Mary Mihelakos

The Australian Music Vault is proud to honour the 2020 Music Victoria Hall of Fame inductee, Mary Mihelakos.

If there is one person who has traversed the entire landscape of the contemporary Australian music scene, it’s Mary Mihelakos. An industry stalwart and champion of Australian music, Mihelakos has worked across almost every aspect of the music industry since she first began volunteering for 3RRR radio as a teenager in the late 1980s. She has been a booker, publicist and manager for a wide range of venues and bands, was Music Editor of Beat Magazine for a decade, the “Sticky Carpet” columnist for The Age, a DJ, founder and producer of numerous landmark festivals, and ran the Music Victoria Awards for a number of years. Her unwavering support for Australian artists and desire to advance the local music scene stems from an unquestionable passion for music, which can be traced back to her roots in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne.

A second-generation, Greek Australian and the youngest of three sisters, Mihelakos was passionate about music from a young age. She experienced her first live music concert, INXS at Festival Hall, when she was just 11-years-old and by 14 her parents were dropping her off regularly for gigs at St Kilda’s Palais Theatre.

I would go and see Melbourne bands play if they did daytime gigs, and anything I could get that was live music, I went to it. So even though I was a sheltered Greek girl, I did get very lucky to have a parent or a sister driving me there… they would drop me off and pick me up and to a lot of these I went by myself.

In her early teens she began volunteering, on air and in the office, at 3RRR radio in Fitzroy where she was responsible for compiling the 6pm gig guide on a typewriter. She got to know most of Melbourne’s venue bookers through chasing up listings. Unaware of her age, they would put her name on the door for gigs.

Before Mihelakos was even legally allowed into live music venues, she was working for them. She enrolled to study media and journalism at Swinburne University and began working as a booker and publicist for some of the city’s landmark venues, including the Evelyn Hotel and the Punters Club on Brunswick St, Fitzroy.

Linda Gebar the founding booker of the Punters Club mentored me; she was also the manager of The Killjoys and Frente, and a publicist. I landed my first venue PR job at the Sarah Sands four months before I was old enough to be legally allowed in the hotel. A school friend’s dad owned a South Melbourne pub, the Wayside Inn, and I started booking bands there as well.

When Richard Moffatt began booking the Punters Club, Mihelakos took over duties at the Evelyn Hotel down the road where a veritable mix of cult 90’s bands like The Mavis’s, Greenhouse, Holocene, Incursion, The Glory Box, Rail, The Dead Salesmen, Dirty Three, Snout, Even and Moler were on regular rotation.

Always ahead of her time, Mihelakos made regular visits to Sydney where the music scene was thriving. Iconic live music venues like The Lansdowne, Annandale, Hopetoun and Sandringham Hotels played host to a wide variety of artists and bands, and she credits Louise Dickinson, publisher and editor of the legendary fanzine, Lemon, for introducing her to You Am I, The Welcome Mat, Asteroid B6-12, Front End Loader, Smudge, Headache and Crow before they toured Melbourne. In the absence of the internet, she relied on street press publications like On The Street and Drum Media to plan her visits, and made purchases at the influential record stores Red Eye, Waterfront, Phantom and Half A Cow.

At a time when music goers relied heavily on the street press, newspapers, radio and word of mouth to navigate live music, Mihelakos’s immersion in the Melbourne and Sydney scenes put her in good stead to lead the free, Melbourne street press, Beat Magazine, as Music Editor from 1995 – 2005.

In the mid-90s I started working at Beat Magazine as the Music Editor where I stayed for 10 years or so. I went to gigs every night so I got to know a lot of the people in the Melbourne music scene. And it was just something that felt natural to me, I never thought, you know, I was doing anything that other people my age weren’t doing. I was just super supportive of Australian bands, new and older.

From 2009 until 2016 she also wrote a music-dedicated column for The Age, “Sticky Carpet”, which provided a weekly summary of the live music scene in Melbourne.

More recently, Mihelakos has been involved in producing several landmark festivals. In 2003, along with Glenn Dickies, she started the Aussie BBQ at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival in Austin, Texas, in response to what she perceived as a lack of support for Australian artists.

I saw that in the early 2000s, a lot of Australian bands were spending thousands of dollars to go there. But no-one was really getting anything out of the experience of showcasing their music at this conference… so I decided to set up my own events.

Eager to give Australian music a greater profile, Mihelakos and Dickies set themselves the task of putting on a barbeque and show for the Australian bands that were due to perform. It was a modest event of about 100 people, but by 2006 it became large enough to justify the establishment of their founding company, Stage Mothers, and is now one of the most attended country focused events on the SXSW calendar. It has also opened up opportunities for over 100 Australian acts and grown beyond SXSW to include mini festivals in LA, New York and now Australia.

In 2016, Mihelakos was also responsible for conceiving the idea of a touring stage show version of Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music. Based on Clinton Walker’s groundbreaking book and accompanying documentary film and soundtrack album, the stage show stars a rotating cast of Buried Country’s featured artists performing a selection of the songbook’s greatest hits. The show made its successful world premiere at the Playhouse in Newcastle in August 2016, and has continued to play the festival circuit ever since, including Melbourne Festival and Dubbo Artlands.

Mihelakos continues to champion Australian music through her roles as a booking agent and publicist for the Thornbury Theatre, The Brunswick Ballroom (formerly The Spotted Mallard) and as a producer of the Australian Music Vault’s much-loved Melbourne Music Bus Tours. Now a Melbourne icon herself, it seems only fitting that her name has recently been immortalised in a limited edition lipstick, LMO’s aptly named 'Hail Mary Red', and not one, but three songs that pay tribute to her unwavering support for Australian music over the last three decades – The Dirty Three’s ‘Mihelakos Arm’, Dan Luscombe and Mike Noga’s ‘Party Poppers Mihelakos’ and Jet’s rock anthem ‘Roll Over DJ’.

The Music Victoria Awards is an annual celebration of Victorian music featuring industry and publically voted categories. Winners will be announced and Mary Mihelakos and the late Chris Wilson will be inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame, at a ceremony at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 9 December 2020. The event will be livestreamed on YouTube and broadcast via Channel 31.

You can find a full list of 2020 Music Victoria Awards nominees here.