Some months ago, whilst out on a regular traipse up in the Dandenong Ranges, I came across a large thistle. It had a huge deep purple bloom and stood alone and upright on a chunky bristle-like stem waving about in a cool autumn breeze. A week later, its colour had faded to barely mauve, it’s stem and leaves a shrivelled straw, and its’ previously grand stature seemed diminished.

But something about the sight of this thistle felt so familiar.

I texted Dad with a photograph …” Dad, I associate this thistle with Diggers Rest – am I correct?”

He replied… ” At Diggers Rest – very tall and slender flowering late spring. On the creek flats – rich soil – taller than the truck. Called a Variegated Thistle. The Reddan land next door – inundated with Artichoke thistle – much shorter and wider.”

I was reminded of being in that truck, it was an old Land Rover, with Dad steering and trying to conquer the steep thistle and rock covered slopes that fell sharply towards the creek bed. Through the truck window in springtime the vista must have appeared, to my much younger self, like a rolling purple sea.

Diggers Rest is a somewhat desolate stretch of land to the north of Melbourne. Jacksons Creek meanders through the landscape creating a valley with steep embankments on each side. I lived here on a ridge above the creek and below the Tullamarine flight path in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Our driveway entrance sat on a bend on the Bulla-Diggers Rest Road and cut a dirt track a mile or so long to a rambling bluestone farmhouse that was built in the late 1800’s.

Huge electricity pylons carrying high voltage wires towered above dusty, weathered paddocks, some lined with dry-stone fences. They were built by early settlers.

Apart from the Reddan family, our home was without immediate neighbours in the suburban sense. My early days were spent in a blissful and carefree bubble – often playing outdoors beneath a large peppercorn tree, rummaging about the multitude of outhouses, of shearing quarters and sheds whilst always keeping a guarded look out for slithering reptiles.

In the January of 1972 our usually quiet Bulla-Diggers Rest Road filled with traffic for several days over one weekend, the Australia Day long weekend. I recall standing upon the cattle grate that denoted our driveway entrance and looking out upon a slow, snaking trail of cars and people. The traffic filed, bumper to bumper, one after another as they headed west up the narrow bitumen road towards the farm of George and Beryl Duncan. 

Whilst many drove along this road, Mum recalled recently that there were also many who were walking, camping, and hitch-hiking their way along. I did not know that these people were heading to the Duncan’s farm specifically. I just knew that this pilgrimage was heading towards the Pop Festival – known to most as the Sunbury Rock Music Festival.

The hosting of the festival created something of a thing for those of us living nearby. Did I glean this by soaking up talk over the kitchen table, or from listening to the adults’ chatter after Sunday mass outside the Bulla Catholic Church, or did I pick it up by watching the TV news at the time, I can’t really tell you exactly how, I just knew that it did.

The Pop Festival certainly was a thing. In hindsight it carried with it the flavour of Woodstock and brought to life a new emerging era in Australian rock music. In the evenings our black and white television beamed images into our den showing footage of the frolicking crowds gathered before the stage. It appeared wild and unrestrained. Life, it seemed, existed beyond the fence lines of my Diggers Rest home.

You might think that I am crazy, but If I could revisit January 1972, just for a day, I would. I would traipse across the thistle encrusted paddocks and embankments of Jacksons Creek. I would admire the rolling purple sea from the window of Dads truck, whilst soaking up the guttural sounds of Madder Lake, of Chain or Deep Purple as they shook the rich soils of the creek flats, and I would take in Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs’ Ooh Poo Pa Doo as it would have echoed throughout the valley… and breathe in the heady vibe and atmosphere that must have encapsulated that January long weekend of 1972. Just for a day.

If only we could stand on the edge of a time, any time, anywhere and watch as it transitions from one era to another. Then again, perhaps I have already.