The Casualty Years

Chapter 4: The Drought

What followed was the longest quiet in this history. Through most of the 2010s the youth scene simply did not exist. The Lab at Woolloongabba ran from 2013 to 2017, the artist-run initiative Outer Space put on shows out of a Montague Road warehouse in West End through to 2020, and neither broke through to the young, because there was no network of young people for them to reach. The 2016 tightening of Queensland's licensing laws squeezed venue economics harder in the precincts where live music actually lived, and an unlicensed hall show meant insurance, liability and council paperwork no teenager dared navigate alone. What none of them knew was that the permission already existed, handed down from the days of The Saints; nobody needed to ask for it. If you were a young person in 2015 you were lucky to know the ramp existed. Otherwise you had nowhere to go and nobody to go with, unless you already had alternative friends, which was the one thing the city offered no way to find.

One of them, a primary schooler in the leafy suburb of The Gap, would spend the back half of the decade learning instruments in his bedroom and listening to the bands his parents' radio station played, with no idea that any of this had ever happened, or that he was about to restart it.

Chapter 5: Kaleb Collings and the Great Scene Revival

In December 2018 two teenagers named Kaleb Collings and Darius did the 4ZZZ youth announcer training at the St Pauls Terrace studios, on the same frequency that had carried the scene through every era it had survived. Kaleb had been practising and recording demos with his band Absolution since 2018, when he was fourteen. Their first gig and their first EP both happened at Tym Guitars, with Phase 4 Records the other unconventional venue that would have them, and Kaleb later described Tym and his sound engineer Carter as the first adults apart from their parents that saw their passion for music.

Wanting to release Absolution's music properly, Kaleb formed an entity to do it through. Casualty Records released the band's song 'Shit Day' on 12 April 2019 and was formally dedicated on the 20th. The name came from 'Casualty' by The Chats, the first song Kaleb and Darius had ever learned together; Darius would go on to found the Late Night Collective on the hip hop side of the same youth world. It was a fitting theft. The Chats had come up the Sunshine Coast a few years before, three school kids who fell in together over The Saints, Radio Birdman and the Sex Pistols and called what they played shed rock, the same Saints lineage this whole book runs on, picked up by the band a teenager in The Gap was learning to cover in his bedroom. When Stafford put out the twentieth-anniversary Pig City in 2024, the foreword came from the Chats' own Eamon Sandwith, the lineage sealed in the same book this history takes its bones from. The line from Petrie Terrace to a mousetrap logo is not a metaphor; it is a chain of kids learning each other's songs. The first logo was Donald Duck with his eyes crossed out. The one everybody remembers came later, a cartoon mousetrap, a tiny label called Casualty with a trap for a face.

Absolution's debut album 'Queensland State of Mind' arrived on 21 March 2020 with an all ages afternoon release party, songs about Brisbane punk figures, living in Queensland and being a student in the education system. Two weeks later the lockdowns hit, the venues that had given them a stage went under, and Kaleb found himself at home with an abundance of time. He spent it falling in love with the founding of the Brisbane scene in the 1970s. He was the same age Kuepper had been, in a city gone just as quiet, and he decided to do the same thing, deliberately, fifty years on. Through 2020 Casualty ran a newsletter, sold CDs and stickers, and on 12 April 2020, a year to the day after its first release, began signing other artists.

The first Casualty Records gig was held at King Lear's Throne on 27 June 2021, a benefit for the Bravehearts featuring Gunt with Private Function headlining, small, intimate, launch-style. More gigs followed and began propelling acts like The Chimpeltons, Loose Cannon and Kaleb's new band Artie and the Rantans to scene stardom, with plenty of bands forming and dissolving around them, nothing taken too seriously yet. The venue that made it a scene was the Woolloongabba Substation, chosen for the least romantic reasons imaginable, easy to clean, central, right on the train lines for kids who couldn't drive. There was no bar, so there was no bar take; the door was the whole economy, which is why an all ages ticket cost more than a pub show. The kids were paying for the room, the PA and every band on the bill themselves, and they did, month after month.

The bands the Substation made are half the story of everything after. In those thin early crowds, the ones the label's own newsletter described as low attendance and nerdy appearing audience members, stood Arran McKenzie and Johnnie Campbell, two Brisbane Grammar boys who had started Piss Off in June of 2021 with Asha Stewart, a family friend of Johnnie's, on a still broken bass and a shitty drum pad. Their big break, in Arran's own words, was through Casualty really; the label put on a gig for their debut album, a lo-fi record called Gormless, straight shed rock in The Chats' coinage, taped fast and live on a phone in drummer Johnnie's home studio, full of exaggerated songs about being bored in a library and hating Geography class, that sounded enough like a joke that new listeners regularly took them for a comedy act until it dawned that every word was meant. George of the future Project Punk played in Shock Value, the first of two Georges the lineup would carry, a band that came together at school around songs written for a side project that mercifully never launched, found Isaac at a Casualty substation gig, tried him on bass and then on guitar, decided two guitars sounded shit, and put Krystina on bass instead, at which point, by the members' own telling, they stopped calling themselves a band and started being one. The Subscene's second generation was standing in the first one's crowd.

The era around those first Substation gigs is the one the people who came later still talk about in golden terms. The King George Square ramp came back to life as the scene's open-air hangout, and you could go in on a Saturday knowing nobody and come home with ten new friends, because nobody had established cliques yet and the entire machine ran on letting new people in. The first scene press appeared, a small magazine called Censure, in early 2022. On 12 February 2022 Casualty and the Late Night Collective co-ran the first Shedfest in a converted taxi repair warehouse in Albion, fourteen acts deep, school bands and cover bands included, Videocouch, Sunday Service, the audience mostly other bands, their mates and their parents. Most of the era's bands lived and died inside it, Cannon Limba, female-fronted, among them; the Chimpeltons were among the few that carried through to 2024. Watching the footage now, the attendance looks thin and the interconnection total, members of one band playing in two others the same afternoon. It was during this period that the scene began calling itself the Subscene, a community of musicians subverting the general Brisbane music scene, which had been relegated to bars and pubs and was more about profit than community; a proper noun, the kind people reach for when the thing is moving so fast it feels like 1976 starting again. Nobody wrote that definition down as a creed. They didn't have to.

In April 2022 a fifteen year old named George Roberts, who had watched Kaleb work and wanted something with a lot less rules and regulations, founded Project Punk. Its first gig, at the Albion Peace Centre, came within days of the news that Chris Bailey of The Saints had died; The Rantans answered with a Saints cover, and the people who were there still describe the timber floors shaking under the stomping; maybe it was a sign from Chris Bailey himself. The first Project Punk has been described, by multiple people, independently, as insane. It drew a more characteristically alternative crowd than the school band kids of the Substation, and it marked the moment the scene got serious. The Peace Centre itself revolutionised things, spacious, central, right on the train station, an oasis in the desert, and when Casualty installed a proper stage with a backdrop and lights it stopped feeling like a shed and started feeling like a venue. George's founding rule, announced from the stage at the first show, was that you can do whatever you want, but your actions have consequences, so have fun but do not ruin other people's fun. As constitutions go, the scene has never needed a longer one.

George was more than the gig-runner. A visual artist and a reader, he pressed the books that made him on the people he met, Junky and On the Road and Notes from Underground, and he loved Radio Birdman and The Saints the way the founders had, as scripture. He ran his band Shock Value off the front of the stage, leaping into the crowd like Iggy Pop of the Stooges, the mic stand turned flagpole, a wet-floor sign laid down to call the floor what it was. In 2025, at a gig called Punk Goes Preschool, he sat the teenager who would write this history down beside him and walked him through how to run a gonzo interview, the founder teaching the documentarian the form. The Saints handed it to Radio Birdman; the reader-artist who loved them both handed it on again.

In May 2022 Ixara Dorizac, fourteen years old, newly arrived at Music Industry College, founded Antidismal. She had been performing at Casualty events with her band Sunday Service and producing her own music, but couldn't play licensed venues herself; her mother, rooted in traditional Filipino and Catholic values, wanted her to quit music altogether. With help from her aunt and her new school she built the label anyway, oriented toward a more indie, Triple J pop sound, and it expanded the appeal of the youth scene to a broader and more mainstream audience than punk alone was ever going to reach.

Growth brought the first hurdles. Kaleb moved his operation to the Peace Centre to follow Project Punk, and followed Ixara and others to Music Industry College after realising that his own school, like hers, cared more about its statistics and its money than about a young person's dream. By the third Project Punk a string of noise complaints from a neighbour named Sonia had built up until the scene's response entered folklore as a chair with FUCK SONIA taped to it; in December 2022 the Peace Centre was no longer available, and the gigs moved to Paddington Hall, praised for its hardwood floors, the same hall the first wave had played in the 1970s. Nobody planned that symmetry. The 'proper venues' that will take under eighteens in this city are so few and fake that the scene keeps cycling back through them just like The Saints did, until they said fuck it and started their own, proper venue.

The peak needs dating honestly, because it sits earlier than the big crowds do. Famous things peak before their fame, and the people inside can feel it even when the numbers say otherwise. Oasis felt it at Maine Road, the ground they'd grown up dreaming about, their mother and Alan McGee up in a box, the Union Jack guitar brought out for that night, and Knebworth a few months later was already the victory lap.

The Subscene's Maine Road was the Peace Centre, from the first Project Punk that April to the December 2022 last gig; the stretch when the scene got serious and outgrew Casualty, when Subscene meant something you were in rather than something you attended, and the whole machine still ran on letting new people in. Its Knebworth came on 12 March 2023 at BackDock Arts, an Antidismal mini-festival called Project Subscene, borrowing Project Punk's name-recognition and openly raising it; eight bands on one day's ticket, Sunday Service, Loose Cannon, Wisher, Powerfreak, Videocouch, Neuroticist, The Chimpeltons, Shock Value, the movement now something you could sell by name. Nobody clocks the difference from inside it. 2023 and 2024 played as the encore years, bigger and busier and a little further from the point every month, and the people who were actually there for 2022 already talk about it the way the first wave talks about Club '76.

The scene got big enough that outside press took notice. Stew, a local zine, ran a spread headed 'Brisbane's DIY Youths', teenagers booking their own community halls and playing their own shows with a spiky Saints cover never far away. The piece caught what the lockdown-and-TikTok story always misses, the local lineage underneath it, every kid who saw the Chats and an all ages gig on the same afternoon and walked out having learnt three chords. Kaleb put it plainest, none of the press gloss. Everyone who liked Absolution liked the Chats and Splendour in the Grass; Absolution, he admitted, was pretty much a Chats cover band.

By 2023 Antidismal was gaining real momentum, Ixara fronting her own band Ixaras with the former Sunday Service members, picking up Triple J Unearthed airplay and press attention, seeking out indie pop and TikTok pop acts, drawing mainstream teenagers and even adults from the bar scene into the Subscene's gigs, hiring staff, running shows at AHEPA Hall in West End, becoming, in its founder's own trajectory, something more like a business. At the same time the cracks were showing. Casualty had slowed. The ramp turned toxic with drama and established groups, and the era when a stranger could collect ten friends in an afternoon ended the way it always ends, with the cliques hardening and the new people finding a wall where the door used to be. The scene was bigger than it had ever been, and the thing that had made it worth joining was already going.

One of those shows found the place that would matter most. Antidismal made AHEPA Hall in West End one of its regular halls, and through 2023 it became the home of the scene's heavier nights, the hall everyone seemed to have either been at or heard about. Nobody booking it knew the lineage they were walking into; AHEPA had hosted what the Courier Mail billed as Brisbane's first punk ball, the Deranged Ball, in August 1978, and a 1979 flyer has Razar and the Go-Betweens on its boards a week after the same lineup played Baroona Hall, the rotating hall circuit the first wave ran. The kids had found their way back to the first wave's hall without a map. The fuse this time was a single hardcore booking; the scene took the hint and built a whole heavier wing out of it, and the legend that sealed the place came on 6 June 2024, when Sunami played and Struck Down opened and the pit was the kind people still describe to anyone who wasn't there. Between sets the kids spilled into the carpark down the alley beside it, under a wall where someone had painted CREATIVITY IS THE SOUL EXSPRESSING ITSELF in capitals a metre high, the misspelling sprayed in and never fixed, which is about as close to a mission statement as a scene that subverts every convention down to the spelling ever gets. For a year and a bit it was the closest thing the heavier half of the Subscene had to a home of its own.

end of part 3 part 4, the subscene, is live

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