Sunbury Festival

By Ian McFarlane

From legendary performances that jumpstarted a new era of Australian music to bust-ups between roadies, on the 50th anniversary of the first Sunbury Pop Festival, music journalist and rock historian Ian McFarlane reflects on the impact and legacy of Australia’s most famous music festival.

The inaugural Sunbury Pop Festival took place over the Australia Day weekend of January 1972. Historically and culturally it was a defining moment in the annals of Australian rock, most significantly for being the first time that the industry discovered that overseas acts weren’t necessary to attract 35,000 fans to a three-day music festival.

It wasn’t Australia’s first music festival. There had been Pilgrimage for Pop (Ourimba, NSW, January 1970), The Miracle (Launching Place, Victoria, March 1970 which had been a total wash-out), Odyssey Festival (Wallacia, NSW) and Myponga Festival (South Australia; both January 1971). It was however, the first to turn a profit, largely due to the role of professional promoters Odessa Promotions, headed by the visionary John Fowler.

The prime objective of the Sunbury Festival was to promote Australian music, in an exciting environment, and to provide a forum for young people to get together to hear Australian bands on Australia Day.

These early festivals echoed much of what had already transpired overseas. The most famous American rock festivals of the 1960s, Monterey International Pop Festival (June 1967) and Woodstock Music and Art Fair (August 1969) were the main inspirations for Australia’s first rock festivals. Woodstock was an important manifestation of the hippie philosophy of peace, love and harmony through rock music. By 1972, the naivety of the 1960s was already being cast aside in Australia, however, the Woodstock effect inspired new directions for Australia’s progressive bands and engendered a stripping away of old inhibitions in order to expand their horizons.

The festival took place on private farmland owned by the Duncan family, north-west of Melbourne near Sunbury. The festival area was set within a natural amphitheatre which afforded full vantage points for the audience across the rolling hillside. Jackson’s Creek meandered at the back of the stage and provided a good way for hot festival goers to cool off. It was an ideal location with plenty of road access for the organisers, the bands, campers and the all-important accessory staff from St. John’s Ambulance, Victoria Police and the Country Fire Authority.

Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs and Max Merritt and the Meteors headlined the Sunbury ’72 bill with bands such as Spectrum/Indelible Murtceps, Chain, Madder Lake, Tamam Shud, Company Caine, Carson and the La De Das also taking their place on the stage. Ex-Loved One, Gerry Humphrys and beat poet / impresario Adrian Rawlins co-compéred the event. Thorpie was the unassailable monarch of the festival, with the Aztecs’ legendary performance spawning a Top 5 album, Aztecs Live! At Sunbury.

John Dixon, a film maker employed by the Odessa organisation, produced a historic documentary titled Sunbury at the event and HMV Records released the double LP set of live recordings captured by the TCS mobile, Sunbury, which also holds great cultural significance.

Buoyed by the success of Sunbury 1972, the promoters repeated Sunbury in 1973, 1974 and 1975, (it’s worth noting here that these years correspond with the rise of the Whitlam Labor government).

Another important name in the Sunbury story is that of Michael Gudinski. As manager of several of the bands featured and as head of the booking agency Australian Entertainment Exchange (AEE), Gudinski provided most of the acts for the event. While he has often been subsequently, and erroneously, credited with staging the festival, he did put the bands on the stage, a distinction that is important for historical accuracy. The enterprising future industry mogul also made a killing by selling watermelons on site to thirsty concert goers. Through his inordinate belief in the development and elevation of local music, Sunbury was also the inspiration for Gudinski to pursue his wish of launching a truly independent and Australian focused record label, Mushroom Records.

Sunbury 1973 and 1974 were good years. Upcoming comedian Paul Hogan compéred ’73, while rock’n’roll legend Johnny O’Keefe had the audience of (at first sceptical) hippies eating out of the palm of his hand. Gudinski launched Mushroom Records with the first triple-album set of Australian rock when he released The Great Australian Rock Festival Sunbury 1973 in April of that year. With an elaborate tri-fold album sleeve designed by the great graphic designer Ian McCausland, it acknowledged the look of the Woodstock 3-LP set from 1970.

“Sunbury was such an important part of the development of Australian music. It was Australia’s Woodstock and, for the first two years at least, it was all local artists. I think it was the birth of Australia celebrating with their own. That was the start of Mushroom really. I had a mission and a plan to present our own bands and we did that firstly with the triple album,” said Michael Gudinski.

In an effort to go to the next level, Odessa booked its first overseas act, Queen, for Sunbury 1974. While the band played splendidly, there were boos and jeers from an impatient audience waiting for local heroes Madder Lake to take the stage. Freddie Mercury responded with “when we come back to Australia, Queen will be the biggest band in the world”, and they were. Sunbury 1975 was the end of an era. It rained constantly, only 16,000 paying customers turned up and Deep Purple walked away with an enormous purse for its exclusive performance. It was also notable for the on-stage punch up between Deep Purple’s roadies and AC/DC’s road crew over set-up and contracted time curfews, which resulted in AC/DC refusing to go on afterwards.

With the 1975 demise of Sunbury, the notion of an Australian rock festival almost became extinct. The spirit of Sunbury, however, lived on in a trio of early ’80s events, the Tanelorn Festival of Transition (Stroud, NSW, 1981), Narara ’83 and Narara ’84 (Somersby, NSW) all attracted around 30,000 punters while showcasing all manner of local and international acts.

The early 1990s saw the emergence of the Alternative Rock scene and such overseas ventures as Lollapalooza. This sparked into action a new generation of music promoters and fans who approached the festival experience with a totally new aesthetic, philosophy and internal energy. Enormously successful events such as Livid Festival, the Big Day Out, Homebake and Meredith Festival became essential parts of the Australian musical landscape as memory of what had transpired in the early 1970s began to fade. Nevertheless, the presentation of the Big Day Out did carry on the tradition of large-scale celebrations of music over the Australia Day weekend.

Historian Peter Evans, who was Odessa’s Lighting Director and did the lighting for Sunbury 1972 – 74, produced a definitive history of events, Sunbury Australia’s Greatest Rock Festival, in 2017. It is an extraordinarily detailed and lovingly compiled document, replete with band information, commentary from participants, many previously un-seen photographs and copious images of memorabilia such as posters and souvenir programmes.

So then, what does the 50th anniversary of Sunbury mean to observers today?

Specifically for one generation of music fans - those who attended and those who grew up around its immediate effects - it epitomised a coming of age, a sense of carefree existence with the notion of strength and solidarity through music.

For subsequent generations, it’s the acknowledgement of an immersive experience in which the stories keep its memory alive. The Sunbury festival was a statement of time and place and the fact that the event still resonates in a collective consciousness to this day informs our current understanding and appreciation of its worth.

Keen to find out more about the Sunbury festivals? Check out our exclusive Long Play interview with John Fowler and Peter Evans and head into the Australian Music Vault’s to re-live the ‘sun-filled togetherness’ of the festival in The Amplifier immersive experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ian McFarlane
Ian McFarlane is an Australian writer, researcher and music journalist. He has been writing about Australian music since 1984. Over the years he contributed to a number of music publications and newspapers (Juke, Hot Metal, The Edge, From the Vault, The Australian, Rhythms, Australian Musician, Freedom Train, Prehistoric Sounds). In 1992-93 he was label manager for the Australian office of international record label Roadrunner. He has also worked in the publishing industry and as part of the multi-media unit at William Angliss College (1993-1996). He researched, wrote and worked on the original edition of The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop between 1996 and 1999. From 2000 to 2016 he was project manager / licensing co-ordinator for reissues specialist label Raven Records. He has written authoritative liner notes for over 180 CD reissues, not only on Raven but also the Aztec, Sandman, Vicious Sloth, Spin, RPM and Playback labels. He contributed articles to web site ‘Addicted To Noise’ and to the regular ‘Sounds of the City’ section of renowned roots music publication Rhythms.

The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop was originally published by Allen & Unwin. The Second Edition, completely revised and with updated content, was published by Third Stone Press in 2017.