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In 1999 I completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) thesis at the University of Adelaide titled The Ideal Menstruating Girl: Normalisation and the Menstrual Taboo. The thesis won the Vera May Swift Prize for best Honours thesis.
In 2008 as part of my Master of Arts (Information Management) at UTS I developed a preservation and access strategy for the Octapod Zine Library, based at the Octapod in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. The whole report is available to download here. The project included writing a short, unofficial and very gappy history of the collection, which is excerpted here.
The Octapod zine collection’s history reflects the nature of its community, of DIY action, passion and burnout. The Octapod collection is unique in its collection history, and represents and important period in Australian zine and cultural history. Various projects have been undertaken on the collection over the past ten years, including an initial zine anthology compilation project, a National Library of Australia significance assessment and a Work for the Dole cataloguing project.
The Octapod Association was established in Newcastle in 1996 by ‘a group of artists and students who liked the idea of a public access media space – where people could create and browse interesting and unusual, non-mainstream media’ (Healy, 2005). The Octapod collective initiated the National Young Writers Festival (NYWF) in 1998 partly in response to Mark Davis’s controversial book about the cultural industries in Australia, Gangland (1997) (Leishman, 1999). The NYWF is now an annual event held each October as part of the greater This is Not Art (TINA) festival, which encompasses NYWF, ElectroFringe and SoundSummit and Critical Animals, festivals of art, words, sound and critical thought. The Octapod incorporated as an association in 1996 and was run entirely by volunteer labour until part-time staff were employed in 2003. For many interview participants this change from a volunteer driven organization signified a change in the organization.
In 1998 the Octapod undertook to compile an anthology of Australian zines as part of the LOUD media festival. A call was put out for zine makers to send their zine/s to the Octapod for inclusion in the anthology, and Healy describes the influx of zines received in response to the request:
…they came in dribbles at first, another A5 size punk zine, another diaryish heartspiller, another art-skool collage. And each day they kept comping, the postal delivery service suddenly transforemed into a near daily avalanche of crazy communications from hyper-kids we’d never known before. There was something just soo cool, that people were sending zines from everywhere, to our little office in out little town. And the zine library of course, was becoming something we couldn’t have envisioned. (Healy, 2005)
The New Pollution was published in 1998, and the zines submitted as part of its development were added to the already existing library at the Octapod. The New Pollution contributions form the concrete foundations of the Octapod zine collection, and are an important part of Australia’s cultural history. Leishman (2004) explores further the issues that arose from the publication of The New Pollution within the zine community, highlighting the contention around the presentation of zine culture as a commodity and accessible to more than those ‘in the know’.
The National Young Writers’ Festival is Australia’s premier event for emergingwriters, publishers, performers and trouble-makers. Several thousand of the country’s most challenging and original young minds (…) descend upon Newcastle for a five day creative bender. Far from the seas of white hair, book signings and celebrity author worship you might expect, the NYWF is a DIY, hands-on conversation between equals. (NYWF, 2008)
As outlined above, the NYWF and TINA are annual events, held in Newcastle over the October long weekend, along with Sound Summit, Critical Animals and Electrofringe. Each year the NYWF has hosted a zine fair and often panels and workshops around zines. Interview participants mentioned that the NYWF was the first space created for zine makers to publicly discuss their work:
‘At the start of TINA it was the first time zine makers were asked to be on panels, we were respected. But I didn’t really know what to say.’
‘The panels present certain zinesters as authorities, but when I am on a panel I feel weird because there are probably people in the audience who know more or different or useful stuff to me, and are just as important.’
Stories were also told of ‘putting my zine in a cardboard box’ (most) years with the understanding that they would be put in the Octapod zine library. This was confirmed by festival organizers from 2002-4, and there are also two to three boxes of zines in the library collection labeled by year, and it is assumed these are the ‘donation boxes’ from the zine fairs. They are unopened and the zines have not been incorporated into the main collection. The NYWF and TINA continue to take place each year, and it is expected the collection will continue to grow as part of this process.
Each year the Australian Government provides grants to community organizations forpreservation projects and preservation and collection management training through community based workshops. The Community Heritage Grants (CHG) Program aims to preserve and provide access to locally held, nationally significant cultural heritage collections across Australia (NLA). The Octapod successfully applied for $2,500 funding in 2004 in order to assess the significance of the Octapod’s zine collection, and the project was completed in 2005. The collection was assessed as nationally significant. The project involved the preparation of a significance assessment by Anna Poletti, a leading expert on Australian zines. This included a survey of past, current and future users of the zine collection and the responses to the survey have been consulted in the preparation of this report (The Octapod Association, 2006).
Following on from the Community Heritage Grant significance assessment, a decision was made to undertake a cataloguing and digitization project at the Octapod zine library, using resources provided under the Australian Government’s Work for the Dole (WFD) scheme. The WFD scheme ‘provides work experience placements for job seekers in approved activities which provide facilities and services to local communities’ (Australian Government, 2008). The WFD program was introduced in 1998 and forms part of the Government’s welfare program. The Octapod applied for and was successfully awarded a WFD project for six months in 2006, with 30 participants involved in the zine library project. A WFD project was undertaken at the same time based around TIN radio, the Octapod’s online radio station. The intended outcomes of the Octapod Zine Library Work for the Dole project were:
The paperwork and anecdotal knowledge associated with the project was limited and hard to access. It was suggested by one interview participant that a lot of the work may have been lost when the Octapod server crashed in 2006. There is evidence throughout the zine collection, however, of the project reaching a point of zine classification and preparation for data entry. Various zines have a 1/3 A4 slip in them with the following table completed or partly completed with bibliographic data:
It appears this data would be collected and entered into a Microsoft Access database, which would in turn have an online presence. It is also understood that the project intended to digitize the zine collection. The current status of the WFD project is unknown but it is assumed that after the 6 month period of funding the project ended at an incomplete stage. Anecdotal comments also reflected on the likelihood of ‘burnout’ by the project manager/s. It is important to consider the state of this project when developing future strategies for the Octapod zine collection, as it reflects the intensity of the work involved, and the need to plan for sustainable and implementable projects.
Images of the Octapod zine collection and the Octapod Association are included at Appendix 2.
The Octapod Association is based at TPI House, King Street, Newcastle. The Newcastle City Council owns and maintains the building. The Octapod zine collection is currently housed in five (1mx2m) angled metal shelving (described by one interview participant as ‘Woolies bread racks’) in a corner of the Octapod Association.
The zines are haphazardly stored across the racks face out, with many more zines stacked in piles, boxes and bags in the bottom shelves of the racks. The shelving is close to a west-facing window, and forms part of a wall separating the Octapod’s storage room from the rest of the space.
The collection size and content is unknown, but the collection history reflects the period of collection. Zines in the collection date from as early as 1990 and as recently as 2008, although as noted earlier, many zines are undated.
Of note are
The collection is currently only accessible through browsing and stumbling across items on the shelves, and it is anecdotally claimed that the collection is not used on a day-to-day basis, rather in a more random fashion.
The collection ‘comes to life’ during the TINA festival each year over the October long weekend, and most interview participants related their stories of interacting with the collection during the festival. One participant commented that the TINA festival is ‘the one time each year the zine library gets a workout’.
The Octapod zine collection is currently not part of any local or international network of zine libraries.
Observations of zine libraries in the US especially reflect the importance of being part of these networks. Bartel (2004) suggests this is an important part of the zine library development process. The zinelibrarians yahoo group is an active site of networking for zine librarians, but is dominated by US based librarians, and an attempt to identify Australian based members of the group yielded no response.
There are currently no plans for the future of the Octapod zine collection, and this project intends to make recommendations in order to preserve the collection and make it more accessible. The Octapod Association has triennial funding from the NSW Ministry for the Arts and other sources, and is expected to continue to play a role in the Newcastle arts community. The Octapod is moving towards a community cultural development ‘incubator’ model, where the space is used to further develop the local arts community. The Association’s administrator sees potential for the zine library to be incorporated into this program.
There is a lot of nostalgia associated with the Octapod zine collection: most interview participants related stories of ‘depositing’ their zines in the collection, or interacting with it each year during the TINA festival period, and most have expectations that the collection will continue to be there year after year (although one participant said they ‘expect to walk into the Octapod one October and the zine library won’t be there anymore’).
Considering the Octapod collection as a ‘nostalgic’ collection, and with little plans for its future use, it is important to reflect on issues of preservation and collection within this community. In her discussion of digitization issues in the zine community, Anna Leventhal pinpoints a key issue that is apt when considering the Octapod collection:
For while an individual or a community might have a very real relationship with a particular zine, or the idea of zines in general, that relationship does not necessarily carry over into a box or shelf of un-filed, un-indexed material which in itself repels a certain degree of casual engagement, no matter the gems it may contain. (2007, 19)
The future of the collection is not determined completely by the nostalgia for the past, but also in its repurposing for the future.
References listed in attached pdf document.
