Sunbury festivals recalled as Oz music’s sacred site to be sold

Scrappy farmland on Melbourne’s outskirts seen as the birthplace of a truly Australian brand of rock is to be sold.

Spectrum’s Mike Rudd back at the Sunbury festival site, which is being sold. Picture: David Geraghty

To some it’s scrappy, marginal farmland in an awkward corner of Jacksons Creek on Melbourne’s northeastern outskirts.

Nothing has happened out here for 40 years. It’s likely nothing will for another 40.

But a generation of fans celebrate it as the birthplace of a truly Australian brand of rock music — loud, uncomplicated and shamelessly masculine — that was pioneered at the Sunbury festival by Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

For many, industry legends Ian Meldrum and Michael Gudinski among them, Australian music experienc­ed a coming of age over those three days in January 1972.

And now, the final slice of that land — described by a local real estate­ agent as “superb rural acreage” — is for sale.

They were acres then, they are hectares today — 6.5 of them — a remaining corner of the Duncan family farm that hosted the four Sunbury music festivals. They were never actually held at Sunbury, but rather nearby Diggers Rest, a sleepy stopover for gold prospectors headed to Bendigo.

The festival was dreamt up by two young television producers, Jim McKay and John Fowler, in the Nine Network’s Melbourne canteen in late 1971.

When farmland was found featuring a natural amphitheatre not unlike that of Max Yasgur’s, which had famously hosted the Woodstock festival in the US three years before, McKay and Fowler discussed what to call their show.

“I told (Fowler), ‘we can’t have something called Diggers Rest. It’s not going to work’,” remembered McKay. “It’s summer, it’s Melbourne and it’s got to have ‘sun’ in it. Sunbury’s close to Diggers Rest. We’re going to call it Sunbury.”

The first Sunbury festival was billed as an all-Australian affair. That had less to do with national pride than the tight budget on which the venture was planned but, in any case, Thorpie was English­ and New Zealanders populated the ranks of many of the bands: Max Merritt and the Meteors­, Spectrum, Indelible Murt­ceps, Healing Force, Friends and the La De Das.

But there was no doubting the local flavour of the event that took place just as Australian bands were challenging the dominance of American and British hitmakers.

In 1971, for the first time, an Australian hit had been the year’s biggest. Eagle Rock spent 17 weeks at No 1; it had been beaten there by Spectrum’s I’ll Be Gone, while other local hits locals towards the end of 1971 included Chain’s Black and Blue, Healing Force’s Golden Miles and Russell Morris’s Sweet Sweet Love.

But powerful forces were opposed to the festival taking place at Diggers Rest, and Henry Bolte, who had been Victorian Premier since 1955 — before anyone had heard of Elvis — was determined it would not go ahead anywhere.

“Bolte ordered his departments to absolutely ensure that Sunbury did not go ahead at all,” said McKay. “One of the ways they did that was to try and get the (Country Fire Authority) to say that if anyone went there they’d all be ­incinerated.”

McKay said ads in newspapers and on radio explained­ the dire bushfire threat. But it had rained for months, causing flooding. “I’ve never seen it look so good,” said farmer Georg­e Duncan, surveying his green hillside and the swollen bends of Jacksons Creek. “I don’t know what the CFA is on about.”

The Duncans had offered the site for free. Like Woodstock’s Yasgur, they saw a weekend of music on their land as an act to bridge the generations. “There has never been any generation gap in our family, because we have always­ done things together,” said George’s wife, Beryl. Her son, also George, was the site manager.

The festival went ahead attended by at least 40,000 but perhaps many more from across the country. who stumped up $6 for entry. Many, hauling clumsy metal Eskys and crude canvas tents, squeezed on to buses or walked there from Diggers Rest railway station, some having arrived on specially scheduled trains that had cleared a carriage for dancing.

At the station a hairy bloke with a microphone interviewed concertgoers, but few could make out what he was mumbling about. Meldrum was there for music news­­paper Go-Set and a documentary, with a live recording of proceedings. In the film, he speaks to a naked woman by the creek.

“Are you self-conscious sitting here among all these fellows, completely starkers?” he asks.

Woman: “No.”

Meldrum: “What would your mum think?”

Woman: “I don’t think she’d think anything much. She’s pretty broad-minded.”

The Reverend C. Flavel Cameron was not so relaxed. Writing to The Sun newspaper the next week, he wondered if Sunbury’s impact might best be measured “by anxious parents in the months ahead as they see their children deteriorating in health and morals”.

Emboldened by a first-off profit, Sunbury festivals ran for four years until 1975, when the weather and money ran out. The year before­, Queen, then an emerging glam rock act, headlined. For what became the final festival, organisers booked Deep Purple, then the biggest band in the world.

It poured, ticket sales plummeted, and the organisers went bust. Few, other than Deep Purple, were paid. It looked a mighty setback for local artists.

But within weeks Countdown was on our newly coloured televisions — and Meldrum was asking the same dizzyingly incoherent questions of Skyhooks, Sherbet, Elton John, Rod Stewart and Queen. Sunbury may have gone, but according to Meldrum it had “set up” Countdown, proving Australian acts were world-class and “we could hold our own”.

The asking price for this slice of the sacred site is $675,000. These days, all is quiet on Duncans Lane.

But many Australians remember the night Billy Thorpe arrived and, turning his amplifiers to 11, set the three golden rules of any self-respecting piece of rock’n’roll real estate: Volume­. Volume. Volume.