Outback Elvis

by John Connell

  Commercial activities suffered. The number of chemists fell from six to two, and barbers from seven to two. The wine merchant and the fishmonger disappeared. Numerous cafés, many run by Greek families, went under; so did corner shops. The bootmakers, and the upholstery, glove and ice factories closed too. In the post-war years, Parkes had been predicted to become the centre of Australian glove making but by the 1980s this was gone. Men’s clothing stores nearly disappeared, though ladies’ stores fared rather better. Through all this turbulence the number of pubs remained exactly the same. Not surprisingly, Parkes also lost people, had higher than average unemployment rates and low levels of participation in the labour force. Job opportunities were scarce. The Champion-Post printed more advertisements from people looking for work than offering new jobs: ‘Shearing contractor available for shearing and crutching’ was a common one. ABC Septic Services were forever seeking custom. The nearby Forbes Rural Land Protection Board did at least announce a vacancy for a temporary ranger (or footrot advisor) for its sheep population. At the same time, however, field days showcasing new plants and equipment continued to hint at a better future.

  As young people left for the cities, the Parkes population gradually became dominated by those of retirement age. Right when they were most needed, there was a shortage of both nurses and doctors as skilled professionals avoided the country, and the Parkes hospital faced cutbacks. It nonetheless challenged Woolworths as the biggest employer in town. There were compensations of sorts: McDonald’s opened up in 1991 – with Parkes the smallest town in Australia to have a branch – and KFC arrived in 1992. The council minutes noted hopefully that Parkes had acquired such ‘key operations’ because of its volume of traffic, the ‘regularity of special events’ and the town’s positive outlook. It was early recognition that special events generated economic growth – and, indeed, Pizza Hut arrived two years later.

  Despite the fast food revolution, many other small towns, like Parkes’ close neighbour Forbes, similarly became caught in a vicious cycle of retail decline, losing residents, industries and even confidence about prospects for a sustainable future. As always, the two towns and their populations, the ‘swamp rats’ of Forbes and the ‘bush pigs’ of Parkes, were in fierce competition for survival. Smaller townships, like Bogan Gate and Trundle, felt the pinch early, and young women were often the first to head for the city, later accounting for the popularity of such reality television shows as The Farmer Wants a Wife. In the 1990s women trained for what were described as ‘non-traditional’ trades, on farms and in engineering, the jobs hitherto held by men.

  Other than the Dish, Parkes had little in the way of visitor attractions. Despite strenuous efforts by the town’s then rather grandly titled Parkes Tourism Board, the first west of the Great Dividing Range, developing tourism never seemed likely to be really competitive. Words like ‘ecotourism’, ‘cultural tourism’ and ‘conventions’ still appeared in hopeful editorials and optimistic letters to the editor of the Champion-Post.

  ‘Two vehicles collide: no-one injured’

  As rural towns struggled economically, little was happening culturally either. The elite agricultural order remained entrenched, associated with the conservative National Party, but a blue-collar ethos ruled the sporting scene. Parkes was, and still is, a bastion of rugby league. Soccer and Australian rules had made inroads, but the Parkes Rugby League Club, the mighty Spacemen, ruled the town. The Parkes Rugby Union Club were merely the Boars. Parkes was also a white town, despite a minority Wiradjuri Aboriginal population. Australia’s state capitals had received the vast bulk of post-war international migrants, injecting ethnic diversity and stimulating population growth – effects which rarely filtered across the ranges, despite the former presence of the migrant refugee centre.

  As the front-page banner headline above from the Champion-Post suggests, Parkes was a quiet place – somnolent, even – especially in summer, on the eve of the first Elvis Festival in January 1993. After a long weekend late in 1992, when the police had put in a special effort and expected to net a few speeding cars or drunk drivers, the Post’s headline was ‘Motorists are well behaved’. It was a civilised place. Successive global cultural revolutions – sexual, countercultural, multicultural – had transformed Australia and, like anywhere else, Parkes had gradually changed and modernised. But rarely if ever were there heated clashes. Attitudes and preferences transformed slowly. Unlike elsewhere in rural Australia, where by the 1990s the Pauline Hanson One Nation phenomenon had amplified racial hatred and subjugated anyone ‘different’, Parkes remained a mostly mild-mannered, generally tolerant place, where locals saw themselves as progressive, industrious and civic-minded. The police usually had little to do, but they were clearly assiduous. Parkes briefly attracted national fame on A Current Affair when a police officer was convicted of stealing a $3 packet of seeds and dismissed from the force. A few miscreants had flowerpots of marijuana; some motorists did, in fact, drive while over the limit and occasionally refuse to be breathalysed. Court cases consequently centred on marijuana possession, drunken driving or such desperate activities as ‘malicious damage to a car window’. A 19-year-old man who broke a bottle in the street was forced to appear in Parkes Court. The courts heard sober accounts of the theft of a cask of moselle from the Parkes Hotel and exacted appropriate punishment. The jailhouse rarely needed to rock.

  In the lead-up to the first Elvis Festival the Post reported a ‘daring theft’, with police investigating an overnight entry into the chemist, which had lost various aftershave products. They were equally busy trying to chase a thief who had made off from a garden shed with three new and eight used golf balls and a left-handed four-iron. Within a couple of months, shearing equipment had disappeared too. Such rare burglaries usually occurred because nobody bothered locking doors.

  Late in 1992 a spate of thefts of garden gnomes rocked the town. The detectives now had urgent work. True to its task of informing the local public, the Post reported:

  In another incident a small garden gnome valued at $25 was stolen. The gnome is red in colour and approximately 12" high. A red and blue coloured gnome sitting on a black pig has been reported stolen from a garden of a home. The gnome is valued at $25.

  Disappointingly the Post was unable to report any happy return for the gnomes, despite such meticulous descriptions, or any conviction of gnome-nappers. Like the theft of the shearing equipment, and a set of racing silks and some goat husbandry manuals, crime had rural overtones. Unscrupulous firewood gatherers were ripping timber from the highways, removing habitat for endangered superb parrots and shade for cattle still following the old stock routes.

  Parkes Bowling Club, Parkes Jockey Club and the Parkes Harness Racing Club intermittently livened up the 1990s cultural scene. The town had its seasonal rhythms: the Spring Garden Festival (including prizes for the ‘best pocket handkerchief garden’ and ‘best-kept footpath’) preceded summer’s Christmas Parade (with the best floats in 1993 coming from the Country Music Association and Churches Caring in Crisis), while winter meant the Parkes Show. Debutantes, appropriately photographed in their gowns and pearls, came out at the Anglican Ball at the Leagues Club, and featured in full double-page spreads on the Post’s social pages. Life was utterly peaceful, marked by occasional happy moments: the Post was on hand to record that ‘Glen and Dot Beard of Parkes Blind Awning and Tile Centre have won a seven day trip to Fiji for their outstanding sales of Luxaflex products’. Parkes spent a couple of months in 1992 preparing for the Tidy Towns contest, and clearing up entry roads, where discarded fast food containers about 5 kilometres from the town boundaries marked the point where takeaways had been finished. But there cannot have been too many, or the town volunteers were particularly vigilant, since Parkes again managed to place in the top three tidy towns in the state. Dull, perhaps – staid, even – but certainly orderly, clean and peaceful.

  Houses could generally be had for less than $90 000: ‘three bedrooms, brick veneer, fully
carpeted and with lino’ and ‘all this for only $74 000’. The recession was doing little for house prices. Agricultural prices, too: pullets were $7.50, flock rams $200 each and garden manure only $20 a trailer load. At least a bottle of Jacob’s Creek chardonnay was $4.95, and, for special occasions, Mateus Rosé was going for $7.95. On Fathers’ Day, local residents were encouraged to ‘Treat dad to lunch at Gracelands’. That ubiquitous symbol of multiculturalism, the Chinese–Australian restaurant, offered some competition. Flashdance and Grease, followed by Sylvester Stallone, were on at the local drive-in, while the Golden West cinema was showing Wayne’s World. But on the eve of its new festival, Parkes was not obviously ready for Elvis Presley. In any case, Parkes already had its own shows: the Parkes Show, one of the great traditional agricultural shows, and, in a different season, the Country Music Spectacular, both so much more in keeping with wheat and sheep country. As the early 1990s recession deepened, cultural life in Parkes trundled along largely unchallenged and unchanged.

  At the start of the 1990s the future of Parkes was uncertain; it had escaped neither drought nor declining agricultural prices. The Dish was an impressive technological symbol of distinctiveness and modernity, but it contributed few jobs. Optimism remained in short supply.

  Some towns were lucky – a new mineral discovery, a strategic location, wine country – but most were not. Those that thrived were usually in scenic and accessible places, ‘hot spots’ that depended on nearby cities. In east coast Australia, from Bega to Port Douglas, stagnation could be avoided by ‘sea change’ migration from capital cities, second homes and tourism. Beyond them, on the other side of the sandstone curtain, in the nation’s boundless plains, it was another story. Rural Australia was becoming a ‘patchwork economy’ of haves and have-nots – the lucky and the doomed. While some centres were growing, with ‘sponge cities’ like Bathurst and Orange sucking populations towards them, many smaller towns were battling to hold on. Parkes, although locally regarded as a progressive regional town, was, like many of its neighbours, at the mercy of wider, troubling economic currents. As the 1990s recession worsened, Parkes began losing people, its population falling by 5 per cent before the decade was out.

  Eddie Youngblood – the first Elvis tribute artist to make his mark on Parkes

  Jack Eden

  Steve Lennox and Bob Steel, in newly acquired jumpsuits, pose for an early publicity shoot

  Steve Elvis Lennox

  In the midst of what was stagnation by any other name – the decline of agriculture and an absence of obvious alternatives – a couple of people in Parkes had a crazy dream: to stage a festival in the middle of summer celebrating the birthday of Elvis Presley. It was not a completely bizarre idea, since music festivals existed elsewhere, but they were largely unadventurous country music festivals or newly emerging coastal folk and rock festivals in delightful spots like Byron Bay, aimed at city youth. The one proposed for Parkes was totally different. The Elvis Festival was coming to town at a time when Parkes was pondering its future, agriculture could no longer be counted on, and its youth were leaving. Against all the odds the dream became reality.

  The Boars rugby players, outside their unofficial headquarters, the Royal Hotel, 1999

  Paul Jones

  Locals Lance and Irene Mortlock, living next to eight Elvises for the weekend in Parkes, January 1999

  Steven Siewert/Fairfax Syndication

  Waiting for the parade, 2012

  John Connell

  Elvis in harmony with the Dish. When the festival became licensed by Elvis Presley Enterprises in Memphis this logo quietly disappeared as lacking reverence

  Amanda Slater/flickr

  ‘The fellas said, “We should have an Elvis week”, and that sounded like it might be a good idea. They said, “We’ll have it in August”, and I said, “Well, it’s the end of June, so we won’t, ’cause you can’t organise anything that quickly. Why don’t we go for Elvis’s birthday in January?’

  2

  THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA

  A plain weatherboard garage sits in an unremarkable and peaceful suburban street in Parkes. It’s January and it’s really hot. Feet burn easily: every bit of exposed skin not covered by sandals feels the bite of the sun. Closer in to town, the sounds of Elvis can be heard across the streets, wafting out from the 100 000-watt public address system set up on the temporary festival stage in Cooke Park. Where wide streets radiate out into paddocks, it’s quiet. A lone child lethargically kicks at a ball in the yard across the street. Even the hordes of blue wrens and sparrows that announce the dawn in Parkes with their delicate choruses have found somewhere else to escape the heat. Nothing suggests there is anything distinctive about the place. Yet there is, for this is the garage and house of Parkes’ greatest Elvis fan, ‘Elvis’ Lennox. The air-conditioned tin garage holds a lovingly curated shrine to Elvis – the Elvis Lennox Private Collection – even if the town won’t let him call it a museum. Now 62, Lennox greets us at its entrance – trestle table, cash tray, second-hand books about Elvis on sale as souvenirs of sorts. His hairline is receding, and the front teeth have seen better days, but there are hints of the ducktail quiff once sported in youth; among other things, Lennox was the winner of the first Elvis Festival look-alike competition.

  He watched Love Me Tender at the Bourke Picture Theatre in 1959 as a seven-year-old, when his name was still Neville Steven Lennox. Enthusiasm for Elvis is one of his earliest memories: ‘He presented himself to the world and he belonged to the world. He had charisma and reached out to many people in many ways. Men and women loved him equally’. Lennox became an instant convert. From Bourke he eventually moved on to Parkes, becoming ‘just a railway labourer’, and meeting and marrying his wife Debby. In his teenage years, once a semblance of disposable income arrived, he began collecting Elvis memorabilia. Two decades later his leg and his world were shattered in a car crash. No longer able to work, he used the insurance payments to pay off his house, erect the double garage that houses the collection and in 1997 make his one and still only visit to Graceland, where he amassed a formidable amount of Elvis paraphernalia.

  I spent four and a half thousand dollars in four days when we were there and had to send half ahead of myself to get it back home. I went over with two suitcases and came home with nine … I bought books, pens, watches, bottles of Coca Cola that had Elvis’s twentieth anniversary on them. Whatever I could get.

  In the same year he legally changed his first name from Neville to Elvis. Beyond that, the car crash proved another turning point. ‘I was an alcoholic until 1979 when I gave up the grog, and gave up smoking in 1994 … I don’t do the clubs and pokies. Without Elvis life would be pretty dull … Oh, and the family’.

  As we enter his shrine, he insists on us promptly and firmly closing the door behind us to prevent heat and dust from seeping in and damaging his collection – objects that range from the valuable to the tawdry, from the mundane to the absurd, the trivial to the treasured. It is his means of paying homage. Outside festival times, ‘I come and sit out here, switch off the light, sit in peace on me own, listen to the music and relax. Without Elvis it would be a quiet old world’. Every surface, corner and nook is filled with stuff: costumes, records, teddy bears, cigarette lighters and actual blue suede shoes. There is abundant evidence of an obsessive but tender mind at work: not a speck of dust anywhere. It must take hours every week to keep it all clean and organised.

  Elvis costumes on full-sized mannequins are displayed sequentially, through the King’s career phases, with homemade laminated explanatory labels and photo stills from Elvis films where he is wearing the exact thing. All the details are correct: the belts, buttons, cummerbunds, shoelaces. One of us recognises an Elvis poster once hung on the wall of a student household; the copy here is respectfully framed and, unlike ours, without stain or crease. Elvis figurines are still in their boxes. Belt buckles sparkle from a fresh polish. Everything is in mint condition. Not least, in their own dedicated cabinet
, are Elvis Lennox’s own Elvis awards. Every one of these diverse possessions can stir emotions. Lennox tells us: ‘A few people linger for more than an hour, since it’s as close as they will ever get to Graceland. They say “It’s so great that you have this collection. I feel so close here. I’ve loved him all my life”’.

  Somewhat marginalised now within the festival because of its peripheral location, and without the slick curatorship of the King’s Castle across town, Lennox’s impressive amateur collection, and the trophies, hint at an earlier time and of a stalwart, salt-of-the-earth character central to Parkes’ remarkable story.

  Not far away live Bob and Anne Steel. The setting is equally suburban, though on a rather more elegant street. Unlike that of Elvis Lennox, the Steels’ house displays barely a hint of Elvis – other than a much-treasured Elvis mirror from Anne’s teenage years that greets visitors inside the front door – but features numerous carefully made, flamboyantly coloured mosaic tables mixed with ancient motorbike and car parts outside and under the house. The Steels, now in their seventies, have long been passionate Elvis fans. Anne discovered Elvis at the age of 11, also after seeing the movie Love Me Tender. ‘From then on I was hooked on him and his music’. Bob, like Anne, was born in Parkes, and was as keen on Anne as he was on Elvis, remembering her first as an eight year old in primary school, dressed for a fancy dress party as a Barrett’s ice-cream girl. ‘Some of my interest at the time was probably more to do with the ice-cream tubs’. When he discovered that Anne was an Elvis fan he learned to sing Elvis songs and performed them at what was then the Parkes Wine Bar. It worked: they married in 1964, Anne developed a hospitality business and in 1980 they bought a run-down school hostel. Bob, a plasterer, took over the renovations. They ambitiously called it Gracelands, and decked it and the waitresses out in 1950s rock ’n’ roll style. Gracelands it became because the Steels had been to America to take their children to Disneyland a year before but had frustratingly missed out on also visiting Graceland. Now they had their very own. Without them and Gracelands there would never have been a festival.