I Still Call Australia Home

"I Still Call Australia Home" is a song written and performed by Peter Allen in 1980. In it, Allen sings of Australian expatriates' longing for home.

"I Still Call Australia Home"
Song by Peter Allen
from the album Bi-Coastal
LanguageEnglish
ReleasedJune 1980
Recorded1979
Songwriter(s)Peter Allen
Lyricist(s)Peter Allen

Significance to Australian culture

It has been used to signify Australian patriotism and nostalgia for home. An example is the series of Qantas television commercials where it was sung either by individual Australian musicians or one of several Australian youth choirs.[1] This is also remade in their 2020 safety video, where various covers of the song were made accompanying a 100-year history visualization.[2]

In the 1984 Summer Olympics' Opening Gala TV special (in Los Angeles), Olivia Newton-John performed this song from Sydney, Australia with the choir in a medley with "Waltzing Matilda". Later, both songs were used in the musical about Allen's life, The Boy from Oz, in which Hugh Jackman starred as Allen.

"I Still Call Australia Home" was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry in 2013.[3]

In Australian English speech of earlier generations, "home" referred to Britain.[4] Thus by contrast, "calling Australia home" became for a period a particularly piquant expression of Australian identity.

Charts

"I Still Call Australia Home" peaked at number 72 on the Australian singles chart in June 1980[5] when it was originally released,[6] but re-entered the charts and peaked at number 60 in September 2015 following the screening of the mini-series Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door.[7]

Use

References

  1. Duncan Macleod. "Qantas I Still Call Australia Home". The Inspiration Room Daily. Retrieved 2 July 2009.
  2. "Qantas Safety Video". Qantas. 25 February 2020. Retrieved 10 September 2020 via YouTube.
  3. National Film and Sound Archive: Sounds of Australia.
  4. "home". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) - "Formerly used with reference to Britain by inhabitants of (former) British dependencies [...]."
  5. "Kent Music Report No 312 – Week Ending 16 June 1980". Imgur.com (original document published by Kent Music Report). Retrieved 12 August 2017. N.B. The HP column displays the highest peak reached.
  6. Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (Illustrated ed.). St Ives: Australian Chart Book. p. 15. ISBN 0-646-11917-6.
  7. Ryan, Gavin (19 September 2015). "ARIA Singles: Justin Bieber 'What Do You Mean' Keeps Top Spot". Noise11. Retrieved 19 September 2015.
  8. "TNT 9 Closedown Early 1980s". c. 1980. Retrieved 1 September 2010.
  9. "TAS TV End of Transmission". c. 1986. Retrieved 16 March 2012.
  10. https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/one-hundred-years-of-style-and-innovation-in-new-qantas-safety-video/
  11. "Wonderful Welsh Choirs". (track 11)
  12. Peter Tschmuck; Philip L. Pearce; Steven Campbell (16 April 2013). Music Business and the Experience Economy: The Australasian Case. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 164. ISBN 978-3-642-27898-3.
  13. Gondwana Choirs Ltd (2010). Annual Report 2009 (PDF). Annual report. Sydney. p. 7.
  14. "Tim Minchin - A heartfelt song to my homeland..." Retrieved 11 August 2017.
  15. Caroline Overington (11 August 2017). "Minchin: 'I still call Australia homophobic'". The Australian. Retrieved 3 March 2019.
  16. Chiara Minestrelli (26 October 2016). Australian Indigenous Hip Hop: The Politics of Culture, Identity, and Spirituality. Taylor & Francis. p. 216. ISBN 978-1-317-21754-1.
  17. Brad Porfilio; Debangshu Roychoudhury; Lauren M. Gardner (23 September 2014). See You at the Crossroads: Hip Hop Scholarship at the Intersections: Dialectical Harmony, Ethics, Aesthetics, and Panoply of Voices. Springer. p. 136. ISBN 978-94-6209-674-5.
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