24/01/2026
56 years.
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56 years ago - and only five months after Woodstock - teenagers, hippies and "groovy oldies" flocked to Australia's first rock festival - "Pilgramage For Pop" a two day open-air festival of Love, Peace and Music kicked off at Noon Saturday 24 January and again at Sunrise 25 January, 1970
βοΈ Star appearances included *Nutwood Rug, *Tully, *Doug Parkinson in Focus, *Levi Smith Clefs, *Max Merritt & The Meteors, *Tamam Shad, *Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, *Jeff St. John & The Copperwine, *John Sangster, *Wendy Saddington, *The Chain, *Heart & Soul, *Slime Me and *Adrian Rawlings.
πSun-Herald & Sydney Morning Herald, 25 & 26 January 1970
Pilgrimage for Pop, Music Festival. OURIMBAH, Saturday 24 January 1970 - Security guards on horseback today chased off pop fans who tried to sneak into the Ourimbah festival without paying.
They kept up continuous patrols of the 700-acre farm, seven miles north of Gosford. A crowd of 6,000 teenagers, hippies and groovy "oldies" packed into the farm for the scheduled two day festival.
By 10 o'clock last night the crowd had swelled to 11,000. On the huge rostrum the Nutwood Rug band, the group who instigated the festival, opened the show.
Their lead singer, Margaret Goldie, immediately brought roars of encouragement with one of her first songs.
Its lyrics featured a four-letter word, screamed repeatedly into the highpowered microphone.
The crowd jumped to Its feet and shouted as Miss Goldie sang. Police standing nearby merely smiled. The festival, on a farm owned by Lt. Col. Henry Nicholls, a converted pop enthusiast, resembled a huge fair.
Bazaar stalls sold pop clothes, purses and incense candles while food and drink vendors did a roaring trade. Almost the only people with short hair were police, Press men and about 30 security vigilantes.
J. A. C. DUNN wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald on the Monday after the festival... From Friday night until Sunday night the rich fresh air over the Ourimbah pop festival was filled, at one or another time and place with:
1 An atmosphere of gentle chaos.
2 Windblown thistledown.
3 The mingled smells of incense, food and sunbaked (or dew-soaked) foliage.
4 Red dust.
5 The impassioned shrieks, moans, occult lyrics and occasionally quite beautiful melodies of highly amplified pop music.
6 Smoke from dozens of campfires.
7 The low, steady rumbling of 10,000 people all talking in a valley, punctuated by the squeals of people swimming in a muddy billabong and the valiant bellow of a Gosford man who had 30,000 cans of Coca-Cola he hoped to sell' in 48 hours β"Icee _Cowuld Cokah _Cowlah."
8 The ceaseless chiming of a colony of unquellable bellbirds.
9 The snarls, roars and metallic throat-clearings of motor bikes accelerating, trucks grinding in low gear and sporty mufflers challenging anything on wheels.
10 The wire-taut aura of a subtle, intangible but unmistakable mass consciousness of that magic word "o**y."
But the chaos remained manageable. It was born of a meticulously detailed organisational plan designed to eliminate injury, disease, violence, discomfort and general larrikinism, applied to a huge body of disparate people most of whom were largely unconcerned with things like admission tickets, rubbish bins, Victorian standards of behaviour and (in some cases) the law. The child of this mating was active but tractable enough so that police could stand around chatting and smiling.
The smells were not overpowering. The dust did not choke. The music was, paradoxically, both esoteric and catholic, ranging from raucously surrealistic didgeridoo to polished, familiar blues. The forest did not burn. The bellbirds did not flee. The trucks did not tangle, the cars did not crash, no one was mangled bv a motorbike.
And that fascinating spectre of "o**y" with which everybody was so preoccupied never quite materialised. Oh, a few people swam naked beneath the lush bushes sheltering Ourimbah Creek, and one young man had drunk himself into a stupor before the first note of music was played, and the slow, slightly limping swagger of a helmeted Hell's Angel hinted at a peculiarly American sort of impending doom.
But only a few photographers prowled among the camp fires after dark, searching for tents of wickednessβand they were _stretching it if they called the activity they saw sin.
The festival was well named "Pilgrimage for Pop," because almost all the people came both dressed for the occasion and disciplined for it. They spent two whole days listening to music by either wandering aimlessly, or sitting in a throng in front of the big stage, or gathered in groups under trees, where they stayed in the shade and so looked from a distance much like very colourful windfallen fruit.
If you squinted a bit and let imagination soften the edge of reality the festival scene became something close to planned theatre. For example, an air of make-believe was lent to the occasion by what might be described as the Ourimbah Cavalry, a small troop of local men mounted on horses who patrolled the grounds to ward off such evils as gate-crashers and fence-climbers.
And, of course, there were the pilgrims themselves. They streamed down the narrow Ourimbah Creek Road bearing bundles and boxes and bulging " rucksacks, like refugees, wearing caftans, shirts with Sanskrit writing on them, astonishing demonstrations of the versatility of Basic Blue Jeans, fascinating variations on the Digger Hat theme, booted or barefoot, adorned with shawls and belts and scarves and peace pendants and jewellery made of beercan rings, or swathed in various interpretations of the poncho concept. A harvest of hair would have produced a bumper crop.
The pop pilgrims' appearance was, in fact, generally so fiercely, obsessively individualistic that after a while it had a reverse effect and you got the feeling that everybody had actually arrived naked except for their clothes. If you felt ill-equipped, you could buy mad gear at little stallsβbeads and belts and floppy hats and filmy minidresses.
Those local citizens who did not actually take a hand in management, such as collecting tickets, burying rubbish, putting up shower stalls and directing hundreds of cars on to parking paddocks, spent the weekend sitting on their doorsteps marvelling at the ceaseless traffic, or frankly ogling the strange, bearded, beaded people who jammed the local pub on Friday and Saturday nights.
One waitress in a nearby cafe became almost jocular about the whole business. When asked for directions to the site of the festival she pointed at a group of very mod young pilgrims heading out of the cafe door and said with a guarded smile, "Just follow the hair."
[Photo courtesy Sydney Morning Herald Archives]
