Why The Sharpies Chose Style And Loud Music Over Rules And Authority

New compilation When Sharpies Ruled looks back at an often glossed-over era in Australian society, that of '70s youth subculture the Sharpies. While obviously the blues- and glam-based rock'n'roll of the era was a large part of the movement's core values - the new release features bands such as Rose Tattoo, Hush, Coloured Balls, Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs and Skyhooks, all loved by Sharpies - there was a lot more to the movement than just a love of heavy rock. They had their own visual aesthetic, fashion and outlook on life, most of which reflected a healthy disdain for authority, rules and regulations.

Author Julie Mac was a member of numerous Melbourne Sharpie gangs in her youth, catching the tail-end of the movement in the mid-to-late-'70s, but her fascination with the era has never abated. She's penned two tomes on the Sharpie sub-culture - Rage (2010) and Snap (2013) - and explains that the movement's main tenets in essence can be distilled down to the concepts of 'mateship and defiance'.

"Whenever you caught up with everybody they were all happy to see you, you were safe and you were looked after."

"We could just see that hypocrisy of things," she remembers. "[The main allure was] the connectedness. Number one it was fun; whenever you caught up with everybody they were all happy to see you, you were safe and you were looked after. When you're growing up you have a lot of forced friends - people from school, neighbours, sporting groups and church - but when you get to 13 or 14 you branch out on your own and start making your own friends, and I think that because we chose these friendships they were very strong.

"Back then rockers drove cars, bikies drove motorbikes, but Sharpies were children and we caught trains. Some people had a [driver's] licence, but usually once you got your licence you went and did other things - you went to pubs to pick up girls. But we were still catching trains, and people don't like to think of children as being violent and there was the violent side of it - we were just a product of the society of the time."

The Sharpies sported distinctive haircuts mirroring the UK punk and skinhead movements, but also had their own well-defined fashion instinct.

"Clothes were very important, and there was quite a bit of one-upmanship as well," Mac explains. "The cardigans were tailor-made and could be custom-made, if you could imagine 13-, 14-, 15-year-old apprentice boys going and spending their apprentice wages on a custom-made fine-knit cardigan. Plus there were handmade shoes from places like Venus Shoes - they'd go in and the Greek shoemaker would measure their feet and make chisel-toed shoes with Cuban heels in whatever colour leather or suede they wanted. They could go and get a pair of bell bottom trousers tailor-made by the local tailor, and choose where they wanted the money pocket or the size of the cuffs. That's why it was so unique, because it's the only time in Australian history where commercial fashion has been completely rejected by a group of children.

"Sharpie boys were probably the first heterosexual males in Australia to have their ears pierced, and jewellery would be unisex."

"As well as the clothes there were also distinctive Sharpie tattoos, for example if you see someone with three or four stars across the bottom of their wrist you can usually pick them as having been a Sharpie. Plus Sharpie boys were probably the first heterosexual males in Australia to have their ears pierced, and jewellery would be unisex - if I was wearing a pair of bluebird earrings and a boy said, 'I like your earrings,' I might take one out and give it to him and he'd wear it. There were jewellery, tattoos and a bit of a distinctive walk - a bit of a swagger - and the dance. Plus we had our own words and speech patterns, like any subculture."

And while Mac recalls that sexism wasn't rampant among Sharpies ("girls weren't treated as equals but they were protected, which was nice") members were looked down upon by the rest of society.

"Nobody liked Sharpies," Mac reflects. "They didn't like us at school, they didn't like us at train stations. Once you became a Sharpie even your neighbours would look at you differently. I don't know if it was fear because when you think about it we were children, but there must have just been something intimidating about it. Generally Sharpies liked other Sharpies, until it became territorial. But for example if I went to the Croydon market on a Sunday and another Sharpie girl from another town came there, we'd acknowledge each other and swap stories. There was a lot of storytelling in the Sharpie movement and that's one of the things that I loved the most - there wasn't the communication channels that there are now and some of us didn't even have [home] phones, so the way that we used to keep each other safe was by telling stories about who you could trust and who you couldn't."