Nat Kassel - Cracking Asbestos Zine

This is a 44-page story about a Sydney warehouse, freelance writing, selling nangs, a hidden lake, illegal parties, trespassing on train tracks and the gig work blues. It's a not-for-profit writing project by me, Nat Kassel, with design and illustrations by Kayla Sutton.

Cracking Asbestos was written about a period in 2016 when I lived in a Marrickville warehouse. At the time, I felt like Sydney was in the midst of a war — we were fighting the lockout laws, the housing crisis, the WestConnex, intergenerational inequality, rampant gentrification and the corrupt Baird government. Live music venues were struggling and disappearing while The Star casino was exempt from the lockout zone and allowed to stay open all night. It was a corrupt and culturally flattening time, but there was light in the underground. I saw some amazing shows at the local bowlo, the three Portuguese clubs and in the array of illegal warehouse venues in the inner west. Part of the fight was in doing cool DIY shit and making it cheap or free. But healthy communities are hard to form and even harder to maintain.

This story is also about trying to turn freelance writing into a full-time job under a precarious and degrading business model. I aspired to become part of the media class, but that was difficult to reconcile with a lifestyle where I was dumpster diving, going to punk shows and living in a windowless room in an illegal warehouse. Being a freelance writer in Sydney only felt financially possible by living a cheap and limited existence. I stitched all the gigs together and got by, but I really couldn’t see much of a future in what I was doing.

Freelance writing isn’t my primary job anymore, which is surprisingly freeing. It’s been refreshing to think of writing as more of a creative DIY outlet and less like a job.- Nat Kassel