This joyful doco will teach you the real meaning of the word bogan

2 months ago 21

ABBA and Elvis in the Outback ★★★★

There’s a good chance you’ve had a giggle at images from the annual Elvis and ABBA festivals held by Parkes and Trundle, small towns in country NSW. Middle-aged women swooning in poodle skirts. Local rugby players in muddy Elvis jumpsuits, losing their wigs in the scrum. Farmers and tradies in feather boas and headbands, all jiving to Dancing Queen.

But this 2025 documentary covering the birth and potential death of these eccentric but crucial festivals could almost make you cry.

Former Parkes Shire mayor Ken Keith appears in ABBA & Elvis in the Outback.

Directed by Tahyna Tozzi MacManus, who has familial connections to the area, ABBA and Elvis in the Outback is a loving ode to the Parkes Shire and the bonkers behaviour of its residents over the past three decades.

It all began in the early ’90s when married couple Anne and Bob Steel, who are featured in the 55-minute documentary, threw a party for Elvis Presley’s birthday. What started as a casual event with just 60 people has now become renowned worldwide, a full-blown festival routinely attracting 25,000 people to Parkes, which is usually has a population of less than half that size, and bringing in a reported $15 million in tourism. In 2012, its success was emulated with a celebration of ABBA in Trundle, a nearby town of about 400 people that would eventually swell to 10 times that size as lovers of Swedish pop took over the tiny rural community.

Speaking with local farmers, Indigenous elders and business owners, MacManus paints a rich picture of the area – the sweeping vistas of the vast, dry plains are so much more beautiful than what you’ll see from the highway – and the strength of its community. Stricken by drought and flood, stagnating economically and culturally, these towns found an ingenious (and lucrative) way to create some much-needed joy. And the documentary does a great job of balancing the serious issues with the outright absurdity of the solution.

Trundle doesn’t technically have a train station, but that didn’t stop them rolling out the red carpet.

Highlights include then-Parkes Shire mayor Ken Keith silently dressing himself in a baby blue jumpsuit in his dimly lit office, and Trundle residents rolling out a red carpet on some dirt in lieu of an actual train station. It’s really a delight.

Things then get more serious in the second half as the future of the ABBA Festival is thrown into doubt, with floodwater cutting off the only road into town a week before the 2022 event. The filmmakers follow the difficult decisions that are made and touch on the devastating fallout before ending on an uplifting message of community resilience. But there’s more than bit of whiplash in those final 10 minutes, underscored by the fact that the ABBA Festival is now on permanent hiatus as the council struggles to justify its costs.

The past few years have wreaked havoc on Australian festivals, with extreme weather resulting in more cancellations and insurance troubles. I’ve experienced the joy of the Parkes Elvis Festival first hand, becoming an unlikely convert a decade ago. The last time I attended it was plagued by a dystopian dust storm that shut down the outdoor stage and temperatures that regularly cracked 40 degrees. Thankfully, that event is still going strong, but council minutes show finances are front of mind and the festival would be operating at a significant loss if not for funding from state tourism bodies.

The end of this story is clearly not yet written, but if these kinds of events do eventually bite the dust, this documentary is a strong monument to the beautiful bogan spirit that sustained them. And I mean “bogan” in the Wiradjuri sense which, as one elder explains, means birthplace of a king.

ABBA and Elvis in the Outback premieres at 7.30pm on Thursday, December 18, on SBS and is now streaming on SBS On Demand.

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