Print Ain’t Dead: Capitalist Amnesia and the perseverance of Australian indie mags

Photo courtesy: Unsplash.

Dr Megan Le Masurier describes the Audit Bureau of Circulation, a non-profit service which calculates circulation figures for newspapers and magazines, as “basically a joke now”, although, to be fair, the same can be said about the Audited Media Association of Australia.

It’s a game of smoke and mirrors. Major magazine publishers have fled the scene, withdrawing from independent audits for sales number. The cause is the decline in circulation for mainstream print mags. “Advertisers would be put off if they saw the hard facts about circulation”, Megan explains.

Granted, COVID-19 lockdowns did provide a brief respite. Many rediscovered their passion for reading in isolation and readership figures for Australian magazines have since risen.  But Megan says that readership stats, while “more palatable”, are also “a bit shonky” because readership is a more fluid category than circulation which measures the sale of print and digital copies.

“Imagine, you buy a magazine, leave it on your coffee table. Friends drop by, thumb through. They are now considered readers,” she explains.

But, since the COVID-10 pandemic, people are reading more. The evidence from media reports and market research surveys is overwhelming. If the readership figures for mainstream magazines is overblown, as Megan suspects, where are we focusing our attention?

The obvious answer is books. According to data from Nielsen BookScan, the Australian book industry saw record sales in 2022. While sales have plateaued in 2023, book purchasing remains elevated above pre-pandemic levels. But is it just books?

Megan believes she has an answer. See, for someone so frank about print media, Megan is also optimistic. But it’s no surprise if you dive into her published work. She is one of the few academics to theorise about an indie magazine renaissance.            

While the world has busied itself proclaiming the death of print, independent print magazines have undergone a revival, multiplying in the shadows of mainstream media. Since COVID-19 first hit, youth magazines such as Rolling Stone Australia and Fact Magazine have successfully relaunched. The Australian publishing house Giramondo have brought back their literary journal HEAT. Numerous Australian indie print magazines emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic: Soft Stir, Sweaty City and PUSH Magazine, to name just three.

Bubbling beneath the surface like a geothermal spring, noticed only by a few intrepid researchers and journalists, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when indie magazines began to surge in popularity. Quantitative studies, whether industry-sponsored or academic, are non-existent. No one’s exactly checking in with zine-makers and indie mag start-ups to ask them how many copies they’re selling and what kind of print runs they’re ordering. Evidence remains largely anecdotal.

Regardless, I can say one thing with certainty: for at least the last ten years those paying attention have declared that Australia is in the midst of an indie mag renaissance.

This anomaly cannot be tired purely to augmented reading habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s remarkable is the duration of this revolution, and indeed whether something so drawn out, so established, can even be called a renaissance at all. Put simply: indie magazines are the phenomena that refuses to die.

But why? What makes indie magazines so special?

*  *  *

Editorial philosophies and the demands of readers guide editors in the independent magazine space. It’s a far cry from mainstream journalism where editors are subservient to the news cycle and the economic bottom-line. As a result, local indie publications tend to celebrate boundary-pushing creativity, under-represented subcultures, minority groups and overlooked manifestations of popular culture.

One example is the Sydney-based print magazine Soft Stir. The original founders, Alex Stevenson and Gab Flood, financed the first issue through a combination of their own money and crowd-sourced funds. The magazine now receives financial support from the Inner West Council via a grant, but Alex, Gab and editor-in-chief Chloe Hayman, who joined the team after the first issue was published, still dig into their own pockets. Keeping the magazine afloat is no easy task.

That said, turning away from a dogged focus on profit has a thick silver lining. It unlocks radical potential. “We can choose whoever we want to be in the magazine”, says Gab, the publication’s art director and graphic designer, as we huddle around drinks in a quiet corner of The Temperance Society, a shoebox bar in Summer Hill. We sink into vintage furniture. Upstairs, books shelves line the walls. “We’re not being swayed by a boss with different interests – one who is probably worried about money.” As a result, the magazine represents “emerging locals and young people who would not otherwise be represented in traditional media”. In the second issue, you’ll find a comic about internalised racism within the beauty industry by Yasuko Toda and a short story about forlorn romance by queer sex-worker Tilly Lawless.

Soft Stir Issue 02 at Chinatown Social Club, Sydney. Photo courtesy: Chinatown Social Club.

Soft Stir attempts to move beyond the “tokenistic” approach to representation in mainstream media, asserts Chloe, although she is quick (and humble) to suggest that the magazine is not necessarily a “shining beacon” for diversity. By encouraging contributors to critique structures of oppression in their work, reflect deeply and experiment – the magazine is an annual publication that rewards patience – Soft Stir creates a work environment more welcoming to marginalised voices than your average publication. I sense that the trio behind the magazine – Alex, Gab and Chloe – understand that simply filling quotas does not automatically achieve inclusion. It involves radically remoulding the structures we have in place.

One step in that direction is the idea of slowness. Like many indie magazines, Soft Stir platforms ‘slow journalism’, although it is not limited to this formula. It’s also brimming with art pieces, poetry and more.

Cultural commentators such as Megan Le Masurier argue that, in a climate of media distrust and fake news mania, slow journalism constitutes a more ethical non-competitive type of journalism. Here the traditional aims of mainstream media dissipate. No one is interested in breaking news first or pumping out daily photo essays. Often finding a home within magazines, literary journals and weekly newspapers, slow journalism centres on in-depth investigations and transparency. It acknowledges the subjectivity and uncertainty in factual discovery and makes plain where and from whom information is obtained. This kind of frank, self-reflexive journalism, where the first person, ‘I’, radiates warmth and noise like a homing beacon and chroniclers shed the dead weight of objectivity to increase their buoyancy, sometimes verges on gonzo journalism. Feature writers, artists and photographers often immerse themselves in the subcultures they are examining. That is, they produce stories relevant to a community with the collaboration of that community. This decentralisation of ownership over the story dulls the jagged edge of extractive hard news journalism.

Capitalist modes of production – cut-throat hyper-competitiveness, intense productivity, environmental degradation and the centralisation of social clout – may not vanish completely but they recede into the background. Think of these traits as smoke billowing in the wind when previously there was only dense smog.

In this claustrophobic creative world where the walls seem to be constantly shifting, herding us towards a murky future, peer support is vital. Take Kai Brach, the Melbourne-based founder of the independent print magazine Offscreen, for example. His blog, ‘Indie Publishing Field Notes’, overflows with tips and tricks on how to start and sustain an indie print magazine. It’s a conscious move towards transparency. Through Heftwerk, a Berlin-based indie magazine help service, you can download the free e-book Indie Magaonomics: How to Create a Sustainable Independent Magazine, a behind-the-scenes self-help guide penned by Brach. And it’s hardly the only guide out there. The indie publishing world is rife with freely-available insider takes.

Soft Stir, meanwhile, is a direct multidisciplinary response to subcultural echo chambers. It’s about the cross-pollination of creative scenes. “Sydney is unique in that all these pockets of creative industries never intermingle”, Alex says. “The underground music scene doesn’t know much about the voguing industry or poets.”

Chloe, Alex and Gab, Soft Stir founders, at the Semi Permanent Art and Design Fair in 2023. Photo: supplied.

Alex and Gab started Soft Stir to practice their craft in an economic environment hostile to media graduates. “It’s not easy to enter creative industries in Sydney”, Alex says.

When she started Soft Stir with Gab, she’d just finished her Master’s degree. She was freelancing as a graphic designer. She now works full-time but says that, the more full-time work she does, “the more the projects means… We want to keep that outlet for ourselves but also keep a community going for the other people who haven’t necessarily got their foot in the door yet.”

Indie print magazines are a form of grassroots mobilisation and solidarity amid the onslaught of a rapidly shrinking labour market. According to a report published by The Australian Institute in 2021, The Future of Work in Journalism, the total employment figure for Australia’s media sector has steadily declined since it peaked in 2007. While a few media industries have prospered – the film industry, for example – declining advertisement revenue and profits have hit the publishing industry the hardest. Since 2007, Australia’s publishing industry has lost of half of its total jobs. In other words: 28,000 publishing jobs have disappeared.

*  *  *

In late October last year I awoke to an unexpected email. A local writer – and not just any writer but one with two novels published by my favourite publishing house, Giramondo – had found my writing online. How the fuck did this happen?

That author is Max Easton. He’s a Liverpool boy, punk musician, multimodal creative and rugby league enthusiast, so he both makes no sense and complete sense as a human at the same time, rather like myself, I like to think. It turns out we have crossed similar terrain in our creative endeavours.

Max first found out about me while researching the Midnight Star Theatre in Homebush, a dilapidated Art Deco cinema that once housed a thriving social centre/squat, and now attracts graff writers, urbex heads and, well, not many others… Except Max and I, I suppose (I once wrote a story on Sydney’s squatting history for USyd’s student rag Honi Soit). But he really found me via my personal Substack where I have self-published meandering reflections on Sydney’s history of underground counterculture – writing that is too long, too niche, perhaps even too experimental, to find a home elsewhere.

Max also has a penchant for interrogating urban gentrification and the intersection of politics and underground music. You only need dip into his novels, zines, freelance articles and Barely Human podcast to realise this.

Naturally, chatting over email soon led to an in-person catch up and multiple schooners at the Courthouse Hotel in Newtown where Max presented me with a gift: a copy of an otherwise out-of-stock magazine called Tempered, which Max edited, compiled, funded, nursed and babysat during his younger years.

After our pub hang, I follow up with Max over email, fishing for pearls of wisdom among the shoreline rocks of our serendipitous collision.

“Around 2015, when the online music press and street press was hitting the first roadblock of a long decline, I turned to self-publishing,” Max tells me.  

“I wrote the Barely Human; I Like Randy Newman zine after an editor turned down the article I’d written due to a perceived lack of reader interest, and a lack of print space. It was so freeing to write that, and it attracted a lot of unexpected interest from outside the online music journalism bubble. So I kept going and turned that into a zine series. I then tried to cast a wider net and bring in contributions for the Tempered journal.”

“Founding my own publications ended up being really important in establishing a track record as a writer. It was one thing to show some evidence of freelancing, but when it came to pitching for larger projects like the Barely Human podcast or my first novel, being able to hand over a volume like Tempered was proof of being able to handle more complex work. In the case of my fiction writing, no publishers or literary journals had any interest in what I’d sent to them for years, but it was only when I printed a zine of short stories and posted it to Giramondo [an Australian publishing house] that I was even let in the door to pitch the idea of a novel.”

“It’s probably my biggest piece of advice to new writers: if you’re itching to write something, then don’t wait around for permission to do something about it.”

Max Easton. Photo courtesy: Max Easton.

In a city where the grind has become an art form in of itself, where landlords, cruel taskmasters, whip the have-nots into a state of numbed exhaustion, what has struck me throughout all my interactions with Max is his generosity with time. Like every Australian writer, he’s well acquainted with the daily struggles: shoddy pay rates, declining incomes, industry nepotism, media homogeneity and all that nonsense. A few years ago, battered financially from multiple angles, while he was starting a record label and funding the second volume of Tempered, having just quit a toxic job on top of that, he almost had to declare bankruptcy. So there’s solidarity between us.

But it’s clear he also genuinely cares about independent media.

“We need strong writing that pushes up from below, rather than top down through the editorial filters of corrupt institutions,” he tells me over email. “The instinct to self-publish, or to publish as a community rather than asking for permission from above really needs to be fostered and encouraged by all of us. The way that mass media has responded to the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people, land and culture by the Israeli state and the western powers that prop it up has been proof of this. The kind of censure, misinformation, cynical wording and lack of journalistic integrity has been wild to witness in real time. I think we should see that, and fight not just to hold institutions to account, or to reform them into reporting with integrity, but to form our own publications to counterbalance what has been happening. I think we’ll see more independent publishing in the coming years, and it’s on all of us to support those who stick their necks out.”

*  *  *

People crave escapism from capitalism, however momentary. But such a state of mind is difficult to obtain. Even believing we can escape capitalism in the first place takes a certain level of imagination. As the late Mark Fisher famously argued in his seminal work Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, late stage capitalism functions by convincing us that “it is the only viable political and economic system… it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative”. He coined this process of cultural indoctrination “capitalist realism”.

Often we pin hope on the internet as a site for productive escapism, self-education and political radicalisation. After all, it was first envisioned as an anti-commercial, anarchist utopia centred on freedom of information.

But the internet today, web 3.0 included, simply reminds us of our imprisonment, of the falsity of our utopian dreams. Neoliberal ideals of market freedom, unrestrained communication and freedom of speech, have nurtured cyber racism, fake news and conspiracies theories. Cyberspace has become exceedingly familiar; a mirror for capitalism which replicates traditional hierarchies and expands economic markets.

In neoliberal democracies, post-COVID workplace practices and the pressures of late stage capitalism have dissolved boundaries between work and leisure, between private and public life. Thanks to cyberspace, wage labour has invaded the home. It climbs through Zoom windows into our bedrooms. In this environment where down time is wasted time, we increasingly make decisions based on a time economy. Retailer-catered research has revealed that customers are increasingly turning to time-saving services online where there are instantaneous search functions and no queues. Online magazines are thus popular as time-saving measures.

However, academic studies that highlight this online niche for magazines forego the materiality and perceptual dimensions of media experience in favour of business jargon. What constitutes a “better bargain” overshadows the intangible metrics of what a print magazine feels and looks like in your hands.

Physical magazines, especially indie ones, do offer escapism. They’re care-packages dropped from the sky in this capitalist warzone. They’re about the joy of hearing the postman turn up on your doorstep with a rectangular-shaped delivery, about the sheen of high-quality photography, about the bristle of dog-eared pages and the roughness of the paper where food scraps cling to it. We crave these sensory acknowledgments that our time matters. As such, you’re more likely to spot an indie mag in the middle of a bed-side reading stack or on a coffee table in a sharehouse than in the trash or abandoned on an office work desk. Make yourself a cup of tea, indie mags instruct. Let the cloud-like folds of your sofa embrace you and lift you off the ground into another realm.

A study of the business magazine Group Leisure and Group Leisure Online by media scholars Deena Ingham and Alexis Weedon provides insights into this phenomenon. A two-stage survey of the magazine’s consumers revealed that readers usually perused the print magazine at home and used the online version (Group Leisure Online) at work where they were more likely to face interruptions. 90% of respondents preferred to read the print magazine over its online counterpart with many pointing to the “relaxing and restful” nature of consuming the magazine in a domestic environment.

The nature of magazines as material objects and the tendency for indie magazine producers in particular to invest significant time and resources into graphic design, despite a comparative lack of capital, ensure their longevity. It takes one second to click out of an internet tab and two seconds to toss a newspaper or a glossy mag you picked up at the airport into the bin. As a highly sought-after collectible item, the indie mag presents more formidable opposition to carless rejection.

When I follow up with Chloe over e-mail after our group interview, she explains the decision to make Soft Stir solely a print publication in design terms. She writes of “finding synergies between pieces”, “telling a narrative”, creating a “chronological flow of pieces overall” and “tapping into the energy of each individual piece to form a point of view on our theme”. Alex and Gab filter their interpretations of freelance contributions through “bespoke designed spreads”, going ham with unique title fonts and stretching print design rules for each individual written piece. “A core part of any curatorial body of work is the vision, voice and message a curator has… To do so is a series of considered choices that belong together in a singular body of work. To break this up into isolated bits across the internet would remove this core function.”

Open pages from Issue 02 of Soft Stir. Photo courtesy: Hamish McIntosh.

*  *  *

Margarita Bassova, who moonlights as a DJ under the name Rita Bass, describes the recent dwindling of online content for Verve Zine, the music and art publication she runs. In 2022, the publication shifted focus to a print format, releasing its debut print edition in October.

It had become “difficult” and “exhausting” dedicating time to an online space while juggling work commitments, Rita explains. “There’s also a point where I feel uncomfortable asking writers and editors to donate their time [for free]”.

She weaves a forthright story about “countless financial barriers” and “failed grant applications”.

With an emphasis on short-form online writing in Verve – album reviews, premieres, artist interviews, festival reviews and exhibition criticism – it’s difficult to gauge audience engagement. Being the lone creative director of a small publication and a freelance writer, as Rita is, is rather like guiding a riverboat through the open sea in gale-force winds. You may be alone – nobody else’s life in your hands – but you’re sleep-deprived and shovelling water overboard with a dinner plate, convincing yourself that rescue is imminent. It’s a waiting game, and since COVID has wrought havoc on the arts you may as well be trundling through a cyclone. I know from experience.  

For Rita, however, the print medium is a flare, shot up into the evening sky, attracting attention. Rita sold out the physical magazine via online sales and two market stalls. The process has rejuvenated the publication.

“The reception has been really heart-warming. People I didn’t know were coming, excited to buy them, which is still a bit of a shock to me.”

*  *  *

In recent years newfound optimism surrounding print media and a scepticism of the ongoing vitality of internet communication has emerged. Swim down far enough and you’ll discover that some of the roots of the print revival are located within the murky depths of 4chan and 8chan. It’s not exactly the first place I’d have picked as the inspiration for print optimism.

In a nutshell: it all boils down to Dead Internet Theory – a conspiracy theory birthed on the chans which suggests that artificial intelligence has almost entirely taken over the internet. A slew of cultural critics now argue that Dead Internet Theory presents some legitimate insights; that it contains some effective critiques of surveillance capitalism amid the wackier accusations of government-orchestrated mind control.

Seen in this light, the internet is a stale entity; a soupy miasma of bots, fake accounts, click farms, catfishing, deepfakes and spam, swamp-like and polluted, and therefore antithetical to human habitation. Algorithms syphon us into echo chambers. We seem to be rehashing and recycling the same debates online in a cyclical process of perpetual déjà vu, rereading the same Buzzfeed listicles while the Twitterati hold our eyes open with toothpicks and place megaphones next to our ears. Jump on ChatGPT – the recently-launched AI chatbot – and you’ll discover that humans no longer need to write clickbait listicles. This is the end destination of capitalism; it has reduced even the most human form of expression – writing – to machine learning. The internet is a capitalist realist purgatory.

The dictatorship of the click rules journalism. But research has shown that the proliferation of online media and expansion of options for consumers has paradoxically coincided with an increasing lack of diversity in news content. At the heart of this phenomenon is a global public relations (PR) juggernaut. Estimates suggest that public relations professionals currently outnumber their journalist counterparts six to one in the US. PR spin is a microwave-ready meal for overworked editors and hungry media bosses, so it’s little surprise that PR is a booming industry. This encroachment of commercialisation and corporatisation into news media increases ‘churnalism’ – the hasty regurgitation of press releases with little verification and original reporting. Nobody really believes that it’s a healthy diet. 

In his essay ‘The Internet is Already Over’, the writer Sam Kriss goes as far as to predict the death of the internet: “In the future – not the distant future, but ten years, five – people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.” On Substack, Ted Gioia has argued that the internet has surpassed peak clickability. It seems like the cyber fad is wearing off.

There’s quantitative data to back up these claims. Since 2020, despite global lockdowns, engagement rates have steadily fallen across various social media platforms. Ted Gioia underlines Youtube’s continuing success vis-à-vis Tik Tok and the rise of Substack as evidence for the return of longform media. Just consider the cult-like adoration for Joe Rogan’s three hour podcast epics.

We’re entering a time of digital exhaustion. Social media ravages our attention span. Hyperlink wormholes set readers off on never-ending journeys. The sensory bombardment of noise and colour amid information overload – what feels like an internet psychosis – encourages the non-linear consumption of narratives. It hardly bodes well for engagement.

Explaining his preference for making print publications, Max Easton tells me over email, “online spaces are increasingly influenced by the algorithms of big tech. I feel like print and its tangibility is a way to cut through it and disconnect from those heavily influenced networks.”

And he’s right. Indie print magazines expand minds in ways that online publications (and mainstream magazines) cannot. Why? Not only is there more choice in what you read when you’re presented with a print magazine – you scan headlines you otherwise wouldn’t see within the online echo-chamber and you hover over stories as you flick through – but there’s also substantial evidence that reading in print is more immersive and linear.

Not one but three academic literature reviews, which have synthesised available reputable research on reading comprehension, have found that, although the difference is not colossal, people of all ages learn more reading print texts than digital texts. Furthermore, numerous studies have confirmed that print texts, especially non-fiction ones, command greater attention and focus.

Researchers Neil Thurman and Richard Fletcher have charted the decline in engagement with British publications which move to purely online formats across a number of years. Investigating the transformation of The Independent to an online newspaper, Thurman and Fletcher initially discovered that, while net readership remained steady, audience attention – the time spent perusing the publication – fell 81% in the year after it became online-only. It’s a valuable reminder that shallow metrics – net readership, for example – don’t tell the whole story. Sure, plenty of readers may skim The Independent’s website still but how many are reading beyond the headline?

Thurman and Fletcher’s subsequent exploration of the move of New Musical Express (NME) to an online format in 2018 reinforced their previous research, leading the pair to propose a theory of print platform cessation. In other words: Thurman and Fletcher argue that the attention print periodicals attract does not immediately translate online.

Advertisement-laden mainstream magazines emit a similar in-your-face energy to the online hellscape. Flick through any copy of National Geographic, Esquire or Australian Women’s Weekly and you will find text everywhere, garish colours and little dead space. The mindless phone scroll and the barbershop perusal of coffee-table glossy mags are dangerous for one key reason: forgetting. We absorb little.

The irony of fast-paced newsrooms and hyper-commercial magazines is that they fail to inform the public. Instead they confuse and numb the public. In doing so, they aid capitalist realism. As Megan Le Masurier argues, quoting the novelist Milan Kundera in her essay ‘Slow Journalism in an Age of Forgetting’, “the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting”. In Speeding Up Fast Capitalism theorist Ben Agger argues that “alienation involves forgetting – losing contact with the damaged lives that made this world possible. We are taught to forget so that we remain on task. Time is compressed into an eternal present so that we forget what brought us here”. We forget the possibility of utopia, Agger concludes, just as Mark Fisher does.

In his essay ‘Irony Politics & Gen Z’, the internet theorist Joshua Citarella argues in a similar vein that “the vast archive of the internet effectively flattened the past”, contributing to the pervasive anxiety that we have arrived at “the end of history”. “This shift away from historical perspective helped to foreclose our political imaginations”, Citarella continues.

I’m fascinated by how indie print magazines, as repositories of ‘slow journalism’, redefine our relationship to time and memory. They simultaneously slow down time and outlast rivals. Accordingly, they’re a form of grassroots resistance against the mass-scale digitisation of culture; against Kindle, Buzzfeed and Spotify; against the internet’s flattening of the past; against information overload and hyperlink wormholes. By imagining alternative futures and alternative ways of living, I believe indie mags counter the ways in which the capitalist forces behind mainstream media dupe populations into forgetting. They allow us to think in less distracted, fragmented ways.

They inspire us.

*  *  *

Soft Stir began as a uni project. Inspired by interning at Adbusters, a not-for-profit anarchist media organisation, Alex Stevenson made “this A5 zine that you could fold into A2 posters, pull apart and play with” for a class during an exchange program in Canada.

“That was the earliest prototype… It was about wanting to stir shit up and thinking about feminism and making change gently”.

Soft Stir Issue 01. Photo courtesy: Hamish McIntosh.

Making change gently. It’s a frank acknowledgement that no indie magazine will single-handedly topple a government or catalyse nation-wide revolution. That’s an absurd thought, of course. But it’s also a nod to the crux of the anarchist project, to prefigurative politics, to DIY culture as emancipatory, to the anarchist viewpoint on social change as incremental and non-linear.

In lieu of the grand, Marxist metanarrative – that the proletariat, surfing a revolutionary wave, will rise up and liberate all humanity in some distant future – anarchists believe we need to start mucking in now. This can mean direct action and experimentation. But anarchist praxis also involves less dramatic (and often tedious) forms of self-management including lengthy discourse and persistence. This isn’t about top-down party politics and bureaucratic, centralised modes of decision-making, as per democratic socialism and Soviet-inspired Trotskyism. It’s about grinding down capitalist modes of operation at a daily micro-relational level via non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Enter: soft activism. Making change gently. This is what a good indie print magazine achieves.

*  *  *

In his 2011 book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past, Simon Reynolds argued that we were in the midst of a “pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemorations… Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about very other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinctive identity and feel.” Musicians were pining nostalgically for past sounds, recreating and rehashing them obsessively like museum curators. Labelling the 00s the “‘Re’ Decade”, he writes: “The 2000s were dominated by the ‘re-’ prefix: revivals, reissues, remakes, re-enactments. Endless retrospection: every year brought a fresh spate of anniversaries, with their attendant glut of biographies, memoirs, rockumentaries, biopics and commemorative issues of magazines.”

Since Reynolds highlighted this phenomenon in 2011, our nostalgia for the past, our obsession with revival, has only expanded. Vinyl is back. So too cassette tapes. The recent explosion of popularity for retro and vintage aesthetics contradicts what scholars call media displacement theory; the concept that the proliferation of new media (for example: the CD-ROM) causes older forms of media (for example: the floppy disk) to wither away or disappear entirely.

But is this new trend simply a counterproductive, primitivist return to our roots? Is it a fleeting phenomenon, already stale and destined to reverse?

Dr Megan Le Masurier certainly doesn’t believe so. “Print is far from dead”, she tells me, “and the future of magazines, if I was to look into a crystal ball, is niche and indie”.

I find myself agreeing. Indie print magazines aren’t backward-looking relics; desperate attempts to cling to the past. They frequently experiment with new technologies. Take, for example, the second issue of Soft Stir which bears a cover depicting Genesis Osuwu and an in-depth interview with the hip hop artist. Designed by visual artist Michaela Stafford, the cover transforms into a moving 3D artefact via a QR code located on the back cover. Against an orange background reminiscent of fire, bubbles wobble in the foreground and alien tendrils bend behind Genesis Osuwu like a living throne. In the centre, Kofi (Genesis Osuwu) stands defiant.

Soft Stir Issue 02 with the front cover on full display. Photo courtesy: Hamish McIntosh.

There’s a thin line between painstaking cultural recreations of the past and dynamic reimagining but local indie magazines envision radically different worlds. They’re brimming with optimism.

In the second issue of Soft Stir, in the editors’ letter, the team describe the stories contained within those pages as “the golden wings of a phoenix, mangled with reverence. They are our reflections, warped and waned”. The letter references the iconic meme of a dog sitting in a burning house, eyes popping, as a source of inspiration. “They remind us that while we may be the wide-eyed dog sitting in the fire, we are not staring out in shock but staring back with purpose – telling ourselves, this is fine”. The imagery of fire and the phoenix evoke a world reforged in the ashes of its predecessor. In other words: a radical reimaging.

In this era of media market monopolisation, indie magazines are popular because they offer a unique product. The passion project as an expression of anti-commercialism – or at least the prioritisation of other outcomes over mere profit – goes up against the mainstream press juggernaut. It’s not necessarily a fair fight. But it’s a form of resistance against the ways in which capitalist forces dupe populations into forgetting, numbing our minds and deadening our political impulses.

At Temperance, when I ask Alex, Gab and Chloe whether Soft Stir is an archival record for particular communities and subcultures, they respond in near unison. “Yes!” Alex suggests the magazine is a “time capsule”. Throughout our conversation, this theme of timelessness continually rises to the surface. It is this shift away from a fleeting present and towards both the past and the far future that distinguishes indie magazines from digital journalism and mainstream magazines. Indie print magazines outlast their rivals, lingering in homes and communal spaces as welcome outliers in this hyper-speed world of late stage capitalism, because an indie mag isn’t simply an indulgence. It’s not a guilty pleasure. It’s self-empowerment.

If I’m to hazard a guess myself, I find myself agreeing with Dr Megan Le Masurier. The indie print magazine revival in Australia isn’t a fleeting moment.

I suspect they’re here to stay.