Outback Elvis

by John Connell

  In September 1956, just as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ reached the top of global hit parades, Sydney’s first rock ’n’ roll riot erupted following the screening of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. The ‘riot’ involved dancing in the street outside the Victory Theatre on George Street and, even more provocatively, outside police headquarters. The perpetrators of such ugly incidents were charged with offensive and indecent behaviour. Violence did briefly break out at a Brisbane concert at the end of 1956, with eight people arrested after bodgies and widgies partied, threw pennies at the police and broke a bottle on a police car. Such spontaneity and freedom were unprecedented, and needed to be repressed.

  In that same ground-breaking year, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was described by the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘cleaned up version of a Negro sex-song’, but within a year Bill Haley arrived in Australia a megastar. Johnny O’Keefe, a middle-class boy from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, was doing his best to rival the Americans, but the Wild One’s time was still to come. A federal Labor MP complained in parliament that mothers of young children who had seen rock ’n’ roll dancing on television reported that ‘in their opinion the act was immoral, disgusting, offensive and entirely unsuitable for presentation on any television programme’. A year later a writer in The Nation described teenagers at a Sydney concert as not spectators but participants ‘in an orgy of communal hysteria’. Clearly Elvis, Bill Haley and local sycophants had much to answer for. Nevertheless, Bandstand, a musical show that supported local rock singers, started on television in 1958, beginning the domestication and sanitisation of rock ’n’ roll. In due course Elvis joined the army and paler imitations such as Ricky Nelson and Bobby Darin toned down the beat. Rock ’n’ roll, however, was here to stay.

  Peace in the country

  Rural Australia took a little longer to catch the Elvis fever. There, the mood and the music were quite different. One contemporary observer concluded that Australian versions of American hillbilly music were especially popular in rural districts:

  The lyrics romanticise the cowboy, the cattleman; his isolation and confusion in cities; his triumph over city slickers and the sorrow of his one true love; his good friend the horse and his faithful dog … they are socially acceptable symbolic expressions of the sorrow that’s too deep for tears and too self-consciously Australian to cause actual weeping.

  Country songs, classical music and insipid soft pop ballads ruled the rural airwaves, and local entertainments remained unchanged – barn dances, Saturday matinees at the picture theatre, a travelling circus or carnival. In the centre of New South Wales, 360 kilometres from Sydney, that was the world of the people of Parkes.

  Parkes, in 1956, was still a small country town of less than 8000 people, with not even a hint of a future rock ’n’ roll identity. The town’s skyline was dominated by grain silos, two picture theatres, wool stores and its five churches (Anglican, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian), all monuments to the cultural and economic mainstays of rural Australia – wheat, wool, religion, a community of shared entertainment and weekly rituals where people knew their place. Butler Air Transport could fly you to Sydney – once daily – for £4 (about $125 in today’s money), or one could travel by steam train (‘The rail is the safe way’) on the Central West Express. Television was still six years away.

  Steve Lennox, winner of the inaugural Elvis Festival look-alike competition, 1993

  Steve Elvis Lennox

  The Michael Hanley & Sons funeral parlour in Forbes was a big attraction in the early years of the festival

  John Connell

  In the early days there were arguably more people in the street parade than there were onlookers

  Steve Elvis Lennox

  In 2008 Anne and Bob Steel received Order of Australia medals for their role in establishing the Parkes Elvis Festival. They pose on the front porch of their home in Parkes, for Sydney Morning Herald reporters

  Glen McCurtayne/Fairfax Syndication

  In many ways Parkes’ modern history had barely begun. Europeans only arrived in the 1830s, after finally crossing the Blue Mountains to the inland plains. The initial prospects seemed inauspicious. Agricultural squatters had illegally claimed land and displaced many Wiradjuri Aboriginal people from their country, and the settlement, then called Currajong (now just a Parkes street name), was tiny. That all changed when gold was discovered in 1862, precipitating a gold rush that brought 2000 people to the area, and the hasty construction of a ‘canvas town’. A decade later a second gold rush followed and, after respectful petitions, the two adjoining townships of Currajong and Bushmans, with a population of 6000 by now, succeeded in changing their names to the rather grander Parkes, so challenging the more established and sedate neighbour, Forbes, and being properly respectful to Henry Parkes, then the Premier of New South Wales. In 1865 the first successful wheat crop was grown, prefacing the transition from gold to grain and sheep.

  By 1888 the gold rush had faded and the population of Parkes had fallen back to 2000, but the town was well established. As the Centennial History of NSW reported: ‘all the leading denominations have goodly places of worship and the tone of the place is of high order’. An early arrival was Henry Cooke, an English migrant and an early gold miner, who, as so many pioneers did, turned his hand to almost everything: storekeeper, postmaster, baker, grape grower and wine producer, orchardist, businessman, newspaper proprietor, politician, magistrate, and the first mayor of Parkes. Over a century later, the municipal park named in his honour became the stage for a unique festival, one that he would have utterly struggled to comprehend. Then the gold was worked out, the frontier moved further inland and Parkes was largely forgotten.

  The first half of the 20th century brought commemorations, changes and challenges typical of the age: the arrival of telephones, electricity, motor cars and picture theatres; red brick municipal buildings erected in optimistic Queen Anne style shortly after Australian Federation, amid alternating economic prosperity and depression, two world wars and the loss of scores of local young men. There were tragedies and occasional oddities. In 1937 a four-tonne elephant, in town with a visiting circus, attacked and killed its trainer; it was shortly afterwards euthanised by being given a poisoned apple, and took ten days to be cremated on a funeral pyre made from another four tonnes of wood, witnessed by the whole town. As the austere 1940s made way for the rather more optimistic 1950s, 2000 refugees from southern and eastern Europe flowed into the town. A welcoming committee, led by the mayor, expectantly received them at the town’s ‘migrant reception centre’ – a refurbished ex–air force encampment of corrugated steel and asbestos Nissen huts. Over 200 babies were born there in the first half of the 1950s, adding to the town’s own nascent baby boom, as ‘New Australian’ families adjusted to new lives and neighbours. Momentous global events made way for a more tranquil rural life.

  As ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was being released in America, the big news in Parkes, in sweltering January heat, was the changed ownership of the Star Hotel pub, and the release of the results for the Technical College’s dressmaking examinations. The local newspaper, the Parkes Champion-Post, reported on its front page that Mr Con Fisher, ‘one of the last survivors of those who knew Parkes in the early gold-mining days’, had sadly passed away, while a local labourer had his arm caught in a wheat auger and ‘was fortunate to escape with lacerations to the right arm and leg’. Local news and gossip kept the world afloat. Townsfolk had enjoyed the usual New Year celebrations, with highland dancing and clowns, and nine stalls including ‘two chocolate wheels and three lucky number stalls’. A record heat wave saw Cordaiy & Son, cordial manufacturers, and the Parkes Ice and Cold Storage Co. reporting increased sales of cordial and ice to keep up with the demand from innovative milk bars. The Champion-Post congratulated the Cage Bird Club on its successful third Annual Show and the Central West Car Club on its hill climb contest, while its fashion columnist, oblivious to youth culture’s music and fashion re
volutions, declared reserved black nylon tunic dresses with ‘a double skirt falling in almost sharp silhouette’ the new look for 1956.

  Rock ’n’ roll made barely a ripple. When Elvis’s double-sided single ‘Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel’ was released in America in July, establishing sales records that would take over three decades to be broken, local concern in the Champion-Post’s pages was over wool production being threatened by extreme weather, and sheep lacking vitamins on cloudy days. Seemingly unaware of any invading rock ’n’ roll culture, the most heated opinion columns were dedicated instead to complaints that the council was allowing Sunday night swimming carnivals in the Olympic pool (‘a deplorable lack of consideration to those people who feel that Sunday night should be a night of peace’), and bemusement over local police questioning an established resident over his haircut (‘Don’t you know a barber?’). This tranquil place had not yet felt the seismic tremors of cultural change, and Elvis and Parkes were far apart.

  Throughout the seminal year of 1956, the local newspaper made no mention of Elvis or rock ’n’ roll music. Local radio station 2PK (‘The Voice of the Golden West’) likewise ignored it, preferring instead provincial content: the Cashmere Bouquet Show, Ballad Time, The Lutheran Hour, and Agricultural Magazine of the Air. At the local Century Cinema, Purple Mask, starring Tony Curtis and Colleen Miller, was the main attraction, shown on the cinema’s much-touted Giant Vistascope Screen. On at the rival Parkes Picture Palace (known to locals as the ‘PPP’) on Bogan Street was Big Jim McLain, starring John Wayne and Nancy Olson (who were tracking down the leaders of the Hawaiian Communist Party) and Ronald Reagan and Doris Day in The Winning Team, with Reagan an alcoholic baseball player. After its US release, it had taken four years to reach Parkes. Not surprisingly, Love Me Tender only got there in 1957, and when it and other Elvis movies finally arrived at the Parkes Picture Palace they were relegated to midnight on Sundays. Some teenagers and young kids did try to keep up with the times. With no television and no joy on the local airwaves, movies were the main social outlet, and pretty soon they discovered Elvis there. Midnight screenings of his films seemed fitting – relegated to late-night darkness, and suitably risqué.

  One of those kids watching Elvis movies in the Parkes Picture Palace was Barry Green, growing up on a sheep farm outside town with his three brothers. With jobs to be done after school, there was no time for the radio, but his parents loved music and encouraged the boys to learn instruments and sing around the house. Barry remembers: ‘The TV didn’t really come in here till ’61, ’62. We were a fair bit behind. The picture theatre was the only way we found out about Elvis … But we lived 35 kilometres out of Parkes. So I used to hassle me brothers to take me in to see Elvis. I never saw Elvis on TV until the comeback special in ’68’. Barry liked him from a young age: ‘He was so versatile, really, with his styles of music. It wasn’t until I really matured and grew up that I realised what a great bloke he was, and every bastard took him down’. Much later in life, in a town reinvented by a festival, Barry would pay homage to Elvis, the man and his music, on a much bigger stage, as the premier local Elvis tribute artist. Elsewhere in New South Wales, in the frontier town of Bourke, just east of the black stump, a seven-year-old Steve Lennox was enthusiastically soaking up Love Me Tender at the local cinema. In due course he too would make his mark in Parkes. At nocturnal film screenings a handful of rural teenagers had discovered Elvis too, but it was far from wild in the country.

  Sixty years later, first impressions suggest that very little has changed. From the window of a transcontinental jet, turning 5 kilometres above the centre of New South Wales, contemporary Parkes is still almost invisible and indistinguishable – a tiny town with a single main street, surrounded by a chequerboard of green and brown fields on a featureless plain. Much like other small towns nearby, at this height it is entirely anonymous. At ground level Parkes is barely more distinctive. Its once ornate Victorian streetscape of hotels and shopfronts was mostly demolished in the 1960s to make way for boxy, modernist structures, though a few remaining Federation-era and Art Deco buildings and pleasant gardens are more attractive. Still, it is a rare country town without even a river running through it, and just a few hills to remind visitors that relief is literally not far away. But the hills are neither cool enough nor extensive enough for the wine and foods of Orange to the east. Neighbouring townships – Trundle, Bogan Gate, Nelungaloo and Cookamidgera – sound much more intriguing. Parkes is mostly still a typical Australian country town. With around 12 000 residents, it is big enough to have supermarkets, banks, a municipal swimming pool, a Thai restaurant, and the ubiquitous Chinese–Australian restaurants (with obligatory circular brick window-fronts). DVDs, internet downloads and cable television have taken over, and the cinemas that brought in Elvis have all gone. But Parkes has acquired two highly distinctive features: the radio telescope that transmitted the first moon landing, and a festival.

  The first of these arrived 20 kilometres outside Parkes in 1961. Nicknamed ‘the Dish’, it gave the town its sole claim to 20th-century fame. Conceived in the same auspicious year that Elvis hit the mainstream, it had taken nearly five years to design and construct. When built, it was the world’s most advanced radio telescope and it is still the world’s finest single-dish telescope. Yet it was not until the moon landing in 1969 that most of the nation became aware that it even existed, and that it might be a short, photogenic break in a regional itinerary: a startling sight amid the gum trees, kangaroos and canola fields of the Goobang plains. That the Dish was constructed there at all is a remarkable and ironic measure of Parkes’ position. Radio telescopes are constructed as far as possible from built-up areas with large populations, where human interference would occur. Parkes was just the right place: small enough, quiet enough, geologically stable, away from radio interference and free of any winds that might shake the telescope. At least it could benefit from and celebrate isolation and peace.

  Originally expected to have a lifetime of no more than about 20 years, the Dish should have already been in genteel retirement by the time the Elvis Festival came to Parkes. However, its functions dramatically changed when NASA belatedly realised that it was an ideal instrument for tracking spacecraft in deep space. So the Dish tracked the Mariner 2 mission to Venus in 1962, Mariner 4 to Mars in 1965, and, of course, the celebrated Apollo moon landing missions. Thanks to Parkes, Australia viewed the first 1969 landing fully 0.3 seconds before the United States. Much later, in 1996, came NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter. Three decades after the moon landing, the Dish became the subject of a popular Australian feature film of the same name. Ironically filmed mainly in neighbouring Forbes (unlike Parkes, they had kept their Victorian storefronts, adding a vital ‘vintage’ rural feel), but with Sam Neill starring, it proved a boost for Parkes. Such glamorous moments are tiny fractions of what the telescope normally does: the detection of radio emissions from stars, once digitised onto disks and magnetic tapes, spectacularly incomprehensible and boring to all but the handful of astronomers for whom they provide crucial data sources. Parkes trades on the very few moments when the telescope briefly departed from its routine functions and became a global icon.

  Now forgotten, the Dish played a role in another moment in cultural history when Elvis Presley’s celebrated Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite concert of 14 January 1973 was beamed live through the Dish to Australia and various Asian countries, the only parts of the world to see the broadcast live. Aloha from Hawaii was the first live satellite concert to be undertaken by a single performer, with Elvis dressed in what quickly became the famous white ‘American Eagle’ jumpsuit. Australia viewed the concert three months before the United States, where the original concert clashed with the Super Bowl. Twenty years before the Elvis Festival, Parkes had already brought Elvis to Australia.

  Way Down? A fading agricultural order

  Parkes’ other distinctive feature – its Elvis Festival – came in 1993, three decades after the Dish, in rat
her less optimistic times. As Australia entered the last decade of the 20th century, many rural and regional areas were in a state of crisis. Mechanisation, farm amalgamation and the onset of a national recession had hit hard. High prices for fertilisers and equipment shut out all but the largest farmers. Labourers lost their jobs, farmers racked up debts (compounded by high interest rates), and a generation of young people fled the country for better prospects in the city. By the early 1990s Australia was experiencing over-production of wool, the end of the wool reserve price scheme and a huge national stockpile. Global wool markets simply collapsed. Farm fortunes fell and a long era of ‘riding on the sheep’s back’ appeared to be coming to an abrupt end. Reliable work and the romanticised nomadic life of sheep-shearing became things of the past. Country towns were desperate for new ways – any ways – to retain populations and develop profitable economic activities.

  Parkes remained – as it liked to remind possible visitors and investors – ‘the crossroads of the nation’: a major transport hub centred on its railway, although ongoing rationalisation of the New South Wales rail network had reduced this role. At least it was a substantial service centre in central New South Wales, and a place to drive through; perhaps a truck stop for a good night’s sleep.

  Like much of inland Australia, Parkes went through tough times. Plagued by drought, and the occasional flood, for a time it was known as ‘parched Parkes’. Farmers sought to diversify into other crops such as canola and oats, but high interest rates, the giant wool stockpile and the precarious nature of wheat exports spooked the town. Landowners were in trouble. Sheep and wheat farmers and the National Party MP Michael Cobb were complaining bitterly about America subsidising its wheat prices, and in the fashion industry cotton and synthetic fabrics were all the rage. The entire New South Wales wheat–sheep belt, an area covering more land than Germany, suffered devastating losses of stock and family farm incomes due to the ‘perfect storm’ of falling commodity prices, drought and increasing debt through the 1990s. At the economic and geographical centre of this was Parkes. Even such pleasures in life as the Parkes annual garden competition were reduced to being held only every second year, with fewer and fewer exhibitor categories.