Austrlian Scene Report

Written by Adok & Goblin

This is a short report about the Australian PC demoscene, based on interviews with several Australian sceners, among others Phorte/FTS/Vault, Goblin/Xtatic, Spoonman, Raven/Tektonic and Dark Fiber.

The Australian PC demoscene has been existing for longer, but it had a renaissance in about 1994. Nowadays the Australian scene isn't as big as it appears to be on #coders, which gets flooded by Australian dudes. The scene concentrates mainly on the big cities - Adelaide (South Australia), Sydney, Melbourne and Victoria. A lot of sceners are inactive when it comes to making a production, but they're quite happy to flood each other with mail, or IRC.

Groups in .au

Two of the best known groups of the pioneer time are the Breakdown Demo Crew and Oxygen, which faded out before 1994. Nowadays the probably most important groups in Australia are JoP (which can stand for Jubes of Power or Jar of Pickles, formerly known as PoP) and FTS, both Adelaide-based, Xtatic, Jinx, Cydonia, and Tektonic (founded by Raven in 1995). Another group, Reality were only alive during the 1994-1996 period (1996 saw the death of a mailnet called Bloodnet, which caused a lack of activity in the Australian scene). Another group called Heretics also existed in there somewhere, as well as a one hit wonder group, Smash!.

Productions from .au

Australian productions that are spread in the rest of the world are Starplayer, Impulse Tracker and Prometheus True Color (PTC). There have also been a number of intros, demos and music releases that have become fairly well known throughout the world.

Diskmags from .au

The only diskmag that still exists is oOze, an ANSI-mag that is venturing into the demoscene too, whose third issue was released in May. Another mag is Paranoia by FTS with focus on demo/art/hp. Two issues were released before the mag died. PoP released the first and only issue of What?! in December 1995. Polyester made three issues of a mag called SOAP, which again was mostly arty. Also there was BoRE, which had a few issues, more in the H/P domain. Event Horizon, a RPG zine, survived 3 issues. Moreover, Goblin edited Restless #2.

Parties in .au

Probably the first party was C in Perth, where Oxygen released the first Australian PC demo ever, called Cyanide. Coven95 (Adelaide), Oz96 (Sydney), Coven96 (the best Australian party so far), Scenery97 (joint PC/Amiga party) and Coven97 followed. Coven98 is going to be held in the middle of July 1998. In older times, there were a number of Amiga parties, and the C64 scene has had a number of parties, mostly in the Western/South Australia areas.

Sceners

Some names one should have heard of:

Goo (for setting up the Australian scene mailinglist and keeping it available, as well as the scene.au webpage)

Random (for being the public face of Oz96 and Scenery97 organizers, and copping whatever shit went along with that)

The organizers of Coven (Mandalas Zarich, Baldrick, etc)

Gaffer (because he is said to have the biggest ego in the Australian scene and he keeps active with PTC, not to mention his extra-curricular rectal activities)

Goblin (because he really is a great guy that has remained at least semi-active in the scene for a number of years - as he himself says -, and he actually takes the time to "fill-out" questionairres like the one he got from Adok about the Australian scene ;)

Pulse (for making the internationally acclaimed Impulse Tracker)

Hunz (one of the most famous musicians from Australia)

and of course, the lovely, extremely cute Tatharina of oOze :)

BBS's

Morbid Incite was ran by Spoonman for about 4 or 5 years. MZ ran Room 101, JuD ran "Don't Panic", and Squidgalator ][ ran The Deep Umbra. Several BBS's in the other states were run by people like Legend, Black Artist and Ozone.

Other scene institutions

The Australian scene has a mailinglist and a web-page of its own. The name of the mailinglist is scene-l, but the subscribers usually call it spam-l due to the high number of unserious mails. The web-page with the name scene.au is located at http://scene.ign.com.au/.

Some web resources

scene.au - http://scene.ign.com.au/
Coven - http://coven.au.demoscene.net
Coven releases - http://www.smug.adelaide.edu.au/~saxon/coven
Scenery - http://scenery.au.demoscene.net
oOze - http://www.ice.org/~sq2/ooze
Tektonic - http://www.cobweb.com.au/~andrewn
Xtatic - http://xtatic.au.demoscene.net
PTC - http://www.gaffer.org/ptc
Goblin/Xtatic - http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~s2190983
Blup/Acid - http://student.uq.edu.au/~s373779
Tatharina/oOze - http://www.effect.net.au/sharon/studio
Squidgalator 2 - http://www.ice.org/~sq2/retgolla