Ticket stub for Melbourne Beatles concert, 1964

Beatlemania was real in 1964. Mass hysteria was inescapable when the Fab Four visited Australia on a whirlwind tour of just 13 days. This ticket stub for the Beatles' concert at Melbourne Festival Hall, Wednesday 17 June, would have been hot property at the time. If you missed the live concerts, you may have been granted a day off school on 1 July to watch a recording of their Melbourne TV show The Beatles Sing for Shell – an hour-long special on Channel 9.   

When the boys from Liverpool graced the first-floor balcony of the Southern Cross Hotel on 15 June 1964 to wave to their waiting fans, many teens were hurt in the crush; some were even hospitalised. On that date The Age newspaper reported that ‘six ambulances ran a shuttle service to take casualties to the Royal Melbourne and St Vincent’s hospitals’, ‘girls fainted but were carried along upright in the crush’, ‘one slightly built girl began hitting a man over the head with her stiletto shoe when he blocked her view’ and ‘one fell 10 feet into the crowd when the branch of a tree snapped’.