Australian Commodore and Amiga Review - Australia's Magazine
Updated 24 October 2025
Personal Experiences
There have be a few Australian computer magazines published through the years. Possibly the most independent of them all was the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review. I believe that the magazine started as the Australian Commodore Review and then it extended the masthead as the Commodore Amiga became popular. The magazine was published out of Kensington in Sydney. The magazine must have been a big deal for the editor and this looks like a small publishing unit here. Honestly, I bought more of the UK magazines, like Amiga Format, in the day but ACAR was always just there waiting to to be picked up and read. And yes, the covers have always looked like they were desktop published.
Sample Selection from the archives
Commodore Annuals
1980s—The Golden Decade
1990s Onward
Note: Links to the magazines are available online at the Internet Archive using the supplied online reader. Links to pages that are external to this website. Refer to archive.org's privacy and copyright policy.
Legacy and Preservation
The legacy of the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review lives on because enthusiasts refused to let it fade. What began as a monthly touchstone for local users now survives as a digital record of Australia's home–computer culture, carefully mirrored in community archives and personal collections. The Internet Archive provides durable hosting and a reliable viewer, but the real preservation work happens at kitchen tables and spare rooms—careful flatbed scans, cleaned edges, calibrated colours, and filenames that make sense ten years from now. Each upload gains value with accurate metadata: issue dates, cover lines, contents, contributors, and the small production details that historians love. Optical Character Recognition helps searchers rediscover long–lost tutorials and product reviews, though human proofreading still matters when old ink meets modern algorithms. Preservation is also ethical stewardship: credit original publishers, respect reasonable takedown requests, and document provenance where possible. If you hold issues we haven't seen, consider scanning or lending them for digitisation so others can share the story. ACAR's spirit was always communal—letters pages, public domain disks, meet–ups, and tips traded after school. Keeping these magazines available ensures that Australia's unique voice in the Amiga era remains readable, referenceable, and inspiring.
