1976 Concert On Sydney Harbour

On Saturday, March 27, 1976 I went to a concert at Milson’s point in Sydney with some friends which I’m pretty sure was organized by the Sydney AM radio station 2SM. We caught the train into the city, crossed the bridge and sat on a grassy bank at Milson’s Point watching bands like AC/DC, The Ted Mulry Gang and John Paul Young play their music on a barge that was anchored about 50 feet offshore. I can remember girls jumping in the water and swimming out to the barge and being pushed back into the water by the road crew on the barge.

One of the themes I wanted to incorporate into Seeing Colours was a discussion about attitudes to land and how this impacts Aboriginal people both in the city and the bush. Bennelong became a part of the story because he was buried at the end of the street where Susan grows up, the same Sydney street I grew up on in the 1970s and 80s. When Jay reads about his grandmother Susan’s attendance at this same concert in her diaries it seemed a natural fit to have the two characters in the book, one a white girl from the suburb of Putney, the other an Aboriginal boy who was a member of the stolen generation, reflect on their cultural knowledge (or lack of it). They sit on the grass looking across the harbour at the Opera House which was built on Bennelong point and Susan tells the boy she’s written a poem about Bennelong and Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Opera House.

The YouTube video is of John Paul Young singing on the barge on Sydney Harbour that day in 1976. The sound has been interfered with, which is quite obvious because JPY thanks Melbourne at the end of the song, so it’s not the original but it still gives the viewer a pretty accurate impression of what it was like to be there.