Tony Robinson Four Days in June: the Liberation of a Teenage Generation
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Tony Robinson Four Days in June: the liberation of a teenage generation THE INCREASINGLY UNCONTROLLABLE reaction to public appearances of the Beatles, born in late 1963 and christened ‘Beatlemania’ by the time of their early 1964 American tour, foreshadowed the band’s mid-year Australian visit. En route, Amsterdam police, despite the recall of 2000 officers and a willingness to employ rubber clubs, were unable to prevent 30 over-enthusiastic fans clambering aboard Queen Juliana’s royal boat as it escorted the band along the city’s famed canals. ‘We might as well have mobilised the army, it wouldn’t have made any difference’ was the exasperated force’s rueful impression.1 Stopping briefly in Beirut, an angry airport manager, perhaps channelling Alabama police chief Bull Connor, ordered the mass hosing of fans.2 At Bangkok airport Thai police struggled to deal with a ‘near riot’ of 1000 screaming fans.3 Hong Kong’s reaction was no less ebullient, culminating in a ransacking of the band’s hotel rooms immediately after their departure, eager fans helping themselves to any mementoes, apple cores and cigarette butts included.4 Like the radioactive clouds of Neville Shute’s On the Beach, filmed in Melbourne only five years earlier, Beatlemania was sweeping south. As Australia prepared itself for the thrall Hong Kong police happily handballed a thankless job to Melbourne’s CIB headquarters, offering only that ‘you’ve got the Beatles now and may providence help y o u’. 5 Charged with managing the exuberance of Sydney’s youth who would after the Beatles made a midnight stop-over in Darwin, be the first Australians to greet the band, police Superintendent George Barnes grappled with the unknown. Fire hoses were at the ready, he declared, as a ‘last resort’.6 Barnes hoped it wouldn’t come to that, imploring fans to simply ‘behave’.7 While the fictional Austin Powers would build a comedy genre around this same edict four decades later, acceptable public behaviour was a serious civic construct in mid- 1960s Melbourne. A city named after a lord, capital of a state named after a monarch, was perhaps bound to slavishly imitate British sensibilities. The mid-nineteenth century gold rush underpinned Marvellous Melbourne’s spectacular rise but came at a huge cost in the form of an equally spectacular economic bust. The twentieth century brought with it austerity and a reasserted moral conservatism, allowing the city to frown in equal measure on financial and moral misadventure. Seeking to distance themselves from the excesses of the city’s first sixty years, Melburnians spent the next sixty eschewing loose behaviour and social modernity. The influence of the temperance movement, responsible for the closure of up to half of the 160 161 Four Days in June: the liberation of a teenage generation Rennie Ellis, photographer, [Beatles greeting crowds at the Southern Cross Hotel, Melbourne, 14 June 1964]. Courtesy of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria [H2011.2/82; H2011.2/83] state’s hotels between 1900 and the early 1920s and avidly supportive of the 1930 and 1938 referenda on liquor license abolition,8 endured through heavily restrictive licensing laws. Liquor’s moral twin, gambling, continued to test the patience of legislators who had long known of the population’s susceptibility to temptation, and only by the closest of Parliamentary votes in 1961, legalised an off-course totaliser. No expression of rectitude was stronger than Melbourne’s enduring Sunday coma, a day devoted almost exclusively to religious observance. Beyond church services, the 98.9% of Victorians who professed Christianity in the early 1960s9 were provided ample opportunity to exercise their faith. In 1961 Australian commercial radio featured 283 hours per week of religious programming10 and television was no less devoted, Melbourne viewers able to choose between three Sunday religious programs on HSV 7 alone. While Sundays in mid-1960s Melbourne have been held up as an example of ‘a city remarkably devoid of commercial activity and public entertainment’,11 it is more 160 161 The La Trobe Journal accurate to say the decade witnessed the beginning of a sustained and ultimately successful challenge to an era of suffocating dullness. The vast majority of shops were prohibited from opening on Sunday and 1964 began with cinemas subject to laws rooted in the age of George III.12 Melbourne’s matrons had not heard of Jean Shrimpton, much less been shocked by her ‘gloveless, stockingless, and hatless’13 Flemington Oak’s Day appearance, and Carlton was yet to greet either its first pizza shop or Ron Barassi. Football, of indisputable cultural significance, was confined to Saturdays in its VFL form and would have to wait until 1970 before being permitted on a Sunday, and then only as a one-off event in tribute to a royal visit. A dedicated Sunday newspaper was still five years away. The 1960s are commonly referred to as a decade of marked social transition but the currents of change were only stirring in 1964. Cinemas were granted the right to open for profit on Sunday evenings but only in response to the continuous circumnavigation of restrictions by entrepreneurs who had been imposing charges for programmes and seat reservations rather than admission.14 Football’s second tier code, the VFA, had established a Sunday foothold in a few municipalities. Six o’clock closing endured but a successful mid-50s New South Wales extension of hotel trading to 10pm ensured ongoing agitation for change within the ruling Victorian Liberal Country Party government. Commercial radio was agitating for change. Between 1961 and 1964 the total amount of free air time dedicated to religious broadcasting in Australia decreased by more than 20%.15 Program Manager at 3XY, Dick Heming, drew the ire of some listeners with his secular push, one declaring she had ‘prayed to the Lord that [he] be struck dead’.16 Melbourne’s Sunday tedium had its defenders, state MP Campbell Turner amongst them. In 1962 Turner lamented ‘the failure of Parliament to carry out the law in respect of the law of Sunday’, a day on which he would ‘sooner see children at home with their parents or at church’ than be tempted by sport and other attractions such as ‘these new fangled bowling alleys’, operating in defiance of the long standing laws.17 Reform of Sunday restrictions came slowly; speaking on the 1967 Sunday Entertainment Bill, Chief Secretary Arthur Rylah quoted an undertaking by the Cinematograph Exhibition Association that it would, if permitted to open earlier on Sundays, refrain from screening ‘horror films or other objectionable films at these sessions’. He urged the industry to follow television’s lead by ensuring that a ‘very good type of film is shown on Sunday night’, and warned that if this was not the case the legislation would be repealed.18 That the swinging sixties arrived in Melbourne later than elsewhere can be demonstrated by the thin pickings in the Age entertainment column the day before the Beatles’ arrival; beyond the National Gallery’s three hour afternoon’s opening and a North Melbourne Art Gallery exhibition, only two soccer matches and three Victorian Football Association matches were on offer.19 Amidst this poverty of choice the widely publicised Sunday afternoon arrival of the Beatles was an irresistible attraction. 162 Four Days in June: the liberation of a teenage generation Rennie Ellis, photographer, ‘1964 Beatles Tour Programme signed to Kenn Brodziak [the tour promoter]’. Courtesy of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria [H2011.2/77; H2011.2/78] Older Melburnians, comfortable with the heavily regulated Sabbath, may have looked to the city’s recent history in their hope the band’s arrival would not generate civic misadventure. They were not without reason. The respectful pubescent reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s 1954 and 1963 visits surely spoke of a young citizenry’s innate maturity, as did the huge 1959 attendances at evangelist Billy Graham’s rallies which drew the largest crowd ever recorded at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.20 Compared to these powerful displays of respectfulness, the frenzied late 1960 airport greeting of music star Johnny O’Keefe might be considered an isolated event attributed to the novelty of rock and roll, if not overlooked altogether.21 The Beatles’ Essendon Airport reception was exuberant but in a predictable and manageable way; a morning crowd of around 200022 welcomed Ringo Starr, reuniting with the band after hospitalisation for tonsillitis. Fourteen year-old Marilyn Arthur screamed so hard that she ‘burst a blood vessel in her throat’,23 thus becoming the first of hundreds of teenage casualties in Melbourne over the next few days. By mid-afternoon when the remainder of the band arrived the airport crowd had more than doubled but their excitement was only a hint of what lay ahead. Victoria 163 The La Trobe Journal Police, over 1300 officers short of the strength recommended by Chief Commissioner Porter six years earlier,24 mustered 300 officers, a score fresh from the Police Depot. A troop of mounted police was also on hand but long before the band arrived at the Southern Cross Hotel, the city’s bold tribute on the corner of Exhibition and Russell streets to modern architecture and the dawning jet set age, it was clear more help would be needed. Civilians, recognising the dangerous crush that was building, were quick to assist, and hundreds linked hands with police to maintain access.25 Of the quarter of a million who turned out between the airport and city to witness the arrival,26 20,000 packed tightly around the hotel, overwhelming the best efforts of police, army and navy personnel and civilian volunteers to hold them back.