The crowds streamed in,filing down the grassed slope above a stage rigged with concert lighting. Timeless rock music pumped through banks of amplifiers. But what was this,precisely?
A fair slice of the Sunbury 2024 crowd on the weekend,choosing carefully their spots on swarms of camping chairs,wouldn’t have been out of place at a lawn bowls club. A glass of white wine appeared the most exotic mind-altering substance among this congregation.
Sue Smith (from left),Vanessa Cinnani,Andrew and Victoria Dixon and Barb Hayes at the Sunbury ’24 Festival on Saturday.Chris Hopkins
And good grief. Lifeguards stood on duty above the creek. Could there have been the wild risk of revellers of a certain age leaping with naked abandonment into the swimming hole? Those of us who attended half a century ago - Australia’s Woodstock,we tried to persuade ourselves - might have been tempted to chuckle.
We’d be laughing at ourselves. We are yesterday’s children.
Sunbury 2024 on Saturday turned out,however,to be a happy salute to our great good fortune at having lived long enough to remember the privilege of carefree youth.
Lifeguards ensured there was no skinny dipping at Sunbury ’24.Chris Hopkins
Yes,and this new gentler Sunbury was also a celebration of the music and some of the musicians who have made the long joyful trip with us.
Jeff Duff of Kush,Matt Taylor of Chain,Margret Roadknight,Madder Lake,Spectrum,Bongo Starkie,formerly of Skyhooks,singer-songwriter Richard Clapton and rock troubadours Joe Camilleri and Ross Wilson all played at the Sunbury festivals of the 70s.
Why,Madder Lake was the opening act of the very first Sunbury in 1972,but you’d barely notice that 52 years had passed as they revisited12 Pound Toothbrush andGoodbye Lollipop.
‘We are yesterday’s children’:Five decades on,Sunbury is again a hit with the crowd.Chris Hopkins
Of all the original performers,only Duff,who is 68,is aged less than 70.
Mike Rudd of Spectrum,whose harmonica seems to be driven still by a set of bellows,will turn 80 next year.
We sang and swayed along with them,for their music remains strong in our memories,and as the night descended,a fingernail moon in the clear sky above,some in the crowd - young and old - got up and danced.
Was Matt Taylor - who is 75 - having a dig at us,just a little,when he sang his old hitI Remember When I was Young,or should we have taken to heart a line from the song “I should think of the present ’cause the present’s now”?
The crowd enjoys the music of Kush singer Jeff Duff at Sunbury ’24.Chris Hopkins
Margret Roadknight,accompanied by an all-female band,recalled drily that she was the only woman performer in the Sunbury line-up of 1973,just as the late was the only woman listed among the 27 acts headlined at the 1972 festival.
It couldn’t happen now,Roadknight said. Quite.
Among the more electrifying performers at this new Sunbury were,Karen Lee Andrews in the Sunbury 24 house band and Laura Davidson in Bongo Starkie’s Skyhooks Show,whose rendering ofLiving in the 70s seemed never to have been more pertinent.
There were four Sunbury festivals back in the day,from 1972 to 1975,each spread over three sun-drenched January days of surrender to rock music and youthful indulgence.
They were held in a natural amphitheatre on a 250ha property owned by farmers George and Beryl Duncan. It was closer to Diggers Rest than Sunbury,but the organisers thought Sunbury sounded more suitably summertime than Diggers Rest.
Mudsliders John Akers,18 at the time,of Frankston bears down on Brian Carson of Bonbeach in January 1975. Robert Gray.Robert Gray
Jacksons Creek,which flowed alongside the festival site,seemed never to be empty of frolickers,a lot of them naked.
The young festival crowd of the era tended to separate itself into two camps:the beer guzzlers who came for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs - who brought ear-splitting and high-energy rock to all four festivals - and the more relaxed latter-day and would-be hippies,who indulged in more exotic substances than beer.
Thorpe,who died in February 2007,remains inextricably linked to the festivals,and a plaque to sits not far from the original site near Diggers Rest.
Nicole Greenfield dances at Sunbury on Saturday.Chris Hopkins
George and Beryl Duncan,who allowed use of their farm as a gift to Australia’s youth,are also gone - Beryl died in 1988,George in 1990 - but they live on in the district’s memory. The Hume City Council decided two years ago to memorialise them with a plaque at the end of Duncans Lane,alongside Thorpe’s memorial.
Sunbury - like all of Melbourne’s outer areas - has grown remarkably since the 70s and access to Duncans farm has long been blocked by a housing estate.
Saturday’s festival,thus,was held several kilometres away in Sunbury’s rather lovely treed park,known as The Nook,where Jacksons Creek flows by.
All 4000 available tickets were sold within days of their release.
Sunbury 2024 was,thus,a triumph for what we might call the third age at a time when modern music festivals are foundering through rising operational and insurance costs,,the continuing fallout from Covid and to buy tickets early,among other problems.
It was also a triumph for the Hume City Council,which organised the show.
The Mayor,Naim Kurt - who at 32 has no memory of the original festival,but has cannily embraced it as part of Sunbury’s essential history - said he hoped the celebration would continue and get bigger as the years go on.
The services of Jacksons Creek lifeguards,happily,were not required.
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