Dig. David Nichols S.

did not spring fully formed into this performance mode: they had started out as jazz or country players, working in what we would now understand as a swing style. American-British record producer Joe Boyd, discussing the London scene of the early 60s, observes:

      Some jazz clubs had already started programming folk singers and comedians while others would soon be taken over by rock entrepreneurs. Jazz had comfortably coexisted with R&B and rock ’n’ roll, but the Birth of Rock elbowed it out of the way.²

      If this was true in the UK and in Boyd’s other hangouts, such as New York, it was not necessarily so in Australian cities, where jazz and folk were a conjoined force, often ‘against’ rock and roll, although rock and roll in the early 60s did not seem a terribly potent force. The big names of 50s rock – Col Joye, Johnny O’Keefe, Dig Richards, and others who made their names early – had by now become established entertainers, compelled by professional requirements to broaden their palette and demonstrate they were more than just rockers. Just as, twenty years later, many young or otherwise unknown musicians saw punk as a way to break into the music industry, ‘rock and roll’ in the mid 1950s was – accidentally or deliberately – a starting point for men and women who quickly became entertainers in a variety of styles. A post-rocker might sing ballads on television variety shows, or take on older standards so as to appeal to a broader demographic. The many covers of show tunes released in the early 60s – Billy Thorpe’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ and Normie Rowe’s ‘Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)’, for example – might be seen as attempts to appeal across markets.

      Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman (a story Koch himself describes as a ‘fairy tale’) presents a sensitive portrait of post-war Australia’s cultural touchstones (in this case, Hobart in the 50s and Sydney in the 60s). Koch worked for the ABC, the national broadcaster, in the 60s and presents a credible account of the way entertainers – and through them specific cultures – might gain a hold on the population. The book’s narrator, Richard Miller, tells a story about a folk-rock group called Thomas and the Rhymers, who take Australia by storm with a unique and complex sound that acknowledges both traditional balladry and psychedelia. This last element does not sound particularly plausible, but everything surrounding it does, particularly the importance of media (notably television) and the transition the band undergoes from playing crowd-pleasing country and western in regional towns to performing in the elitist folk clubs of the gentrifying inner city.

      Prominent modernist architect Robin Boyd coined the term ‘Austerica’ to describe what he saw as Americanised modern Australia; he was talking about streetscapes and buildings – design styles rather than cultural ones, either popular or high – but the concept can readily be extended, and many critics believe that Austerica also reigned in the cultural sphere in the mid 20th century. Lawrence Zion has claimed that Australians of the late 1950s did not understand the ‘cultural origins of rock ’n’ roll’.³ By this he appears to mean that Australia, lacking a visible, oppressed non-European population at this time and with much of its population still in many ways embracing the repulsive concept of ‘white Australia’, was unable to comprehend rock and roll as the product of the losing end of a social/ethnic imbalance. Yet he also suggests that ‘most rock ’n’ roll performers [appropriated] “America” as the source of their style . . . distilled through records, radio, magazines [and] Hollywood films,’ and through visiting American performers.

      For all his strengths as a cultural commentator, Zion is entirely wrong even to imply that there was one ‘Australia’ in the late 50s, let alone that it was some kind of Austerica. Nigel Buesst’s glorious 1963 short film, Fun Radio, is a red-blooded critique of the kind of Americanisation that Zion claims to detect – and its very existence demonstrates that Austerica was hardly an all-pervasive phenomenon. The Australian-raised Buesst, a creative and often whimsical left-of-centre filmmaker, supported himself as a photographer and a stringer for television news for most of this decade. When he came back to Australia in the early 60s from Britain (where he had worked on Ealing comedies), he was horrified by what he saw as a new and (at least in comparison with Britain) crass commercialism. Fun Radio is his filmic response, a highly structured and often very funny composite of news images from his own camera, set to the hysterical banter of commercial radio DJ Don Lunn. Lunn himself appears (apparently unwittingly) in the film, as do the accoutrements of contemporary teen life in all their hollow horror, including beach and surf culture and an absurd competition in which young women are compelled to trot alongside a Volkswagen being driven slowly around Melbourne’s Albert Park Lake – when the car’s tank runs dry, one of the contestants wins it. There are also scenes of American pop stars, such as the Beach Boys and Roy Orbison, landing at Melbourne’s Essendon Airport and clips of international touring artists in concert, wittily juxtaposed with boxing footage. All of this set to a soundtrack of forcedly jolly and ‘modern’ surf music.

      As this chapter will show, the reality of Australia in the early 60s is very different from any fantasy of a hyper-Americanised ‘Austerica’. The documentary evidence points instead to the dominance of a particular strain of Australian pop star. Young Australians certainly worshipped some American idols – such as Johnny Ray, whom Johnny O’Keefe had impersonated professionally before working under his own name – and there were also very popular British stars, like Cliff Richard. Numerous movements and trends existed in youth culture at the time, however, both within and outside the various cultural styles that we have come to understand as ‘rock and roll’. Whether Australians saw these movements – and the Australian celebrities who promoted them and worked within them – as uniquely local, or as part of the local branch of a wider scene, depended on the individual and his or her world view, as we will see.

       YOUNG MODERN: ONE CITY’S POP CULTURE IN THE EARLY SIXTIES

      Looking in detail at the scene in one city can deepen our understanding of all of them: in his study ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Youth Culture and Law ’n’ Order’, Raymond Evans claims that a focus on one city’s youth culture in the 50s enables a ‘closer-grained regional analysis’ which captures ‘additional texture, detail and nuance’ that a wider perspective might miss.⁴ I will take a similarly closer-grained approach here, using the Adelaide magazine Young Modern to assess the way popular music was represented to teenagers in Australia in the early 60s.

      Young Modern in 1965, with a young Twilights on the cover

      During this period, Australian cities were more likely to celebrate their own performers than would be the case later in the decade. State capitals had their own television and radio stations, which promoted local and international (rather than national and international) entertainers. Adelaide briefly even had its own pirate radio station;⁵ it was operated by John Woodruff, who would later become an important figure in music management, beginning with Adelaide group the Angels. Similarly, there were local specialist magazines. Fondly remembered by those who grew up in Adelaide in the 60s (John Dowler named his late-70s proto-new-wave group after it, though silverchair probably didn’t name their 2007 album after it), Young Modern lasted for four years. It had a number of owners, though some measure of control was usually exercised by one Ron Tremain, who claimed in 1964 (by which time he was its managing editor, at the age of 23) to have come to the magazine after working on the Adelaide News, followed by Stock and Station Journal, a position playing piano with a group called the Del-Aires, and management of a club called the Princeton ‘running casual dances for young people’. Tremain eventually became the magazine’s proprietor.⁶

      Whether because it was desperate to increase sales, or just because it had the freedom to do so, Young Modern experimented with different styles and ideas, showcasing youth culture in numerous forms. It even delved into politics, an area few of its readers may have felt directly connected to, given that the voting age at this time was still 21. Nevertheless, the youthful and cultured future Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, was featured in the magazine, writing about the questionable fairness of long-established patrician Premier Thomas Playford’s ability to retain power in the state through the support of independents.⁷