Why, Madder Lake was the opening act of the very first Sunbury in 1972, but you’d barely notice that 52 years had passed as they revisited 12 Pound Toothbrush and Goodbye Lollipop.

Of all the original performers, only Duff, who is 68, is aged less than 70.

Mike Rudd of Spectrum, whose harmonica seems to be driven still by a set of bellows, will turn 80 next year.

We sang and swayed along with them, for their music remains strong in our memories, and as the night descended, a fingernail moon in the clear sky above, some in the crowd - young and old - got up and danced.

Was Matt Taylor - who is 75 - having a dig at us, just a little, when he sang his old hit I Remember When I was Young, or should we have taken to heart a line from the song “I should think of the present ’cause the present’s now”?

Margret Roadknight, accompanied by an all-female band, recalled drily that she was the only woman performer in the Sunbury line-up of 1973, just as the late Wendy Saddington was the only woman listed among the 27 acts headlined at the 1972 festival.

It couldn’t happen now, Roadknight said. Quite.

Among the more electrifying performers at this new Sunbury were Emma Donovan, Karen Lee Andrews in the Sunbury 24 house band and Laura Davidson in Bongo Starkie’s Skyhooks Show, whose rendering of Living in the 70s seemed never to have been more pertinent.

There were four Sunbury festivals back in the day, from 1972 to 1975, each spread over three sun-drenched January days of surrender to rock music and youthful indulgence.

They were held in a natural amphitheatre on a 250ha property owned by farmers George and Beryl Duncan. It was closer to Diggers Rest than Sunbury, but the organisers thought Sunbury sounded more suitably summertime than Diggers Rest.

Jacksons Creek, which flowed alongside the festival site, seemed never to be empty of frolickers, a lot of them naked.

The young festival crowd of the era tended to separate itself into two camps: the beer guzzlers who came for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs - who brought ear-splitting and high-energy rock to all four festivals - and the more relaxed latter-day and would-be hippies, who indulged in more exotic substances than beer.

Thorpe, who died in February 2007, remains inextricably linked to the festivals, and a plaque to his memory sits not far from the original site near Diggers Rest.

George and Beryl Duncan, who allowed use of their farm as a gift to Australia’s youth, are also gone - Beryl died in 1988, George in 1990 - but they live on in the district’s memory. The Hume City Council decided two years ago to memorialise them with a plaque at the end of Duncans Lane, alongside Thorpe’s memorial.

Sunbury - like all of Melbourne’s outer areas - has grown remarkably since the 70s and access to Duncans farm has long been blocked by a housing estate.

Saturday’s festival, thus, was held several kilometres away in Sunbury’s rather lovely treed park, known as The Nook, where Jacksons Creek flows by.

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All 4000 available tickets were sold within days of their release.

Sunbury 2024 was, thus, a triumph for what we might call the third age at a time when modern music festivals are foundering through rising operational and insurance costs, extreme weather, the continuing fallout from Covid and reluctance of young festival enthusiasts to buy tickets early, among other problems.

It was also a triumph for the Hume City Council, which organised the show.

The Mayor, Naim Kurt - who at 32 has no memory of the original festival, but has cannily embraced it as part of Sunbury’s essential history - said he hoped the celebration would continue and get bigger as the years go on.

The services of Jacksons Creek lifeguards, happily, were not required.

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