ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Clinton Walker has been hailed as “our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture” by the Sydney Sun-Herald.

Born in country Victoria in 1957, Walker grew up in Melbourne and, after dropping out of Brisbane Art College in 1976, started writing for student newspapers and his own punk fanzines. After moving to Sydney in 1980 and freelancing for rock magazines such as RAM and Rolling Stone, he gained a reputations as Australia’s most prescient and colorful music critic. His early books Inner City Sound (1981; reissued by Verse Chorus Press in 2005) and The Next Thing (1984) were the first to champion punk and independent music in Australia, and are now regarded as classics of DIY cultural history.

Since Highway to Hell was first published in 1994, Walker has written four more works of ground-breaking music and social history: Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music, 1977-1992 (1996), Football Life (1998), Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (2000) and Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car (2005).

Walker was the presenter of late night live-music TV show Studio 22 on ABC, co-wrote the acclaimed 2001 rockumentary Long Way to the Top, and produced soundtrack CDs for both series. He also wrote the documentary film based on Buried Country and produced its double-CD soundtrack, as well as Inner City Soundtrack, a 2CD set released to coincide with the new edition of that book.

Walker lives with his wife and two children in Sydney’s inner western suburbs, just down the road from AC/DC’s birthplace.