The National Songbook launched Wednesday night at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra with ten songs and a sensible disclaimer: there is no definitive list. That honesty is the right move. Any canon-building exercise in a country this culturally contested — with its colonial history, its Indigenous sovereignty fights, its migrant waves, its habit of exporting pop culture and then ignoring it at home — that claims finality is lying. The NFSA and APRA AMCOS are building a conversation, and the first ten entries are a reasonable opening argument. The oldest entry is Waltzing Matilda, its 1927 recording described by the panel as 'one of Australia's most enduring hauntings.' That word — hauntings — is doing serious work. Banjo Paterson wrote a song about a man who steals a sheep and drowns rather than face the law, and it became a de facto national anthem. The choice to describe it as a haunting rather than a celebration is the kind of interpretive honesty that distinguishes a cultural archive from a tourism brochure. The political through-line across the list is hard to miss. Yothu Yindi's Treaty (1991), Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning (1987), Ruby Hunter's Down City Streets (1990), and the Presets' My People (2008) are all protest songs in various registers — campfire rallying cry, stadium rock awakening, intimate Stolen Generations testimony, and underground dancefloor fury. Paul Kelly, who co-wrote Treaty around a campfire at Birany Birany, East Arnhem Land, notes the song 'travelled through many hands' before Melbourne electronic duo Filthy Lucre retooled it into an international dancefloor hit. That journey — from campfire to clubnight — is the compressed history of how protest enters culture. The list earns its breadth by including work that defies commercial logic. Peter Sculthorpe's eleven-minute Earth Cry, featuring William Barton on yidaki, is not radio fodder; the panel chose it for capturing 'the vastness of Australia.' The Necks' score to the 1998 film The Boys — described as 'unsettling' and 'off-kilter' — is avant-garde jazz from a trio who have never sought mass audiences. Their inclusion signals that the panel was not simply ratifying chart history. The selection criteria are worth noting: songs must be written or co-written by an Australian APRA member, be at least a decade old, and demonstrate 'demonstrable cultural impact.' That last phrase is doing a lot of lifting — it is elastic enough to include Helen Reddy's I Am Woman (a global feminist anthem written in 1971) and Neil Murray's My Island Home (1987), which evolved through Warumpi Band and Christine Anu into something larger than either recording alone. The panel of eleven included broadcasters Richard Kingsmill and Zan Rowe, composer Cornel Wilczek, and musician Mo'Ju — a range that pushed back against pure commercial consensus. Ten new songs will be added each year by a fresh panel. That rotating-panel structure is smart: it prevents any single curatorial orthodoxy from calcifying the archive.
