on behalf of ‘Australian rock players’:
We think Australian audiences deserve the music we can hear in our heads; not the sell out crap that recording company producers hear in their cash register un-heads.’2
Like a number of his contemporaries, including Billy Thorpe, Loyde’s condemnation of the mainstream music industry derived from bitter experience. His rejection of the economics of the business was fashionably simplistic, but it stands to reason that Australian record companies would ignore Australian acts as long as they could profit by concentrating primarily on promoting their parent companies’ British and American artists, whose recording costs they didn’t have to pay and who they only had to deal with in person on the rare occasion those artists came to Australia on tour.
The early 70s would see the overturning of this cosy arrangement, as the national culture quickly, if unevenly, came into bloom. The development of a consciously Australian popular music was a key element in this broader flowering. The next two chapters – one an overview of the period, the other focusing specifically on Daddy Cool and Skyhooks – explore its different aspects.
NEW SOCIETY
The decade of the 70s is typified for many Australians by the gospel-pop song ‘It’s Time’, which was the campaign theme of the victorious Labor Party in the watershed election of August 1972. The song’s vocalist was Alison McCallum, who in the late 60s had been a member of Dr Kandy’s Third Eye (along with Gulliver Smith). McCallum had recently made the national top ten with Vanda and Young’s song ‘Superman’; given her participation in ‘It’s Time,’ listeners might well have felt invited to compare Labor’s visionary leader Gough Whitlam with that same superhero.
There was nervous anticipation, both optimistic and pessimistic, about the new society that would take shape after the expected Labor victory; the question of the future appearance and feel of the new Australian culture was foremost for Australians. Australians (particularly but not solely young Australians) seem to have known that something was about to happen as soon as the 1970s rolled around. The nation had been prosperous for so long that almost no one under 35 had any memory of what it was like to be anything other than securely employed; this was largely true even among people who considered themselves working class and/or downtrodden. Consequently, society’s elders – whose fears and conservative habits (or in some cases radical left-wing politics) had been shaped by the Depression and the Second World War – seemed alien to them.
Its relative prosperity notwithstanding, Australia was plainly a morally and spiritually frazzled nation ready for some kind of cultural revolution. Billy McMahon, the new Liberal Prime Minister who had come to power via a backroom coup in 1971, was neither liked nor trusted even by those in his own party and government, and his promotion was clearly a mistake.3 (Time would show that his greatest legacy, aside from making Whitlam’s victory easier, was the fathering of the Hollywood actor Julian.)
It seemed highly unlikely that the electorate – even if most of it had happily tolerated two decades of oppressively staid federal government under the patrician Menzies, the stilted Holt, and the cocky and genially gnarled Gorton – would elect McMahon: a Labor government in 1972 was closer to certain than it had been for decades, and had indeed almost happened in 1969. The youth vote – there were adults with no memory of a government other than the Liberal/Country Party conservative coalition – was one important sector of the population agitating for change; Gough Whitlam had also courted other elements of the community, such as postwar migrants and residents of the underresourced outer suburbs of the major cities. What’s more, the Liberals’ entanglement of Australia in the Vietnam war had become widely unpopular, perhaps because, as journalist and activist Pete Steedman has put it, ‘mummy middle class’ had begun to see ‘sonny middle class coming back in a fucking bag’4; Australian women, led by Jean McLean, organised the Save Our Sons Movement. The rise of this organisation made it plain that protest against government policy was not merely the province of overstimulated, rebellious-for-the-sake-of-it young people; there were also others who (albeit more cautiously) rejected not only the war but the ‘straight’ yet hypocritical society from which it had sprung. While protest against the Vietnam war, rapacious urban development, and racism was no longer only the province of youth, however, rock and pop music was still primarily for the under-25s who had grown up with it.
The early 70s saw an upsurge in political activism which embraced the Aboriginal Land Rights movement5 and other protests by and on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia, including the Aboriginal embassy that was erected three times outside Parliament House in Canberra, and pulled down by the authorities twice.6 The Aboriginal Black Panther movement shone briefly, with leading activist Denis Walker thrilling and frightening the Anglo-Australian media with statements such as: ‘It would give me a lot of pride to walk down the street carrying a gun to make sure no pig could touch me.’7 Walker’s Anglo-Australian girlfriend, Lindy Morrison, was a social worker in Brisbane, although she would soon abandon that profession for the theatre and later for music – all of these pursuits were appropriate within the world of protest and activism. In the country that had been in the forefront of enfranchising women 80 years earlier but then became mired in adherence to textbook gender roles, women’s liberation marches were now frequent and effective. Merely the activism inherent in leading a radical lifestyle was liberating for many women and men. Most prominent – probably because they were the most inclusive – were the seminal Vietnam moratoriums of 1970 and 1971,8 mass demonstrations that are still regarded as a crucial element in the development of not only a radical Australia but also a motivated middle Australia. Ian Turner wrote of the first moratorium in Melbourne in May 1970:
There had been nothing like it in Melbourne since V-E day; a concourse of people so vast that the city centre was wholly occupied. The traffic stopped, the shops closed; for a whole afternoon the city returned to one of its traditional functions – a place where pedestrians could define their own needs and purposes . . . The people of my generation made at most one in ten of those who filled the streets. The ninety per cent were young. For the first time even children had taken to the streets of their own volitions . . . telling the oldies that the world would soon be theirs . . . This was the counter-culture on the march . . .9
In Sydney, Greg Quill reported, ‘A very human anger hurled itself down wintry city blocks and stamped into cold pavements.’10
For once, the vast majority of Australia’s pop stars let it down; none of these potential role models seemed to think change would come about through protest, though Wendy Saddington assured Go-Set readers that ‘the Vietnam War stinks’. Ronnie Burns – still in the public’s mind the star who sang the first anti-Vietnam pop song, ‘Smiley’ – said he’d be marching in the moratorium parade ‘because I believe the war’s wrong’ but said he felt it would only be a gesture. Mike Rudd, always cynical, didn’t think the Moratorium ‘will really succeed’.11 Jeremy Noone of Company Caine coined the term ‘plastic wombats’ to refer to his country’s soldiers in Vietnam (the Australian cousins of the ‘Yankee paper tigers’).12 The Arts Vietnam festival staged in Sydney in October 1968 had been by all reports a major success in raising consciousness about the war; Pip Proud and Nutwood Rug Band were there, but it is plain that many were sceptical about young people’s involvement in these causes.
Tim Burstall’s wonderful comedy Stork shows the confusion these ideas often generated. Eleven minutes into the film, a montage of protest posters introduces a scene in which Bruce Spence, in the title role, disrupts a Monash University lecture. The showy music that plays over these posters seems to suggest a cavalcade of craziness, or perhaps a collection of consumable, but ephemeral, protest ‘products’: it’s yet another example of the non sequitur approach to the representation of political activism in the early 70s. In early 1972, Anarchist draft resister Michael Matteson came out of hiding to appear on the cutting-edge current affairs show This Day Tonight, with every expectation of being arrested afterwards. Instead, he escaped through a small window at the back of the ABC’s Sydney studios.13 The police ended up looking stupid and TDT looked refreshingly countercultural; the real radicals looked brave and principled (as indeed