National Film and Sound Archive announces 2021 Sounds of Australia inductees

These words from Kevin Rudd's Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples were heard across the country when they were first uttered in 2008, as part of a formal apology on behalf of the Australian Parliament to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Now, they have been added to the National Film and Sound Archive's (NFSA) Sounds of Australia for 2021.

"There's not many things that go by just the description, but 'the apology', when you say that, everyone knows what that means,"  NFSA curator Thorsten Kaeding said.

"It was huge and lives on now, I think, in people's memory."

Ten new inductees to the archive

Each year, the NFSA selects a number of recordings that have informed or reflected life in Australia to add to their Sounds of Australia collection.

The recorded sound "has to be Australian, has to be more than 10 years old, and it has to have a real historic or cultural significance to it," Mr Kaeding said.

"It's speeches, it's environmental sounds, it's radio, and it's popular music as well."

This year, along with the Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples, sits federal parliament's announcement of the end of WWII  hostilities in  Europe in 1945.

Jim Davidson's Dandies and Dick Cranbourne's Where The Dog Sits On The Tuckerbox from 1938 is also on the list, alongside 1986's Wide Open Road by The Triffids; Heading In The Right Direction by Renee Geyer; and Gotye and Kimbra's Somebody That I Used to Know, which was released to international acclaim a decade ago.

The 1982 soundtrack to The Man From Snowy River by Bruce Rowland and a piece of poetry recorded onto a wax cylinder in 1900 by J.J Virgo, are also named as Sounds of Australia.

"Some personal favourites [are] Gaywaves, which was a community radio program run on 2SER from 1979 up to 2005," Mr Kaeding added.

"I also love Little Pattie's He's My Blonde Headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy, which, as well as being one of the longest song titles ever, is just a really evocative one of that 1960s surf music scene."

There are now over 160 sounds in the NFSA's Sounds of Australia archive, dating as far back as 1896.

Mr Kaeding said the collection "really had become a reflection of Australia through the decades".

"We live in an audio world. People listen to the radio, to podcasts, to music. You actually spent a lot more time just listening to media than you do watching it, and that's something that often we forget because it's just so much a part of what we do every day," he said.

"It's really evocative. And I think that's what people were looking for when they nominate for Sounds of Australia, is those things that have that real cultural impact that really stay with you and mean something.

2021 Sounds of Australia:

1. 1.Absent minded beggar, J.J. Virgo, 1900 
2. 2.Where The Dog Sits on the Tuckerbox, Jim Davidson's Dandies and Dick Cranbourne (Jack O'Hagan), 1938
3. 3.Parliamentary announcements of the Victory in Europe: First parliamentary sitting broadcast, 8 May 1945
4. 4.He's My Blonde Headed Stompie Wompie Real Gone Surfer Boy, Little Pattie, 1963
5. 5.Heading in The Right Direction, Renee Geyer, 1975
6. 6.Gaywaves, Gaywaves Collective (2SER), 1979-2005
7. 7.The Man from Snowy River Soundtrack, Bruce Rowland, 1982
8. 8.Wide Open Road, The Triffids, 1986
9. 9.Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples, Kevin Rudd, 2008
10. 10.Somebody That I Used to Know, Gotye ft. Kimbra, 2011

More detail on the 2021 Sound of Australia inductees can be found at www.nfsa.gov.au.