I might swing away from school for the moment, poking my nose, eyes and ears out into the wider world.

Australia was a very different nation in those days. You could probably count the number of students who could use chopsticks on the fingers of one hand. If not for a trickle of Greeks, Italians and other odd Europeans, Australia was a monoculture. We were slowly moving out of the British orbit, but drawing closer to America than Asia.

ANZUS was a reality. We and New Zealand were fighting in Vietnam alongside the USA. The UK was not. American troops were on the streets of Sydney for R&R breaks from the war, American television shows were edging British programmes off our screens, and “All the Way with LBJ!” had been a recent election slogan.

Gough Whitlam, not quite there

It was Richard Nixon in 1970. Former US Vice President Nixon, elected as President two years earlier after a narrow loss to John F Kennedy in 1960, was to end American involvement in Vietnam. Watergate, re-election in 1972 and resignation two years later were still in the future, and for the rest of our high school years he would entertain us with bizarre scandals.

In Canberra, the long-standing dominance of Robert Menzies had come to an end, and Australia was governed by a succession of leaders who, like Nixon, assumed they were masters of their destiny. Harold Holt had been sucked away by the sea, the Country Party’s “Black Jack” McEwen had been a caretaker PM until the realities of coalition politics kicked in, and though his Liberal successor John Grey Gorton had won a slender victory over Labor’s Gough Whitlam in 1969, popular support was leaking away from his government.

It was to drain even faster under the ridiculous figure of Billy McMahon, a loser in the “It’s Time” landslide of 1972. Whitlam, with his contempt for middle Australia, found support slipping, faster than any of his predecessors, until he was shown the door by Kerr and booted through it by the voters. It was a time of political leaders who thought that all they had to do was occupy the top spot and they would rule forever.

Joh, Queensland's powerhouse

In Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who from his ever-tenous support base of less than 30% of the voters never took any election for granted, was a recent arrival in the Premier’s office after the surprise death of Robert Nicklin in late 1968. He presided over a period of growth and prosperity for the state. Every month there would be news of new suburbs, new mines, new opportunities.

His local counterpart, Clem Jones, was the Labor Lord Mayor, as much a powerhouse as Joh. He took what the rest of Australia saw as a big country town with dirt roads and outhouses and made it into a capital to be proud of. Throughout our time there were bridges and freeways built, skyscrapers rising, suburbs spreading. And schools and universities established. I scored a few minutes with him when he came down to Canberra for the Constitutional convention, and all I could do was ask him about the time he personally prepared the Gabba wicket for a Test Match.

Exciting times for any observer of popular culture. The conservative views that had reigned for generations were dissolving as the Baby Boomers entered adulthood, the workforce and politics. Global communications of satellite transmissions and ever-increasing bandwidth brought the world and outside influences closer.

Black and white became colour. In television, newspapers, opinions.

–Peter Mac

Australian Top Ten – 7 March 1970

–Go-Set Magazine

Pete’s Jukebox

Elvis Presley was by now a classic part of the American influence in Australia. Not yet the pathetic, bloated figure of 1977, the 1970 video shows him in his prime.

“Flaming Star!” Mrs Podevin exclaimed when somebody mentioned the 1960 Elvis film. “That was the first movie I went on a date with someone.” For a moment she was sixteen once more, and I resolved to look up when the movie had been released here. 1923, I imagined.

Knocking out hits in music and film since the mid-50s, Elvis was a cultural icon. For the Baby Boomers, he was a role model, a heartache, an inspiration. He could make middle-aged women weak above the knees.

Like President Nixon, his future was bizarre and downhill. In December 1970 the two got together, with an uncomfortable Nixon making Presley some semi-official anti-drugs crusader. Ever after, Nixon was remembered for corruption and Presley for drugs, with both implausibly regarding themselves as innocent.

Today I stumbled from my bed
With thunder crashing in my head
My pillow still wet, from last night’s tears,,,

Don’t cry daddy
Daddy please don’t cry
Daddy you still got me and little Tommy
Together we’ll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy ride us on your back again
Oh daddy please don’t cry.

The song calls for a return to the good old days, a call that Elvis – and Nixon – should have heeded. Sad, like so many of Elvis’s songs now, Don’t Cry Daddy did well in the charts, reaching Number Six in the US and Number Three in Australia. Burning Love in 1972 was the only later Elvis song to do better. His last Number One had been Suspicious Minds in 1969. The trend was downhill.

Don’t Cry, Daddy was one of Presley’s last good songs. The hits were getting scarcer and the performances, both live and studio, increasingly shakier. Kentucky Rain, released in 1970, described a search for a woman who had left the singer, perhaps echoing the increasing distance between Elvis and his wife in real life.

The Beatles (still together, more or less, in 1970) were embracing new themes and musical styles, but Elvis, rooted in gospel and rockabilly, was not one to go with the flow of the times. Other bands, other performers took over Elvis’s territory.

Elvis’s death in 1977, and that of Michael Jackson in 2009, prompted many to mutter “Good career move”. I have no doubt that shrines to Jackson will prove as popular as Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis, where “The King” reigns and the middle-aged worship.

I visited, years later, staying at the Peabody downtown, rather than Heartbreak Hotel, just along Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. But I couldn’t pass through Memphis without a stop along the way to think of Elvis. Elvis had been a familiar part of my childhood, part of the soundtrack of my early life, always there in the background, like the Beatles and Frank Sinatra.

There’s an Elvis song for every occasion, and if his later tracks were sad and sentimental, the earlier ones were full of love and fire, life and passion sizzling out of them with every fling of those famous hips.

I’m not one for flock posters of Elvis in his prime, nor do I have the complete set of his films, sighing over smouldering romance in the wee hours. But he’s on my iPod, here and there. Not Don’t Cry, Daddy, though. Some songs are probably best described as “interred”.

–Peter Mac

Related posts:

1. 14 March 1970: Dreaming
2. 21 February 1970: Mental blocks.
3. 14 February 1970: Hearts and soles