Extraordinary collection of Elvis Presley’s Graceland memorabilia set for Australian exhibition

Elvis Presley’s wedding tuxedo, jump suits and hundreds of personal items, including his car from Blue Hawaii, head to Australia.

A rare 1958 photograph of Elvis with his parents Vernon and Gladys. Picture: EPE Graceland

In April, 1956 Elvis Presley was big. He was 21, and his song Heartbreak Hotel sat at No. 1 on Billboard’s singles chart. By August, 1977, 21 years later, he was even bigger, dying at his Graceland home while weighing in at 159 kgs.

It is easy to see the Elvis story in three parts, a tale the world well knows: the impossibly handsome singer who jump-started rock’n’roll; a second-division Sixties film star in a series of increasingly aimless movies; and the Las Vegas era of grand live shows, expanding jump suits and farcical karate kicks, now mostly seen at Elvis conventions or dangling from rearview mirrors.

Elvis and his red MG in a still from Blue Hawaii (1961). © EPE. Graceland and its marks are trademarks of EPE. All Rights Reserved. Elvis Presley™ © 2021 ABG EPE IP LLC. Elvis: Direct from Graceland brings some of the King of Rock 'n' Roll's most prized possessions from Graceland to the Bendigo Art Gallery. Picture - Supplied, PLEASE NOTE WHEN PUBLISHING THIS IMAGE PLEASE INCLUDE IN THE CAPTION - , , © EPE. Graceland and its marks are trademarks of EPE. All Rights Reserved. Elvis Presley™ © 2021 ABG EPE IP LLC

And it is just as easy to miss who Elvis really was, and always had been – an unnaturally talented singer and self-taught musician who loved his family, gospel, and the way of life in America’s South.

An extraordinary exhibition arrives in Australia next year that peels back the layers of legend to help reveal Elvis as a loving son and father, a curious child of pre-World War II America who wanted to understand the world around him, and a spirited man who led as fulfilling a life as possible in the thin confines of unprecedented fame.

Elvis: Direct from Graceland includes the prosaic and preposterous belongings of a man made phone calls on a gold telephone, but who kept the box of crayons he took on day one to East Tupelo Consolidated school where, a little later, teacher Oleta Grimes would encourage him to sing.

Some of the items in the collection have never left Graceland – Elvis’s colonial revival mansion on almost six hectares that he bought in 1957 primarily for his parents in Memphis, Tennessee.

Elvis Presley in the film Blue Hawaii.

Coming to Australia are his wedding tuxedo and wife Priscilla’s dress, that gold telephone, his box of grade one crayons, the privately-owned red convertible 1960 MG from the 1961 film Blue Hawaii that he bought there and shipped back to Graceland, and the stunning white suit in which he sang If I Can Dream to close his 1968 comeback TV special – along with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, perhaps the most important gig in rock history – and emphatically reclaim his King of Rock crown.

Elvis during his 1968 comeback TV special.

“This has been a little bit of a pipe dream for a while,” said the director of the Bendigo Art Gallery, Jessica Bridgfoot, of her upcoming exhibition. Through contacts at Graceland – which has its own museums and even displays the singer’s planes – she suggested the regional Victorian gallery might host an Australian version. That was two years ago. “They get a lot of requests, but they have thrown open their archives to us.”

From them Australians will see the bongos Priscilla gave on their first Christmas together in 1967 – they would have only six of these, the couple separated in 1973 – and they were in the room, drummer Ron Tutt told me several years ago, when Elvis recorded his final song, Way Down, at Graceland in October 1976. (Tutt died last week aged 83. The bass singer on Way Down, the late J D Sumner, whose inimitable final notes on Way Down were regarded as the lowest sung by anybody, had known Elvis since the star was 14. Sumner sang at both Elvis and his mother’s funerals.)

Elvis Presley strolls the grounds of his Graceland estate circa 1957.

Lauren Ellis, the curator who has pulled the exhibition together concedes that she didn’t know much of Elvis’s life before researching this project, but has been immersed in his life since as she negotiated to display items from his childhood years in Tupelo including hymnals and family Bible.

“And he was an avid reader and had a huge collection of books, and we have a few coming – The Prophet Kahlil Gibran, lots of history books, a biography of Churchill, and the Warren Report (US Chief Justice Earl Warren’s controversial 888-page investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy) and his book travelling case that he took with him on tour.”

Elvis Presley: Direct from Graceland at the Bendigo Art Gallery March 19 – July 17, 2022.

Tickets: www.bendigoartgallery.com.au