by John Connell
The Four Winds Festival on the fringe of Bermagui has shown that innovative classical music can succeed, even in seemingly unpropitious locations. ChillOut, Australia’s largest rural gay and lesbian festival, held in Daylesford, Victoria, has grown despite local fears and prejudices. Creativity may even be fixed in place, as at nearby Ootha, where from 2008 Utes in the Paddock (an open-air gallery of utes mounted in a parody of Stonehenge, and adorned with the art and graffiti of diverse bush artists) attracted people on their way to Parkes. In 2016 the installation was relocated to Condobolin. Australia is crammed with big things, from the famous Big Banana in Coffs Harbour to the somewhat less famous Big Gumboot in Tully and, most recently, the Big Bogan (‘who stands proud with his mullet, stubbies, singlet and Southern Cross tattoo’) in Nyngan, at the cultural heart of adjoining Bogan Shire.
Some festivals began for no special reason other than for entertainment – surely reason enough – and because local authorities wanted to enhance local cultural life. Others started as efforts to promote particular kinds of music, food, beer and sport. No Australian towns have emulated or displaced the Parkes Elvis Festival, but many have opportunities to develop their own idiosyncrasies and strategies, and have visited Parkes to see how it might be done. Just as Parkes once believed itself too staid for something as frivolous as Elvis, so other towns may still prefer more conservative images. As visitors from Orange, expecting something bizarre in Parkes, told us: ‘It’s a bit kooky. Orange is a bit too serious to do something like this’. Orange has its serious Food of Orange District festival, but in Parkes, being ‘kooky’ worked, and has continued to work.
‘Positive Parkes’
In 1956, when Elvis unleashed the rock ’n’ roll revolution, Parkes was a small and quite ordinary country town. The same cannot be said now. Its latest slogan – Positive Parkes – attests to optimism and success, a success that Elvis has supported. Local leadership, often the cause of festival failure elsewhere, has ensured this success, but then in Parkes most town councillors are more eager to make a contribution to the Elvis Festival Committee than the Waste Facilities Committee. Despite occasional tensions between the original committee and the council, burnout has been avoided. Now, in the other weeks of the year, the economy has stabilised, the worst drought years are over and the rains have returned, agriculture has survived in high-tech form and three supermarkets boost commerce.
Beyond the festival, Elvis sometimes worked overtime. A team from Parkes invariably went to the Country Week Expo in Sydney, an annual event designed to show off the virtues of country towns and attract new residents from the congested metropolis. Elvis often went too and his 2-metre-high image dominated the stand. He was even capable of saying ‘Thank yer very much’ as visitors passed by. It was a friendly, eye-catching image that made Parkes difficult to forget.
Out in suburbia Parkes is changing. The 2015 Festival first advertised a brand new place to dwell: the Gracelands Parkes Garden Estate, with development approval for over 400 houses, an aged-care facility and a 5-star Gracelands Country Club. Prospective owners could choose from four housing styles: Follow that Dream, Wild in the Country, Blue Hawaii and, presumably for those who dared to dislike Elvis, Country Cottage. Parkes is beginning to rise on Elvis’s back. Unlike many country towns, it is growing.
If there was any simple measure of Elvis’s adoption it comes not just in the form of the mayor, as bearded Elvis, clambering aboard the Elvis Express on its last stop before Parkes, fellow councillors behind him, but in the town’s police force becoming impersonators – though duty must still be done. Improbable and daunting indeed to be pulled up for a breathalyser test by Elvis and Priscilla, and a moment when some motorists may fail to enter into the spirit of the occasion.
Above all else the festival has succeeded because of the unpredictable and kaleidoscopic social interactions it fosters, the bizarre moments and strange encounters balanced with the finest of tribute artists and a myriad Elvii. Talking to people in the final week of writing this book we heard stories of staggeringly drunk men, with beer guts seriously straining see-through jumpsuits; ETAs singing to handicapped kids as their parents looked on in tears; rugby boys in full regalia upholding their malodorous club tradition; the mayor opening his house to a German backpacker who needed a place to sleep at short notice; a jumpsuited volunteer barging into Tara Moss outside the pub (and having no idea who she was); two Estonian men dropping their daks in unison in the midst of the renewal of wedding vows, to the horror of most of the crowd (and the disappointment of one woman, too late to catch the action, who sought an encore); and countless other hilarious, ludicrous and poignant encounters.
Quirkiness brought the crowds to Parkes, and friendly people kept them coming back. Barry Green summed it up:
The Parkes Elvis Festival is like a big banner over the top of the town. The people you meet, they’re what make it. They’ve come to enjoy themselves; they’re not here to make trouble. The visitors are friendly and the townspeople themselves. They make that extra effort to make the people feel welcome. I sometimes say at my gigs, to me Elvis is up above the town looking down on us, and we’re all here to enjoy ourselves.
As adolescent fans of Elvis now follow him to the grave, the festival has evolved and drawn in more and more who could never have known the King in his days of glory. That is an achievement. And it is also a challenge. While many visitors come back year after year, others fade away and bucket lists allow just one trip. As ShElvis put it: ‘The bandwagon for Elvis festivals may peter out’. Parkes has lasted, against the odds. For a few days each year the town emerges from its summer torpor and throws a giant party. As the last bars of the hundredth rendition of ‘Love Me Tender’ fade away and the main street loudspeakers are switched off for another year, Parkes returns once more to being an Australian country town, but one inhabited by Elvis for a quarter of a century. The Elvis Lennox Collection and the King’s Castle have ensured that he never leaves. More than a century ago, Parkes started life as a gold town. It has since found gold in a most improbable source, and the town can still hardly believe its luck.
EPILOGUE
Almost all those who did so much to create and maintain the Elvis Festival are still around the scene, though after a quarter of a century some limbs and voices have become rather frail. Elvis Revival Inc. still meets monthly, though committee numbers have fallen, and is actively debating with the council how to fund and where to put a $75 000 statue of Elvis, especially in relation to that of Sir Henry Parkes himself. They are even more excited about the possibility of getting Priscilla to come – or, failing that, beaming her in by video.
Now in his sixties, Elvis Lennox still opens his collection on demand, rather less often than during the festival, although his unpretentious suburban garage is somewhat overshadowed by the permanent King’s Castle collection. He has never stopped supporting the festival despite a little nostalgia for his own dancing days. He and Debby are still making Elvis suits to order, with appropriate leather belts, so good that they have acquired a national reputation and are purchased by tribute artists and fanatics. A Queensland fan came to the festival in 2015, admired the suits and ordered one for himself. A few weeks later Lennox got a call from the man’s daughter, enquiring if the suit was ready yet, but completion was still a week away: ‘What’s the rush?’ ‘Well,’ the daughter replied, ‘he passed away on Monday and we’d like to bury him in it’. The suit was finished in 48 hours. As Lennox pointed out: ‘I no longer had to do the back; no-one would ever see that’.
Bob and Anne Steel, like Elvis Lennox, are delighted with what they had created, and still amazed at how their wildest dreams turned out: as Anne said, ‘Finally, it’s done wonders … It’s exactly what I wanted it to be’. Sadly they sold Gracelands and it no longer plays a starring role in the festival. Bob Steel retired, worked on the Wall of Fame, and spent more time on his first love – 1920s motorbikes. Anne continues to run her portfolio – the Miss Priscilla competi
tion dinner. A whim had taken over their lives. In due course both the Steels received the medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for their services to Parkes.
Monique Kronk, after navigating the festival boom years, moved to a 25 000 acre property with a 7-kilometre-long driveway outside Goondiwindi, Queensland, where she was organising the Boulia camel races. Her abiding memory of the festival was ‘the smell of dozens of sweaty Elvis armpits and three-day-old lycra jumpsuits when I was scooped up for media photos’. Kelly Hendry, who briefly seemed just one more Sydney blow-in on a regional placement, is now the Parkes Destination Development Manager and emphatically a Parkes local. She might lack grandparents in the cemetery, but she is now more part of the town than even Elvis. Perhaps Kelly Reserve had anticipated her. Roel ten Cate, enthusiastic as ever about the festival, was bemoaning what he perceived to be the imminent demise of the Parkes Champion-Post , victim of Rupert Murdoch and the shift to online content, but he too was retiring.
Sadly, Crap Elvis retired to another life on the other side of the continent, in Perth, and never returned. He became a professional comedy stage hypnotist and hypnotherapist. Perhaps Jen Li had been hypnotised all the time. Dozens of superior tribute artists have also retired. Stan Kingham, who at 81 had probably done his last tributes, was battling cancer but still entertaining the Westmead hospital nurses with Elvis songs. Alvis, now the President of the Boars, is doing the rounds of the shire roads, and ShElvis the rounds of Sydney clubs. The Boars always travel to carnival games in Elvis jumpsuits, but most of the rugby boys have retired from playing; in any case, their fame lay off the pitch – and how often they scored remains a mystery.
Eddie Youngblood had retired, four years older than Elvis when he died, to become a marketing and entertainment manager. In 2014 he realised his life’s ambition to get to Graceland: ‘I simply wanted to stand over Elvis’s grave and to say thank you for everything you have given me’. Parkes’ own Elvis tribute artist, Barry Green, was winding down but still had 4000 sheep, a full head of hair and a collection of jumpsuits. He never became full-time: ‘At the end of the day, I’m not a full-time entertainer. I’m only a bloody farmer. I don’t perform during harvest, because we’ve got 4000 acres of crops’. Others, like Paul Fenech, were fading: ‘When you’re 57 years old it’s difficult to convince yourself you can still do it. The knees begin to object’.
We finally managed to catch the mayor of Parkes, Ken Keith, just as he had completed his sheep feeding and before he sat, in mayoral chain and Elvis suit, for a portrait to be painted for the prestigious Archibald Prize. He was hoping to emulate his predecessor’s record of 43 years as a councillor and 23 years as mayor, and he was anticipating that Elvis would be there throughout the journey.
NOTES
Parts of this book are drawn from some of our earlier published work on the festival, and unpublished reports to the Parkes Tourism Office, which contain more ‘data’. These include: Chris Brennan-Horley, John Connell and Chris Gibson, ‘The Parkes Elvis Revival Festival: Economic Development and Contested Place Identities in Rural Australia’, Geographical Research, 45(1), 2007; John Connell and Chris Gibson, ‘Outback Elvis: Musical Creativity in Rural Australia’, in Brett Lashua, ed., Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Place and Globalization, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014; and Jen Li and John Connell, ‘At Home with Elvis: Home Hosting at the Parkes Elvis Festival’, Hospitality and Society, 1(2), 2011. We have also jointly written Music Festivals and Regional Development in Australia (Ashgate, 2012) and edited Festival Places (Channel View, 2011), both of which include chapters on the festival. Music Festivals has a chapter on the Tamworth Country Music Festival, while Festival Places also has chapters on various Australian festivals from the Bundanoon Is Brigadoon Scottish Festival to the Daylesford ChillOut Festival.
Recent changes in rural and regional Australia are discussed in Rae Dufty-Jones and John Connell’s edited collection Rural Change in Australia (Ashgate, 2014), in which Chris Gibson has a chapter on ‘Rural Place-Making, Tourism and Creativity’. The struggles to repopulate regional Australia are discussed in John Connell and Phil McManus, Rural Revival? Place Marketing, Tree Change and Regional Migration in Australia (Ashgate, 2011). We have written about the relationships between festivals and droughts in Chris Gibson and John Connell, ‘The Role of Festivals in Drought-Affected Australian Communities’, Event Management, 15(4), 2015. There are a number of local histories of Parkes. The most comprehensive on recent times is Elizabeth Butel with Tom Thompson, Parkes 1983–2008: Generation of Change (2008).
The private enigma that was Elvis has meant there are literally hundreds of biographies and cultural analyses of Elvis. The better biographies include those by some of the great pop music analysts: Jerry Hopkins, Elvis: The Final Years (1981) and Peter Guralnick’s trilogy, the first of which is Last Train to Memphis (1994). Albert Goldman’s Elvis (1981) is a much more critical account. The quotation in the final chapter comes from Greil Marcus’s celebrated Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1990). For Elvis’s travels the most straightforward is Michael Gray and Roger Osborne’s The Elvis Atlas (1996). Gilbert Rodman’s Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend (1996) and Greil Marcus’s Dead Elvis (1991) are intriguing accounts of the cultural significance of Elvis, both rather before the festival era. Charlie Connelly (In Search of Elvis, 2007) delightfully tracks Elvis in multiple destinations, from Uzbekistan to Porthcawl. Adam Victor’s The Elvis Encyclopedia (2008) covers just about everything else one could ever want to know, and much more besides.
Lynn Spigel (‘Communicating with the Dead: Elvis as Medium’, Camera Obscura, 23, 1990) and Eric Lott (‘All the King’s Men: Elvis Impersonators and White Working Class Masculinity’, in Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, eds, Race and the Subject of Masculinities, 1997) offer much the best accounts of the complex worlds of Elvis tribute artists – at least in America. Erika Doss beautifully describes the fascinating world of Elvis fans in Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith and Image (1999). Joel Slemrod asks ‘Why Is Elvis on Burkina Faso Postage Stamps?’ in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 5, 2008.
Joanne Mackellar completed a PhD on serious fans and festivals in 2008 at Southern Cross University, and has since provided one account of the diversity of reasons for being at the Elvis Festival in ‘Dabblers, Fans and Fanatics: Exploring Behavioural Segmentation at a Special-Interest Event’, Journal of Vacation Marketing, 15(1), 2009. The notion of ‘serious leisure’ was developed by Robert Stebbins; see his book Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Times (2007). Donald Getz has written the useful ‘Why Festivals Fail’, Event Management, 7(4), 2002, which does not apply to the Elvis Festival, and also ‘The Nature and Scope of Festival Studies’, International Journal of Event Management and Research, 5(1), 2010, which covers the whole global gamut of festivals.
Numerous journalists have covered the festival and we have also benefited from their observations at times and in places where we went missing. The best of these include Richard Jinman, ‘Don’t tell Lance and Irene, but Elvis is in Parkes’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 1999, Beverley Hadgraft, ‘King of Hearts’, Sunday Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 24 June 2007, Emma Downey, ‘The King on Call’, The Land, 2 February 2012 and Mark Dapin’s ‘The Men who Would be Kings’ (Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, 2007), which is reprinted in his book Strange Country (2008) as ‘50 Million Elvis Impersonators Can’t be Wrong’.
The delights and horrors of Australia’s roadside attractions have been well documented in David Clark’s Big Things (2004). Greg Page’s adventures with Elvis are recounted in his autobiography Now and Then: The Life-Changing Journey of the Original Yellow Wiggle (2011) and his treasures, including all those in the King’s Castle, are discussed in the colourful Greg Page and David Johnstone, Elvis: His Story, His Treasures (2014).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book involved countless enjoyable trips to Parkes, more than a thousand visitor and bu
siness surveys, hundreds of interviews with festival-goers, organisers, home hosters and local residents conducted over more than a decade (2003–16). Some names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty. All this could not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of Kelly Hendry, who responded to our initial inquiry with gusto, invited us to be a part of the annual Elvis festival family, and when possible shouted us train tickets and pub accommodation. We also thank subsequent Parkes tourism and festival staff for their help and input, notably Monique Kronk, Beth Link, Cathy Treasure and especially Katrina Dwyer. We must particularly thank Steve Elvis and Debby Lennox, Anne and Bob Steel, Roel ten Cate, Tom Stuart, Michael Greenwood, Lorraine Job, Al Gersbach, Alan Payne, Scott Rayner and the mayor, Ken Keith. We are indebted to the many visitors and shopkeepers who filled out our forms and filled up our recording devices, and the buskers and tribute artists, notably Eddie Youngblood, Barry Green, Paul Fenech, Sheryl Scharkie, Jacqueline Feilich, Scott Crawford, Terry Leonard, Norm Bakker, Alan Gordon and Paul Reynolds. Naturally we are grateful that NewSouth, especially Phillipa McGuinness and Emma Driver, had faith in us. We are even more grateful that they found Tricia Dearborn, who did a superb editing job. We particularly thank the United States Consul, Hugo Llorens, for providing a distinctive American perspective. We must thank Katie Schlenker for helping with early data, Alissa Dinallo for design, Josephine Pajor-Markus for assistance with the maps and Steve Ostini for the superb front cover photograph. Each year that we attended the festival to conduct surveys and interviews, we brought with us a group of energetic student volunteers from the Universities of Sydney and Wollongong, who manned stalls, collected data, got drunk, sang in the local pubs and introduced us to the wonders of Tinder, as they, of a different generation, were introduced to the wonders of Elvis, and surprised themselves by enjoying it. The following people made a generous and gregarious input: Jen Li especially, who was with us almost from the beginning and was still there at the end, Chris Brennan-Horley, Nick Skilton, Anna Stewart, Robbie Begg, Shane Newman, Brad Ruting, Kat Maiden, Rosie Jones and Brandon Sherman. We would like to thank Kat Maiden and, as so often before, Robert Aldrich, for pointing out the many flaws in previous drafts of the book. A special thanks too to Elyse Stanes for her own voluntary research, and her help in pulling teams together and providing all-important technical assistance with surveys, iPads and recorders. Jen and Brandon got into the festival spirit by getting engaged soon after the 2015 Festival. We anticipate that before long they too will be renewing their wedding vows with Elvis.
