of that was me doing it to myself. It doesn't much matter anymore. The people who inspired me aren't carrying the scene now, and the people I once pictured carrying it with are gone, so whether anyone likes it or not, including me, the carrying has landed here. How long I've been doing it and what I've done speaks for itself, and it isn't really the point. The Saints felt the doubt too and went ahead anyway, and the going ahead is what made them The Saints. The first edition of this history ended on a line I'll say again, because the two years since tried to prove it wrong and failed: a subculture is not a disposable TikTok aesthetic, something you put on for a season and scroll past. It is a fifty year old movement with a door in it, and the door is still open.
I close this by saying what those who inspired me said, in my own way, for the scene as it is right now. When the thing you want to do is so strong it feels like a need and not a want, do it. You will cop naysayers, wannabes, haters and bullies. There will be pain in it. In this town the jury is rigged, but the people always know the truth. It's when you're in your bedroom, hours into a burnt out second hand guitar, no money, drama raging, half your mates not talking to you, and you still have the dream. It's when you're in a community hall with that thick, dense twentieth century air, people trickling in, the lights going out, the first band coming on, and the sound somehow soothing the wounds inside. It's when you're up in front of a crowd of mutuals you've only ever seen as profile pictures, your mates, your mentors, and the venue is shit and the aura is off and you fluff your parts, and afterwards the people who actually matter, people you haven't spoken to in months and people you're speaking to for the first time, tell you it was awesome. It's love and violence, all rolled into one. It's being stranded by your parents, your school, the people you thought understood you, stranded by everyone and everywhere you once knew, and then the music comes on, the right people are there, and you're home, the real one, doing the thing you love with the people you love.
You are not getting any younger, only older. This is your moment, and if you do not use it you will regret it for years, so quit waiting around and make it happen. Document, distribute, demonstrate. You're the scene, and you're the ones making it.