The PlaceThe street press media which brightened and enlightened Australian music fans’ lives for decades starting in the early ‘80s is usually synonymous with capital cities, but a few intrepid publishers made an impact far outside of such metropolitan climes.
Fuelled by a love of street press media which dates back to his growing up in SEQ and feasting on local titles Time Off and Rave – augmented by a spell selling advertising for the Sunshine Coast-based Tsunami – in 2007 Daniel Sorenson, while up north visiting his sister, noticed a gap in the North Queensland market as far as street press was concerned and quickly resolved to do something about it.
Setting up base in Townsville, the first issue of his monthly publication The Place hit the streets in late 2008, and for the next couple of years the free magazine became a focal for North Queensland music and arts lovers, a place for the far-flung and loose-knit community to galvanise and discover what was happening in their own tropical neck of the woods.
“It was great, I loved the time,” Sorenson smiles. “Even though it was pretty short, only a bit over two years from late 2008 to early 2011.
“A few years before I was up there just staying at my sister's place – she was based in the army at the time – and I went and hung out and was trying to get involved with the existing street press Remedy, because I had a background in selling ads for surfing magazines. They already had someone doing that though so I just ended up doing some writing and helping with distribution and stuff like that.
“I just loved print media really – surf mags and street press – but I’d never had a full time job in the field. But I just sort of knew that Townsville was a good market for it because they were sort of starved of the touring bands – bands would go to cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, maybe Perth and Adelaide, but rarely up to places like Townsville and Cairns.”
The first and last issues of The Place, from December 2008 and March 2011.
“I got a government grant called NEIS (New Enterprise Investment Scheme), where they basically pay you the equivalent to the dole for a year while you start up a business,” he continues. “So I got a grant for that, and I remember looking at it in about 2007 and seeing that Remedy wasn't there anymore.
“Townsville had, from memory, about 200,000 population and then you had your little towns around it and then Cairns above and Mackay below, so I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, that's a big enough market. There's not going to be anything else similar up there’.
“So I went up there in about late-2008 and we had the first edition of The Place come out in December 2008, and that was the start of it.”
As well as the inherent difficulties in starting a new publication in a relatively small and far-flung market, there were also some temporal hurdles for the new publisher to navigate.
“I don't know if you remember, but the GFC – the global financial crisis – hit in 2008,” Sorenson continues. “It was tough in that sense, but I just had the energy because I was just enthusiastic about it. The GFC didn't hit Australia too hard in the end but that was the beginning of it, and what businesses were saying is, ‘Oh, we’re just holding off on advertising, just seeing how things go’. And when they hold off, a niche new street press media is the easy one to sort of hold off on.
“So I was pushing it uphill a bit, but I had a little bit of savings so I knew I could do the first few editions and not even need to make any money – the first few were paid for – so it eventually got off the ground.
“But then it was a weird time with the rise of the internet as well. I remember going up there and MySpace was the main online portal, but by 2007 and 2008 Facebook was starting to become the main one and MySpace was starting to become obsolete.
“People were starting to go online a bit more to find things, but that was still sort of new, yet I remember people starting to say even back then that I should do the magazine online instead. There was a definite shift in that direction.
“But it kept going, and we got a good two solid years out of it until the money just didn't add up. It just didn't really make money in the end, that’s why it stopped going. I guess it probably wasn't a big enough market either.
“We were printing over 30,000 copies a month at the peak, which is pretty decent circulation given the population. We flooded the market. You'd cruise around or go to a cafe and you'd see someone reading it – it was well read, I just don't know if there were enough people up there to keep it going.”
Despite the issues in getting The Place off the ground, there was definitely a thriving scene in the region that deserved to be documented and fostered.
“There were a lot of good local bands at the time, obviously The Middle East is the one that made the most impact,” Sorenson remembers. “The main feeling or the theme up there was acoustic and indie – as well as a lot of folk and roots music – but there was also a lot of arts up there, actually.
“That was the thing that surprised me doing the magazine up there, for how small the town was, how much arts there was. I'm from the Gold Coast and back then it was sort of a bit starved of the arts, it was more about tourism and surfing. There was a lot more Aboriginal art up there as well, I remember, which was good to see. So, yeah, the arts stood out to me.
“But there was a strong contingent of local bands, and people supported each other. In the regional areas bands sort of end up having to support each other a bit more, so you get this natural community that we were able to help encourage.”
Powderfinger and Bullet For My Valentine featured in The Place’s July 2010 issue.
While keeping The Place running on the smell of an oily rag proved unsustainable despite his enthusiasm and work ethic, looking back Sorenson is proud of what he – and his cohort of passionate helpers – achieved with the publication.
“I remember chatting to a couple of people at the time who told me that the street press had sort of brought the community together a bit,” he reflects. “We did a partnership with the local FM radio, they'd read out the gig guide on the radio, all the standard sort of things you aim for.
“Before The Place arrived I don't know if there was that sort of glue holding things together as far as local independent, original music – all that sort of stuff – so, yeah, I am proud now. I've never really thought about it that way, but it was a good moment in time. I was too busy in the moment to realise it or appreciate it because I was just sort of holding it together.
“And there was just so much support. When I first went there, I went to the university up there, JCU, and hit up their journalism department – I got in contact with someone there – and all their students would write for free.
“I could pay the editor – we had a couple of really good editors over the journey – as well as the designer, and I could just live. We ran it from my house – really just a unit that I was living in – and then virtually the only other help was some people distributing it for like 50 or 100 bucks a go or something.
“I did a lot of the distribution myself as well. I'd get in a van and drive around in Townsville – pay those other people as well – then drive four hours to Cairns and distribute it up there. So after about two or three or four days, you're just exhausted from driving around distributing the thing, which takes time away from selling the advertising.
“I just took all the support I could, so there were all these people involved making it work because they were passionate about street press and the local scene as well.”
With the experience now well-and-truly in the rearview mirror, today Sorenson is delighted that all of this collective elbow grease is going to be immortalised in the street press archive, with The Place’s entire run now available online to be perused by future generations.
“It's great, when I first saw it I was just really happy about it,” he enthuses. “I think it's a great thing that The Music's doing. It's an important thing as well because I think Australia had quite a good culture of street press, we punched above our weight population-wise.
“And a lot of that stuff like that has been lost to time: even myself, I had a street press title in Townsville and I haven't even kept the physical copies! So if The Music wasn't doing this it would easily just get lost to history, and I’m stoked that that isn’t the case.”
Find the complete archive of The Place on The Music’s Street Press Archive.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
