Rolling Stone Australia is the Australian edition of the United States' Rolling Stone magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture, published monthly. The Australian version of Rolling Stone was initially published in 1970 as a supplement in Revolution magazine published by Monash University student Phillip Frazer. It was launched as a fully fledged magazine in 1972 by Frazer and was the longest-surviving international edition of Rolling Stone until its last issue appeared in January 2018.
As of February 2019, Rolling Stone Australia returned with a digital platform published by The Brag Media, in an exclusive licensing deal with Rolling Stone owner Penske Media Corporation.
In June 2020, the magazine was acquired from the Bauer Media Group by Sydney–based investment firm Mercury Capital.
History
The Australian version of Rolling Stone launched in May 1970 as a supplement in Revolution, a counter-culture magazine edited and published by Phillip Frazer in Melbourne as an offshoot of his teen-based pop newspaper Go-Set. Go-Set introduced a counter-culture supplement called Core on 13 December 1969, edited by Ed Nimmervoll who had worked on Go-Set since 1966. Frazer soon decided that the "Core" material deserved a stand-alone publication for older readers, and on 1 May 1970, Go-Set Publications launched the tabloid Revolution, co-edited by Frazer and Jon Hawkes. From its fourth issue onward Revolution included a supplement of Rolling Stone pages under an agreement Frazer made with its Californian owner and publisher Jann Wenner. In August 1971 Revolution became High Times(before the US magazine of that name), which featured Australian underground cartoons curated by co-editors Pat Woolley and Macy McFarland. Frazer left Go-Set and High Times early in 1972 and, with his business partner Geoff Watson, launched the Australian Rolling Stone as a fully fledged magazine, five years after the flagship started in the United States. Rolling Stone Australia was published fortnightly, devoted to music, politics, and popular culture, with a few local articles supplementing the major features from the parent magazine. In August 1972 Frazer launched an Australian counter-culture magazine The Digger which was published fortnightly, then monthly, and it was The Digger, and not the local edition Rolling Stone, that fostered a team of star young writers like Colin Talbot, Helen Garner, Garrie Hutchinson and Robert Adamson, who rivalled the American Stone’s iconoclastic reputation for New Journalism.
In 1975, before Frazer left Australia for the United States, he closed down The Digger and sold the local Stone licence to a group of journalists led by former Financial Review writer Paul Gardiner, with Jane Mathieson and Paul Comrie Thomson. One thing this meant, perhaps most crucially, was that the magazine moved base from Melbourne to Sydney. The first Australian act on the cover was Skyhooks in 1976, who reportedly hated the photo, but it did mark a broadening recognition of local acts in the magazine. Together Gardiner, Mathieson and Comrie-Thompson built Rolling Stone Australia up as a major player in terms of circulation, shifting about 35,000 copies each fortnight. The magazine, however, lacked consistent local content. The Skyhooks cover was the exception rather than the rule, and an Australian band would not re-appear on the cover again until Men at Work in 1983 – and that was a relayed American story. The magazine also lacked the immediacy and the team of quality contributors that made its rival RAM so much more successful in terms of relevance and quality. Certainly in no way in this phase, in the late 70s, did it develop a cast of writers the way The Digger had only a few years earlier, with only Bruce Elder staying on for the long haul, and P.D. Jack coming and going.