Australia’s National Songbook: Full list of first 10 songs inducted, from Beds Are Burning to Waltzing Matilda

Waltzing Matilda and Midnight Oil made the cut, as did a dancefloor banger about asylum seekers. But Australia’s first official National Songbook has no room yet for AC/DC, Cold Chisel or You’re the Voice.

Ben O'Shea

The West Australian

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The inaugural 10 inductees into Australia’s National Songbook include a searing hit by Midnight Oil, a dancefloor banger about asylum seekers and the nation’s most iconic bush ballad, Waltzing Matilda.

The eclectic array of tunes were selected by a panel of industry experts and revealed at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra on Wednesday.

Compiled in conjunction with APRA AMCOS, the National Songbook can only include tunes written or co-written by an Australian APRA member, released at least 10 years prior to consideration, and must “demonstrate significant cultural impact within Australia”.

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Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning ticks those boxes, with the band infamously performing the protest song about Indigenous land rights at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, clad in black outfits emblazoned with the word “sorry”.

Also performed at the 2000 Olympics was another Songbook inductee - My Island Home.

It was a hit for Christine Anu in 1995, and performed again by the singer at the Games, but was actually written by Neil Murray as a founding member of the Warumpi Band.

Murray told The West Australian he recalled feeling “a bit miffed” the Warumpi Band weren’t asked to play the song at the Olympics, which he originally wrote as an ode to the group’s frontman, George Burarrwanga.

Murray penned the lyrics to My Island Home on a bus after spending a few days with Burarrwanga in the remote community of Galiwinku on Elcho Island in Arnhem Land.

The songwriter was struck by the difference between the Warumpi Band’s desert base in Papunya and the island “paradise” Burarrwanga called home.

“I heard the chorus in my head, and it just insisted itself, and I had to hang on to it because I didn’t have a notebook or anything (on the bus), and my guitar was down in the in the luggage hold,” Murray said.

Australian pop group The Easybeats ride bicycles around Berkeley Square, London, circa 1968. Credit: Andrew Maclear/Getty Images

“It does tap into a universal feeling for anyone who’s missing their home, or a place where they feel they really belong; that’s something that we can all identify with, but I had no idea that it would take off the way it has.”

My People by the Presets, another Songbook inductee, has a more pointed message, taking aim at Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.

“I’m here with all of my people. Locked up with all of my people,” sings Julian Hamilton on the song he co-wrote with bandmate Kim Moyes.

The synth-heavy 2007 dancefloor hit, which couldn’t be more different to fellow inductee Waltzing Matilda by Banjo Paterson, spent 27 weeks in the ARIA Top 50, and earned the ARIA Award for best music video.

The National Songbook’s first crop of inductees included a second dance hit, Yothu Yindi’s 1991 protest anthem, Treaty, which found mainstream success following the release of a remix by Filthy Lucre that climbed to No.6 on the US Billboard club chart.

Downtempo but no less impactful is soulful Songbook inductee, Down City Streets, by Indigenous singer Ruby Hunter, which was recorded by her legendary husband, Archie Roach.

Inspired by Hunter’s experience as a member of the Stolen Generation, the lyrics examine the plight of those sleeping rough.

This year’s crop of inductees might broadly be described as anthemic in their own way, which is certainly apt for I Am Woman by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton.

The Easybeats classic Friday on My Mind also made the list and is widely considered to be the first Aussie rock song to become a global hit, capturing the energy of change in Australia in the 1960s.

Screen and classical compositions round out the inductees, with Peter Sculthorpe’s evocative Earth Cry the 1998 score to Australian cult thriller The Boys, written by The Necks’ Chris Abrahams, Tony Buck and Lloyd Swanton.

“I’m in really good company there,” Murray admitted.

“It’s a real honour. I’m very humbled by it.”