The Local Rag began
in June 1989 as a way of keeping in contact with fans after the
demise of Pat Drummond's long term residency at The Rest Hotel.
It signalled the beginning of Pat's touring life. Most of the
early editions were comic and offhand in style and featured a
number of Pat's cartoons and line drawings. As the years progressed,
however, they developed into a more considered style of travel
journal and these (and the stories gathered on his ever more wideranging
excursions) gave rise to Pat's 1990's newspaper reporter persona.
Eventually the Shoestring 1991 album "Tales From The Local
Rag" took it's name from the fictional paper and became the
first in the 'Australian Stories' albums which brought Pat to
national prominence over the next 15 years.
The first newsletters
were prepared on an early Apple Macintosh Program called Macdraw
with Pat's original 128k Apple Macintosh. Using the original machine
(still in perfect order - see The
Hoard) these have recently
been saved as PICTs and ported to Photoshop where they were re-saved
as .gifs and inserted in these .html pages.
