Bondi, Sydney, in the shadow of the Vietnam War. On national television, a lottery machine draws birthdays like chook-raffle marbles, deciding which twenty-year-olds will be conscripted. Meanwhile VINCE DONATI, a seventeen-year-old Italian-Australian rocker who works in his mum's milk bar (and can't swim), is determined to write the song that will take his perpetually renamed band to the world.

 

Into his orbit comes MARY MCNAMARA, a vicar's niece freshly arrived from Coonabarabran while her army officer father commands troops in Vietnam. Mary is a natural musician with a voice that turns hymns into rock and roll – and a good girl beginning to question everything she was raised to believe. As Vince and Mary write together, sparks fly; but Vince can't say how he feels, and Mary falls into the arms of CARL, the school's resident surfie.

 

When the lottery draws the birthday of RUSSELL – Mary's cousin and Vince's best mate and bass player – he refuses to run and ships out to Vietnam. Mary, now pregnant to Carl (who promptly shoots through), finds her voice among the women around her: her schoolmates DEBBIE and DONNA, the activist teacher MISS MENDOZA, and the Save Our Sons movement. Then a telegram arrives: Russell has been killed at Long Tan, aged twenty.

 

Grief fractures the McNamara household but forges something new in Mary – and finally in Vince, who realises a song has to be about something that matters. On the day of the first live global telecast from the unfinished Sydney Opera House, the band crashes the broadcast on the back of a flatbed truck and sings 'All Around the World', carrying Russell's last poem to a billion people. An epilogue reunites the company years later, closing on a chorus of 'Mary'.

 

BONDI HIGH is a rock and roll musical about first songs, first love and last goodbyes – the kids of 1960s Australia caught between the surf, the sink and the draft lottery, and the music that let them raise their voices.