It was Gareth Powell’s Chance International, however, that took the Playboy and Penthouse templates to make Australian’s own highbrow men’s magazine. Australasian Post and Pix both promised nudie thrills in the '60s but were soon swallowed up. Years before Kerry Packer purchased the rights to publish an Australian version of Playboy in 1979 - coincidentally the same year Australian Penthouse was first published - a handful of Aussie men’s mags mirrored Hef’s juggernaut.

The first issue of 'Playboy' featuring Marilyn Monroe.

The Playboy Bunny photo shoots for which the magazine became famous mixed with lifestyle articles, features and short stories by such little known writers as Arthur C Clarke, Ian Fleming, Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King! Guccione’s porn project, designed to compete with Playboy, offered unique soft-focus photography and in-depth reporting of government corruption scandals as its pornographic point of difference. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy made its debut in 1955 with a certain Marilyn Monroe as the first centrefold. Hef’s aim was to create a worldwide brand that was associated with a particular lifestyle his magazine promoted. Penthouse, however, wasn’t the first top-shelf magazine to hit the newsagent’s shelf. The magazine often pushed the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable in a mainstream publication.

From the '60s summer of love through the '70s sexual revolution, Penthouse’s pages became an eye-opening precis on the history of sex. Heading into your local newsagent to get your first glimpse of naked female flesh was a traumatic man-making experience.įlicking through the pages of Guccione’s infamous girlie magazine over the decades, their contents parallel society's acceptance of a more sexually permissive lifestyle. In those innocent times before the internet, buying a men’s magazine became a right of passage for your average teenage boy. When New Yorker Bob Guccione, subject of the SBS On Demand documentary Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story, first published Penthouse in England back in 1965, it was a tame, almost naive affair - a million miles from the sexually explicit imagery we are bombarded with today.

Penthouse magazine models