Wake In Fright
Ted Kotcheff, Wake In Fright, 1971 Note: Contains spoilers You know a film is truly seminal when it finds its way into the vernacular: a ‘Wake in Fright moment’ is now Australian for being confronted by menacing people, alien to you, in a harsh [...]
Song of Australia
Song of Australia (1859), Caroline Carleton At a trivia night you might be asked, “What were the four songs Australians could vote for in the 1977 plebiscite to choose our new national anthem?” You should get ‘Advance Australia Fair’. I mean, it is the current anthem. [...]
Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda (1895), Banjo Paterson ‘Waltzing Matilda’ perhaps doesn’t belong in the Canon’s Poetry section and might be better placed in the Song section. It is, after all, best known as a song, Australia’s unofficial national anthem, but its author Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson did include it [...]
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1972 Here is Thomas Keneally writing in 2013 about the background to his most notable book which appeared in 1972: At the time I started to write the book, Australians had passed, by a huge majority, a referendum that enabled [...]
Khe Sanh
Cold Chisel, 1978 Cold Chisel’s 1978 song ‘Khe Sanh’ sits in the great Australian tradition of the melancholic anthem. Alongside ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’ itself, Khe Sanh, the story of a Vietnam vet’s ennui, is a raucous Australian [...]
Great Southern Land
Icehouse, 1982 Known for being the inspirational walk-out song for the Australian cricket team, Icehouse’s Great Southern Land was track one on their second album, Primitive Man, released in 1982. But, like Men at Work’s Down Under and My Island Home, Australian songs with choruses that make [...]
Australia
A.D. Hope 1938 Until Les Murray’s work (like Noonday Axeman) began appearing in the 1980s, A.D. Hope was indisputedly Australia’s premier poet, with a singular reputation internationally. Unable to publish his debut collection, The Wandering Islands (1955), until his late 40s because some sexually explicit poems [...]
