“I was born into the golden age of ‘baby boomers’, the 1950s; and grew up on Sydney’s lower north shore. Life was simple, but not without its challenges as my parents struggled to build a home and acquire the must-have modern appliances of the time. Our extended family included dozens of cousins, which was typical of Italian communities. About six of them were around my age. Outside of school was mostly unsupervised, so we made our own entertainment - visiting friends and playing in the local bush, creeks and river. Our push bikes were the link to each new adventure, including pocket money delivering newspapers and telegrams. 

It was the Beatles who turned me on to music in 1964. I saw all their movies at the local theatre and knew the words to all their songs. 

I think my first live concert experience was Little Pattiesinging at the local shopping mall; where I joined the older kids dancing to the Stomp. Later my cousins and I got to the Pop Spectaculars at the old Trocadero – it used to stand where the current Hoyts debacle is at Town Hall station. These were great concerts - Zoot, Sherbet, Ted Mulry Gang, John Paul Young- they all dressed up in crazy costumes, sang jingle songs and everyone danced.

The innocence of childhood took a twist in High School as I was one of the Italian wogs and a dago, but once the Yugoslavs turned up, the heat was thankfully passed to them. Together, and with the rest of the class, we were lashed with the strap by the teachers as a part of some daily routine. They certainly got our attention, but the punishment questioned every aspect of my Christian education. 

By a stroke of luck our art teacher taught silk-screen and the mono image of Jimi Hendrix’s head became a T-shirt favourite. It got me interested in his music very early. I tried to mimic Jimi with the hair to some success, but I was too intimidated by his riffs to learn to play guitar. 

When I wasn’t doing school sport, I was building push bikes, billy carts and skateboards from rubbish-tip findings. I also really loved muscle-car racing, and would often, unbeknown to my parents, jump a train on a Sunday and go to Warwick Farm to see my heroes risk life and limb.

When I was old enough I got my licence and thankfully had the cash from my part time jobs to swap the school bus for a trail bike. All was going well until the teachers caught my mate Paul and I pulling wheelies in the street at lunchtime. As a result the bikes were banned but, undeterred, we’d park them down the road in a mate’s yard, where we could also smoke ciggies without getting busted. 

I graduated in 1972 at the height of the Age of Aquarius. A sense of awareness and freedom had permeated society. My dad swapped the Brylcreamed short back and sides for an over-the-collar look and my mum wore a kaftan. My four brothers and I had lots of hair and were into surf, skateboards, pushies and motor bikes. Life was driven by great music, unforgettable lyrics, free love and an optimism that has since been lost to the world. 

Times were a-changin. After twenty-three years of conservative government Australia decided ‘It's Time’ and voted in Gough Whitlam and his Labor Party. This set in motion a number of radical social and economic policies that would result in free university, free healthcare and ultimately the end of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Thank God someone had the sense to stop sending Aussie kids to be killed in someone else’s debacle.

Sex, dope and rock’n’roll were the mantra of the day. And there was plenty to go round. Given I’d been to an all-boys school I was still finding my way around the girls, but I was enjoying smoking pot which I’d been doing it since I was fourteen….. and I hadn’t yet turned into the crazy guy from the Reefer Madness movie. 

The music of the time came from traditional record shops and the rare stuff from Anthem Records which was one of the first “import” stores. You never knew when a new record would drop so every time you passed you’d drop in and finger through the albums. 2SM and 2UW owned AM pop radio, but the real rock’n’roll before Double J started, was on an ABC-TV program called GTK, which aired every week night. I even managed to get to a few GTK recordings (Max Merritt & the Meteors, Jeff St John, and Spectrum) at the old ABC Studio when it was under the TV tower at Gore Hill. 

So, with school behind us, my best mate Pedro and I, loaded up our trail bikes and headed north to easy-ride our way to hippie-town Nimbin and beyond. It started off a bit rough when about one hundred kilometres out, Pedro ran up the back of a Vee Dub Beetle that had stopped suddenly and his Honda left knobbly tyre marks all the way to the roof. It was a really heavy thing, but very funny to watch as Pedro and his bike stood motionless on top of the car for a few seconds, before leaning sideways and tumbling off. Thankfully Pedro only suffered a few grazes, so we dusted off his bike and polished out the rubber marks on the Dub. Pedro apologised heaps and on we pushed. 

It was amazing how far we went as “heads” on the north coast of New South Wales. The bush was full of alternative beings living and smoking the dream. There was always a place to crash, a meal on offer, or bounty to be picked from farmlands or the bush. 

It was here we wrestled our bikes through hundreds of miles of amazing forest fire-trails, and tried our hand at a number of culinary techniques to make the gold-top mushrooms, that we collected from the cow paddocks of the Promised Land, somewhat palatable. None of the recipes worked, but the mushrooms sure did! I remember, we ate about six each and nothing happened for about an hour. In despair we went to the pub, where they suddenly ignited and sent a hot flush straight to our brains. We were lucky to find the exit without being restrained. These were our first hallucinogenic trips. They lasted about six hours and, thankfully were conducted in the quiet and safety of the beach sand hills at night. No one to see us digging Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes and howling at the moon.

Sharing all this with Pedro was the best part. He was about a year younger than me but like a big brother. He was about six foot tall, broad from swimming, and had shoulder length red hair and light freckled skin. Pedro had an infectious laugh to support his great sense of humour and, if he wanted, he could muster a deep voice that would scare the shit out of everyone. He was pretty academic, had a great perspective on life, and was ready to ride any wave that came his way. Music was a big part of Pedro and he spent a lot of his cash on records. He also made audio cassette compiles and was always turning someone on to a new band or music style. Pedro loved his hot shots. Flaming Southern Comfort was his nirvana; until one night he was pissed, and missed, and set his face alight. The result: a badly singed moustache, eyebrows, eyelashes and fringe, which led to lots of silly comments and laughter. Pedro loved surfing, motorbikes and adventure, and when not burnt looked like James Dean in double denim and boots.

Tripping around up the coast was a fantastic escape, and the ocean-front camping was awesome. At one point we camped on Aboriginal land, met the locals and got some depressing insights into life on a “reservation”. Overall the way our first nation’s people are treated is a very shameful exercise on white man’s part. 

With limited cash we soon returned to Sydney to find our way into a career and further education. 

I was lucky to get an advertising cadetship and started a course at East Sydney Tech at night, and Pedro signed up for an Arts degree at Sydney Uni. It was free! 

We were having a lucky and carefree time, but the scene was very small…. the grog was getting tiresome, and we yearned for greater adventure. We were also very silly eighteen and nineteen-year-old boys and if we didn't change our surroundings there was a good chance we’d get into some real trouble. Nothing criminal like, but it was before Responsible Service of Alcohol and Random Breath Testingand there were some very narrow escapes. Fortunately, we were able to spend a lot of our spare time, riding off steam around a bush or race-track, and got close to God that way. 

A few of our friends weren’t so lucky. One tried to push his car over a cliff for the insurance and went with it. One fell from a party balcony and impaled himself on the fence below. Another got hit by a car while changing a flat on the side of the road. And one got mixed up with Mr Asia and ended up dead from a heroin overdose. All very sad. We really hadn’t had to deal with the Grim-Reaper up until then, but with this wave of friendly corpses it became a scary reality, and reinforced our need to do everything we possibly could before Doctor Death came a knocking.

We had a little motorcycle and Hendrix-lovers group called the Woof Brothers. Our motto was “ride hard, die free”. We would meet regularly to party. Our school mate Marcus hosted a lot of the time. His oldies were really cool. He had lots of brothers and sisters and they all had friends, and their rambling house easily accommodated loud music and group sleep overs. 

We loved our motorbikes, riding hard, and testing our mettle. Lots of other guys and girls were doing the same so we made heaps of new friends and tried to earn their respect by trashing their favourite street-circuit times. A couple of unlucky ones ended up in hospital. And amazingly no one was killed, but it was our dirt-bike buddies with whom we had the most amount of fun. 

Some of these friends were renting an old market-farm on the outskirts of Sydney. We were there for a three-day party and Goat’s Head Soup was playing on high rotation. There was plenty of grass, some interesting girls and a guy who had just returned from travelling in India. His stories were wild and intriguing. Out of this world! At one point Pedro and I caught each other’s eye. There was a raise of the eyebrow and a glint that without a word sealed the deal. We were going to check this out!

At the next opportunity I quit my job to start a higher paying labouring job at the fruit markets. Pedro postponed uni and got his bartending “degree” and as many shifts as he could at the local hotel. I often waited for him after closing time as he hosed out the tiled floor of a bar that would easily sit fifty guys. Public bars were tough places in those days and the women waited outside. 

We gave ourselves twelve months to stash away as much as we could. And as soon as we had the first $320 we went to the steam-liner company and bought our ticket. There was no turning back. 

We were going to the U.K. which was a rite of passage in those days. A lot of my older cousins had done it, got work, tripped around Europe and come back with that badge of honour. We were going to do the same, but instead, we were going to do the overland trip home through India and the “Mystical East”. 

We really had no idea what was ahead of us as we both still lived at home. Pedro lived in his oldies garage and I converted our under-house storage into a pretty neat bedroom, complete with day-glow posters, a black light and record player. I was listening to my older brothers’ music until my first purchase of Are you Experienced and Deep Purple in Rock. We had some independence from our parents, but they still knew when we had a friend over or were “burning hay” late into the night. 

The twelve months couldn't have gone quick enough, even though we were having a whole lot of fun. The Australian Rock’n’Roll music scene was right up there with AC/DC, The Angels, Midnight Oil, Billy Thorpeand a dozen other world class acts bashing it out on the pub circuit of Sydney. Pubs were a great breeding ground for talent, helped along by the fact that there was one on every corner. The Antler at Narrabeen, the Manly Vale Hotel, the Bondi Lifesaver and the Coogee Bay Hotel were the great music venues of the day.

The Arts Factory in Sydney was also a favourite haunt and Tully a favourite band. It was at one of these gigs that my cousin Johnny and I heard about the Pilgrimage for Pop, the first outdoor music festival in Australia, at rural Ourimbah a few hours north of Sydney. Keen to get our dose of Woodstock we were among the first to hitch our way out there. It was a funny scene, very bluesy. Some known bands like Tamam Shud, The Nutwood Rug Band, Max Merritt, Jeff St John and Doug Parkinson grooved it out, and other experimental musicians got the chance to do their thing. 

We took acid, got our clothes off, swam in the river and met new people who exposed us to some wild ideas and experiences. It was mind blowing to see just how left field some people were, and it certainly made us look like “fresh meat”. Tripping on acid was interesting. I’m not sure what the dose was like, but it was a lot milder than the mushrooms, it came on pretty quickly, there was an amazing clarity and sensitivity to everything, and you just floated along. Soaking in the warmth of the sun and the music was a great experience and like most hallucinogens it was great sharing with friends. 

With a huge appetite for live music, Australia was starting to become an important stop on the world tour for some big international acts. We got to see some golden moments like Black Sabbath at the old Showground Hordern Pavilion, and The Rolling Stones rocking up at Randwick Race Course in the Queen’s gold carriage drawn by six white horses. At the time there were very few venues capable of holding more than a few thousand people, so music popped up in some pretty strange places. The Stones concert was particularly crazy with about twenty thousand fans standing on the horse track, all lighting up to create a cloud of smoke that would have stoned three neighbourhoods. We pre-rolled joints and inscribed each with a song title that became a salute to the music when played. Funnily, at the end of the night the only joint left was Soul Survivor. 

Our next “Woodstock” was the Aquarius Festival in Canberra. It was another ‘hippies are happening’ event and, as it was really, really hot, clothes were optional. I don’t remember much about the music but there were lots of joints, a great river and the girls were very exciting. 

The next big three-day music festival was Odyssey at rural Wallacia on the Australia Day long weekend. It was promoted and hosted by a cat named Adrian Rawlins who also MC’d the Pilgrimage for Pop and was Om-ing on stage at Aquarius. He was a larger than life, poetry reading, arty type who you’d swear was always tripping. He was always laughing and would often chuckle and bellow without stop. He had no inhibitions so was very funny, and I remember later seeing him on GTK just laughing for the full five minutes of the show. Bizarre!

I travelled out to Odyssey with Johnny in his friend Zac’s old Chrysler ambulance. His “Ghostbusteresque” ambo always got the looks. It was no different that day when we drove up to the gate to pay our entry, and the guys collecting the dough just waved us through. Before we knew it, we were parked alongside the stage. Zac got the patter down quickly, “we were there to pick up the bummers”. What a great scam and what a great three days. Thankfully, we weren’t called on to help any bummers, as we were in no state to even help ourselves. 

Johnny and Zac were in a low-key band called The Sot Weed Factor. They had their guitars and jammed near our campsite. It was amazing how many of the paid talent dropped in to share some chords and belt out some songs. It was surreal sitting there beside my music heroes and offering up the joints. 

Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs with Lobby Loydewere the act of the weekend. Billy (“Most people I know think that I’m crazy”) was an animal on stage – such tough rock n roll. Wendy Saddington and Copperwine were doing “Janis”, and Daddy Cool were at their peak. We were also introduced to an eclectic Kiwi line up that called themselves the La De Das and whose members, lead guitar hero Kevin Borich and rhythm guitar man Phil Key, have since become a bedrock of Aussie music. 

Meanwhile back in Sydney we were hanging out with another group of friends who had rented a share-house in Chatswood. We went to the Show-ground Speedway (daringly awesome) with them every Saturday night. They had dope growing in the backyard, a keg in the kitchen, motorbikes in the lounge room and the music was always loud. They were crazies. They even heated Castrol R motor oil to get in the mood while listening to sound-blasting audio recordings of the Isle of Man TT.  

One of the guys was a ratbag Norton-riding electrician who rode flat out everywhere, often bouncing off parked cars and sliding off through corners, all the while with his bull-terrier gripping for life on a hessian bag he had thrown over the tank. They both carried the scars. Another was a huge guy called the Hulk who smoke two joints, before he smoked two joints, and then he smoked two more. He later rode a stunt bike and crashed big time in the biker movie Stone. Then there was Woody, a real biker with colours, a BSA, and lots of leather-clad babes always hanging around. One day he came out of his room with three very sleepy and undressed girls. He was a lovely guy, loved his beer, was always laughing and was rumoured to have a huge schlong. I figured that’s how he got his nickname. I was always a bit nervous when visiting these guys, as I expected the vice squad would one day bust down the doors. 

I remember riding up to the Easter Bike races at Bathurst with the Hulk and another guy called Rip. We got as far as Amaroo Park when Rip missed a corner and ended up tangled in a wire fence. He had broken bones so we used tie-downs to hold him upright while I pillioned him to Nepean Hospital on our way through. The four days at Bathurst were outrageous as the racers defied speed and gravity up and over the mountain, while the crowd of 30,000 carried on like animals on the hill. It was the days before police presence so you can imagine the bon-fire initiations and tests of skill as the revellers burned around an amphitheatres two feet deep in beer cans and bodies. There were so many bikers in town that you couldn’t find a bike park anywhere. The whole weekend could probably be surmised when riding home in a long convoy behind a dishevelled guy wearing only a hessian sugar bag with Northern Territory number plates. 

When we weren’t riding, we were taking acid at the Yellow Houseart space in Potts Point where pop artists like Martin Sharpwere living and modernists Brett Whitely and John Olsenwere displaying their works. The Yellow House consisted of two side by side rambling multi-story Victorian mansions connected by a hole in the wall and every room had a different theme. The sign above the ticket office said: “Price of Entry - Your Mind”. Pop art, a surf movie projected on the wall, a walk-through sculpture, liquid light shows - there were some crazy people doing some very improvised art on the ceilings, walls and floors. And with music from the incredibly-voiced Jeannie Lewis it was a hip place to trip. We’d often bump into the people we met there, tripping on through Cooper Parkat Bellevue Hill after all else had closed. 

But, Time waits for no one (Mick & Keith are the Rock Lords), and before we knew it we were inoculated, getting passports, and starting to pack our bags. We really had no idea of what was going to unfold. I had five thousand dollars, Pedro had about three and a half and we both expected it was enough to travel the world. There was very little travel information in those days - even about Europe. Ship and bus tour brochures were about the extent of it. No travel guides, and certainly nothing about travelling in the Middle or Far East. There were however a few newspaper articles written by Richard Neville, about his overland trip to London, where he established the UK version of his university counter-culture magazine Oz. Good info which we packed away.