When the Beatles came to Australia: ‘Letters to the editor

Sixty years since the Fab Four arrived to mass hysteria, a new book captures the thousands who lined up for a glimpse, the moral panic and resulting generation gap

It was 60 years ago today that the Beatles arrived in Australia. For those of us who weren’t there – perhaps even those lucky enough to see Taylor Swift’s Eras tour – it’s hard to fathom the level of hysteria that accompanied their 1964 tour: in Adelaide, 300,000 people lined the streets to welcome the band on 12 June, officially the largest crowd ever to greet the Fab Four.

Like Swift, seemingly every waking moment of the Beatles’ tour was dissected; editors were savvy enough to know just mentioning their name was a way of increasing circulation. Now, that historic fortnight in Australia and New Zealand has been exhaustively documented in a new book by Greg Armstrong and Andy Neill, When We Was Fab.