Outback Elvis

by John Connell

  The Festival is kept afloat by an army of volunteers, directing traffic and crowds, marshalling the street parade, handing out information, removing litter, serving and cooking on the local stalls. They greet and farewell the Elvis Express, hand out plastic leis, and link visitors to accommodation. They sell concert tickets, sew and embroider costumes, practice choir songs, and much later clean up the park, stack piles of plastic chairs and carry out all manner of often boring but necessary behind-the-scenes activities. Charity shops like Vinnies, run entirely by volunteers, stay open for this one weekend in the year because it is worthwhile. There are fringe benefits: ‘It’s fun for us too, since all the visitors are so lovely’. The Christian bookstore too was run entirely by volunteers, who saw benefits in evangelical outreach as much as in selling Elvis gospel CDs, but they stayed closed on Sundays. Some volunteers simply took over the responsibilities of ‘looking after the grandkids’ so that their parents could help out. They were all crucial and they enabled Parkes to flourish.

  By 2008 the festival had 180 volunteers, and more were still needed. By 2010 as many as one in ten of local people claimed to have volunteered in some way – a remarkable degree of community participation and support. Since another one in five of the respondents said that they were engaged in paid work during the festival (with a third of them working longer hours over the festival period), fully a third of the Parkes population were now directly involved in the festival. Balancing local enthusiasm, involvement and pride in place – the themes that drew in community volunteers – with the degree of professionalism needed to manage complex administrative, legal and financial issues, and the hiring of overseas performers, was never easy. Without the volunteers the festival would not be viable, but volunteers can age and burn out.

  Mind the gaps

  In one obvious respect the Elvis Festival was particularly welcome; it brought people into Parkes at a time when local people went the other way, and commerce was at its lowest ebb. Indeed, unlike the Parkes Show, the festival’s market is mainly outside Parkes. As the festival grew, and Parkes acquired more accommodation, the Elvis Festival became the only time in the year when absolutely everything was full. What, then, could Parkes do to fill up its accommodation, and provide patrons for its services, for the rest of the year?

  That was no new question. Parkes was always clamouring for events and being in the centre of the state provided some advantages. Various state sporting events could regularly be captured, but they were never an annual event, circulating instead to other towns. Golf and touch football led the way; regular Australian Scale Aerobatics Associations Championships were rather less substantial. The NSW Chess Championships came to Parkes in 1993, alongside the annual conference of the Association of Civilian Widows, but they too would go elsewhere in succeeding years.

  Alongside the Elvis Festival, Parkes organises a Country Music Festival, the Australian Indoor Marbles Championships (which brought 20 four-person teams to Parkes in 2014), an Antique Motorcycle Rally, a Kennel Club Show and the AstroFest (an annual one-day event that ‘endeavours to bring to the people of the Central West world renowned astronomers, both professional and amateur, so they may share their enthusiasm and love of the heavens’, but which attracts no more than around 50 people). While astronomers, dog owners and marbles enthusiasts have other reasons for coming to Parkes, for most visitors there is only one real reason.

  Other initiatives fared little better. A Beer Can Fest came and went without fanfare. A Father Ted Festival was brought to Parkes in 2010, modelled on the Friends of Ted Festival, an annual fan convention held in Ireland to celebrate the highly successful Irish television sitcom series of the 1990s, which follows the misadventures of three Catholic priests on the fictional Craggy Island, off the west coast of Ireland. It brought about 200 fans to Parkes, in search of such wondrous activities as Buckaroo Speed Dating, and Camogie Jelly Wrestling, but proved a disappointment, with the festival bar being closed down at 11.30 on the first night and visitors demanding their money back. However hard Parkes has tried, nothing has come close to being as successful as the Elvis Festival.

  Take Me to the Fair

  Each year the number of visitors increased, they spent more, revenue grew and more local people took part. Beyond Parkes, income was flowing into its neighbours for accommodation, food and much more besides. As the festival drew in more people, and from greater distances, the trickle-down, multiplier and spillover effects all increased. Forbes, and smaller townships like Trundle and Peak Hill, were the earliest beneficiaries, for accommodation and then other services. Orange attracted new visitors, including busloads from Queensland, travelling daily to the festival, and their cold country wine sold well. Others stopped in Bathurst to see the Mount Panorama racetrack on the way home. Fun-Over-50 tours contributed to several towns as they travelled from Brisbane and back, making their way through Stanthorpe (‘breaking for a food and wine luncheon’), Werris Creek (‘for a cuppa’), on to the ‘quaint township’ of Dunedoo for lunch, and eventually returning via Coonabarabran (lunch again), Moree (to stay), with a final break at Goondiwindi for another cuppa, and Warwick for lunch. Numerous small towns’ petrol stations, newsagents, restaurants, motels and gift shops became beneficiaries. Some visitors had specialised tastes: one festival-goer claimed to have visited every op shop between Brisbane and Parkes. Others had immediate needs:

  ‘The car broke down in Bathurst; that was costly’. And, as we have seen, almost 4000 kilometres away a tiny East Timorese community was benefiting from the Gospel Service.

  While Parkes residents and town councillors might have been happier to talk in general terms about the spirit of community the festival had created, and how it had helped them see off an unpleasant drought, as one of Elvis’s lesser songs had pointed out, the bottom line was ‘Money Honey’. Every single business, except for the funeral parlours, was benefiting directly or indirectly. Cafés and pubs could scarcely wait for the next Festival to come round. The tattoo parlours were bringing in new Elvis designs and more households were renting out their homes. Income was trickling down to households and businesses that had little to do with the festival. As the trickle became a flow, even the most intractable citizens reluctantly found merit in the festival, and the town took on a new life.

  Elvis the Rockin’ Rhino

  John Connell

  Parkes Elvis Festival, Sunday 11 January 2015, 3am

  Brandon Sherman

  ‘Originally I didn’t get that involved, but a lot of us locals have realised how important it is to support an event like this in our own town. So many people are doing it real tough out here with the drought and everything. So by dressing up and getting into the whole spirit of things we can hopefully make it bigger and better and get more and more people out here to spend their money.’

  9

  ELVIS AND THE UNIVERSE

  A tiny group of enthusiastic individuals have battled against the odds to establish a festival out of season in honour of a performer without local ties, who was not many country people’s favourite musician, in the face of public ridicule, institutional exclusion, crazy temperatures and occasional flood and drought. The Festival’s genesis was derided as frivolous and inappropriate, while an incredulous national press found it delightfully and foolishly hilarious, incidentally spurring its growth.

  It would have been totally improbable that everyone could be convinced about the merits of the festival. After all, few Parkes residents were actually Elvis fans. For 51 weekends of the year the pubs played quite different kinds of music, although much of that might have been even less welcome to the clientele. A few curmudgeonly citizens found it all simply too much: their town had been invaded and their routine disrupted; that horrible noise, drunkenness and surely debauchery. Town youth in their hoodies and board shorts looked on from afar and pretended to despise it: just a bunch of oldies dressing up. A minority of them, sceptical of most things, saw it as ‘just crap’. A few people left town, or wen
t about their business regardless, and were irate when they found parking outside the supermarket more difficult than usual. By 2015, recognition of the benefits was virtually universal. Meanwhile, although Parkes has not chosen to erect a Big Elvis, it has gained ‘Elvis the Rockin’ Rhino’, prominent outside the Visitor Information Centre, wearing the obligatory white jumpsuit. Elvis had become a social, economic and even an ecological phenomenon.

  King of the Whole Wide World: Parkes goes global

  Beyond its national significance Parkes has gradually acquired a global presence. Along with 14 other Australian festivals, mostly metropolitan, it was listed in Frommer’s 300 Unmissable Festivals Around the World (2009), where it was also distinguished for having set a new record for the most Elvises in one place. For the first time in 2009 two overseas newspapers, Britain’s Independent and the Wall Street Journal, featured Parkes and Elvis. The Independent recommended both the AstroFest and the Elvis Festival: the moon and the star in a single small town.

  Australian guide books have not been greatly interested. Lonely Planet’s Australia (2005) recommended stopping at the Dish, as the company name surely requires, and dwells on the elegant buildings of Forbes, but there was nothing in between until the 2015 edition finally relented. Even its expanded New South Wales version of 2007 hid the festival after AstroFest, the Country Music Spectacular and the Antique Motorbike Rally. By contrast, Rough Guide’s Australia (2015) mentions that Parkes ‘considers itself the Elvis capital of Australia’, features the festival as a moment when the town population almost doubles and celebrates Elvis’s gold lamé suit and last Cadillac in the King’s Castle.

  The Festival does appear regularly in Australian newspaper travel supplements. In 2007 the Sunday Telegraph puzzled over whether the Dish was so powerful ‘that maybe it can spot Elvis, flipping burgers out there in the galaxy’, far beyond ‘the unofficial Elvis capital of the southern hemisphere’. Three years later, the Telegraph returned to the same theme: ‘I daydream about Elvis in outer space and wonder whether serious-faced astronomers will one day find him alive and gyrating near the Milky Way’. Once again Elvis and the Dish were inseparable twins.

  Emily Mann, the then Festival Director, claimed in 2015 that ‘the Festival now enjoys a worldwide media audience of 60 million fans around the globe’. Nothing like being positive, and the festival has been featured in Germany, Japan, Singapore and the United States. How many people actually read Frommer, the Independent or the Straits Times and so choose to come to Parkes is a moot point. Many northern hemisphere tourists visit Australia in summer, but are more likely to hug the coast. By the 2000s the festival was receiving visitors from Singapore, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and surveys picked up small numbers. Most were in Australia anyway, and had made a detour. The Festival was certainly attracting overseas visitors, but they were rarely travelling to Australia just for the festival.

  Beyond Parkes, shadows of Elvis can be found almost anywhere. Australia has more than 15 Elvis Fan Clubs, merely a small proportion of 500 spread around the world. Melbourne Cemetery hosts an Elvis Presley Memorial Garden, commissioned by the Elvis Presley Fan Club of Australia in November 1977. As a Melbourne tourism website observes

  Elvis may have left the building but his memory lives on in some crazy places. Glossy black, like his famed quiff, The King’s tombstone stands tall in a lovingly landscaped stone grotto, surrounded by ferns and succulents. Hand-etched portraits and fake flowers crank up the kitsch, while plush toys and roses are often left in his honour (especially around his birthday and the anniversary of his death). This memorial is strangely touching – and touchingly strange.

  Adelaide Botanic Gardens has its own homage – a wrought iron cupola, featuring gumleaves, and a plaque inscribed ‘Erected to the Memory of Elvis Presley by the Sound of Elvis Society 26 November 1982’. The Australian shadow extends outwards. At the festival, one can book a Meridian tour of Vietnam – ‘Rockin’ the Mekong with Elvis’: an eight-day cruise with Elvis, in the person of Damian Mullin, performing nightly. It was touted as ‘absorbing two cultures simultaneously’.

  Trips to Memphis, via Nashville and New Orleans, are easily arranged. If more is needed, purchase Bill Yenne’s lovingly compiled The Field Guide to Elvis Shrines (2004), published by Last Gasp of San Francisco; as the New York Times recorded: ‘It’s enough to wear out several pairs of blue suede shoes’. Even so, after two editions, like Elvis, it barely left the United States.

  By 2007 the festival was locked into gentle competition with many other Elvis festivals, after it was reported in the Guinness Book of Records as having a record 147 Elvis artists simultaneously performing ‘Love Me Tender’ on stage, and, by bad luck, in 42-degree heat. Monique Kronk, who lost her voice simply counting the Elvises as their full attire was checked, reflected that it was visually inspiring, but tough on noses and ears. When an American festival had the audacity to top that number Parkes made a spectacular effort to retaliate; in 2011 its world record attempt to have 646 Elvises singing ‘Love Me Tender’ fell just three short when not quite enough costumes and singers could be found. More formally, by 2010 the winner of the Parkes Tribute Artist Competition was representing Australia in the Elvis Tribute Artist World Cup in Wales, against competitors from 16 countries. Once Parkes was accredited by Elvis Presley Enterprises, the great Festival prize was to become the winner of the Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist competition, and go on to compete in the grand finale in Memphis – a truly global event.

  Parkes thus became part of a loose network of sites including at least ten major Elvis festivals in the United States and several in Canada, notably that at Collingwood, which claims to be the world’s largest. Since 2002 Bad Nauheim has hosted the annual European Elvis Festival. Smaller festivals exist in Blackpool, Porthcawl and Bridlington in Great Britain, Benidorm in Spain and a range of other towns, some ‘officially licensed’ by Memphis, many not. The globalisation of Elvis festivals continues; Kobe now hosts the Japanese Elvis Festival and Scotland put on its first festival in 2016. Barry Green recalled holidaying in South Africa in 2013, and by chance pulling up for the night in a little town in Tsitsikamma:

  There was this tiny retro café out of the fifties, full of Elvis memorabilia. I got talking to the owner and said ‘So what’s all this for?’ and he says ‘Well, we have an Elvis Festival here each year. We saw a story in a magazine about a little town in Australia called Parkes that had one and so we thought we’d have a go here’.

  Sadly, it failed to survive.

  Spectacular American festivals, highly commercial and choreographed, such as those at Biloxi, Mississippi (‘the Gulf Coast’s premier casino resort’) and Lake George (New York State), have become locked in to the Memphis world of Elvis Presley Enterprises. In 2015 the Lake George Elvis Festival featured performances by Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artists Shawn Klush and Cody Slaughter, said by some to be the best in the world, and the debut of ‘Elvis Meets the Beatles’ (though Elvis was said to have told President Nixon that the Beatles exemplified both anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture). In June the scene switched to Tupelo, to ‘honor Tupelo’s native son’, in one more festival, this one interspersed with a pet parade, a beauty contest and a 5-kilometre run (although there is little evidence that Elvis ran far). A week later Myrtle Beach in South Carolina hosted its inaugural festival, before Penticton in British Columbia, then on its 12th anniversary festival. On and on the cycle goes around America – Ypsilanti, Michigan (with the largest tribute artist contest in North America and a candlelight vigil); Ocean City, Maryland; Brunswick, Georgia and Collingwood (Ontario), not ignoring an Elvis Themed Mississippi River Cruise and Tour (‘Memory flows deep and sentiment eddies and swirls along the Lower Mississippi River … Fertile cotton fields, vast sugar cane plantations and imposing pillared mansions will transport you back in time’) and, of course, Las Vegas (‘HUGE prize money and some of the very best ETAs in the world’). At several of the f
estivals, ‘artifacts direct from the Presley family’s treasured Gracelands Archives, some of which have never been exhibited outside Graceland, had their own touring circuit.

  A glossy sense of corporate homogeneity, slick and commercial, hangs over them. See one and you may well have seen them all. Parkes, however, is quirky and defiantly different. It might have been, as the Global Post once stated, ‘the oddest location on the global circuit for Presley devotees to sing collective praises’, but that made it unique. In the United States, Elvis festivals are serious and reverential; Parkes is fun, sweaty, and something less than reverential. For at least one American visitor, that was perfect. The United States Consul-General, Hugo Llorens, on his third visit to the festival, proclaimed from the centre stage: ‘This is a great community full of friendly folks and the home of the best and most fun Elvis festival in the world’. To him, it provided ‘three days of wonderful karma’. He could see analogies: ‘Elvis was a country boy at heart, like a kid from Parkes, who voiced his yearning for romance and love in his timeless music’. ShElvis, after four visits to the festival, summed it up well:

  The characters in Parkes make it … The Americans just cringe. The horror Elvis, the fat Elvises – they don’t do that. I think they’re being a little bit precious. At the end of the day you’ve got to be yourself. Sure, being an ETA is serious business, if you’re performing for a crowd of people that are expecting the height of performance. But when you’re at the festival, you’re there to entertain the horde. Twenty thousand people are there to have fun. They do that pilgrimage … Australians have always been known for their larrikinism. I fear we’re losing it, but it’s alive in Parkes. I hope it lasts forever.