So it's not that controversial to say that Cold Chisel are the biggest aussie band to never break overseas. Certainly from the 70s and 80s. They formed in '73, but their first studio album was in '77, with the last of this period, which is where the real canon lies, finishing in '84, with the last studio album, 20th Century, and last concerts the year before in Sydney. The Last Stand.

And here we go, found a couple of articles that do the rest of the writing for me...
It’s December 15th, 1983. Around 13,000 people, a capacity crowd, are packed into the Sydney Entertainment Centre. This is the last of five Cold Chisel shows there. Fans had queued for blocks, some had even camped out overnight, to buy tickets. The original two shows became five. Sales were extraordinary. After all, this is the end of Cold Chisel’s final tour, and this show supposedly their last. . .
. . Chisel hit the stage in that “last show” in 1983 with a rendition of “Wild Colonial Boy.” Not the nineteenth century Irish-Australian ballad but the song written by Don Walker who wrote most, but by no means all, of Chisel’s material.
“Wild Colonial Boy” was off Circus Animals, the group’s penultimate album, released in 1982.
Walker would have been well aware of the allusion to the Australian ballad. His song echoed the ballad’s subversiveness, and is an allusive statement of rebellious “Australianess”.
The band came to define the kind of Australian rock music that could be found in pubs in the 1970s and 80s.
This kind of music used to be called pub rock, the same term is used in Britain for music made there in pubs in the mid-1970s, just before the advent of punk. .
. . .The year 1976 saw AC/DC’s first internationally-released album, High Voltage. Two years later Cold Chisel released their first album, Cold Chisel, and the single from it, “Khe Sanh”.
Khe Sanh was banned from radio, but had a huge impact on the music scene. YouTube/Cold Chisel
Written by Walker, “Khe Sanh” is about a Vietnam War veteran who is suffering post-traumatic stress. At the time the song was not very popular, peaking at number 41 on the chart. In part this was because it was banned from radio play due to lines like “And their legs were often open/But their minds were always closed”.
Over the decades since it was released however, “Khe Sanh” has become embedded as part of Australian life, sung in drunken unison by groups of men and women, at barbecues and weddings.
Its detailing of the damaged existence of a veteran – his nightmares, his addiction to speed, his inability to make meaningful contact with any woman, and his need for casual sex with East Asian women – all contribute to a particular image of masculinity. . .
. . . .Unlike AC/DC, Cold Chisel were unsuccessful outside Australia. Many reasons are given for this, the lack of record company support being the most common.
However, lyrically, the group’s songs speak more specifically to Australian audiences, and particularly men. American hard rock groups rarely sing of the kind of damaged masculinity that Chisel offer.
After Chisel broke up, Barnes tried one more time to break into the US market. The vehicle for this was “Working Class Man”, a song that celebrates blue-collar life.
It was written by the keyboardist for the American stadium rock group Journey, Jonathan Cain.
The song failed again in the United States. It reached number 5 on the Australian chart in 1985 but could never have been part of the Cold Chisel canon. . . .
. . .Chisel have become identified as the definitive Australian group.
Suggesting the appeal of their songs to women as well as men, “Flame Trees” – a Prestwich and Walker song about nostalgia for lost youth from the group’s “final” album recorded during the Last Stand tour, Twentieth Century, released in 1984 – was recorded by Australian artist, Sarah Blasko in 2005.
“When the War Is Over”, written by Prestwich for Circus Animals, was recorded by former Australian idol contestant, Cosimo De Vito in 2004.
It reached the top position on the Australian singles chart.
In his biography of Chisel, The Pure Stuff, O’Grady notes that like only half-a-dozen other groups, including the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Chisel’s albums, rather than just greatest hits collections, have continued to sell after the band’s demise.
They are the only Australian group of which this can be said. Their audience has become transgenerational. Chisel’s Last Stand started their transformation into an Australian popular music icon.

Flame Trees is absolutely one of my favourite songs of all time. I even did a list a little while back, and it was top 5. Impeccable on every level.
As hinted at by the above quotes, I'm interested to see how the supposedly uniquely (70/80s) australianness of the lyrics etc translate. I mean, the big ballads, like Choir Girl, and When the War is Over still send shivers down my spine, and there's a magic to their pseudo reggae numbers, like Saturday Night and Breakfast and Sweethearts.
And trying to explain Ita is gonna be tough without a wiki:
East was a deliberate attempt by Cold Chisel to make a more commercial album. Walker said at the time, "I go to bed with a tape recorder under my pillow. The tape loop says, 'hit single, hit single, hit single.'"[9] Allmusic describes the album as, "their most widely accepted and artfully constructed album."[10] Producer Opitz said of the pressure for commercial success, "My brief to myself was: “I don’t want to sacrifice the credibility of the band, but I still need hits.” Of course, the band at that stage were letting me have my total way with them. Because they weren’t a successful recording band."[11]
Some of the songs were topical at the time of release. "Ita" referred to journalist and television presenter Ita Buttrose.[12] "Star Hotel" is written about the riot that took place there,[13]"Choirgirl" about abortion,[14] and "Four Walls" referenced the riots at Bathurst Gaol.[15] Barnes later said, "At the time we'd been doing a hell of a lot of gigs in jails and Don had been really into it. He'd been talking to Jack Mundey and all those people, and I don't think he knew why, but he was sort of obsessed with the penal system."[16]
Later, Walker was described as, "keen to play down the political side of the band's songs." Walker said, "That whole East political thing, all those things were not necessarily said by us. Most of the themes were dreamed up by reviewers."[17] Anyhoo, enjoy.