Dig. David Nichols S.

on glam rock, Barney Hoskyns quotes Esquire journalist Tom Hedley to the effect that the early 70s were ‘the homosexual time . . . The faggots were our [i.e., Americans’] new niggers.’¹⁴ ‘Homosexuality was chic,’ Hedley says, and in Australia too, gay liberation was a hot topic. In one sense, of course, this was old news in Australian pop – Keith Glass’s soul-pop group Cam-Pact’s flirtation with a homosexual ‘style’ had already challenged convention in the late 1960s. Jim Keays writes that in the late 60s Daryl Sambell ‘quite frequently’ booked the Masters Apprentices into ‘camp dances . . . in out-of-the-way venues that only those in the know could find’.¹⁵ There was clearly a whole vocabulary of camp behaviour in the music hall styles of are-they-or-aren’t-they-gay celebrities of Australian television such as Graeme Kennedy, Stuart Wagstaff, Frank Thring,¹⁶ Ian Meldrum, and a host of lesser lights. At the same time, everyday life featured often horrific violence against gay men, which in many ways can be interpreted as sanctioned by the wider society. Unsurprisingly for the times, there were also macho groups like the Zoot (discussed in chapter 5 in their late 60s context), who saw the writing on the wall for their former non-threatening bubblegum image and were quick to deny any ‘pink poofter’¹⁷ tag. There is also, of course, Johnny Farnham’s infamous line (no doubt a reaction to rumours about his close relationship with his manager): ‘If poofters come near me, I’ll kill ’em’.¹⁸ A Gay Lib demonstration against the ABC’s decision – apparently at the last minute – not to screen a report on homosexuality¹⁹ appears to have been an important spark for the gay rights rallies which took place in mid 1972. In July of that year, the organisation C.A.M.P. proclaimed a ‘Sexual Liberation Week’.²⁰

      Few would disagree that Melbourne remained the centre of Australia’s music scene in the early 70s, as it had been in the late 60s. When the decade began, clubs like Sebastian’s and Bertie’s (both brainchildren of Michael Browning, soon to be manager of AC/DC), and the Thumpin’ Tum, all located in the central business district, reigned supreme. Weekend dances in the middle-to-outer suburbs – such as the Q Club in Kew, Pepper’s in Box Hill, the White Elephant at Broadmeadows, and the Purple Spirit in Sunshine – would host name bands like the La De Das, the Aztecs, and Chain. Establishments like the T. F. Much Ballroom (in Fitzroy, walking distance from the city centre, and the natural place for Peter Weir to document Australia’s emerging pop/rock acts) and Toorak’s Regent Theatre augmented the scene by featuring markets and art as well as innovative new bands.

      Melbourne was famously the most staid and wowserish of the nation’s state capitals, but it nevertheless (or perhaps for that very reason) had a thriving art-rock underbelly. It had the nation’s premier ‘import’ record shop, Archie and Jugheads; located ‘in a tiny lane off Collins Street’ and owned and operated by Keith Glass and David Pepperell, the shop offered British and American releases for sale before the Australian branches of the major record labels had issued them locally.²¹ That Melbourne boasted the country’s best newspaper (The Age), and that after 1971 the state of Victoria had an unusually liberal Liberal government under the benign and democratic Rupert Hamer, did not hurt matters.

      In January 1970 the Age tossed out some apparently zany predictions about the decade ahead. Many of them proved to be correct. It suggested the Labor party would win the next federal election, in 1972, and serve two terms – which it did, even if its second term was cruelly curtailed by political conspiracy at the highest levels. The paper also suggested ‘TV, movies, pop music, color, art and good design’ would free young people’s minds from an ‘obsession with the printed word’, and:

      Young people . . . will be bored and dissatisfied . . . Young fashions – as usual – will outrage the oldies. The more sartorially adventurous young men will probably be wearing codpieces, while bared breasts and scantily-girt buttocks will be de rigueur for the trendier (skinnier?) young women.²²

      Out-of-town weekend rock festivals were providing places for young people to congregate, and even if they didn’t actively conspire against the mainstream, but rather maintained a sullen lack of interest in it, such gatherings made them realize just how many they were in number.

      PILGRIMAGES FOR POP

      As will be seen, where people experienced their rock and pop would become very important. Festival events were quickly embraced by Australians – already well acquainted with various versions of an outdoor lifestyle. Tully and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs starred at the ‘Pilgrimage for Pop’ festival at Ourimbah. Here, in February 1970, a natural amphitheatre near Gosford in NSW²³ saw ‘8,000 people who like pop and individuality’ congregating in a ‘green valley’. The event had been organized by the Nutwood Rug Band, a group of US draft dodgers from California. Plainly, there was great apprehension amongst law enforcers about the event, but as Go-Set reported: ‘The local police gazed at the thousands of colorful “pilgrims” and got used to the idea that long hair, beards, beads and no-bras don’t spell trouble.’²⁴ Age journalist Robert Drewe – later to become a very good novelist – noted ‘short back-and-sides young constables’ looking ‘frankly envious as young semi-naked couples emerged from the shady Ourimbah Creek.’²⁵ Wendy Saddington, who wrote regularly for Go-Set in the early 70s, presented a report on Ourimbah that presented it as a genuine communal experience:

      Ourimbah was simply a flash, a quick look at how life should be and a brilliant weekend proving that one can be so much happier without the ridiculous restrictions and conventions which society insists upon. A place, a time where policemen could be people and people could be humans, not just indoctrinated representatives of ammunition or targets.²⁶

      The Fairlight Festival near Mittagong the following year was a disaster due to weather and organizational problems;²⁷ Myponga, with a smaller group of attendees (estimated at 5,500), was not a success either: heavy rain and icy winds no doubt made the experience unpleasant even before the Draft Resisters’ Union tried to break down the fence, distributed pamphlets condemning the festival as a money-making concern, and at one point marched onto the stage chanting ‘out, pigs’ and ‘free concert’.²⁸ Another ‘pop concert’, sponsored by the T. F. (the ‘T. F.’ did indeed stand for ‘Too Fucking’) Much Ballroom and planned for the outer Melbourne township of Launching Place, was washed out and a compensatory event was staged five weeks later at Burnley Oval in inner Melbourne, where the musical exponents joined forces with the long-running Ashton’s Circus.²⁹ Anticipation of Launching Place inspired two marvelous songs recorded at the sessions for (and added to the reissue of) Spectrum’s first album, Spectrum Part One, though Mike Rudd’s bleak description of ‘children making love to children’ hardly evoked feelings of bliss. The organisers of the Lothlorien festival arranged not only for the presence of the Nutwood Rug Band, but also displayed an Australian flag appropriated from atop the Sydney GPO; ‘Friends’, the Planet’s correspondent announced, ‘the Commonwealth patches its flags.’³⁰

      It is distinctly possible that even for those who did not attend these regional festivals – some of which were day trips from major cities, others camping forays only available to dropouts (or the wealthy or frugal or otherwise ‘free’) – the image of rock ’n’ roll in the countryside, rather than in small clubs or halls in cities and towns, was part of a nascent environmentalist ethos, as exemplified by poet Charles Buckmaster, writing in 1970:

      There is no retreat – you thrust your obscenities beneath my feet and tell me that I soil your earth!

      I scrape at the bitumen of your carnal streets – the soil in which no thing could grow for a thousand years. So much destruction!³¹

      Midway between the rock festival experience and countercultural lifestyle celebration was the Aquarius Festival, which the Australian Union of Students had organised every two