The magazine was founded in September 1983, from an office on the Earls Court Road, by two British Iraqi brothers, Ali and Ghadir Razuki.
[1] Their family left Iraq for the UK in 1968 when Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, then led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, came to power.
They regularly socialised with Australians and New Zealanders, the brothers, then aged 18 and 22, set about creating a weekly magazine to meet the needs of the hundreds of thousands of Aussies, Kiwis and Saffas who visit London (South Africans did not arrive in large numbers until the post-apartheid era in the early 1990s).
The UK version was not the first magazine to reach readers via distribution bins in key areas across London.
However, two years later, TNT’s freight chairman, on a visit from Australia in London, snared a copy of the magazine from opposite Harrods.