2009 Additions

The earliest disc recordings by an Australian brass band were made by the Newcastle Steelworks Band during their year-long visit to Great Britain in 1924. Altogether the band had a repertoire of some 500 pieces. From these they made the equivalent of 18 double-sided recordings for the Aeolian Company in London.

The Newcastle Steelworks Band was formed in April 1916 from the ranks of employees of the BHP Steelworks in Newcastle, NSW. Under its third conductor, Albert Henry Baile, the Newcastle Steelworks Band became the first Australian band to participate in competitions in Great Britain. They scooped the prize-pool, winning the British Empire and English championships and gaining third place in the World Championship.

On their return home, the Mayor of Newcastle noted that when the Commonwealth Government presented a map of Australia to the organisers of the Wembley Exhibition, it forgot to put Newcastle on its map. “Now,” he declared, “the Steelworks Band has done it for them”.

NFSA Title No. 560469

In 1922, Dr Cyril Callister, a young food chemist, created a distinctive ‘pure vegetable extract’ at the Fred Walker Cheese Factory and food processing plant in Dandenong, Victoria. A nation-wide competition in 1923 yielded the name Vegemite. In 1926 Walker sold their creation to Kraft Foods of Chicago and passed over the secret recipe.

The first radio jingle for Vegemite appeared in 1954. In this, three ‘Happy Little Vegemites’ sang their toe-tapping song almost ad nauseam. With the advent of television in 1956, the jingle became a television commercial. The Vegemite jingle has been used in advertising campaigns for Vegemite ever since.

NFSA Title No. 416113

In a career spanning six decades, Smoky Dawson was Australia’s first cowboy musician and a pioneer of Australian country music. Smoky and his horse Flash were legendary figures to an entire generation of young Australians who grew up listening to his radio show, The Adventures of Smoky Dawson from 1952 to 1962.

Around 1955, Smoky produced a series of 10” 78pm recordings for Columbia Children’s Records including Smoky Dawson and the Adventure of the Singing Bullet. Smoky’s old enemy Grogan escapes from jail and confronts Smoky and his mates. Smoky outwits Grogan with the aid of the ‘singing bullet’ from a gun supposedly inside the guitar.

Smoky Dawson died on 13 August 2008, a month short of his 95th birthday.

Columbia KO 1026

NFSA Title No. 281755

Courtesy EMI

Dorothea Mackellar’s My Country was created by a homesick 19 year old Australian girl travelling through Europe with her father, Sir Charles Mackellar, the noted parliamentarian and physician. She had laboured over her poem for almost three years before it was published in The London Spectator in 1908 with the title Core of My Heart. Reprinted in several Australian newspapers, it was warmly greeted as the quintessential evocation of post-colonial rural Australia.

Mackellar’s family owned numerous properties in north-west New South Wales, and the inspiration for her poetry no doubt stems from memories of childhood holidays spent at the family properties. My Country describes the breaking of a long drought at the Torryburn Station near East Gresford. Late in life, Mackellar was to describe how, after the rain, the grass began to shoot across parched, cracked soil. As she watched from the verandah, the land seemed to turn green before her eyes, all the way to the horizon.

In 1958 Mackellar recorded a reading of three of her poems with oral historian, Hazel de Berg.

NFSA Title No. 328116

Courtesy National Library of Australia

During World War II, American troops created a mania for jazz in the cities of northern Australia, particularly in Queensland. Maintaining morale kept local musicians busy, including the Pitt sisters - Dulcie, Sophie and Heather. Hailing from Cairns and of Torres Straight Island origin, they became The Harmony Sisters.

After the War, Dulcie re-invented herself as Georgia Lee, singing blues and jazz in southern Australian cities. In the 1950s, Georgia Lee toured the United Kingdom on a contract with the Geraldo Dance Band and also worked with Nat King Cole during his tour of Australia in February 1956. She appeared with many leading Australian bands, and performed on such television staples as Bandstand and In Melbourne Tonight.

In 1962 she recorded Georgia Lee Sings the Blues for the Crest label, becoming only the second female artist to release an LP in Australia and surely the first Indigenous female singer to do so. The album was also the first Australian album to be recorded in stereo.

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NFSA Title No. 511557

Courtesy Marcus Herman

In 1966, the ABC entered Butterley’s work In the Head the Fire in the Italia Prize, the pre-eminent international competition amongst broadcasting organisations. One of 16 entries, it won the award against some stiff competition.

Over several months, nearly 100 separate recordings were made in Sydney and Adelaide, supervised by conductor John Hopkins and the cream of the ABC’s technical engineers at the time. Although scored for vocal soloists, a small chorus and 23 instrumentalists, the effect of vast multitudes is achieved by multi-layering of tapes. The final tape comprised five separate but concurrent tracks. Although originally released in mono, the tape was re-mastered in stereo and issued for commercial release in 1968.

Like much of Butterley’s later work, In the Head the Fire explores various tenets of mysticism across cultures and centuries. Butterley himself assembled texts from the Latin Mass, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Irish mystical poetry (from which the title is taken) and other passages in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. The component parts are woven into a dramatic arch form of almost 30 minutes duration.

ABC Radio recording WRC s/2495
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Courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

In Tokyo, on 26 February 1968, the twenty year old Indigenous boxer Lionel Rose took the World Bantamweight Championship from defending champion, Japanese boxer Masahiko ‘Fighting’ Harada. Rose won in a 15 round unanimous decision by the judges. The fight was heard in Australia called by Melbourne station 3DB sports broadcaster Ron Casey.

Lionel Rose was the second Australian to win a world boxing title, and the first Aboriginal to do so. On his return to Australia he was greeted by a crowd in the streets around Melbourne Town Hall estimated to be around 250 000 people.

In 1968 he was awarded the title of Australian of the Year.

NFSA Title No. 283495

Courtesy Australian Radio Network

Released in its best known version in 1972, I Am Woman has become the enduring anthem of the women’s liberation movement. It was written by Helen Reddy and Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist Ray Burton. In December 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard charts, the first song by an Australian artist or composer to do so. It was also the first Australian song to win a Grammy Award.

Selling over a million copies, I Am Woman soon deluged the US radio playlists, launching Reddy on a successful career of some 30 years.
In 1971 Reddy, then living in Los Angeles, was signed by Capitol Records to produce an album. She had been searching for a song that would express her growing convictions about female empowerment.

“I couldn’t find any song that said what I thought being a woman was about,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “It came down to my having to do it myself.”

“I had no idea what the song was destined to become,” she said at the time. “If I had known, I would have been far too intimidated to have written it.”

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NFSA Title No. 619633

Courtesy EMI

Described as Australia’s great lost classic album of black protest music, Vic Simms’ The Loner and the circumstances behind its recording are extraordinary.

In 1973 Vic Simms was a 26 year old Bidjigal man, mid-way into a seven year sentence in Bathurst Jail for robbery. In jail he had bought an acoustic guitar for two packets of cigarettes, learned to play chords and started to write songs about his life and the injustices he saw around him.

Representatives of a charity group heard Simms singing in the prison yard and took a cassette of his songs to RCA. The company brought in a mobile studio and recorded ten of Simms’ original songs in a single one hour session. Initially, Simms’ music enabled him to sing his way out of Bathurst Jail. He was one of the first indigenous performers to sing at the Sydney Opera House and went on the prison circuit singing for other inmates. Offended by the patronising attitudes of both RCA and the NSW department, Simms struck out on his own when he was released from prison in 1977.

The original LP is exceedingly rare and few copies are known to exist.

RCA Camden CAMS 156
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Courtesy Sony Music

Treaty was written by the Indigenous group Yothu Yindi (the name translates roughly as ‘mother and child’).

As part of the Australian Bicentennial celebrations in 1988, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke attended the Barunga Festival in a small community south of Katherine. There he was presented with a statement of Indigenous political objectives by Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Wenten Rubuntja, chairmen of the Northern and Central Land Councils. The Prime Minister promised a treaty would be concluded with Indigenous Australians by 1990.

Treaty was created as a protest against the failure of the Australian government to honour Mr Hawke´s promise.

Mushroom Records released the demo as Yothu Yindi´s first album Homeland Movement. The first Yolngu language song to enter the pop charts, Treaty received roaring approval when performed by Yothu Yindi at the Closing Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics on 1 October 2000, watched by a worldwide television audience of incalculable millions.

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NFSA Title No. 226647