over a struggling Sydney engineering firm, retooled and relaunched it as Festival Records. Its main local competition was ARC (Australian Record Company), a former radio production and disc transcription service that established the successful Pacific, Rodeo and Coronet labels and competed with Festival as a manufacturer and distributor in New South Wales. Although most of the major labels were Sydney-based, Melbourne's vibrant dance and concert scene powered a local boom in rock 'n' roll and pop music and it became Australia's pop capital in the 1960s. During the 1950s luthier Bill May expanded his Maton guitar company, becoming one of the first local manufacturers of the new electric guitars and amplifiers. In 1953 precision engineering company White & Gillespie established a custom recording division, which their company history claims was the first in Australia to press records in the new vinyl microgroove format. The new division soon included the W&G label and studio, which arguably had its biggest success with the earlier Australian releases of Melbourne band, later based in London, The Seekers. In 1960 Melbourne consumer electronics company, Astor Electronics, created its own record division, Astor Records, which established the Astor label and also became a leading distributor. Festival grabbed an early lead in rock 'n' roll by releasing Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" in Australia in 1956 after it had been turned down by EMI and Decca. It became the biggest-selling hit released in the country up to that time, and its success set Festival on its way to becoming the dominant Australian local record company for the next fifteen years. During this period Australia experienced an increase in migration, as hundreds of thousands fled post-war Europe. The majority of migrants were from the UK, many of whom were "Ten Pound Poms" who took advantage of the Australian government's A£ 10 assisted-passage fare. Also, for the first time since the 1850s Gold Rush, large numbers of non-Anglo-Celts came from other European countries including Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland. These arrivals exerted a powerful influence on all aspects of Australian society and notably in popular music: many Australia pop and rock performers of the 1960s were migrants or their children. By mid-1957, inspired by Elvis Presley and Little Richard, Sydney-based singer Johnny O'Keefe achieved local acclaim after his breakthrough appearances on a Gordon-promoted tour by Haley. O'Keefe carved out a national profile to become a