It began quietly enough. Bad weather diverted the flight from Hong Kong en route to Sydney and at 2.53am on 11 June, 1964, the BOAC plane carrying the greatest music phenomenon of the 20th century touched down - in Darwin.
About 400 souls, nearly half of them police, made it out to the airport in time to see the Beatles descend the stairs, jump into a car and, shortly thereafter, reverse the procedure. One plucky girl, 16 year old Joan Wiltshire, even managed to break the hastily arranged police cordon and dash to within metres of the band, only to be caught and quarantined for her trouble.
"Welcome to Australia," said a reporter, before throwing "which one am I talking to?" at a bemused Paul McCartney. From this the bass player may have gotten a false impression of just how much interest Australians had in the Fab Four, not to mention a taste of the media banality to which they would be subjected.
In the weeks that followed, the Beatles experienced unrivalled scenes of mop top mania. Hordes of screaming teenagers and indeed much of the population turned out to cheer them. In Adelaide 350,000 people, more than half the city's number, crowded the streets to welcome them on the 15km route from the airport to the Southern Australia Hotel. It was by far the biggest welcome they ever received.
In Melbourne the story was similar, 250,000 vying for a glimpse of the boys, who took turns on the balcony of the Southern Cross Hotel. Famous as they were, nothing back home had prepared them for such a spirited welcome. Even the normally wry John Lennon was happy to admit that the Australian tour was the greatest reception they'd ever had.
On the 35th anniversary of their arrival, it's easy to see it as a turning point in Australian history, a kind of cultural awakening for the nation's youth, who were hungry to embrace the counter-culture that had already taken hold of the US and the UK, even if they didn't quite know how to go about it. The tour, it seemed, was the catalyst for a change of values. The true '60s had finally arrived.
"Entertainment up until then was an adult view of what we should like," says Glenn A. Baker, rock historian and author of "The Beatles Down Under". "So we were getting the Vienna Boys Choir. Then the Beatles came out and they were cheeky to the press, as cheeky as you could actually be. To a lot of Australians that was quite breathtaking.
"They were young and cheeky but in an endearing way. It was a wonderful coalition of circumstances. We were crying out for release from our isolation and they were the most dynamic and exhilarating outfit on the face of the globe."
Four hours after their Darwin diversion, McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison and fill-in drummer Jimmy Nicol (Ringo Starr, who had tonsilitis, was reunited with the group in Melbourne), landed in rain-soaked Sydney and the frenzy began. Television covered every moment of their arrival. Fans crowded happily in the rain for a glimpse of their favourite Beatle as the four young men huddled under umbrellas.
The country had never known anything like it. Everyone had an opinion about the Beatles. It became a national obsession and the press coverage knew no bounds. There is nothing of the Beatles' time in Australia that has not been documented; no comb of the hair, no witty aside, no opinion of the girl who took the towels up to their hotel rooms. All that's left is the nostalgia of those who were there or saw the drama unfold on TV or in the newspapers.
"It had more to do with who we were than who they were," says Baker, who was 12 at the time. "I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened for Gerry and the Pacemakers... but we were this far-flung colony. We were linked to the world by these two week old newsreels. Somehow in the Beatles we saw our entry into the big, wide, exciting world.
"I think it almost legitimised us as a nation in the postwar period. We'd had the Queen with her pearls and twin-set, so we weren't entirely forgotten. But this was something incredibly exciting coming to visit us."
The reason it was the Beatles and not Gerry and the Pacemakers or any other British act was down to one man, promoter Kenn Brodziak. The Melbourne impersario, who died last week, brought the Beatles to Australia for the ridiculous fee of £1,500 a week, manager Brain Epstein honouring an agreement he had made with Brodziak before Beatlemania really took hold.
Of course, the shows placed a poor second to the hysteria that went with them. Every one of the 32 gigs in Australia and New Zealand was drowned out by the crowd, the band's inadequate equipment unable to register any noise beyond the front few rows. For the 28 minutes of each performance the Beatles spent much of it out of tune and out of time, unable to hear themselves above the cacophony that welcomed even the slightest movement or gesture from the stage.
Off stage they endeavoured to have as much fun as they could, but most of that was spent trapped in their hotels or fending off the press. There were civic receptions, where the glitterati got their few minutes with the stars, and there was even a party to celebrate Paul McCartney's 22nd birthday. Girls were more readily invited into the inner sanctum than boys.
DJ Bob Rogers, then working for Sydney radio station 2SM and now at 2CH, spent the entire period on the road with the Beatles. Acoording to him, the group coped better with the ordeal then he did.
"At that stage [of their career] they didn't mind. They had a great zest for life and a lot of testosterone. It was all a big hoot to them. [But] it was the closest I ever came to losing the plot."
All in all it was an exhausting three weeks for the group, but for Australia, things would never be the same. Today the Beatles phenomenon seems slightly surreal. How could almost an entire city be provoked into leaving their homes just in the hope of catching a glimpse of four shaggy-headed musicians from Liverpool?
Such fanatical behaviour in Australia or anywhere else is unlikely to be repeated. Pop groups, while they will always have some relevance, are not the cultural icons that the times dictated in the '60s. We live in a world where music is just another facet of youth culture and not quite the escape route from the parental attitudes that it once was. Today's mums and dads like rock music too.
"There have been many attempts to convince us that it is happening again or that it could happen," Baker says of Beatlemania, citing as an example how the band Kiss were hailed as the new Beatles when they waved from the balcony of Sydney Town Hall in 1980. "But forget it. We will never be so open to a situation like that ever again."