Outback Elvis

by John Connell

  Fun, families and a lot of nostalgia

  Some visitors seem destined to be there. In 2003 Elvis Aaron Stefanovski was one of them, as he had been for the previous three years:

  Yes, it’s my real name. My mother was an Elvis fan and named me after him. When Mum’s waters broke ‘It’s Now or Never’ was playing on the radio. When she got to hospital, an Elvis movie was on TV and then, two weeks later, after arguing with my dad and godfather about names for me, Flaming Star came on. She took it as an omen. So I’m here whether I like it or not.

  He copped a lot of teasing at school but after a group of his mates had entered him for a look-alike competition and he came third, he realised there was no point fighting it. By then he was boasting: ‘I won a look-alike competition at the RSL last night’. His mum delightedly made a series of elaborate bejewelled jumpsuits and capes, and two years later he won the Festival Look-alike prize. Just the name can be enough: ‘My name’s Priscilla, so I’ve enjoyed everything’. Others have different kinds of personal attachments: ‘My birthday’s the same day as Elvis’s and he was born the same year as my father so I’ve sort of always been hooked’.

  From its early days, a mix of people attended: keen fans, curious locals, people passing through town for other reasons and people wanting a day out. Janet, who had lived in Parkes her whole life, told us in 2007:

  I think there are four different kinds of people that come … there’s the people that follow Elvis in a cultish kind of way, and then there are the others that are just interested and come along for a weekend out, the others [who] think there’s a few bob in this so let’s get into it, and then there’s … people like me, who just come along to see what’s happening.

  While she had probably never heard of event management obsessions with ‘market segmentation’, these were astute observations.

  Year after year the geographical origin of visitors has barely changed. Unsurprisingly, most are from nearby, and from Parkes itself, but they are less easy to capture in surveys; they pass through the scene ephemerally and tangentially. Equally unsurprisingly, for a town in the middle of New South Wales, most come from that state, the largest (by population) in Australia. In 2015, from a large sample, just over three quarters (78 per cent) of visitors were from New South Wales. One in ten came from Queensland, although the Queensland border is more than 500 kilometres from Parkes, and Brisbane a ten-hour drive. Chartered buses did good business. Smaller numbers came from Victoria, the ACT (Canberra) and the more distant states. Sydney is always the single dominant source, usually providing about a quarter of all the visitors. Geography clearly matters.

  Festival-goers come from all walks of life. In 2006 one in five were retired people. In 2010 that proportion had increased to one in four. While professionals made up a quarter of the visitors in 2006, one in ten of the visitors were unemployed and many were from blue-collar backgrounds. In practice, other than the resplendent Napoleonic collars on jumpsuits, there are not many collars to be seen. Builders, mechanics and nurses were all there. Teachers and managers jostle with farmers and tradies; scientists and cleaners come together in harmony. In 2010 one group of four travelling from Queensland consisted of a teacher, a housewife, a coal miner and an accountant. Marginally more hairdressers come than bankers. Elvis clearly has broad appeal.

  Ethnically, the festival reflects regional Australia in being largely white, but local Wiradjuri families are increasingly involved and Elvis has long been popular among western NSW Aboriginal communities. An occasional bemused Papua New Guinean comes from the Northparkes mine, and in 2016 a group of Fijians, predictably at the Gospel Service, were in town to boost the stocks of the rugby league team. Over the years Asian Australians became more frequent visitors.

  More remarkable and particularly distinctive is the age of the visitors, already evident in the retired proportions. Many are of a certain age, considerably older than visitors to most other festivals, and not surprisingly very much older than those at rock music festivals. The Festival is dominated by people who experienced their youth when Elvis was alive and an active performer. In 2010 as many as 57 per cent of the visitors were over 55, though that was a peak. Nostalgia for adolescence is a powerful force. Increasingly, affluent baby boomers come in numbers.

  Younger people are fewer, but they are certainly there, and the proportion is increasing. For those who live in the area, it is the biggest party weekend of the year. For outsiders, the festival is increasingly popular as a ‘kitsch’ or ‘retro’ event for the fun and humour – a giant dress-up party – rather than for nostalgia or reminiscence. But many of them also love, even respect, the King. For 16-year-old Tahlia from Wollongong, dancing in a polka-dot frock: ‘I love dancing and it’s just different with his music. It’s the passion he puts in – you can really feel it’. Her friend Hayleigh thought that Elvis was ‘pretty hot’, quickly qualifying it with ‘in his younger days’. Others have inherited Elvis from their parents: an intergenerational love story.

  Most visitors come as couples or nuclear families; some extend into in-laws, boyfriends or girlfriends, grandparents and family friends. Some family groups are not entirely expected. One man commented: ‘I’m just here with my daughter. Normally she wasn’t allowed to come, but just before Christmas the ex kicked her out and that changed things’. Family reunions are common. One large group came annually, to reunite with family members from Sydney, Canberra and elsewhere. For them and many others, Elvis is a good excuse for getting out of home, rekindling extended family ties and having a good time. Indeed, ‘in small towns there’s not always a lot of things to cover the generations, so it’s something that kids can do, grandparents can do and families can come and do’. Others come to celebrate significant events – wedding anniversaries and key birthdays.

  Groups of women are common, some as large as the 16 from the Central Coast, enjoying themselves on the train from Sydney. ‘Men don’t get into Elvis. I think it’s a woman’s thing. But we love it: a lot of crazy ladies. They can go fishing’. Beth’s group was composed of 13 women all decked out in T-shirts screen-printed ‘Beth’s 60th’: a trip planned three years in advance. Twenty-six Gold Coast Rockers came in a fleet of caravans. A large group in 2009 were Parents Without Partners; all but one were women. There are tennis friends, work friends, friends from childhood, neighbours. Some groups are more commercial; in 2015 more than 30 people came from various parts of Queensland in a Fun-Over-50 bus tour. In 2016 that number had doubled and two buses arrived. At the core of the six-day $1600 tour is Parkes, now one of many festivals that companies such as Fun-Over-50 specialise in visiting. The verb ‘to festival’ has entered vocabularies.

  Fanatics and fans

  For a vast number of visitors the festival has always been much more than a vaguely passive experience: listening, watching, applauding, eating and drinking are rarely enough. It is about entering into the spirit of the festival, really ‘being there’ – dressing up, dancing, singing, being ‘reluctantly’ dragged onto the karaoke floor and impersonating Elvis, often overindulging and bearing the consequences the morning after. Age has not wearied plenty of them. Selfies capture it all.

  Those who describe themselves as Elvis fans often travel greater distances and stay longer than more casual visitors. They are a significant component of the audience, and they want still more: there is simply ‘not enough Elvis’ in terms of music, market stalls, decorations and just about everything else. They seek to absorb, and try to purchase, everything Elvis. They keep their teenage scrapbooks, posters and fan club magazines, and store them alongside more recently bought merchandise in shoeboxes, albums, glass cabinets – private pop culture memorials. In survey after survey they criticise the parade: vintage cars are not seen to be in keeping with appropriate Elvis themes, or are from the wrong era, or the participants are not adequately dressed up. Music is frowned upon as not being sufficiently authentic if it is only from Elvis’s era, but not the King himself. This is an Elvis Festiva
l and watering down of Elvis content is seen to be dangerous, disappointing and demoralising.

  Their allegiances are obvious and absolute. Visitors returning to Sydney on the Elvis Express, usually the most enthusiastic, display their new souvenirs to each other. Acquisition of memorabilia and detailed knowledge enhances fans’ social status. They discuss the shrines they have constructed in their houses: Pam, who in 2009 described herself as an ‘Elvis tragic’, had a room in her house dedicated to Elvis; Thelma claimed ‘a house just like Graceland’. For particularly committed fans of Elvis, there is no other means of expressing devotion without lengthy and expensive travel to America – but many have done that too. Fans proudly wear T-shirts or jewellery that can only be purchased in Memphis. Visiting Graceland itself is a coup; visiting more than once is idolatry: ‘I shed a tear at Elvis’s grave; I held Elvis’s microphone at Sun Studios. I’ve seen it all, baby’. These are the fanatics.

  The keenest wear carefully and expensively made replica costumes: the inevitable jumpsuits, rhinestones and a dozen petticoats. Lycra is seen as cheap, inauthentic and inadequate. Many fans entertain each other – through reminiscences, demonstrating and exchanging knowledge, showing off their mementoes, dress styles and dance performances, or their customised classic Cadillac cars. When events researcher Joanne Mackellar visited, one fan told her: ‘When we go home we’ll start preparing for next year. It can take up to six months. Designing the outfits for the girls, sourcing materials and making the dresses; it’s all part of the fun’. For them the festival is both pleasure and ‘serious leisure’; this is their world, and it gives them both enjoyment and status.

  Some fanatics come as individuals. At the very first festival, as the Champion-Post recorded:

  One elderly lady from Cowra contacted us to thank the committee for doing something she said is long overdue. She is in a wheelchair ... and could only come over for the Saturday morning program … She is a dedicated Elvis fan and tells us she has a poster above her bed which is one of only 10 in the world.

  A decade later, for a 2003 visitor:

  I wanted to come for years but my dad, whose birthday was the same day as Elvis’s, was ill for a number of years, so I did not come. But my dad has passed on and is up with Elvis in heaven singing along. This is my first year and it’s been fabulous.

  The train brings many of the fanatics together. By 2010 the Elvis Express had become a reunion of old friends, singing, dancing and reminiscing, eating Elvis cupcakes and Love Me Tender chicken, and enjoying State Rail’s own tribute artists on the way.

  We’re members of Lithgow Workers Rebel Rockers Dance Club … we’re also members of the rockabilly federation [the now defunct United Rockabilly Rock ’n’ Roll Federation of Australia] and the rock ’n’ roll council. It’s a great time for us to get out and have time with our friends … so we have meals out together, just relax and dance our socks off and it’s just a great interaction with our mates and meeting up with people we’ve met before over the years.

  Footloose, a rock ’n’ roll dance group from Wollongong, was another team of likeminded visitors, keen to perform on a larger stage. As one put it: ‘We want to do some dancing and rock ’n’ roll, absolutely. You gotta have some fun. Really, that’s it … it’s better than sex’.

  For some it was escapism, for others a near-religious experience. Some come for the beer, others for the Gospel Service. For Trisha, from Lithgow:

  He has been a huge influence on my life, being close to my age, as a small child being about 10 years younger than Elvis. I went to all his movies growing up. I love his music. I love his gospel background. It’s sad that he ended up the way he did but who are we to judge, because it could be anybody that could end up like that.

  Nostalgia can be acquired belatedly and is not necessarily tied to adolescence. Ros from Sydney, 64, claims she ‘got it’ when she saw Elvis in his 1969 film Change of Habit in her mid-30s: ‘That just grabbed me, that raw, sexy feel’. Some can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard Elvis. In the 1950s Jim Gardiner was working in his grocery truck; it was lunchtime and Elvis came on the radio: ‘I nearly fell out of the cab’. From then on, Gardiner headed to the record shop every payday to buy the King’s latest single. ‘He was the prettiest-looking bloke you ever saw. So handsome you’d have to fall over backwards’. Half a century later he was still happily watching his recordings of Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show.

  Fans invariably remember where they were when Elvis died. Ros was sitting in her kitchen as the news broke: ‘My daughter was hanging out the washing and she came back and I was at the kitchen table crying my eyes out. Then they played “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and that was the end of me’. Margie had come from Bathurst for four years in a row. She had been an Elvis fan ‘forever … I was in year 10 [about 15 years old] and I was in a sewing class when they turned on the radio and told me he had died … that was 30 years ago now’.

  George, from Canberra, said: ‘You hear a tune and it triggers off memories’. The song lyrics are important too; for Sheila: ‘You can hear the words, relate to the songs; they bring tears to your eyes’. Charlie, a boilermaker from Mudgee, who had come in 2015 for any possibility of jiving, was similarly enthused:

  I grew up with him … got all his records when they were big 78 records … In the ’50s Elvis was the man. He was the King and his voice was magnificent. He could do anything. He sings rock ’n’ roll, he sings gospel. You know, he’s just multitalented. And it was like he just came at the right moment … He’s the King. I can’t really put it into words. … It’s like he’s playing to you.

  Elvis so often inspired personal connections, unbroken over decades.

  Thelma, a retired hospital worker from Warwick in Queensland, said, ‘We go to most of the concerts around … and we’ve been over to Memphis … But we’re really enjoying this festival … I thought we saw more here than over there because … there they didn’t have the festivities going on’. For another: ‘I play Elvis music every day. Not many days go by that I don’t actually sing Elvis music ... I spend about five hours a week doing Elvis things’. To Gloria from the New South Wales Central Coast: ‘Elvis was my hero. My son was born the day that Elvis died and I think of them together. I dress up three times a year, if I’m lucky … I’ve got 108 of his LPs – my hero … I went to Graceland – the Mecca – three years ago’.

  Celia had been to Graceland too: ‘I felt so emotional; the house was not at all pretentious from outside’. Elvis Lennox had experienced similar emotions: ‘The hairs on the back of my head stood up as I entered’. For such people being an Elvis fan is the reason they’re there; they eagerly anticipate the festival year after year and they play an active part in it.

  Some recalled the social revolution Elvis had prompted in 1956.

  To Kath on the Elvis Express: I was 17 when Elvis hit the big time, when his first record came out. I had to buy it within half an hour – we all did … In my day, it was ‘Yes, Mum; no, Mum. Yes, Dad; no, Dad’ and ‘You be in by 12’, and you were in by 12. But Elvis came, and he rocked, didn’t he? And so us kids stood up for the first time in our life and said, ‘We’re going to rock too’. We call it the start of our freedom, because it just sort of gave us that … little bit more confidence to say, ‘We’re going to go’. Mum and Dad would say, ‘I don’t want you going there’, but we’d say, ‘Oh, no, we’ll be fine’, and we’d go.

  But Kath also saw Elvis as a rather different kind of role model: ‘Nobody could say that he wasn’t good to his Mum, because his Mum was his number one. I mean, he just absolutely idolised his mother, and if his mother, Gladys, spoke, he obeyed, even though he was Elvis Presley’. Another festival-goer said, ‘He had the looks and the voice and was such a spiritual person. I actually joined a church because of him. I was an atheist before hearing him’.

  Elvis was more than mere music, however beautiful that was. ‘He’s got a charisma that transcends time’.
The word kept occurring. For Shirl from Tamworth, his image had never faded: ‘It’s the man, it’s his music; he has charisma … He has the whole package … Because of his music he can attract any age-group. He speaks out to all walks of life’. Elvis Lennox had the same perspective: ‘He was a most generous man – he knew what side of the tracks he came from. As a kid he struggled but he helped a lot of people because he knew what it was like, and never did drugs – only what was prescribed’. For his greatest fans, even when liberated by his music, he was always a model of rectitude – a law-abiding, patriotic man of morals and spirituality.

  For a handful of fanatics the visit to Parkes is akin to pilgrimage – a pale reflection of the trip to Graceland in Memphis, but memorable nonetheless. It doubles as a religious experience. As one student assistant, Rosie Jones, observed: ‘By pilgrimage, I mean it – the fervour of the knocking knees, swinging hips and pseudo-religious wailing of “Jailhouse Rock” in the streets gives the otherwise sleepy rural town, for just one week of the year, an almost sacred aura’. For the fanatics it is the presence of Elvis that gives it that aura: an annual rite, celebrating his birthday, communing with other true believers, focusing on gospel music and paying tribute to his image. Elvis gives meaning to their lives and, in the presence of other fanatics, Parkes becomes a special place.

  In search of the real Elvis

  There are others even more knowledgeable, dedicated and reverential than the fanatics. The year 1992 had been a good one for Elvis in Australia: the festival was planned, and Elvis Australia, the official Elvis Presley Fan Club, was launched. Members received a personal ‘King Card’ ID, a welcome letter from Graceland, a quarterly ‘Elvis Extra’ newsletter, a souvenir portrait of Elvis and a club sticker and pencil. The Champion-Post saw this as ‘a launching pad for a new social experience amongst avid Elvis fans’. Parkes welcomed the Fan Club, but the Fan Club proved to be rather less enthusiastic about Parkes.