Rock Australia Magazine

Rock Australia Magazine or RAM (its acronym and popular name) was a fortnightly national Australian music newspaper, which was published from March 1975 to July 1989.^[1] It was designed for people with a serious interest in rock and pop music, as were its rivals Juke Magazine and the local Australian edition of Rolling Stone.^[2]

RAM was founded in Sydney by Anthony O'Grady – a former contributor to the earlier teen-orientated, pop music, weekly newspaper, Go-Set – and Phillip Mason, a publisher.^[2] It was modelled on the English music trade papers, New Musical Express and Melody Maker,^[2][3] and O'Grady's stated objective was that there would be no drop in quality between the copy it imported from those papers and the copy it generated domestically, which had been the case with previous Australian rock magazines. Its first issue was printed on 8 March 1975 by Soundtracks Publishing, ^[1][4] and one of its subsequent successes was that it indeed met O'Grady's vision, and put Australian music writing on a par with its counterpart overseas.

There were three eras of RAM, each defined by their editors – O'Grady, Greg Taylor and Phil Stafford. Another of its successes was that it faced down all its competition. Roadrunner magazine came and went, yet even as the local edition of Rolling Stone improved and rose inexorably, RAM retained its pre-eminence as the Australian journal of record for rock music. Its star writers included the late Annie Burton, Jen Jewel Brown, Stuart Coupe, the late Andrew McMillan and Clinton Walker.

By May 1980 it was being published by Eastern Suburbs Newspapers, and in July 1989 published its last issue after running for over 14 years.^[1] In 2012, Jenny Brown was the presenter of a radio documentary, '"Paper Trail", for Radio National, which described four newspapers she wrote for during the 1970s and 1980s, including RAM.^[5]

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