The Slip Slop Slap skin cancer awareness campaign from the early 1980s and Robyn Archer’s Menstruation Blues – a five-minute musical tirade from the same decade – are among 11 soundtracks that have been added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry for 2023.
Updated each year, the list draws on the past 96 years of sound recording, capturing popular and symphonic music, advertising themes, spoken word and radio broadcasts deemed of cultural and historical significance, and at least 10 years old.
Written by Phillip Adams and composed by Peter Best, Cancer Council’s Slip Slop Slap remains one of Australia’s most successful health campaigns, credited with increasing the population’s understanding of the risks of sun exposure.
On television in the early 1980s, the jingle was sung by Sid the Seagull, an animated sun-safe bird wearing boardshorts, a T-shirt and a hat; in 2007, the slogan was updated to “Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide”, to encourage Australians to not just slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat, but to also seek shelter and slide on sunglasses.
The oldest in this year’s inclusions is a 1927 recording of Verdi’s Anvil Chorus performed by Australian harmonica virtuoso PC Spouse. The newest is the 2012 Aria award-winning album Concerto of the Greater Sea by the oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros.
It is one of two LPs listed, the other being the 1979 album Harry Williams and the Country Outcasts, by Harry and Wilga Williams.
Two female singers of yesteryear – the actor and operetta star Nellie “Our Nell” Stewart of the 1930s, and the jazz artist Wilma Reading of the 1960s – have also made the cut, along with Sherbet’s Howzat, and the Loved Ones’ eponymous rock song of the 1960s.
Although not written with the intention of selling anything, the song I am Australian, also included in the 2023 register, is probably familiar to most people as a recurring advertising anthem. Over the years it has been used to sell the ABC, Telstra, the Rugby World Cup, the failed 1999 republican referendum and the Salvation Army’s Red shield appeal.
A 1959 ABC narration of Ivan Smith’s The Death of a Wombat completes the list.
As long as it’s Australian and more than 10 years old, any sound has the opportunity of being immortalised, according Nick Henderson, the curator of the NFSA’s Sounds of Australia project.
“We invite the Australian public every year to nominate their most significant sound recordings,” he says. “We pull together a long list of about 40 or 50 recordings covering what we hope is the full breadth of Australian sound recording history. And then we go to an industry panel of about 30 people, an anonymous panel which includes musicians, record producers, musicologists, people involved in music representation in a lot of different ways, and they vote.”
But for a sound to qualify, it must be a recording. So while in previous years the sounds of a dingo howling and whales singing have been added to the register, other sounds such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground siren and the clatter of the city’s trams have been rejected, because there are no specific recordings.
The 2023 cut of 11 was drawn from a list of about 200 nominations.
“This year we’ve covered a lot of formats,” says Henderson. “We’ve got shellac discs, 78s, vinyl, we’ve got quarter inch magnetic tape, right through to CDs and digital downloads. In other years we’ve had wax cylinders and wire recording. So it’s highlighting Australian heritage and history in terms of the material used as well as the sounds.”
More than 300,000 audio items are now housed in the National Film and Sound Archive, with one-third of the collection classified as at-risk and preserved through digitisation.
The complete Sounds of Australia list, from 1896-2012, can be viewed here.
