For a band just barely a year old, Camp Cope have had a remarkable amount of success come their way. The Melbourne punk trio entered the ARIA Albums Chart at Number 36 last month, an impressive effort for their self-titled debut.
Now, they’re paying that success forward, once again urging the girls of Australia to the front. Vocalist and guitarist Georgia Maq recently took to Facebook to announce her plans to publish a zine highlighting the work of young Aussie women.
“Let me set the scene: it’s Friday night, I’m flicking through Tinder, watching the Kathleen Hanna documentary, The Punk Singer, and I just got so inspired by that and I was like ‘I need to do this, we need to do this’,” she told triple j.
“We’ve got like 6,000 fans on Facebook, which is pretty cool, so if we could engage all these people – let’s use it for good.” Maq said she was also inspired by Sommer Tothill, a Camp Cope fan who recounted her experience at one of the band’s gigs online.
Tothill penned a piece from the perspective of a woman at a punk show, describing her interactions with loutish male fans. According to Maq, after Tothill’s piece went viral, many publications asked her to pen a follow-up but did not offer to pay her.
Maq’s as-yet-untitled zine will be sold at Camp Cope gigs, with a portion of the money going to cover the cost of printing and the rest going to the content creators. “It’s about women’s voices getting heard and I want to pay the women,” she said.
“I want to make a feminist/women’s zine to have at our shows so people can buy them and then give the money to those who’ve submitted into the zine, because unpaid womens labor doesn’t fly with me,” Maq wrote on Camp Cope’s Facebook page.
“I’m calling all women to send me submissions of literally anything they want, as long as it’s a page or smaller (size 12 text). I want your voices heard and we have this fantastic platform to do it!”
Maq said interested parties can feel free to submit everything from recipes and craft idea to poetry, editorials, advertisements for businesses, feminist writing, and Tinder date nightmare stories to “[email protected] with the subject line: ZINE”.
Feature image by Matt Warrell
