"The Song of Australia" was written by English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

-born poet Caroline J. Carleton in 1859 for a competition sponsored by the Gawler Institute. The music for the song was composed by the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

-born Carl Linger

Carl Linger

Carl Linger was a German Australian composer who wrote the "Song of Australia". For his song he received a price of ten guineas.German-born intellectual Carl Linger, who had studied at the Institute of Music in Berlin, came to South Australia in 1849 on the Princess Luise. He settled in Gawler,...

 (1810-1862), a prominent member of the Australian Forty-Eighters

Forty-Eighters

The Forty-Eighters were Europeans who participated in or supported the revolutions of 1848 that swept Europe. In Germany, the Forty-Eighters favored unification of the German people, a more democratic government, and guarantees of human rights...

.

The song was popularised in Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 by a rendition in the early 20th century by Australian baritone Peter Dawson.

The song was one of four included in a national plebiscite to choose Australia's national song

Australian plebiscite, 1977 (National Song)

As an additional question in the 1977 referendum, the voters were polled on which song they would prefer to be used to mark occasions where a particularly Australian national identity was desired. Voting on this question was not compulsory...

 in 1977. Nationwide it was the least popular of the four choices, but it had the distinction of being the most popular choice in South Australia

South Australia

South Australia is a state of Australia in the southern central part of the country. It covers some of the most arid parts of the continent; with a total land area of , it is the fourth largest of Australia's six states and two territories.South Australia shares borders with all of the mainland...

.

The four songs in the plebiscite were: Waltzing Matilda

Waltzing Matilda

"Waltzing Matilda" is Australia's most widely known bush ballad. A country folk song, the song has been referred to as "the unofficial national anthem of Australia"....

; the then current anthem, God Save the Queen

God Save the Queen

"God Save the Queen" is an anthem used in a number of Commonwealth realms and British Crown Dependencies. The words of the song, like its title, are adapted to the gender of the current monarch, with "King" replacing "Queen", "he" replacing "she", and so forth, when a king reigns...

 (now the Royal Anthem); the now current anthem, Advance Australia Fair

Advance Australia Fair

"Advance Australia Fair" is the official national anthem of Australia. Created by the Scottish-born composer, Peter Dodds McCormick, the song was first performed in 1878, but did not gain its status as the official anthem until 1984. Until then, the song was sung in Australia as a patriotic song...

; and Song of Australia.

External links

• More history of "Song of Australia"
• Recording by the Royal Australian Navy Band in MP3
  MP3
  MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
  
  format