Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning Billy Thorpe, a rock and roll legend, passed away. Some 50 years of music, performance and entertainment to Australia has come to an end. I wish tonight not to try to show my credentials as a former rock and roll disc jockey but to record a little about the early history of Billy Thorpe. As a result of his passing, I have had a chance to look at his wonderful website, www.thorpie.com, which displayed his enormous generosity to his fan base and where he disclosed all that he is and was. This was a man born on 29 March 1946 in Manchester, England, but what makes it absolutely relevant to my electorate of Moreton is that is where he first played.

He attended Moorooka primary school as a young bloke. His first gig was at St Mary Magdalene’s Anglican church hall in Salisbury. He was discovered in 1956 in a Hollywood sort of way by Gwen Illiffe, whose then husband, Jim Illiffe, was host of a Channel Nine television show the Channel Ninershe was somebody I knew many years ago as a young bloke and in my early years in the Brisbane media. Billy was playing and singing in a storeroom behind one of his parent’s local stores in Fegan Drive in Moorooka, which in those days was the end of the Beaudesert Road tramline. Gwen Illiffe was literally walking past and looking for the address of Mary Saint Ledger, who according to Thorpie was:

... an incredible boogie-woogie piano player who lived with her family just around the corner from us. Mary often did duets with the legendary pianist Winifred Atwell. She was a killer player who could have stood toe to toe with Jerry Lee.

She heard him, handed over her card and said, ‘Let’s talk further.’ Within a few months, he had auditioned and got a gig at the La Boheme restaurant in Brisbane and off he went. He continued—this is at the age of 10—with his schooling at Moorooka primary and then later went to Salisbury high school during the day. He said on his website:

What a childhood. Its still like a dream to me. Moorooka State School and later Salisbury High during the day and Rock n’ roll High school at night.

This was Billy Thorpe’s fantastic upbringing that he afforded himself out of the passion he had not for the piano, despite what he could have done and lamented he did not, but because Hank Williams and Eddie Cochran played the guitar and that was where he went. He played country music for a while, doing Hank Williams and yodelling Slim Whitman. He worked in the tents with Reg Lindsay and Slim Dusty. He was by every possible means somebody who lived passionately for the music he enjoyed.

When I was a teenager at Macgregor high school—and I actually went to Salisbury high for a few months when a tornado in 1973 blew down a lot of our school and we had to go over to Salisbury by bus each day—little did I know all this history was happening in our local area, that Billy Thorpe’s attachment was so strong. Salisbury high is known as the school that Jamie Dunn, the Brisbane radio announcer, the voice of Agro—at one stage Brisbane’s answer to Leif Garrett in the late seventies—went to. What an amazing school that Salisbury, now Nyanda high school, was for the talent that it had within its midst. Both of these schools continue to work hard to nurture the best of talents for kids that attend them.

One of the things that the House should be told tonight and should be put on the record on the day of the passing of Billy Thorpe, the rock hero, the man who brought about the Long Way to the Top live tour that brought three decades of Australian music to a new generation of people, is that Billy Thorpe had heard that Moorooka primary school was one of three schools that was hit by arson late last year. He offered his services to perform to raise funds for the school later this year.

I think we can pay an incredible tribute to this man by saying that no matter how many famous people he played with, no matter how much of a Hollywood lifestyle he had, he was true to his roots. He cared about the people who were amongst his fan base, so there are many people very sad and disappointed that we have lost Billy Thorpe today, and my thoughts go out to those closest to him. I want to say in this very public way thank you to Billy Thorpe and I know that each of those schools and my local community are very proud to know he was once amongst all of us.