For 360 days a year, Parkes, New South Wales, is an anaemic town in the middle of nowhere like any other. Its claim to fame is “the Dish”, the radio telescope 12 miles (19km) to the north that broadcast the Apollo 11 moon landing and inspired a film of the same name. I ask a local student, back home for Christmas, how people pass the time around here. “Drinking and the pokies [fruit machines],” she says. “And meth,” she adds, referring to the drug methamphetamine.
But every January, this crumbling corner of Australian bush becomes a pilgrimage site to “the King” and the polka-dot postwar world he ruled. The Parkes Elvis festival, which bills itself as “one of the top three festivals and events in Australia”, is celebrating its 33rd edition this year. Started by local superfans Bob and Anne Steel, the festival attracts more than 25,000 fans to a town with a population of about 10,000.
Accommodation sells out by June, but at a month’s notice, I luckily find a farm cabin an hour’s drive away with a bug-infested outdoor toilet. On a Saturday in January, temperatures hit 40C (104F), a dry heat that weighs you down – and that’s without a leather jumpsuit and foundation that could double as grout. The majority of the attendees, many north of 50, spend the weekend chasing shade and air conditioning.
A smorgasbord of “Elvii” (apparently the accepted plural) are in attendance: Japanese Elvis, Scottish Elvis, ventriloquist’s dummy Elvis, operated by ventriloquist Elvis, Hawaiian shirt Elvis, Elvis riding a mini train fashioned from a skateboard, dachshund Elvis and Elvis woven from barbed wire. There’s a cutout of Elvis in the phone shop and Elvis custard tarts in the bakery, while the Discount Dave’s shop is flogging AI-generated Elvis tat.
Anthony Fenech performed as 1970s Elvis with his dad
Two memorabilia collections compete for eyeballs: the Elvis Museum, run by Elvis Lennox (born Steve, he changed his name in 1997), and the King’s Castle, owned by the former lead singer of Australian children’s band the Wiggles. The latter displays a lock of Elvis’s hair, receipts for his wedding ring and a sealed copy of his coroner’s report.
But perhaps the highlight is the Elvis rugby match, not featured on the official programme because Memphis-based Elvis Presley Enterprises (EPE) believes it could tarnish his reputation. Players spray-paint numbers on to the back of their Temu jumpsuits for 20 minutes of drunken rugby-adjacent activity. It’s hard to imagine what EPE is worried about.
‘Platinum Elvis’ Maria Phillips
After a five-hour drive west of Sydney on roads littered with decomposing kangaroos, I arrive in time for the heats of the “ultimate Elvis tribute artist contest” (UETA) – a feast of rhinestones and stick-on sideburns. Across two hours, 20 Elvii perform two songs each, with the winner of the final going on to represent Parkes at Elvis Week in Memphis later this year.
By the seventh Elvis, you appreciate the impossibly fine margins of trying to replicate the irreplicable. The tempo of your leg shake and gyrations can be the difference between looking like the real thing and like you need urgent medical attention. One guy’s teeth are so white you can’t focus on anything else. You soon recognise those just slightly too self-conscious or self-aware to ever really inhabit someone else.
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One of eight Elvis tribute artists (ETAs) – “impersonator” is an offensive term here – through to the final is Anthony Fenech, last year’s runner-up. Off stage, he doesn’t really resemble Elvis: soft features and a prominent nose, his wig-and-sideburn combo peeling away from sweat. But up there, his black leather jumpsuit can make grandmothers shriek like they’re 14 again.
His dad, Paul, is one of Australia’s most famous ETAs, a two-time Parkes winner and ex-owner of Elvis Pizza, a former Sydney restaurant. Anthony moved to Kansas to play basketball as a teenager, but after returning home, he let himself into Elvis Pizza one evening and sang to a room of empty chairs. He joined forces with his dad shortly after: Anthony as a younger Elvis, Paul in the 1970s jumpsuits. Having recently turned 30, this is Anthony’s first year wearing a jumpsuit, tailored with meticulous attention to historical accuracy in Thailand or the US and costing anywhere from £2,000to £5,000.
“The jumpsuit’s got to fit you, not the other way around,” Anthony explains. “You don’t become Superman just because you wear the suit. I’m trying to connect and feel what Elvis was feeling when he hit his 30s.”He is often away from home 40 weekends of the year, regularly landing home in Melbourne on Monday morning before heading straight to his day job for a company that mass-produces bathrooms. He became a father five weeks ago, but has no intention of slowing down. “There’s no job that will fulfill me like this,” he explains. “It’s addictive.”
But being an ETA encourages – perhaps even requires – a blurring of the lines between you and the King. “You have to become Elvis and you can’t help but feel it even off stage,” Fenech Jr says. “It’s especially hard to wake up on Monday morning and you’re just Anthony.”
Maria Phillips was the only woman in this year’s UETA. The least experienced of the contestants, she only devised her stage name – “Platinum Elvis”, referencing her short, bleach-blond hair – while on the 2025 Elvis Express, the dedicated Sydney to Parkes train.
Having sung while growing up in Lincolnshire, Phillips worked as Rod Stewart’s accountant and organised Cher’s wigs, before becoming chief financial officer of the Nine Entertainment media group and Virgin Mobile Australia while raising three children. It was only after a 2022 breast cancer diagnosis that she pursued the creative life she had always dreamed of.
Last year, Phillips recorded 70 Elvis songs and is planning a merch release. “The bits of me that didn’t have an outlet now do,” she explains, wearing a hot pink jumpsuit and matching personalised cape. “It’s made me a much better person.”
Although Phillips has “probably sung an Elvis song every day since I was three”, she has worked hard to mimic his phrasing and breathing, but by not wearing a wig, she has chosen to create her own distinct Elvis (as much about feel as look, and it works) standing out from what can be a repetitive crowd. “How do you replicate Elvis’s charisma? You can’t,” she says. “So just do you.” She has interest from charities to become “breast cancer Elvis”.Tribute acts are booming as part of the golden age of music nostalgia. While some ETAs are here for fame or money, many are motivated by the apex of modern fandom: worshipping someone so much you try to become them. This religious adoration is an undercurrent throughout, peaking with a packed gospel service on the final day.
Everyone here struggles to explain exactly why they love Elvis, before eventually intimating at something not just unique but transcendental, transformative. At midday on Sunday in a baroque cinema-cum-church, there is a group vow-renewal ceremony, officiated by Dean Vegas, a classically handsome ETA who has run to be mayor of the Gold Coast three times. Twenty-three couples embrace along the stage, two of them married for more than 50 years. A wild-eyed old boy with a handlebar moustache and a stars and stripes shirt giggles while declaring: “I just can’t help falling in love with you” with extraordinary tenderness.
There are tableaux such as this everywhere: mothers and sons dancing in the streets, gaggles of female friends guffawing at jokes they’ve heard a thousand times. You cannot help but get dragged into the overwhelming joy – a community forged by a shared love that is the foundation of so many marriages and friendships.
In the headline show, Anthony and his dad perform together as 70s Elvii for the first time. They do Paul’s favourite, Suspicious Minds, and he sings: “Because I love you too much, Anthony.” But in the end, his son finishes in second once again, pipped by 21-year-old New Zealander Taurean Kenny Mill, who brings the house down with Unchained Melody.
A fan in her late 80s says waiting for Anthony to win is motivation for her to live another year. “It’s very cut-throat and hard to take,” Anthony reflects, post-final. “But it’s a beautiful world to be in.”
Photographs by Trent Mitchell