Through the early 60s, it was rock-and-roll lite, and novelty acts ruled the airwaves. This was an era of fads and crazes, one after another. Lee Gordon's last gasp was the twist; soon after bringing Chubby Checker to Australia, he was found dead in his hotel room. But the twist didn't last; it was soon obliterated by what was arguably Australia's first national dance, the Stomp. An absolutely ridiculous dance style, whose only redeeming feature was that it required absolutely no skill to master. Anyone could do it. With the stomp came infusions of surf music and the australian surf lifestyle. This gave the local rock acts a refuge from the dying rockabilly style; they joined the surf scene. The surfies were treated as just another passing fad, but it had something that the blues/rockabilly style had lacked - a culture that was less about angst than it was about freedom. With one foot in the Beach Boys camp and the other with The Shadows, the result was a strange blend of hard-edged guitar-riff driven melodic rock. One surf band carried this sound to international success - "Bombora" by The Atlantics. Even today there are people in the US who never knew that the band was Australian.
These ingredients were the foundation for the popularity of the beat bands, led by the Beatles, who would provide the inspiration for a new era in Australian Rock.The people who would build on that foundation were amongst the quarter of a million migrants who came to Australia in the 50s and the early 60s. These immigrants were right up to the minute with the British style, the British attitude, and the British sound. Housed in migrant hostels and later brand-new suburbs, like Elizabeth in South Australia, they reinvented the local music scene. The earliest exponents of the new style were Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, and when the Beatles toured in 1964, Thorpe's band had the number one song on the charts. After the tour, where 300,000 came out to see the band in the city of Adelaide - which wasn't even on the original tour schedule - the imported musicians were inspired to start writing their own material. The concepts of what made a band "Cutting Edge" was changing throughout the country.
One of the early pioneers of this new wave was Terry Britton, of the Twilights - members of which would form the Little River Band a decade later. Britton later used his talents to support the career of another Australian import, Olivia Newton-John, writing many of her best known hits and producing most of her records.
In addition to the bands who aspired to emulate the Beatles were others who favoured the Stones - perpetuating the twin strands of Australian Rock. Many of these dug deeper for their inspiration, seeking the sources that were the foundation of the entire rock genre, the Blues.

But still the most successful band in the nation was the one led by Thorpe, and they played only cover versions - of what were already cover versions. 9 Gold records in 18 months were measures of their success. They were dominant until one of the migrant-based groups swept all before them - with something original. The Easybeats had arrived. The members first met in Sydney's Villawood Migrant Hostel in 1963; within 2 years, catchy lyrics fused with hard edged high-energy australian rock would sweep the country. To Australians, these were the first domestic artists that were every bit as good as the big names from overseas. They were the first Australian band to consistantly top the charts with their own compositions. If any further source of inspiration were needed, the success of the Easybeats supplied it. Australian pop and rock exploded, bigger than ever.
The members of the Easybeats would have an even greater impact in the 70s as a songwriting team than they ever did as performers. They got their feet wet in this aspect of the industry early on; Harry Vanda, George Young, and Stevie Wright were a bonafide hit factory, penning succesful tunes for a number of local acts. The Easybeats crossed the country to Beatlemania-like scenes - in truth, Adelaide excepted, their reception was far wilder than that accorded the British band. They shared equal billing with bands like the Kinks, and Manfredd Mann. Inevitably, they were driven to try and conquer the mother country; there were no more mountains to climb in their adopted home. The year was 1966.

Melbourne had become the hub of Australian Music. Unlike Sydney, who had ended 6 PM closing at just the right moment to support the early wave of Rock and Roll, the restriction persisted in the Southern state capital. But the prohibition on serving alcohol across the bar didn't stop the band scene - it invigorated it. Hundreds of bands would pack hundreds of unlicensed venues, playing 3, 4, or even 5 gigs a night, rushing from venue to venue, crossing like ships in the night. Just as this sort of performance schedule had been the making of the Beatles in their Hamburg days, so it would prove for the new generation of Australian rock bands, each striving for that hint of uniqueness that would set them apart. The result was an incredible diversity of sounds. Bands split up, formed new acts, and slowly the cream began to rise to the top. At the same time, the spirit of cameraderie and friendship - everyone knew everyone else - would become another hallmark of the Australian Music Industry of the 60s and 70s. What had started as British R&B slowly acquired a genuine Australian flavour, but while the live circuits were rebounding with energy, these bands were growing in reputation without much help from the established industry.
Radio was still mining the pop / novelty vein. The greatest success of the Melbourne live scene was that these artists were achieving success despite the lack of airplay. Only one DJ was pushing - Stan Rofe was still the man. With a slight softening of the edges, he was able to guide several of the melbourne artists into a commercially-acceptable (and exploitable) compromise. Arguably his biggest success in this regard was young Normie Rowe, whose hit "It Ain't Necessarily So" was rescued from British obscurity by Rofe and given a poppier sound. The song, midly blasphemopus in it's expression of doubt in the literal truth of the Bible, was denounced, banned by some radio stations - and made Rowe an instant celebrity.

With the continued growth in popularity of rock and pop, and the increasing realisation that successfully targeting the teenage market was a licence to print money, television again jumped onto the rock bandwagon. The demand for content was so fierce that almost anything could be tried. Blues, rock, underground music, psychedelia, and commercial pop - all were getting airplay. The result was something unexpected.
While the teens who were in touch with the local music scene knew the different styles, and were able to focus in on what they liked and wanted to hear, to most of the kids born in the late 50s and early 60s, it was all one style - rock music. They started identifying not with music of a given style, but with individual artists. And, for those who would become the next generation of performers, the cross-fertalisation of styles would continue to evolve the local scene into something unique. The forerunner of the new trend was The Loved Ones, which had reinvented themselves as a blues-based band from a trad-jazz basis. When they had a number one, it was a shock to the establishment. Quirky melodies and rythms had proved to be acceptable - there was a national audience for even more alternative, underground, music.

Meanwhile, the Easybeats had found the going much harder than they had expected. At first, they stuck with the established formula. But whle they might have been on a par with the early Beatles, the yardsticks had cxhanged. They had to record a song that no-one could ignore. The result was "Friday On My Mind". It reached #6 on the English charts, #1 in Holland, and - a year later - #20 in the US, proving it could be done. But its success proved even harder to emulate than the initial breakthrough had been. In desperation, they began to meddle with their essential mixture, trying anything and everything to get through the media filter, the people who decided what was good and what was not. From a once-vibrant and hard-edged rock band, they slowly slipped until they were recording tunes suitable for Englebert Humperdink or Frank Sinatra. Eventually, they lost heart and came home, to find that their domestic popularity had not waned; but after one more national tour which just seemed bereft of challenge and achievement, just more of same, the group broke up.
The band had been the first to try their hand at the British big time. They were not the last. Even before they returned to Australia, they had been joined by a number of other Australian acts trying to crack it in London. Many seemed not to realise that the opportunities that had given the Fab 4 their big break would not necessarily be given to upstarts from the colonies. Hopefuls like John Broome and the Handles left to try their luck - and failed. Against competition like the Beatles, The Stones, and The Yardbirds, they didn't stand a chance.
What they had failed to take into account was the perceptions Australians amongst the populace they were trying to sway. Provincial, Ignorant, Half-civilised, a population of criminals and ex-criminals, backwards - and most importantly, inherantly inferior, culturally, to the mother country. Many still thought that kangaroos could be seen on the main streets! It was the same attitude that had prevailed when Australia first beat the British at cricket - the english press immediatly dubbed it the death of English Cricket and the MCC burned a cricket stump to symbolise that death. Although they subsequnetly learnt to respect our prowess on the sporting field, this was a whole new arena - and to catch on, an Australian act would have to present something that was in keeping with the British perceptions of Australians. Without realising it, The Seekers were the perfect vehicle for an Australian entree into Britain. A blend of commercial pop and well-crafted folk music, they had played their way to England as the entertainment on board a P&O cruise ship. It was supposed to be a working holiday; it turned out to be the best decision of their lives.
British Television fell in love with them. Within weeks of arriving, they had the number one single, their own television show, and were outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones - combined. They came close in the US as well, scoring a number one with the title theme to "Georgy Girl". But the Seekers were burnt out and never followed up properly with intensive touring, and the chance to scale the pinnacle of the ultimate market passed them by. They had forced the first inroads into the media filter; Australian Music could at least compete thereafter on it's merits.

In the late 60s, the hippie movement arrived in Australia. A radical new music was the mode of expression for the alternative lifestyle. The conservative Australian heartland was not receptive; but the teens adopted the counterculture ideals as a matter of survival. Australia was sending conscripted soldiers to the Vietnam war, and the protest movement that grew out of the hippie scene opposed the war. Adopting one plank of the new ideology meant adopting the whole package - sexual liberation, recreational drugs, anti-pollution, anti-racism, and anti-establishement. Established pop stars were also conscripted, to entertain the troops. This could have driven a wedge between the new wave and the old guard; but rock absorbed the lessons of the new music and made them mainstream. The first protest song to achieve mass success was "Smiley" by Ronnie Burns, written by once of the old guard - Johnny Young - about another teen idol who had joined up, Normie Rowe. But the 1969 hit was an allegory for all the soldiers - sent to fight in a war against their will, and returning home damaged by the horrors they had experienced, to find themselves socially rejected by their peers. Too many were drug addicts, or bundles of rage, or simply socially maladjusted, incapable of fitting into a society that had not been through the same ideals and amongst peers who did not respect them. Vietnam ripped the innocence out of Australian Music and Australian Society.
The returning troops demanded a new direction. The lighter, poppier sounds of the early 60s seemed naive and superficial, with no relevance to the harsh experiences of real life. Something harder was needed.
The brits may have missed the potential of the hard-edged sound offered by the Easybeats on tracks like "Sorry" and "Good Times" but the next generation of Australian bands stripped it back and turned it up and in the process invented something new. With the end of 6 O'clock closing in the pubs, nationally, the pubs added a new ingredient - alcohol. The result was an audiance that would terrify overseas visitors who couldn't measure up, live, with their reputation,. an audiance that demanded to be entertained, insisted that the people on stage work their bums off. The demand was "Blood - Or Else". Either the performers would sweat it - or the audience would beat it out of them. As the crowds became rowdier, the bands had to turn up the volume to cut through the noise. The circumstances made the Aistralian Pub Rock sound inevitable.
The war may have been the catalyst for change, but drugs were the vehicle. Billy Thorpe created a public relations firestorm by publicly stating that he intended to try LSD. The hippies had inadverrtantly succeeded in revolutionising Australian Youth - not with their ideals, but with a spinoff from their lifestyle which had taken on a life of its own.
Thorpe transformed himself from "The Boy Next Door into Every mother's Worst Nightmare", as he would later describe it. Hard Loud, Blues-based rock. Life - and music - had become all about living for the moment, because the next moment could be your last. The new credo was to enjoy as much freedom as you could grab - while it lasted.
There was an unexpected legacy from the hippie sounds. Crowds tripping on LSD and pot were willing to listen to long pieces with a musical and lyrical depth impossible to a three-minute pop song. While not more than an alternative fringe, the musical and production depth that was fostered would eventually elevate the three-minute pop song into a new era of sophistication. Gradually, psychadelia seeped into the mainstream. But to be commercially acceptable, it had to be cleaned up - sugar without the spice - Bubblegum.
Rock had stablised back into its two divergant strands. Both had evolved, taking from the turmoil of the era what they needed to remain relevant to the new audiances they faced. The Bubblegum vs Soul "War" was played up by promoters and publishers, and captivated the nation's record-buying public, when from out of left field, Australian pop threw up a genuine psychadelic hit. "The Real Thing" by Russell Morris, also written by Johnny Young, was six minutes long. It featured bombs, a hippie consciousness, and broke all the rules for a hit single of the era. The genie was out of the bottle, and it marked the completion of the musical revolution.