About Nexus

Nexus

Nexus is an Australian bi-monthly alternative news magazine, published from Maleny in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland. Owned and edited by Duncan Roads since 1990, it covers geopolitics, alternative health, future science, the unexplained — including UFOs — and what it calls "hard-to-get" information: the stories, theories and research its editors believe the mainstream media ignores or suppresses. Published in print and digital editions and translated into more than a dozen languages, it is one of the longest-running alternative publications in the English-speaking world.

Overview

The magazine's masthead carries a statement of purpose: Nexus recognises that humanity is undergoing a massive transformation, and seeks to provide "hard-to-get" information to assist people through these changes — while declaring itself not linked to any religious, philosophical or political ideology or organisation. Its subject matter spans alternative medicine and health freedom, geopolitics and conspiracy theories, future science and suppressed technology, UFOs and the paranormal, surveillance and "Big Brother" issues, historical revisionism, and freedom of speech and thought.

Nexus is published bi-monthly — six issues a year — in English, from its Queensland base, and distributed internationally: the magazine is or has been published in more than twelve languages and sold in more than twenty countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and across Europe. Its conferences and lecture tours — more than twenty international conferences organised by Roads over the years — extend the brand beyond the page.

History

Nexus was founded in 1986 by Ramses H. Ayana, with Jenni Elf as co-founder, as a quarterly publication covering human rights, the environment, alternative health, women's rights, New Age spirituality, free energy, alternative science and the paranormal. Both founders had previously worked on the independent Australian magazine Maggie's Farm, part of the country's alternative-press tradition.

In 1990 the magazine was purchased by Duncan Roads, who changed its contents and direction to reflect his own interests and moved it to a bi-monthly schedule. Roads — raised on a small farm in northern Tasmania, a veteran of the alternative bookshop, lecture-tour and conference world, and publisher of the free what's-on magazine Southern Crossings — brought to Nexus a focus on suppressed and ignored information: the conspiracy theories, alternative health claims and geopolitical analyses that became the magazine's stock in trade. With co-editor Catherine Simons, Roads has produced the magazine ever since — more than three decades of continuous publication.

The magazine's international expansion made it one of Australia's most widely distributed independent titles: editions and translations across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and a global readership built on the alternative-news audience that the internet would later supercharge.

Editorial character

Nexus's editorial identity is defined by its adversarial relationship with the mainstream: the magazine exists, in its own account, to publish what others won't. Its health coverage promotes alternative medicine and challenges pharmaceutical and medical orthodoxies; its geopolitics covers the New World Order narratives, central banking, and the hidden-hand theories of international affairs; its science pages champion suppressed technologies and free-energy claims; and its "unexplained" coverage treats UFOs, ancient mysteries and the paranormal as serious subjects.

This positioning has brought the magazine both a devoted readership and sustained criticism. In 1997 the Stephen Roth Institute listed the Nexus website among sites promoting antisemitism — a charge Roads has contested, noting that the magazine and its editor have been variously labelled left-wing, right-wing, pro-Israeli and antisemitic by different attackers, and insisting on the magazine's political neutrality. The magazine has also been criticised for promoting the claims of Jim Humble and his "Miracle Mineral Supplement" (MMS) — a bleach-based product spruiked as a cure-all — with Humble appearing as a speaker at Nexus conferences. These controversies illustrate the risks of the magazine's editorial model: open to heterodox claims, it has at times platformed figures and products that mainstream science regards as dangerous.

Duncan Roads

The magazine is inseparable from its owner-editor. Duncan Roads's account of his own background — raised on a small Tasmanian farm by parents who turned to organic gardening, meditation and spiritual literature in the early 1970s; leaving home at fifteen to hitchhike to Sydney; immersion in the alternative health, spirituality, peace and environmental movements; running alternative bookshops; organising lecture tours and conferences; creating the free magazine Southern Crossings; working at Simply Living magazine, where his interest in suppressed information "took full bloom" — is the origin story of the editor Nexus required.

A 1986 commission to write about conspiracy theories proved pivotal: months later Roads found himself in Libya, meeting figures including Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat, and becoming convinced that Gaddafi was attempting to build alternatives to the IMF and World Bank while warning of a coming New World Order. The experience fixed the geopolitical lens through which Nexus has viewed world events ever since.

Roads describes himself as politically neutral, and the magazine as avoiding the traditional left-right narrative — a positioning that has seen both magazine and editor attacked from all directions, as he notes with wry pride: accused of being a Freemason, a Libyan agent, a CIA agent, a Rosicrucian, a Scientologist, and even a shape-shifting reptilian. The list is offered as evidence of independence; critics read it as evidence of the conspiratorial milieu the magazine inhabits. Either way, it captures the magazine's relationship with the mainstream: permanently outside it, permanently at odds with it.

The conferences

Nexus is more than a magazine: Roads's conference and events business has organised more than twenty international conferences and dozens of national lecture tours, bringing alternative-health practitioners, conspiracy researchers, UFO investigators and geopolitics speakers to Australian audiences. The Nexus conferences — where figures such as Jim Humble have spoken — function as the live embodiment of the magazine's editorial philosophy: the suppressed information, delivered in person.

This events arm gives the enterprise a commercial dimension beyond publishing and a community dimension beyond readership. The conferences are where the magazine's audience meets its contributors, where the ideas in print become a social movement, and where the brand's loyalty is renewed. For an independent publisher, the integration of magazine, conferences and mail-order books — the classic alternative-press business model — has provided the resilience to survive nearly four decades.

The alternative press tradition

Nexus belongs to a distinct Australian publishing tradition: the alternative press that flourished from the 1960s, from the underground papers through the New Age magazines of the 1980s. Its founders' roots in Maggie's Farm, Roads's background in alternative bookshops and the free-press what's-on scene, and the magazine's survival as an independent, owner-operated title all place it in this lineage — the tradition of keeping alternative publications alive in Australia, in the phrase used of the 1990 handover, "regardless of monetary considerations."

The internet transformed the economics and reach of alternative media: where Nexus once relied on print distribution and mail order, it now operates in a crowded digital ecosystem of alternative news sites, podcasts and video channels. The magazine's persistence in print — alongside its digital editions — distinguishes it from the purely digital alternative outlets, and its translated editions give it a reach few independent Australian titles can match.

The magazine today

Nexus continues to publish bi-monthly from Queensland under Duncan Roads's ownership and editorship, with Catherine Simons as co-editor — one of the longest continuous editor-owner tenures in Australian magazine publishing. Its conferences, lecture tours and publishing operations make it a small alternative-media enterprise rather than merely a magazine.

For its readers, Nexus is a trusted guide to the hidden currents of world events; for its critics, a vector of misinformation. Both views acknowledge the same fact: for nearly forty years, an independent magazine from the Sunshine Coast hinterland has published the stories its editors believe the world needs to hear — and found, in more than twenty countries, an audience willing to listen.