[7] The Australian version of Rolling Stone launched in May 1970 as a supplement in Revolution, a counter-culture magazine edited and published by Phillip Frazer in Melbourne as an offshoot of his teen-based pop newspaper Go-Set.

[8] From its fourth issue onward Revolution included a supplement of Rolling Stone pages under an agreement Frazer made with its Californian owner and publisher Jann Wenner.

[2] Frazer left Go-Set and High Times early in 1972 and, with his business partner Geoff Watson, launched the Australian Rolling Stone as a fully fledged magazine, five years after the flagship started in the United States.

[3][4] Rolling Stone Australia was published fortnightly, devoted to music, politics, and popular culture, with a few local articles supplementing the major features from the parent magazine.

A handful of younger writers like Ed St.John and occasional RAM contributors Toby Creswell and Clinton Walker too started freelancing for Rolling Stone and invigorating its pages.

In 1985, Rolling Stone published The Big Australian Rock Book, a sort of A-Z survey of then-Australian music, edited by Ed St.John and written largely by him, Bruce Elder, Toby Creswell, Clinton Walker and Andrea Jones.

Naturally it still relied heavily on its American parent for content, but with Clinton Walker especially as a star contributor alongside the copy Creswell himself generated, the magazine was now brimming with well-written local features and news stories, and incisive reviews.

In the face of competition only from the now-widespread, regionalised free street press with its preponderance of advertorial, and now with John O’Donnell as Creswell's Assistant Editor and going glossy full colour throughout, Rolling Stone entered its peak period, with its own flavor quite distinct from the American edition.

In addition to relying on Clinton Walker for major features and acerbic reviews, Creswell nurtured new young writers like O’Donnell and John Birmingham, who won Rolling Stone’s campus writing contest, and had it not been for its great weakness, its Sydney-centricity – its inability to get good consistent coverage on the ground in Melbourne – the magazine would undoubtedly have been Australia's journal of record for music culture.

By the early 90s, however, with Next Media now having bought a building of its own in southern-Sydney suburb Redfern, tensions were brewing between Phil Keir and both his wife Lesa-Belle Furhagen and Toby Creswell.

[15] After Bail and Scatena (and Clinton Walker) had left the magazine by the late 1990s, it entered into something of a phase in the wilderness, with a succession of editors and owners compromising its content and integrity in the face of a shifting pop-cultural landscape, including not least of all the rise of the internet.