Skyhooks’ emerged into Australian popular culture with a novel trait; singing about things which were actually Australian.

Sadie, the cleaning lady
With trusty scrubbing brush and pale of water
“Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)” – Johnny Farnham (1967)

Home, Home, goin’ alone to the sound of the military brass
Home, home, lovin’ alone, layin’ on Arkansas grass
“Arkansas Grass” – Axiom (1969)

He bought his first dope outside the South Yarra Arms
“Toorak Cowboy” – Skyhooks (1974)

It is a widely held view that Robert Menzies was the most ardent anglophile to ever lead this country. His first visit to England, at age 41, was said to have been a profoundly emotional experience, prompting him to exclaim that he had finally come “home”.

Indeed, sections of his 1963 speech during a reception for the Queen at Parliament House, such as describing Her Majesty as “the living and lovely centre of our enduring alliance” and the reading from the work of 17th-century poet Thomas Ford (“I did but see her passing by/And yet I love her till I die”) are an entrenched part of Australian political folklore.

When viewing the black and white promotional film clip for John Farnham’s 1967 monster hit “Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)” through modern eyes, the first thing one is struck by is its (in the most clichéd sense of the term) “Englishness” – there’s the accent in the vocals, there’s the George Formby arrangement, not to mention the terminally polite (some would say quaint) persona that Farnham presents here.

However, I would argue that on closer inspection several things reveal themselves: the English accent actually comes and goes, giving the vocal performance a tentative quality – it is the sound of someone ‘hedging their bets’; the all-smiling politeness reveals itself to be closer to a sort of desperate obsequiousness.

Rather than the “cheeky Cockney chappie” that Farnham seems to be going for, he comes across more like a bashful choirboy too eager to please. In short, this is not what Englishness looks like. This is what someone aspiring to Englishness looks like.

Even though he was a year out of office by that stage, it is easy to sense the spectre of Menzies and his perception of British superiority (the Australian-born and bred PM also famously announced that he was “British to his bootstraps”) looming large here.

(I am aware that the preceding example could possibly be clouded by the fact that Farnham was born in England, but I would submit that as an artist he has always identified as Australian and was indeed “crowned” Australian Of The Year in the nation’s bicentennial year no less.)

Fast forward to the mid-‘70s. And Skyhooks make their first appearance (playing “Horror Movie”) on the newly-minted pop TV show “Countdown”. Much has changed.


The election of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister in 1972 changed the landscape significantly for the arts scene in Australia

In fact, we’re now Alice through the proverbial looking glass: black and white is now colour (1975 marked the introduction of colour TV in Australia); Farnham’s forelock tugging has been replaced by a palpable irreverence or, to use Australian vernacular, “piss-taking”; ‘smart’ suits have been replaced by garish faux-glam garb; naiveté replaced by a worldly, sneering cynicism; and the innocuous (a less charitable onlooker might say vacuous) lyrical content of poor old “Sadie” replaced by socio-political comment by way of a simple yet stunningly effective “horror film equals television news” metaphor (“Horror movie, it’s the 6.30” is, as the cliché goes, more relevant now than ever).

Looking at this performance in a bit more detail, one’s attention is drawn to the following: in lead singer Graeme “Shirley” Strachan’s facial expressions and general demeanour, there’s more than a hint of “I could take it or leave it”.

In fact at times, as Peter Wilmoth observed in “Glad All Over”, Shirl here gives the distinct impression that he would rather be surfing. There’s also the (not so) small matter of the ludicrously large outstretched hand painted on the crotch of his tight satin jumpsuit); the gladiator’s hat worn by drummer Imants “Freddie” Strauks; the black lipstick, white make-up and long black hair on Bob “Bongo” Starkie, ensuring that he bears more than a passing resemblance to a pantomime Lady MacBeth; and of course Redmond “Red” Symons who, with his blood-red Elvis cape and sub-kabuki make-up, is a remarkable combination of ingénue, geisha and the devil himself.

‘Horror Movie’ was written by Skyhooks’ bassist Greg Macainish (who wrote most of the band’s material). As he told The Age’s Jeff Jenkins in 2004, authenticity was a primary concern in his song-writing.

“They (the songs) had to be about places I’d actually been to,” he said. “I was a bit sceptical about ‘Arkansas Grass’ by Axiom because I’m not sure any of the guys had been to Arkansas. And the song’s about the American Civil War and I was sure they hadn’t been to the war.”

Billy Pinnell, a 50-year veteran of the Melbourne radio scene, says that Macainish’s songs “exploded the cultural cringe” and in the process “legitimised Australian song-writing”.

Freddie Strauks also alludes to a “cultural cringe” in Glad All Over when he mentions that up until the period under discussion “Australian musicians had an image of themselves as being less than good”. In plain terms, what we are talking about here is an old-fashioned inferiority complex.

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So did this new attitude, this new-found pride in being an Australian musician emerge out of a vacuum, or was there something going on in the broader socio-political arena that helped create the conditions in which a band like Skyhooks could flourish? What was happening?

Gough Whitlam was happening, that’s what. First coming to power in 1972, Whitlam himself stated in “The Whitlam Government: 1972-1975”, that his first task was to formulate “an acceptable philosophical basis for a major government commitment to the arts and cultural activity, something more than the provision of additional funds”.

Implicit here seems to be that over and above simply throwing money at the problem, Gough sought to somehow instil in Australians an outlook that would help the arts to flourish. And, as he lamented at the time that “many of our finest artists are working overseas”, it could be assumed that addressing/redressing the infamous “cultural cringe” would have formed at least some part of that “philosophical basis”.

In “Glad All Over”, Red Symons makes explicit the connection between this governmental mood-setting and Skyhooks’ success: “The national pride that Whitlam had encouraged meant that we could suddenly be proud of ourselves as Australians.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines a revolution as a “dramatic and wide-reaching change in conditions, attitudes, or operation”. Under that definition, a strong argument could be made that in the mid-‘70s, Skyhooks, with the Whitlam-led change in conditions and their new attitudes and modes of operation, were spearheading nothing less than a revolution.

Every revolution needs a manifesto. And for Skyhooks, it came in the form of their debut album “Living In The Seventies”. It’s their “Das Kapital” (or “Little Red Book” at a pinch); and it sets out their agenda over the course of its 10 tracks.

Three of the songs name check Australian locales. In fact, in all three cases you don’t even have to wait until the lyrics kick in as the references are in the titles themselves.

“Carlton (Lygon St Limbo)” chronicles the “spaced out faces” in and around the “pizza places” along the strip close to Melbourne University – students of which made up a fair slice of Skyhooks’ audience, at least in the early days

“Toorak Cowboy” takes a shot at the rich and the aimless with specific place references coming thick and fast (“He gets his hair cut at Marini’s, and he drives a Lamborghini”; “He bought his first dope outside the South Yarra Arms”).

And in “Balwyn Calling”, the hapless narrator tries in vain to fend off unwanted advances from a girl who lives in, you guessed it, Balwyn (“Well you thought she would be a one nighter, But now she wants to squeeze you tighter, cos you ain’t safe when you get home, she’s gonna call you on the telephone, Hey boy that’s Balwyn calling…”).

There’s also the curious case of Red Symons’ “Smut” which paints a rather seedy picture of a night out at the cinema and has the main protagonist deploying a packet of Twisties (an Australian brand) in a way that I’m sure the original makers could not have (and would not want to have) predicted.


It’s easy to draw a line back to Skyhooks when hearing Paul Kelly’s iconic opening lines to his song “Leaps And Bounds”.

By 1977, however, the revolution was over. The less arts-focussed Malcolm Fraser was firmly entrenched as PM and, according to Whitlam, had The Lodge’s music room converted into a “second toilet”. And Skyhooks’ own bête noire, Sherbet, had well and truly taken over the mantle of Australia’s biggest band with their massive hit “Howzat” (Sherbet’s days as a force were numbered, too, as it turns out, but that’s another story).

But in a sense the “damage” had been done. Skyhooks may have lost the fight but, due to the huge influence they had on subsequent Australian songwriters, they won the war. Indeed we can see their influence everywhere: in Australian Crawl’s hit “Beautiful People”, in which James Reyne sings about (beautiful) people “going out tonight to get their Bombay rocks off” (Bombay Rock being a notorious beer barn on Brunswick’s Sydney Rd), as well as the Reyne-penned “Reckless” which talks about watching the Manly ferry cutting “its way to Circular Quay”; in the way Stephen Cummings name checks Russell Street police headquarters in The Sports’ “Boys (What Did The Detectives Say?”.

It’s in the songs of Cold Chisel’s Don Walker such as “Flame Trees” (his ode to Grafton), “Home And Broken Hearted” (“hiked up to Sydney in the week before Christmas, it was 38 degrees in the shade, bought a second-hand Morris for a cheap 220 and I drove it down to Adelaide”), the blistering travelogue of “Houndog’ (“ride the line to Hornsby station, find my circus animals again”), as well as ‘Saturday Night’, a song about Sydney which shares its name with a Skyhooks song about Melbourne.

And it is relatively easy to draw a line back to Skyhooks when hearing Paul Kelly’s now-iconic opening lines to his song “Leaps And Bounds” (“I’m high on the hill looking over the bridge, to the MCG, and way up on high, the clock on the silo says 11 degrees”).

Whitlam’s legacy endures too, with programs initiated by his government such as the recognition of China, Legal Aid, Medicare, and even the national anthem (but unfortunately not free tertiary education) still with us to this day in one form or another.

One of the more successful modern chroniclers of the Australian urban experience by way of place name-checking is Newtown songwriter Tim Freedman.

Songs of his that reference Australian places include “Melbourne” (“walking around the rainy city when there are things to do at home”); “Love This City” (“holding court on Taylor Square”); and “God Drinks At The Sando” about the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown.

The debt that Freedman owes Skyhooks was made relatively clear when in 1999 his band released a cover of Greg Macainish’s “Women In Uniform”, Skyhooks’ last top 10 hit in 1978 before the almost-novelty comeback single “Jukebox In Siberia” in 1990. And the name of Freedman’s band? The Whitlams, of course.