A 2013 exhibition at Canberra Museum and Art Gallery showcased the burgeoning punk-rock scene in 1970s Canberra as did an accompanying book titled Head Full of Flames which impressed with a wealth of text and imagery about a local music scene that thrived in leafy suburbs far longer than expected.
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Local bands like the Young Docteurs, Guthugga Pipeline and the Bladder Spasms put Canberra on the map for music which was not created by traditional jazz bands at Albert Hall in the 1930s.
In an interview to discuss the exhibition, Chris Shakallis, of The Young Docteurs told me: "We had created our own scene with deep roots. The overseas punk scene had filtered through and teenagers in the suburbs heard the murmurings of this new music. It was a real do-it-yourself ethos. We were just trying to deal with being young people in a city like Canberra and at the fringe of the mainstream."
This gives some idea how far-reaching and influential the first wave punk rock scenes in New York and London were, not only in encouraging the formation of comparable regional scenes around the world, but also in spawning significant musical offshoots such as hardcore punk which took off in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
I have been thinking about such things after buying a copy of the stunningly good Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilisation that was made on a shoestring budget in 1981 and, amazingly, has only now been released on DVD.
The music made by bands like Black Flag and The Germs appealed to a universal teen desire to release frustration through noise and the subsequent sound proved to be resilient and influential. Spheeris uses a cinema verité approach to get to the core of her subjects with minimal intervention.
The viewing is not always pretty – The Germs' vocalist Darby Crash pursued a self-destructive life on the margins. But all bands featured in the doco were united in the belief that rewarding artistic expression would never be provided by the mainstream entertainment industry, with punk rock filling a cultural void for those outside the system.
Many hardcore bands toiled in obscurity and it would be another decade before stirrings outside the underground took Seattle grunge to the top of the charts.
The doco explores those early attempts by punk rock bands to create meaningful art outside the commercial hit machine and makes for compelling viewing with significant implications.
One can only hope that somewhere in the outer suburbs of Tuggeranong and Gungahlin a cool kid sits in their bedroom watching a newly minted DVD copy of The Decline of Western Civilisation while plotting to start their own band.
