The National Film and Sound Archive created a National Registry of Recorded Sound in 2007 to encourage appreciation of the diversity of sounds recorded in Australia since the first Edison machines appeared here in the mid-1890s. Ten recorded sounds are added to the Registry each year through a process of public nomination and selected by a panel of experts and NFSA curators. The sounds represent landmark achievements in the way we have recorded the sounds of our history and memory.

The Registry includes what is probably the very first sound recording ever made in Australia. There is something utterly appropriate in the fact that this is not some grandiose oration of Sir Henry Parkes, but the sound of a man imitating chickens, in The Hen Convention (1896).

The Registry places into our time capsule those defining events in history: Sir Ernest Shakleton’s description of his journey to the South Pole (My South Polar Expedition, 1910), and Lionel Rose’s bantamweight triumph in Tokyo in 1968 (Lionel Rose Wins the World Title).

In Hobart in 1903, Horace Watson was recording the singing of Fanny Cochrane Smith, one of the last surviving Tasmanian Aboriginals (Fanny Cochrane Smith’s Tasmanian Aboriginal Songs). (Fanny’s contribution to recorded sound history is acknowledged by the NFSA’s annual Cochrane Smith Award for Sound Preservation.) Other notable achievements in the recording of Indigenous culture appear in the field recordings from the late 1940s by Professor AP Elkin (Tribal Music of Australia, 1953), and extend through to the contemporary songs of Vic Simms (The Loner, 1973), the Warumpi Band (Jailanguru Pakarnu (Out from Jail), 1983), Yothu Yindi (Treaty, 1991) and others.

Also captured are the sounds of careers-in-the-making, the first recordings of singers like Dame Nellie Melba ( Chant Venitien, 1904) and Smoky Dawson (Smoky Dawson and the Singing Bullet, 1955), the early efforts of pianist-composer Percy Grainger (Country Gardens, 1919) and jazzman Graeme Bell (Swanston St Shamble; Two Day Jag, 1944).

We hear important landmarks in the recorded history of Australian classical music, pieces like John Antill’s Corroboree (1950), Peter Sculthorpe’s Irkanda IV (1967) and Nigel Butterley’s In the Head the Fire (1966), an early Australian winner of the Italia Prize for radiophonic works.

The radio has always figured prominently in the lives of Australians. Radio serials like Dad and Dave from Snake Gully – Episode 1 (1937) and Theme from 'Blue Hills’ (1949) sat amidst or alongside jingles like the Aeroplane Jelly Song (1938) and the Happy Little Vegemites (1959) ditty. Almost every hour, on the hour, the Majestic Fanfare (1943) summoned us to the ABC News, but how many of us have heard more than 18 seconds of this familiar clarion call?

As the recording business picked up in Australia from the early 1950s, the output and range of recordings increased rapidly with influences from the USA in blues, jazz, ragtime, folk and rock.

Each year when new entries into the Registry are announced, there is a flurry of comment over what was included and what was omitted. The NFSA can’t and won’t ever claim to arrive at a definitive list. As long as people take notice, argue and listen, the NFSA’s National Registry of Recorded Sound will have succeeded putting us in touch with our sound history, our 'Sounds of Australia’.

Nominations are now open for 2010 additions to the Registry.

Follow @australiascreen on Twitter and nominate your own recorded sound using the hashtag #soundsofaustralia.

Curator

Vincent Plush

Significant people

• Graeme Bell
• Nigel Butterley
• Smoky Dawson
• Percy Grainger
• Dame Nellie Melba
• Thomas Rome
• Lionel Rose
• Peter Sculthorpe
• Sir Ernest Shackleton
• Horace Watson
• Gough Whitlam