Who Gets to Define Australia's National Songbook?

A 10-person expert panel chose the first songs in Australia’s National Songbook, an institutional project that will help determine which music becomes part of the country’s shared story. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and APRA AMCOS announced the first 10 at the archive in Canberra on Wednesday, November 4, 2026. To qualify, a song had to be written or co-written by an Australian APRA member, have considerable or significant cultural impact in Australia, and have been released at least 10 years before consideration.

Who Gets to Choose

The panel brought together music professionals, practitioners, APRA members, academics and journalists. Jenny Morris, APRA AMCOS chair and recent ARIA Hall of Famer, and NFSA chair Annette Shun Wah guided the process. The first selections are “Beds Are Burning” by Midnight Oil; Ruby Hunter’s “Down City Streets”; Peter Sculthorpe’s “Earth Cry”; The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind”; “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton; Neil Murray’s “My Island Home”; The Presets’ “My People”; The Necks’ soundtrack to “The Boys”; Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty”; and “Waltzing Matilda.”

The songs span a wide stretch of time. “Waltzing Matilda” was first recorded in 1927, while The Presets released “My People” in 2007. But the people whose histories these songs carry didn’t choose the panel. The archive says it will add more Australian works each year, though the opening 10 remain the panel’s first cut from a much larger musical record.

“I'm here with all of my people. Locked up with all of my people,” goes a lyric from “My People,” a protest anthem against Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. The track, described as both political and a party song, spent 27 weeks in the ARIA Top 50 and won the ARIA Award for best music video. A song about confinement now sits inside an institution’s official account of cultural belonging.

Songs Carry the Unfinished Business

“Treaty” grew out of a promise Prime Minister Bob Hawke made at Barunga in the Northern Territory in 1988: he would reach a treaty with First Nations Australians. Three years passed without the promise being fulfilled. Yothu Yindi frontman Dr M. Yunupingu then co-wrote the song with Paul Kelly and Peter Garrett around a campfire as a reminder. It combined electronic music with First Nations instruments, became a worldwide pop-chart hit and a protest anthem, and contemporary acts such as East Journey still perform it, keeping the land rights movement alive despite a 2023 referendum ruling out an enshrined First Nations voice.

Midnight Oil wrote “Beds Are Burning” after touring central Australia and encountering Aboriginal peoples’ experiences of displacement and inequality. The protest song addressed Aboriginal land rights ahead of the 1988 bicentenary. Peter Garrett recalled, “We were in a timeless land occupied by people for millennia,” and “With hardly any idea of what had come before us.” The band later performed the song at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony in black outfits emblazoned with “sorry.” Garrett said the song still asks “how can we do the things that we would normally do and have the fun that we'd like to have, until we've actually done that serious work?”

Ruby Hunter wrote “Down City Streets” about displacement and life as a street kid after separation from family. A member of the Stolen Generations, Hunter wrote about people sleeping rough. Her husband, Archie Roach, first recorded the song for his 1990 album “Charcoal Lane,” before Hunter recorded her own version.

A Collection, Not a Living-Music Plan

The announcement came amid festival cancellations, venue closures and falling live attendance, as Australian music struggled to gain traction on local charts and streaming services. Australian music made up 8.4 per cent of local streaming, according to a recent APRA AMCOS report cited by ABC News. The Songbook records compositions and their cultural stories; the source doesn’t present it as a response that will reverse those conditions.

NFSA chief curator Meagan Loader called the collection “a living collection of our unofficial national anthems.” She said the project would preserve the music and the “stories around a song and its impact for future generations as well.” Loader said the first 10 were “really difficult” to choose, and that the aim wasn’t a definitive list but “an ongoing conversation.”

APRA AMCOS chief executive Dean Ormston acknowledged the limit: “No 10 songs could ever tell the whole story of Australia.” The first selections leave out Jimmy Barnes, AC/DC, John Farnham, Cold Chisel and Kylie Minogue. The institutions say the annual process will continue. For now, the panel and its criteria have set the opening chapter.