Stranded (expanded edition)

Clinton Walker's book is kind of a personal history of Australian independent music from punk to grunge, a sort of long-form narrative sequel to Inner City Sound, Stranded was generally well-received back in its day (as the number of glowing spruiks here attest), and it sold quite nicely too. But if this wasn’t without a degree of contention, since the book dared to fly in the face of the party line that said there is nothing in Australia beyond mainstream pub rock and its attendant ‘American Invasion’ – in other words, the corporate/stadium rock of Barnsey & Farnsey and INXS and Men At Work – the fact that Stranded has ultimately proved so prescient that its alternative reading of history has by now been so seamlessly integrated into the general orthodox history that it’s as if the culture wars it charts never even happened, is surely all the more reason to revisit it…Or, given that interest in it as a sort of Australian equivalent of England’s Dreaming or Please Kill Me has never really abated since it slipped out of print in the early 2000s, and given that the post-punk revision of rock history generally has only expanded ever since, it’s timely that Stranded (Expanded) now rejoins a pantheon of pioneers in that process.