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 them seem about national pride, there are deeper themes in this song that makes Aussie cricketers puff out their chests.

That story starts with the song’s sound. Iva Davies, Icehouse’s lead singer, chief songwriter and a classically trained musician, wrote their hit debut album over several years. In that time, he was employed to notate hit albums for music books. His work led him to discover what he saw as the key ingredients for successful pop songs and Icehouse Flowers* became one of the biggest selling debuts in Australian rock history.

The record company contract meant Davies had only a few months to write their second album. In a fit of panic – and having to adjust his home recording schedule in Sydney to deal with constant planes flying overhead – he took inspiration from a recent flight he and the band had made across Australia on their way to an overseas tour. He meditated on all that red dirt, the magnitude of the place; the nation’s first peoples; and Australia’s history and future.

Back home, he bought a new-fangled synthesiser and drum machine, but couldn’t figure out how to change the settings. So, the Prophet 5 synth and Linn drum machine did their standard work and the sound became the majestic opening of Great Southern Land.

No one had musically portrayed our continent’s open spaces with a synth and drum machine before and no one has done it better with any instrument since. Sonically, Great Southern Land was a slight departure for Icehouse, but one that would take them to a wider audience and continue their journey to becoming one of Australia’s most successful bands.

The song was in 2014 added to the prestigious ‘Sounds of Australia’ registry at the National Film and Sound Archives and it centres on the notion that we need to listen to the land to get to the heart of the nation’s story. Davies’ lyric speaks to Aboriginal people’s centuries-old relationship with the land, while subtly and powerfully alluding to the impacts of colonialism on their culture. But the song also entreats every other Australian who walks this land to listen to it, learn from it, process the history of what has happened on it, and find a future here:

Anyone will tell you it's a prisoner island

Hidden in the summer for a million years

Great Southern Land

Burned you black

So you look into the land, it will tell you a story

Story about a journey ended long ago

Listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains

Maybe you can hear them talking like I do

The song is not all outback description: it conjures images of city life, loneliness and longing, while powerfully summing up the isolation that makes Australia – and the experience of Australian people – unique in the world:

Standing at the limit of an endless ocean

Stranded like a runaway lost at sea …

Anyone will tell you it's a prisoner island

Great Southern Land’s lyric sometimes speaks to Aboriginal people’s experience of being ‘burned black’ by the fierce sun for thousands of years, sometimes to the experience of the land itself, what it has endured to become this place of fierce beauty. It means the song’s musical expansiveness is matched by the lyric; focussing on Aboriginal experience, it yet opens out to include the continent itself and, by further extension, all who dwell on it.

After the song was released, Icehouse’s management told Davies to deny in interviews that the song was about Australia.

“Management were hellbent on Icehouse being perceived as an international band, not a band from Australia. They felt if we were tagged to a song about Australia we’d risk what was opening up to be an international market, especially in Europe…I can understand their thinking but to this day I think it was misguided and it certainly made my life difficult,” Davies told news.com.au in 2014.

In the same interview, he also revealed that 1982’s Great Southern Land was in part a reaction to Men at Work’s hit ‘Down Under’ from the year before. He said he respected the song’s writer, Colin Hay, who grew up in Scotland, but could tell it was the work of someone who didn’t have roots in Australia.

It was due to the choice of imagery…all those Bazza McKenzie cliches…There was something about that song, and the climate at the time with Australia becoming Americanised, that I found distasteful…I wanted to get rid of all the postcard stuff, all the koala bears and get to something more substantial. I’m not an overtly political writer [and] I did think that if I got the song wrong on any level it would explode in my face.

*Icehouse were called Flowers when they released their debut album, Icehouse, in 1980. Concerned they would be confused with an act called The Flowers, they changed their name to Icehouse before they released their second album.

Image: Still from music video, 1982, here.

This appreciation of ‘Great Southern Land’ was authored by Melbourne writer and academic Heath Remington, in 2025, specifically for The Genius of Australia.