Various Artists Live Australia Sunbury 1972
Though not the first major music festival in Australia, the Sunbury Music Festival was the first to turn a profit and to run consecutively for several years. For 4 years from 1972, the festival was held on the Australia Day long weekend at a private farm on the outskirts of Sunbury near Melbourne, attracting around 35,000 punters of pop. Likened at the time to Woodstock, today Sunbury can be seen as a forerunner to big festivals like Big Day Out, Falls and Splendor in the Grass. Line-ups included home-grown acts such as Skyhooks, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Sherbet, Daddy Cool and Captain Matchbox; with international guests like Queen and Deep Purple headlining in later festivals. However, it was Deep Purple who tolled the death knell for the Sunbury festival in 1975. Operating at a loss, organisers paid out the UK rock stars at the expense of the local acts who went home penniless.
Sunbury 72
David Hill (a youthful ABC journalist) reported the pioneer festival culture at Sunbury '72 as a mix of hippies, yobbos, organic food stalls and makeshift tents and swags. The first Sunbury concert was held over the Long Weekend period from 29th to 31st January, 1972.
Tickets cost $6 for the 3 days and there was an estimated 35-40,000 in attendance. Gerry Humphreys (of the The Loves Ones) was the MC and the festival sported the largest number of bands of all the Sunbury concerts. Bands playing at the festival were:
The Bushwackers and Bullockys Bush Band
Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band
Glenn Cardier
Carson
Chain
Company Caine
Friends
Healing Force
The La De Das
Mackenzie Theory
Phil Manning
Max Merritt and the Meteors
Pilgrimage
Pirana
Wendy Saddington
SCRA
Spectrum
Tamam Shud
Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs
Total Fire Band
The Wild Cherries
Greg Quill & Country Radio
Highway
Indelible Murtceps
The La De Das
Mulga Bill's Bicycle Band
Blackfeather
Barry McCaskill & The Levi Smith Clefs
Because the site of Sunbury Music Festival was closer to Diggers Rest than Sunbury itself, many patrons travelling by train to the festival would get off at Diggers Rest station. However, the "Diggers Rest Pop Festival" just didn’t have the same zing to it. While the inaugural concert of 1972 is usually remember as being an all-Australian event, many of the performers actually hailed from New Zealand. But as we do, we’ll turn a blind eye to that and claim them as our own, especially Thorpie.
Sunbury '72 also exemplifies the male domination of the popular music scene at that time, although photographs indicate that the audience seems to have been fairly evenly split in gender terms, almost all the performers were male. Wendy Saddington was the only female headliner on the bill, and only one other band, Mackenzie Theory, featured a female member (violist Cleis Pearce).
The festival was organised in late 1971, when a company called Odessa Promotions was formed in Melbourne. Its principals were, according to Adrian Rawlins, "industry people" from the Melbourne television scene, including several TV floor managers and directors; it is likely that several had worked on Melbourne pop TV like Uptight. The principal of the company was John Fowler.
By this stage, five other major festivals had already been mounted, and the oft-repeated claim that Sunbury was Australia's first rock festival is quite untrue. Unfortunately, none of these earlier festivals was financially successful. Undeterred, Odessa Promotions organised and promoted a major rock festival with an all-Australasian line-up, although it's important to note that we don't know for sure whether this was a deliberate decision (or one merely dictated by financing) or whether or not Odessa considered bringing in overseas acts (or not).
