Inside Aotearoa’s zine scene, from punk roots to present day
Wednesday, 10 June 2026
Zines NZ (punk to present) by author Bryce Galloway is the first history of zine-making in Aotearoa. It’s an oral history. What’s a zine? A zine (pronounced ‘zeen’) is any short-run amateur publication. In the pre-internet 1980s zines were an urgent and sometimes scrappy form of punk rock journalism for the discussion of music and politics. These days they’re as like to be well-turned objects of paper craft, featuring poetry, drawing, collage, photography… you name it.
Fifty zine-makers operating between 1980 and now were interviewed for Zines NZ (punk to present). The book is divided into sections by decade, except for the last section which cover the 2010s and 2020s up until the present day.
What follows is an excerpt from the 2010s/20s section in which various zine-makers talk about discovering the zine medium…
Mieke Montagne: I like to mispronounce the word ‘zine’ for fun.
Liam Goulter: When I was 15 I volunteered at The Freedom Shop, back when it was on Left Bank off Cuba Street. I didn’t really care about politics at the time, but my friend was really into animal rights and there was animal rights stuff happening there. So I tagged along with her when she volunteered. They had a whole bunch of zines about stuff that I didn’t really know about. One of them was about polyamory, and I bought it because I thought it would be cool to leave it at my house to piss off my mum.
Murtle Chickpea: There were about 20 of us in the 91 Aro Street collective. We each paid 10 bucks a week to do whatever we wanted with the space; people would have exhibitions out front or sell their stuff from the shop out back. I remember looking at the zines and not quite getting them. One girl had written a zine about being unattractive and how she wore leather jackets and red lipstick to compensate. It made her feel powerful. I remember thinking ‘That’s weird.’ And someone else had made a photo comic about bike riding or something. I was like ‘Oh yeah, okay, is that what people do . . .?’ I still didn’t get it.
Years later I went to the mid-winter zine market and just went ‘Oh my god’, bought heaps of zines and then started making my own. I just lost my mind at that mid-winter zine market. Suddenly I just thought ‘Oh my god — zines are amazing.’ I didn’t know that before. I’d also seen quite a few zines in the anarchist book shops in Melbourne, but they were all political, not my thing. I remember looking around at the people and thinking ‘Oh my god, my crowd: everyone’s just a little bit wonky’, and I really liked that. I talked to a guy who had this zine about being awkward, we just talked and talked. I would do a lot of talking and buying zines and then I’d go to the next stall and talk and buy zines. My friend and I went out for beer afterwards at the Southern Cross. We were reading all our new zines and it was like something had just gone. . . click!‘This is what we should all be doing.’
Liam Goulter: The Freedom Shop seemed like the waiting room at the GPs; all of those flyers like ‘Want to Stop Snoring?’, but in this case geared toward anarchist thought. The publications were really cheap-looking, in a way that I found very cool. They appeared to be made by people rather than institutions, but people I was probably a bit afraid of.
Catalina Paz Nuñez Elevancini: The first zine I came across was probably my sister’s. She was showing me what she was making and telling me she was going to be participating in this thing called Zinefest. I didn’t know that what she was working on was called a zine, but I feel like I understood it pretty quickly as I was already interested in graphic novels and things like that. So I understood it as ‘You make your own graphic novel.’
Mieke Montagne: I was already doing a lot of drawing and crafting and making little birthday cards and things for my friends, but I had no idea what zines were until my sister brought me along to the 2018 Christchurch Zinefest (before the name change to Ōtautahi Zinefest). I was like ‘This is crazy, I didn’t know this existed.’ And then, yeah, I fell in love with them.
Hannah Wynn: Lynette Fisher was the year below me when I was in my last year of the Bachelor of Creative Industries at Toi Ohomai in Tauranga. She just said ‘Hey, do you want to run a zinefest with me?’ And I went ‘What’s a zine?’ I was a graphic design major and was interning for an events company at the time, and she told me that I could do all of the things she didn’t want to do. I was like ‘What’s a zine? It sounds interesting?’
– Extracted from Zines NZ: (punk to present), by Bryce Galloway, published by Massey University Press, RRP $60. Book available now.