to be relieved of the idea that Australian culture was inherently inferior and that any pursuit of culture per se was to be found in other, older countries. Which is not to say we were unaware of this idea, and indeed in many ways it still persists. But we did not suffer under the weight of it in the way our predecessors might have. What is more, my childhood encompassed the years when Australia embraced multiculturalism. I was born as the country approached a milestone – twenty years of immigration from continental Europe – and was shifting toward an ostensibly merit-based (rather than racially oriented) immigration policy. Australian multiculturalism is a Canadian concept taken to its logical extreme; one outcome is that over a third of Australians today have a parent or a grandparent who was born outside the country. An equally important aspect of ethnic difference – policy towards and treatment of Australian Aboriginal people – also began to be addressed, haltingly, awkwardly – and often badly, as it still is at time of writing. I mention all these issues here in order to explain some of the opinions expressed in this book and some of the decisions I made in prioritising certain elements, people and artefacts over others. Briefly, my attitude is that I know there was a ‘cultural cringe’; I know there was (and is) racism in Australia; I know women were (and are still) oppressed. I don’t shy away from these things in this history; I want you, as a reader, to take them as a given. What I don’t want to do is to return continually to these essential, central elements of Australian society during the period I am analysing as to an unscratchable itch. They are undeniable truths. Anyone who dismisses my attitude as ‘politically correct’ is, I contend, an anti-historical crank who won’t get much out of this book (or, for that matter, life): such people should write their own books to read. Having said all that, I am troubled by the lack of marginalised voices in this volume: my explanation for this is simply that many of the people who might have been discussed under this rubric were uncontactable or unwilling to talk. I feel particularly the lack of a large number of female performers who are difficult to write about in the context of a work like this because, in the main, they were vocal interpreters of others’ music: pretty mastheads fronting a showband. Print media advertising from the early 60s shows a huge parade of such young women, whose careers were almost certainly brief and exploitative. I don’t wish to diminish performers such as these; I do pay closer attention to some (for instance, Adelaide’s April Byron, who was a songwriter as well) but I feel that ultimately the focus has to be on musicians who either write their own music or who strongly and decisively reinterpret others’ work in a challenging way. Given the horrifically sexist, indeed in many ways misogynist, times, this was exceptionally more difficult for women to achieve than it was for men. Women, or rather girls, were assigned the role of appropriate consumers of popular music, particularly ‘pop’ music. Fortunately for everyone (except talented female musicians of the 60s and 70s, many of whom can and do feel cheated), the idea that a successful songwriter and/or instrumentalist might be female is almost – almost – unremarkable in popular music today.
At the same time, I feel no need to justify the high concentration of New Zealanders present in this history; all I can really say is, firstly, that my New Zealand-born informants (I use two, in particular, when discussing the 60s and early 70s: Brian Peacock and Mike Rudd) have a good perspective on the Australia they encountered, and secondly, that there’s an argument to be made that New Zealand punches above its weight as a creative society, in pop music and other areas. To leave out that delightful nation close to Australia’s east would, in any case, both pander to nationalism and skew the work to the point of inaccuracy. I have not, it should be noted, tried to tell New Zealand’s own pop music story (which John Dix relates in his remarkable Stranded in Paradise).
Incidentally, in mentioning my awareness of various prejudices in Australia’s past and present, I do not mean to suggest that I am some kind of cross between Buddha and a blank slate: I can’t not be affected by my own experiences. All any of us can do is recognise our possible biases. Many may feel there is a distinct Melbournist tinge to this work: certainly, I have lived in Melbourne for three-quarters of my life, including the years I was working on this book. However, all evidence suggests that Melbourne was the centre of Australian music in the 60s and through to the early 80s; while there’s no particular reason why this was the case, once it became so, the culture naturally expanded on itself. To investigate the smaller capitals and other regions in detail would have been fascinating. But concentrating too much on peripheral places, which took from the wider world but did not have input back, would be detrimental to the overall narrative.
I have tried to avoid some of the usual pitfalls of music history and criticism (including, I hope, irritating and clichéd expression). I consider many music writers have shown a lazy dependence on the idea of ‘influence’, and this harks back to my earlier gripe about the notion of a ‘second-rate’ Australia of the past in which people are beholden to ideas delivered by boat from London. The notion of ‘influence’ strikes me as nothing more than a convenient way of pigeonholing people, and one which hides more important truths. Billy Green, guitarist/songwriter in the group Doug Parkinson and the Questions (later retitled Doug Parkinson In Focus) between 1966 and 1970, may well have devoured every Beatles album when it came out; he would have been a little marginalised if he hadn’t. But if he did, I don’t see this as any justification for talking about the Beatles’ influence on Billy Green, because to do so obscures the reality that a number of factors were at work here: Billy Green was surely at least as influenced by the group’s record company saying ‘Be at the recording studio on Friday to record a hit single’; by the opportunity to write for Doug Parkinson’s extraordinary voice, much more powerful and versatile than any of the Beatles’; by his own experimentation with new instruments and non-Anglo-American music; by the desire to create new music in a pop context; by competition with other groups; by the spirit of the times; by a desire to continue to work in the music industry; and so on. That this group’s best-known hit was a cover of ‘Dear Prudence’ neither negates nor proves this assertion, incidentally. Billy Green’s best songs for In Focus, such as ‘Without You’, are unique.
It also perturbs me that so many writers seem to use the term ‘influenced by’ as a polite way of saying ‘copied’, or implying some similar value judgement about the capacity of artists for original thought. Going beyond this, it needs to be said that even when groups or artists do copy the style and sound of more famous artists, there are numerous reasons why they might do so, including for instance a commercial imperative, or an artisanal impulse, or the wish to pay homage or contribute to the general musical culture in a style people will easily recognise. ‘Influence’ covers and hides anything; if the 70s Tasmanian group Beathoven mimicked the sound of the early Beatles, were they ‘influenced’ by the Beatles or were they influenced by the idea of taking a recognisable retro sound, selling records, and launching careers by it? Daddy Cool may have been ‘influenced’ by 1950s doo-wop in a manner of speaking, but the impetus for the group was surely the idea of playing doo-wop in a ‘head’ music environment. The idea of ‘influence’ hangs out with all of these possibilities, and explains absolutely nothing. It is worth noting, too, that artists – particularly when they are looking back over decades – are often extremely keen to describe their work in terms of influences, possibly in part as a convenient shorthand but also possibly because artists are typically the worst judges of their own work and often think of it largely in terms of what they and others were (or could have been) listening to at the time. Many also hope to simply diminish their earlier work as juvenilia.
I have also tried to move away from the illustration mode usually adopted in pop-culture histories. The internet will soon enter its third decade of mass popularity; almost any depiction of a given artist, as well as their music, can now be summoned up in an instant, and I imagine most of my readers have access to this delightful mess. What then would be the point of reproducing conventional photographs of the people cited in the text? Whatever promo picture I might choose to illustrate what Australian Crawl looked like, you can not only find that image online, you can also view a dozen or more other photos, along with many videos and much more besides, that will collectively give you a greater understanding of the group’s line-ups and styles. Instead, I have drawn on images that are still largely hidden from the web, which I hope provide something of the flavour of the times rather than merely highlighting some celebrities. There is a far more extensive world of knowledge, opinions and images out there now to follow up, should