the desk · the origin story · april 2026
The Origin Story
How Breakbone started; the first gigs, the Charles Bean joke that became the Complete History, and writing to feel heard.
Hey everyone and welcome to the first issue of NGVR, my self-zine.
You might be asking to yourself: “what is this, and why is it ‘close friends’ only?”. I’ve created this zine as a way for me to just write for the people who want to read what I write. And you are those people.
I’m gonna be taking a break from my big baby Breakbone. It isn’t gonna be one of those ‘indefinite hiatus’ sort of things. It’s just a case of me deciding to spend time on building the foundations and getting the form right rather than doing shit that looks cool and which I can do using raw power but which just feels overblown and just ‘not right’ in a way like Oasis’ Be Here Now album, which is actually a fucking great album it just sounds the way it is because it is what it is—a band high out of their minds who knew that they already hit the peak of their career and are now trying to create a ‘statement’ album to really make them go from rock n roll greats to rock n roll legends but they used up all their good authentic songs which were written from a place of truth and since they ran out the main songwriter Noel Gallagher just coughed up a bunch of songs and repeated the same words and choruses a bunch of times which still made it sound anthemic but it just isn’t gonna sound the same or feel the same because the songs and place they were coming from just wasn’t the same anymore.
The place I created the early Breakbone stuff in was one where I just wrote like I was writing to an imaginary friend. During my early high school days I was a fucking loner and really just not in a good state. Some of you know the full story. But what I would do was just write as a way to feel heard. I would do this in my student diary during lunchtimes and write about the people I observed and how shit my life was. I wrote a lot and how I got better was through me looking back at shit I wrote and just knowing “that’s not good enough” and going to the school library or pirating books and seeing what words the authors used and how they wrote.
What I’ve realised is that the best Breakbone work came from a place where I wasn’t trying to write for the sake of using my work as an emotional outlet. Well, it sort of is either way but my best work comes from when I write it as a gift to the scene or to express my gratitude. It’s not when I do it to express my anger or get some ‘goal’ such as to say something so provocative that people HAVE to respond. It’s not when I do it just because ‘the band is big and so this will earn me attention’ or ‘to create mythology’.
Because when you’ve got all the confidence but the work doesn’t add up it just feels overblown and like it’s a pufferfish—inflated to look bigger. My best work comes from when it’s just written as an ‘in addition’ on top of a good life I already have and when the ‘this is history’ is justified because the work literally is that good and when it feels like a personal gift to the people in the scene and yet it also has a purpose at the same time.
Let me explain. My first piece—which was written days after my first ever gig—was to express my gratitude to the scene and establish my voice. The purpose was also to get the people who make up the scene to know who I am and also give back to the community that gave me my life purpose.
It all began one afternoon when I came home from school. At the time, I literally barely slept. I would sleep in class and shit because I didn’t feel as if my waking hours were hours that I wanted to experience. The Paddo gig I went to technically wasn’t my first gig though it was the first proper gig I went to due to the circumstances surrounding my actual first gig.
My actual first gig was at the 4ZZZ carpark and it was something put on in collaboration with Antidismal. Due to a dubious excuse of there being ‘a storm’ when there was literally just a bunch of dark clouds and that was it, the only act that ended up playing was a rap group called Limelight Collective.
I was just excited to be going to a gig. I had known about the scene since 2021/2022 through listening to 4ZZZ and stumbling on the band Piss Off who I at the time thought of as a comedy band due to the lofi recording quality of their album Gormless and their lyrics about shit anyone can relate to—being bored in a library, hating Geography class, hating a teacher. I felt heard.
Listening to their music was what gave me the idea that ‘hey, this shit seems really easy, I wish I could do it’. Well, my parents were pretty damn weird. When I was younger when we passed someone with tattoos or who looked visibly alternative my parents would point them out as ‘weirdo low lifes’.
This just made me even more intrigued. I was scared but also enthralled by the scene at the same time. I had been to stadium shows thanks to my mum’s friend who likes concerts and would invite me to come with.
I remember my mum mentioning that her friend was going to see this band called ‘The Killers’. It was during their Imploding The Mirage tour. I was questioning whether to go or not. At the time I thought concerts were a waste of money considering how you could just watch them for free. But for some reason my mum was willing to pay for me to see them. I thought ‘fuck it, why not?’. Seeing Brendon Flowers on stage doing his frontman antics and experiencing rock music in the flesh in the full floored me. I was just lost, watching them. It also helped that thanks to us getting there early I was able to get second row and multiple times the band members looked me in the eyes. They probably knew that it was my first concert. And at the end of their set their drummer Ronnie Vannuci threw me his drumsticks.
I didn’t get them since I was too busy being overwhelmed by the entire experience. But that night changed the trajectory of my life. I also went on to see Rex Orange County, Paramore (awesome show), Weezer, and Post Malone.
Seeing those big acts imprinted in me the power music has to really free you. So naturally I really wanted to get into the local scene and start having things happen. My dream back then was really simple. It was to get to go to gigs and play songs for people.
The ‘going to gigs’ part took a while. My dad was really stubborn and didn’t like the idea of anything that wasn’t part of the goal of ‘achieving success’. But yeah, at some point he just said ‘whatever’ and said it was up to my mum. My mum ended up being a bit more agreeable but said I had to start heading home from wherever I go at 8 pm. And that was something that lasted right up until very recently. What helped was the fact that I finally got a social life and held a gig.
But yeah, back to how it all started. At my first-est gig I met Ixara from Antidismal. Now I knew she had, at the time, just recently left the school I go to. I was also really impressed with what she did. Someone who also had an immigrant background. Was also a teenager, and fucking went to the same school I went to. So I asked her about how she got to where she was and I was inspired.
Then while researching shit for some history assignment I had to do I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I found out that the city of Brisbane literally translates to ‘Bris’ meaning ‘to break’ in Gaelic, and ‘bane’ meaning ‘bone’ in Old English. I thought it would make a cool band name or could be used if I were to have the means to create some project such as a gig organiser like Antidismal. I didn’t have the means nor audience nor really knew or experienced what the scene was like so it was just that—a dream. I had known about The Brisbane Music Spew Zine and saw how simplistic it was. I thought ‘I can do this!’, but I didn’t have anything to write about nor anyone who would have gotten an idea of who I was from seeing me who wanted to read it.
Then I went to The Big Takeover. It was the first ever time that I didn’t feel like ‘some kid who happened to be at a concert surrounded by older people’. It was the first time I didn’t feel like a misunderstood outsider but as someone who’s part of something bigger. I had made a lot of new friends that night. It started with just some band members and people in the mosh who I vibed with and exchanged handles with. I posted a handwritten note thanking all of the bands and people there and it really expressed how biblical the event was for me. From then on, people who I didn’t know but were a part of the scene started following me.
I had felt like an unknown loner outsider for basically my entire life and having this happen was all so new for me. I just wanted to create something to really give back and prove my history teacher wrong (what he said really offended me and stuck with me) and really capture what I felt was so powerful, so new, and so great.
I had wrote down a description/journal of what the event was like. I’d done that because I knew it would be a day I wanted to remember. I wrote in some more details I remembered after giving the text a read through.
Then, on that afternoon, I just had an idea of what to do. It was honestly modelled on what the Spew did. It provided a convenient ‘template’ for me to get down what I wanted to get down in a way that seemed to work seeing how the Spew had amassed a large following and had people liking what they did.
I designed the logo using Procreate on my BYOD iPad. I was partially inspired by the Soviet hammer and sickle and also punk band logos. It was initially a black hammer and bone on a red background. Having the hammer hit the bone just matched the name and I knew it would be iconic.
Then I individually made each slide. I chose a typewriter font because I looked at old 70s punk zines—one I was really inspired by was this zine called “Sniffin’ Glue”. I also used an ‘emo font’ I got from a free font website because I was really going through my emo phase at the time.
It went down in history because it came as a surprise to the people in the scene and of course it was cool for people to watch some kid who went to his first gig just making his dream a reality.
I know what my best work is. It’s the first two issues of the zine written about my first two real gigs I went to which were back to back with each other.
It’s The Complete History. What happened was again, I was inspired by my history class again. I had to write some assignment about whether some British dude was to blame for the ANZACs dying.
We had to use a work called ‘Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918’ written by a guy named Charles Bean. I thought it was really fucking dense, ridiculous because they call it an ‘official history’ while making it serve a narrative to mythologise the people they wanted to mythologise, and was just a really funny, gormless name for a history text and even funnier, the guy’s name was Charles BEAN.
So I posted a story on the zine account saying I was gonna be writing a piece focusing on the history of the scene and that I would appreciate anyone helping out or giving information. I also posted about how I was inspired by Charles Fucking Bean and how this was gonna be our scene’s history text.
I already got to know a good amount of the scene’s history thanks to my interview and chats with the members of the band Piss Off as well as Ixara and other band members. What really helped was Braxton of Deadtrigger giving a full writeup of what he does and what he was planning to do. At the time Deadtrigger wasn’t as well known as it is now. Him messaging me was how I found out about Deadtrigger.
When I joined the scene the main players were Antidismal and Project Punk. Casualty had been fizzling out and not long after I joined Kaleb of Casualty Records said he was stepping down.
There were a lot of info fragments from the people in the scene and also bits and bobs I got off forums and other sources.
It was going to be THE Complete History of the Youth Scene though so that of course meant tracing it from its very beginnings.
I had already watched a lot of YouTube videos on the history of the Brisbane scene. I also listened to 4ZZZ and watched old videos of theirs and got bits from whatever commentary about the scene their presenters would give out on air or on their website. I also read the book Pig City which was really good.
But I knew that just making it be the history of the entire Brisbane scene would be me just rewriting what’s already been written. Likewise, just focusing on the scene from the start of Casualty Records just didn’t feel complete nor honour the previous iterations of the scene that inspired Kaleb and the founding people of our current scene in the Casualty Records tradition.
I figured it out. Having it be centred on the youth perspective would make more sense as now it would be a way to write down how our scene came to be thanks to not just what Kaleb did but what other young people did in the past to have all ages gigs in Brisbane which ultimately inspired Kaleb.
I had prepared a very raw draft which consisted of what I understood to be the scene’s history at the time which was the hodgepodge I got from absorbing all the information I absorbed. From there I fleshed out the details based on my lived experience and what I got through word of mouth, mainly about the scene from the day Casualty Records started up.
I then added Kaleb and other people’s contributions to the mix. For the 70s it was pretty easy as everyone knows what The Saints did. For the 80s and 90s basically the only source which wasn’t centred on a specific band (literally either Savage Garden or The Go Betweens) or ridiculously vague was 4ZZZ and forum posts and comments by people who were rambling about the ‘good old days’.
I read in between the lines and figured a good title was ‘Radio Silence’.
For the 2000s and 2010s I looked at old websites and webzines about the Brisbane scene back in those days. I also had a teacher who used to be an emo kid back in the 2000s and he told me and the class a lot of stories about his days being in the scene and being in a band. So that got me some insider knowledge into Brisbane’s 2000s emo days. I also watched old YouTube videos created by those emo people. I filled in the gaps with what Kaleb reported about what the scene was like before he started shit from his newsletters and posts.
The draft was still really raw and so I edited it up to flow. I read it again and it felt pretty raw and not like a ‘polished history text’ so I left it as a Word document thinking it was a failed project.
A couple of months later I read it again and realised it was really good. I was just in perfectionist mode. So I made a few edits and that was what I posted.
Another good piece I wrote was about Findaway. It honestly felt like The Big Takeover 2 considering how it was at the same place with a similar vibe and a bunch of new people, just one year later. The gig review in the piece really reflects the state I was in. It was a good piece because it just captured a band going on the up and the photos I took were just iconic. The lead singer named Guy literally asked to use one of my photos. I sent an advance copy to them because I was afraid of getting it wrong considering how it was my second comeback issue after my long hiatus. Guy said it was perfect.
In hindsight those ‘polished’ pieces that each featured a band on the cover weren’t exactly bad. It was just that I wrote them out of a place of wanting to ‘recapture the past’ rather than living in the moment. I had no problem with putting out similar pieces before my hiatus because I wrote about gigs that I genuinely enjoyed going to and which I made the zine as a sidepiece to capture that greatness I experienced in real life. Which is what I plan to do. Keep the zine on the backburner for a while and focus on school friends and connecting with my supporters and when the time comes I’ll know it.
From September 2025 to February 2026 I just felt alienated. That’s what 7 months away from the scene does to you. It only really ended once I created that polemic piece which made me feel relevant again and honestly thanks to that piece I rekindled connections and made new ones from having conversations with people who were provoked into responding.
From the Breakbone back catalogue, re-set piece by piece. More from the archive ›