ABSTRACT
Hansen’s 2005 fi lm, Rash (‘Scratch it and it spreads…’). The Australian and New Zealand hip hop magazine Out4Fame is published in Melbourne, which also has a lively local hip hop scene. Various ‘Hell-Fire’ clubs and leatherbars have opened and closed in Melbourne at various times over the last thirty or so years, catering to S/M and fetish interests. There is the Cave Clan, a loose federation of underground travellers who would sign their name in the fashion of the CocaCola logo and explore and territorialise Melbourne’s extensive underground drainage systems – literally inhabiting an underworld, rather like the Parisian cataphiles. And there is the Melbourne branch of Critical Mass, activist cyclists who protest the way in which the city is dominated by roads and cars but who also arrange cycling events as leisured get-togethers: a small-scale social movement, although arguably still subcultural through its ‘disaffi liated’ structure and ‘attitude’. Automobile dragsters around town, on the other hand, are constantly being moved on by police, encouraged to do what they do elsewhere or not at all. Melbourne has seen its teenage subcultures clash in the streets: like the Mods and Sharpies in August 1966 (Sparrow and Sparrow 2004: 73-77). It has also played host to various literary and artistic Bohemian communities, identifi ed as far back as the 1860s by the novelist and journalist Marcus Clarke and again more recently by the writer and poet Alister Kershaw (1991).
