Music festivals in the 1970s offered unprecedented opportunities for enterprising promoters and homegrown musicians, and were spaces where participants enacted ideals of counterculture and community building.

In January 1970, 5 months after Woodstock, the small NSW town of Ourimbah hosted Australia’s first major music festival.

In 1973, the Aquarius Festival moved off campus to the Northern New South Wales town of Nimbin.

Billy Thorpe, along with his band The Aztecs, was one of Australia’s biggest pop stars of the 1960s.

The organisers of the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin chose not to engage with the music industry, declaring in their manifesto that they would not be ‘sold’ culture.

The Great Australian Rock Festival – Sunbury ‘73 was the inaugural album release for the newly formed Mushroom Records.

Arguably one of the reasons that the 1972 Sunbury festival is so well remembered is because of the festival concert film Sunbury ’72.

A poster advertising the tour of the Sunbury '72 concert film accompanying performances by rock band Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

This video montage celebrates the 50th anniversary of Young Talent Time's first episode on 24 April 1971.

Sunbury’s 1973 iteration has been hailed by several pundits as the most successful of the Sunbury festivals.