Everybody's was an Australian tabloid-style magazine of the 1960s. It has no relationship to the early 20th century British or American magazines of the same name.
History
First issued in 1961, Everybody's was published by Australian Consolidated Press. It evolved from an earlier ACP tabloid magazine, Weekend, which flourished in the 1950s. Weekend was edited by Donald Horne for many years and one of its most famous staffers was renowned journalist and rock writer Lillian Roxon, who wrote for the magazine for several years in the mid-1950s before moving to New York. According to Roxon's biographer Robert Milliken, Weekend had a dubious reputation in "polite society" and was considered very downmarket since it regularly featured lurid stories, often with sexual overtones. Roxon's mother was reportedly horrified by the idea of her daughter working for such a publication and concealed the fact from friends and family. When Weekend was relaunched as Everybody's, it also replaced the venerable women's magazine the Australian Woman's Mirror, which was first published in 1924 and ceased publication in mid-1961. Copies of Everybody's from this period indicate that it was definitely a "women's" magazine in its early days, featuring almost exclusively women on the covers, with typical content including celebrity stories, cooking, interior decorating and fashion.
Notable contributor
Noted Australian cartoonist, illustrator and artist Marie "Mollie" Horseman was a contributor to Everybody's during the early 1960s. Her numerous illustrations included full-page colour cartoons of the "Sexy Man" type and the serial Girl Crusoe, a parody of the popular 'good girl cheesecake' comic. In 1963 Everybody's hailed her as 'Australia's only woman cartoonist', although she was definitely the best known.
As the 'Beat Boom' in popular music took off in Australia in 1963-1964 Everybody's began to cater for the burgeoning teenage market. Its content increasingly featured stories and pinups of local and international pop music, movie and TV personalities, although it still made regular excursions into tabloid territory, as evidenced by 'teaser' cover slogans like "Black Mass in Color: Shock Witchcraft Pictures", "The World's Most Topless City", "Trade Secrets of a Female Impersonator", "The World's Most Famous Nudes", "Those nude films", "What goes on in the suburbs?" and "Jayne Mansfield Tells All: Those Lewd Film Star Orgies". Australian pop culture historian Jeffery Turnbull described Everybody's as:
Market
Everybody's enjoyed a comfortable relationship with Festival Records, which was owned by ACP's rival News Limited, and it did much to promote Festival artists such as Jimmy Little, whom it named "Australian Pop Star of the Year" in 1964. The magazine also covered a range of social trends; in 1964 it examined the "new beach cult" and fretted about the "surfies" -- "they come from good homes, they are well educated, why then, do they turn into common larrikins?" Everybody's also included cartoons, most notably The Phantom by Lee Falk. The magazine also played a role in launching the career of TV and pop personality Denise Drysdale.
Competition
Everybody's dominance was challenged in early 1966 with the appearance of a new Melbourne-based weekly pop magazine, Go-Set, which was launched by a group of former Monash University students. Although Everybody's enjoyed the advantage of being published by a large company and had an established national readership, its position in the teenage market was quickly usurped, and from 1967 until its closure in 1974, Go-Set reigned supreme as Australia's pop culture 'bible'. In 1966 Everybody's attempted to expand its operations by starting up its own Everybody'srecord label, with the intention of selling singles via the magazine. The new label was a joint venture between Clyde Packer and Harry M. Miller and was managed by American-born entrepreneur, producer and songwriter Nat Kipner. The new label was not well received by commercial radio stations, however, and some Sydney stations reportedly refused to play the label's inaugural single, Tony Barber's "Someday", because it was seen as blatant cross-promotion for the magazine. As a result, the label was hastily relaunched as Spin Records, and it became one of the most significant local pop labels of the late 1960s. By the late 1960s the focus of the Australian pop scene was firmly in Melbourne and while Go-Set evolved with the times and developed close links with the local pop scene, Everybody's essentially retained the one-dimensional "fanzine" style it had developed in the early 60s. Its circulation gradually declined, out-competed by the 'hipper' style of Go-Set, and it ceased publication during 1968.
