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Sunday, 14 June 2026

REVIEW: Zines NZ: Punk to Present - Bryce Galloway (Massey University Press, 2026)

Bryce Galloway’s Zines NZ: Punk to Present (Massey University Press, 2026) is both an archive and a love letter to Aotearoa’s rich, unruly, defiantly independent zine culture. Across its 300-plus pages, packed with reproductions, fragments, and visual ephemera, the book does more than document; it immerses the reader in a culture that has always existed just outside the polished edges of mainstream publishing. 
 
Galloway, himself a lifelong zinester and author of the long-running Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, positions zines as a living, breathing form—messy, personal, political, obsessive. The book traces the lineage of zines in New Zealand back to the early 1980s, when punk’s DIY ethos collided with cheap technology and a burning need to communicate. 
 
At the heart of this origin story is the explosive emergence of punk fanzines. Publications like Richard Langston’s Garage stand as foundational texts. Produced in Dunedin and closely tied to the rise of Flying Nun and the ‘Dunedin Sound’, Garage chronicled bands like The Clean, The Chills, and Tall Dwarfs. Langston’s near-mythic obsession with The Clean—he was famously dubbed a “Cleaniac”—captures one of the central truths of zine culture: fandom elevated to fever pitch, turned into print.

These images from www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/zine-scene-punk-to-present

Similarly, other early zinesters brought their own fixations to the page. Figures such as Ania Glowaz with Submission channelled raw, intensely personal fandom into publications that blurred the line between criticism, diary, and manifesto. These weren’t objective documents; they were love letters, rants, and declarations passed hand-to-hand. 
One of Galloway’s smartest decisions is to capture these voices while they are still here to tell their stories. Many of the anecdotes carry the reflective tone of ageing punks looking back on youth, DIY creativity, and the social conditions that shaped them, giving the book both immediacy and perspective. 

Glowaz’s account of 1980s Wellington punk culture adds a vivid sense of the volatility surrounding these publications: conflict on the streets, the threat of theft, and a scene intense enough to feed directly into the urgency of her zine-making. In Galloway’s telling, Submission emerges not just as documentation, but as an expression of identity, resistance, and survival within that world. 

In Galloway’s hands, Submission represents the more intimate, psychologically raw side of zine-making: not simply documenting a scene, but inhabiting it completely, where fandom becomes authorship and the page becomes a space for identity, fixation, and resistance. 

What unites all these early efforts—and what Galloway brilliantly evokes—is their materiality. These were not slick magazines. Early zines were tactile objects: assembled with sticky tape, cut-and-paste collage, Letraset, and whatever scraps were available. Photos were often murky, xeroxed into grainy abstraction; line drawings filled the gaps where technology failed. Pages were folded, stapled, sometimes literally falling apart. Some were even run off old Gestetner machines, ink bleeding unpredictably across cheap paper. The aesthetic was not accidental—it was the aesthetic of necessity, of immediacy, of refusal. 

To bring this world alive, Galloway leans heavily on first-person testimony, using an oral-history approach reminiscent of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me. Built from around 50 interviews, the book moves through overlapping anecdotes and competing memories rather than a single authoritative narrative, allowing the scene to speak in its own unruly chorus. 

That chorus returns again and again to the same impulse: necessity. In the 1980s, when punk scenes were ignored or misrepresented by mainstream media, zines became a means of self-definition, connection, and survival. 

The culture Galloway captures is powered by obsession and individuality, with tiny handmade runs driven by passions that are musical, political, personal, and often gloriously niche. 

The book is also full of superb reproductions of covers, collage, typography, and artwork, offering a vivid sense of the many aesthetics that shaped zine culture across the decades. 

Galloway’s greatest achievement is refusing to sanitize that chaos. The reproductions in Zines NZ preserve the uneven edges of the originals. You can almost feel the glue under your fingers, the photocopier heat warping the page. It’s a sensory archive as much as a historical one. 
 
As the book moves forward in time, it charts how zines evolve without losing their core ethos. Through the 1990s and 2000s, zines diversify—branching into perzines, political tracts, queer and feminist publications, comics, poetry collections. The subject matter explodes, but the underlying impulse remains the same: to create something direct, unmediated, and deeply personal. 
 
In the contemporary moment, Galloway highlights a paradox: zines are both more visible and more underground than ever. The proliferation of zinefests across Aotearoa—such as Auckland Zinefest and Wellington Zinefest—has created spaces where hundreds of creators gather, share, and sell work that might otherwise remain invisible. These festivals act as both marketplaces and communities, bringing together over a hundred makers and countless publications that exist entirely outside traditional distribution channels. 
 
Yet despite this visibility, the ephemeral nature of zines persists. Many editions are tiny, handmade, and quickly disappear. Galloway positions his book as a corrective to that ephemerality: a way of preserving voices that were never meant to last, but which collectively form an essential record of cultural history. 
 
What emerges most strongly from Zines NZ is not just a chronology but a philosophy. Zines are shown to be a form of resistance—against commercial publishing, against gatekeeping, against the idea that culture must be polished to be valuable. They are imperfect, passionate, and often contradictory. And that, Galloway argues, is precisely their power. 
 
Ultimately, Zines NZ is both scholarly and deeply affectionate. It captures the energy of a scene built on obsession, community, and the simple act of making something with your own hands. It reminds us that culture doesn’t only happen in institutions or on glossy pages—it happens in bedrooms, on photocopiers, and in stapled bundles. Galloway proves print still hits harder—messy, tactile, and unmistakably human.

Incredibly Hot Sex With Hideous People #9, edited by Bryce Galloway, 2002. (This image - Audioculture)

Fabulous examples of Zines can be found here: https://www.audioculture.co.nz/articles/zines-to-be-seen

 

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