Fraternity's Aldgate farm — Bon Scott before AC/DC

Before Bon Scott joined AC/DC in 1974, he spent several years as the vocalist of Fraternity, a progressive rock band based in Adelaide that was genuinely ambitious — and genuinely unsuccessful on the national and international scale their ambition required. In the early 1970s, Fraternity took the then-fashionable communal approach to band life and established themselves on a farm property in Aldgate, a small town in the Adelaide Hills about twenty-five kilometres from the city. The band members lived together on the property, rehearsed there, and cultivated the kind of rural bohemian existence that was common among Australian rock bands of the era trying to project seriousness.

Fraternity made two albums and went to England in 1972 in search of a breakthrough that never came. The UK music press was largely uninterested; the tour dates were in secondary venues; the band returned to Australia diminished. Back in Adelaide, Bon Scott's position in the band became increasingly peripheral. In early 1974, he was in a serious accident near Adelaide that hospitalised him for weeks and left him with injuries that took months to fully recover from. It was during this period of recovery that his connection to music deepened into something more urgent rather than less — he came out of it determined to find a band that matched what he wanted to do.

That band turned out to be AC/DC. Angus and Malcolm Young saw Scott perform shortly after his recovery and recruited him in September 1974. He was twenty-eight, older than most of the musicians starting out at that level, and he had spent the preceding decade in bands that had not delivered what he was capable of. The Aldgate farm and the Fraternity years were the long, oblique preparation for everything that followed.