ODYSSEY (WALLACIA) POP FESTIVAL
Wallacia, NSW, Jan. 1971
History
Thanks to John Low of Blue
Mountains City Library and his kind colleagues at Penrith City Library,
who have kindlty provided us with information from press
sources, we have been able to put together what is priobably the first
comprehensive account of the Odyssey Pop Festival. The Odyssey Festival
took place about one week before the
better-known Myponga Festival, and was held over the Australia Day long
weekend on 22-23-24 January 1971 at Wallacia, west of Sydney, near
Warragamba Dam. The promoters, a group called Sanchez Promotions,
included Melbourne poet, journalist, promoter and all-round hip
identity Adrian
Rawlins, who was also one of the MCs.
The names of most of the
major acts that performed there are known, but it is likely that others
are yet to be identified -- for example, we have recently been
contacted by a former member of The Magpies who, with an average
age of just 12 at the time, was
the youngest act on the bill. Odyssey is notable for the
fact that the lineup was all-Australian (preceding Sunbury
by a year), featuring a mixture of Sydney and Melbourne groups.
Wallacia
is a small village surrounded by rural countryside and bushland; it is
a few kilometres south of Penrith, NSW, and about 70km west of Sydney.
The area was a renowned holiday resort area from the late 1800s to the
1940s. The region's main industries were dairying and grazing during
the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century, because of
its rural atmosphere and proximity to Sydney, tourism developed as
people opened their homes as guest houses. After the Second World War
however, the increase in car ownership and the availability of air
travel saw a decline in the local tourist trade. Today
Wallacia’s tourism is centred on the day-tripper trade.
Growth in the area in the past few years has mainly occurred with the
development of hobby farms by people seeking a retreat from city life.
Although once relatively remote from the city, Wallacia and its
environs are now gradually being encroached upon as freeways and urban
development expand Sydney's ever-growing outer suburbs.
The Penrith Press newspaper ran at
least two stories on the festival. One, published in the week preceding
it (probably Wed. 20 January) was entitled 'GROOVY SCENE'. It said that
a crowd of over 40,000 was expected, and that the festival would be
held on 450 acres of land adjoining Bullen's Animal World. The festival
was to start on Friday and continue until Sunday evening, and would
include more than 30 top Australian groups from Sydney, Melbourne and
Perth. A festival highlight, the article announced, would be English
group The Kinks. The organisers, Santley (sic) Promotions had arranged
for 200 lavatories and showers for the site. The article also said that
three members of the promotions company, Messrs Kennedy, Dillow and
Rawlins, had helped to organise the Ourimbah Festival the previous
year. An airstrip adjoining the festival site would be used to
accommodate more than 2000 cars over the weekend.
Another (unidentified) local paper published that week
reported that artists appearing at the festival would include "The
Kinks, Hans Poulsen, Pirana, Tuly, The La De Dahs (sic) Barry McGaskill
and Levi Smith's Clefs". The festival would be held on a
400-acre site belonging to Bullen Bros, it said..
The Sydney Sun reported on the
festival in its Sunday 25 January edition in a page 2 story headlined
'FORMALITY FADES AT FESTIVAL' and written by noted journalist David D. McNicoll.
He presented a surprisingly positive overview and begins by reporting
that only 7000 people attended and that the opening of the festival had
been hampered by power failures on the Friday. The music had been
scheduled to start at noon that day but the technical problems meant
that the first band did not appear until 11:45pm that night, although
the music then continued all through the night until 6:30am the next
morning. By Sunday morning, by which time there had evidently been a
cold change, McNicoll said that more than 500 people were still
gathered around the stage "despite the cold".
The festival, he said, began on a bad note on the
Friday but picked up over the weekend, and that the sullen faces seen
on Saturday morning became "relaxed and happy" as the afternoon wore on
and the tempo of music increased. As the temperatures rose "dozens of
men and women" swam in the three dams on the site. Notably, McNicoll
says that police had reported "no incidents of violence or drug use", a
statement directly at odds with subsequent reports in local papers.
McNicoll wryly notes that "for a generation supposedly concerned with
their environment, the young people at the festival did their best to
ruin that image". The litter on the festival site, he says, is
"incredible" and "hundreds of trees" had been cut down for firewood and
for shelters.
"The camping areas around the
site presented a weird jumble of abodes. There are large caravans,
tents and tarpaulins and lean-to's fashioned from branches. Shops and
stalls on the site are doing a big trade as is the small township of
Wallacia.
McNicoll concludes by reporting that ambulance officers
had treated dozens of people for cuts and abrasions caused mainly on
the Friday night and Sunday morning, when people were "stumbling around
in almost total darkness".
Ursula O'Connor of the Sydney Morning Herald
also reported on the festival at length, in an article headlined 'NEW
SOUND FOR WALLACIA' on Monday 25 January. Her account is fairly
detailed and rather less effusive in tone than McNicoll's. She
described the setting as "a 300-acre site of fields, hills and
waterholes", and that 12,000 people had attended, thus giving us four
totally different attendance figures from four reports! O'Connor
describes a carnival area of sideshows and merry-go-rounds and a
shopping centre "like an Eastern bazaar", selling everything from apple
juice to "clothes styled after every country in Asia, to revolutionary
literature courtesy of Mr
Bob Gould". (Gould was at that time the owner of Sydney's
controversial Third World Bookshop, and has for many years been the
proprietor of Gould's Bookshop, originally at Town Hall, and later at
Petersham and currently in Newtown.)
O'Connor also described residential area on
the slopes, "of expertly erected tents, caravans, or just bed rolls and
blankets". The site also had police, religious sects and a hospital.
"In three days no-one died and
no-one was born. But there was a "wedding" witnessed by the whole
population, and enacted according to their half-formed conventions.
There were traffic jams and
pollution; air thick with smoke at nights from as thousand glowing
campfires and from dust and exhaust fumes by day; ground littered
thicker than any city street with beer cans and bottles, cardboard
plates of half-eaten food and papers; water unsafe to drink because it
had been used as a bath; and sewerage problems."
"There was even a newspaper
published twice daily and called "Rubbish" It was produced by a group
of visitors "for something to do".
And it warned its readers of
police drug raids, criticised the Establishment (Sanchez Promotions),
printed large amounts of misinformation on the internal politics of the
organisation, plus the news of the day."
O'Connor said that travellers from Victoria, Queensland
and even Western Australia left the festival with "mixed feelings about
the worth of the trip", that lack of electrical power had delayed the
start of the music for 12 hours, and that lavatories and showers could
not be used until the Saturday morning. Ading to their annoyance, on
Saturday morning, patrons who had secured a good spot on the Friday
night were forced to pack up, move out of the arena and have their
tickets checked and then be stamped on the arm with purple ink.
Although some text appears to be missing from the article at this
point, the biggest causes of crowd dissatisfaction seems to have been
the long intervals between acts, which were "filled by MCs with the
disc jockey's skill for inane chatter"
She also reported that Sydney Drug Squad detectives had
made six arrests, that two people had been charged with possession and
use of marijuana, and two had been cautioned. The festival's medical
centre was reported to have been "flat out" on all three days, treating
cut feet, sunstroke, sickness and "a few people suffering from 'bad
trips' ". O'Connor concludes by saying that the festival organisers
expected to "just break even" financially, although they regarded the
festival as a success.
A column in an unidentified Sydney paper (possibly the Daily
Mirror, and evidently published on Tuesday 26 January) gives
a detailed account of the court appearances by the two people charged
with drug offences at Penrith Court of Petty Sessions the previous day.
21 year old Ronald Thompson, farm labourer of Cobram, Victoria, was
charged with possession and use of Indian hemp at Wallacia on January
23. Thompson pleaded guilty to both charges; he was sentenced to six
months' hard labour (!) on the possession charge, which was suspended
on condition that he be placed on a $500 bond to be of good behaviour
for three years; he was also convicted on the smoking charge and fined
$200. 18 year old Anne Margarethe Van-As, receptionist of Elizabeth
Bay, also pleaded guilty, was given a three month suspended sentence
and placed on a $500 good behaviour bond for two years.
"The court was told that Drug
Squad detectives watched a pipe being passed around a circle of young
people at the festival before making their arrests. A search of the
area and some persons had disclosed the presence of about one ounce of
Indian hemp and 'smoking instruments' ..."
[NOTE: this article appears alongside another which
reported concerns expressed by Stipendiary Magistrate Mr Murray
Farquhar about delays in a marijuana possession case involving singer
Johnny O'Keefe (see Almanac).]
The Penrith Press reported the
festival on its front page on Wed. 27 January, under the headline 'ALL
PEACE AND LOVE AT FESTIVAL' It reported that there had been
"only seven arrests" and that although up to 40,000 people had been
expected, only 10,000 had turned up, and that the large squad of police
sent to the festival "had little to do over the weekend". The Sydney
Drug Squad, it said, arrested five people -- "two juveniles, one
teenager and one adult" -- for smoking or possessing marijuana. Traffic
Branch had arrested two men for having more than the prescribed amount
of alcohol in their blood, and another had been arrested for negligent
driving and for being an unlicensed driver. Sgt J. Byrne of Penrith
police was quoted as saying that motorists coming and going from the
festival had been "most orderly".
The article continued with information on the drug
arrests, reporting that the two juveniles were remanded. It repeated
the information contained in the report above, adding that Mr Thompson
was given two months to pay his fine and that Ms Van-As was been placed
on a $300 bond ($500 was reported in the other article).
The article is accompanied by three photographs (taken
by CR Studios of Penrith). The largest shows a general view of part of
the festival crowd; beside it is a photo of a young man (a Hare Krishna
devotee) handing out religious literature; the third shows the hippie
wedding that took place at the festival.
Apart from the information listed above, Odyssey was
the venue for notably successful performances by several local
acts. It was one of the major interstate appearances by Daddy Cool, who
were very warmly received; according to Ian McFarlane, their successful
performances at Odyssey and Myponga convinced Ross Wilson and his
colleagues to abandon their earlier Sons
of the Vegetal Mother concept and concentrate full-time on
Daddy Cool. Ironically, Ross himself recalls (see below) that he was
not playing at his best that day -- just before DC was due to go on,
they discovered that Ross Hannaford had gone missing. He was eventually
found (asleep in a truck!), but it put Ross off for his performance.
Spectrum are also known to have performed -- this would
probably have been one of their first ventures north. Odyssey was also
the first festival performance by the new four-piece line-up of The La De Das (Kevin
Borich, Phil Key, Peter Roberts and Keith Barber). According to Vernon
Joyson, the Sydney group The
Original Battersea Heroes also "put in a storming performance
at the Odyssey Pop Festival, which won them considerable attention in
the short term."
A few performances were recorded on audio tape.
Surviving audio artefacts include three tracks by Chain recorded live
at
Wallacia, which later appeared on the retrospective
History Of Chain (issued
in 1973), including a great live version of their hit "Black
And Blue". The set by the short-lived line-up of Copperwine which
was fronted by the great Wendy
Saddington, was also recorded. Their performance,
issued on LP as Wendy Saddington &
Copperwine Live in 1971, was one of Australia's
first
Australian live rock albums. It was rumoured ca. 2000 that
this
recording was scheduled for a CD reissue, but Festival Mushroom Records
scrapped their entire re-release program when they reorganised their
operations and laid off staff, and of course the
company subsequently went into liquidation, with the entire
recording archive being sold off to Warner Music. It is not known
whether Warner has any plans to reissue this album in the
future.
Some photographic images of Wallacia are extant.
Australian photographer Fred Harden has included five photos of
Wallacia in his Photographic History web site:
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/wallacia1.htm
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/wallacia2.htm
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/wallacia3.htm
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/wallacia4.htm
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/wallacia5.htm
The following link is to a French web page I recently
located, which contains a fascinating group of photos taken by French
photographer Emmanuel-Yves Monin. Members of our Rock'n'Roll Scars
mailing list (who attended the festival) have confirmed that these are
photos of Wallacia.
http://frenchrainbow.free.fr/idees/textes/articles/popfestivals/popfestivals.html
The photos and reports suggest that facilities at the
Odyssey Festival were as rudimentary and poorly planned as those at
many other festivals of the period. Star spotters should refer to the
tenth photo down from the top of the page in Monin's collection -- the
figure at right (with his hand to his face) is believed to be
Gerry Humphries. Ross Wilson has confirmed that the person at the right
in the picture you willsee by following this link is Daddy Cool's
manager, Peter
Andrews.
Another of these photos shows a group of Hare Krishna
devotees (also photographed by the Penrith Press),
beside whom is a man with what appears to be a 35mm movie camera,
suggesting that at least some part of this festival was also captured
on film.
Recollections
from Ross Wilson:
(email, 6 Aug. 2003)
"It was a big deal for me to be
playing a serious festival outside Victoria and had taken leave from
our day gigs to do Wallacia and Myponga,
so when we couldn't find Hannaford ten minutes before we were due to
hit the Wallacia stage, it kind of threw me -- everyone was searching
for him and he was eventually found asleep! in one of the trucks near
the stage.
But the damage was done and I
was off centre for the gig -- hearing we were warmly received makes me
feel better even this far down the track, as I was definitely not my
usual self.
There was a lot of psychedelic
action at that festival."
References / Links
Our thanks to Ross Wilson
for his feedback, and many thanks to John Low of Blue Mountains City
Library and his colleagues at Penrith City Library for providing the
press reports about the festival.
Fred Harden Photographic History
http://www.thinktag.com/thinktag/history/default.htm
Vernon Joyson
Dreams, Fantasies & Nightmares: Australia (Borderline Books, 1999)
Ian McFarlane
Encyclopedia of Australian Rock & Pop (Allen & Unwin, 1999)
Emmanuel-Yves Monin
RAINBOWS Gatherings: continuation of the Pop-festivals ...
http://frenchrainbow.free.fr/idees/textes/articles/popfestivals/popfestivals.html
Adrian Rawlins
Festivals
in Australia: An Intimate History
(D.T.E Publishers, Spring Hill, Vic, 1986)
Penrith City
Council - Wallacia information page
http://www.penrithcity.nsw.gov.au/Lib/LocalSuburbs/Wallacia.htm
(author
unknown)
"Groovy Scene"
Penrith Press, Wednesday
20 January, 1971 (page # unknown)
(author
unknown)
"Peace and Love at Festival"
Penrith Press,
Wednesday
27 January, 1971,
page 1
David
D.
McNicoll
"Formality Fades At Festival"
Sydney Sun
(?), Monday 25 January, 1971; p. 2
Ursula
O'Connor
"New sound for Wallacia"
Sydney Morning Herald,
Monday January 25, 1971, (page # unknown)
(author
unknown)
"2 guilty of smoking hemp at festival"
Publication
unknown (possibly Sydney Daily
Mirror)
Tuesday 26 January, 1971
(probable) (page # unknown)
