"This is Australia" is a 1985 song by 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...

n band Gang Gajang from their self-titled debut album, Gang Gajang. "Sounds of Then" was written by frontman Mark "Cal" Callaghan.

Whilst the 1985 release of "Sounds of Then" was not an initial commercial success, it has become the band's most popular and recognisable song and reached its peak when it was used as Nine Network

Nine Network

The Nine Network , is an Australian television network with headquarters based in Willoughby, a suburb located on the North Shore of Sydney. For 50 years since television's inception in Australia, between 1956 and 2006, it was the most watched television network in Australia...

's station ID promotion in 1996. The B-Side, "House of Cards", was recorded live for 2JJJ

Triple J

triple j is a nationally networked Australian radio station intended to appeal to listeners between the ages of 18 and 30. The government-funded station is a division of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation...

.

In an interview for APRA

Australasian Performing Right Association

The Australasian Performing Right Association is a copyright collective representing New Zealand and Australian composers, lyricists and music publishers. The association's head offices located in Sydney Australia, and it has branch offices in Auckland, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth...

 Mark Callaghan states that the song started as a poem in his notebook, reflecting on the time that his family moved from England

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...

 to Bundaberg

Bundaberg, Queensland

Bundaberg is a city in Queensland, Australia. It is part of the Local Government Area of the Bundaberg Region and is a major centre within Queensland's broader Wide Bay-Burnett geographical region...

 in Queensland, a major culture shock.

“We lived half way between Bundaberg and the ocean, all around was bush scrub and cane fields. And walking up to the top of the street to catch the school bus, one morning you turn around and there’s fire. It’s one of those songs where if your goal was only to sell records, whatever it took to do it, then the song would have been called ‘This is Australia’. But it’s not about that. It’s a brick veneer drama. My parents got divorced when they came to Australia, it was a horrible period of my life. And the song is actually about how smells and sounds and sensations can rekindle a memory – which is what music does so successfully for people: I think I hear the sounds of then and people talking / Scenes recalled by minute movement / And songs they fall from the backing tape…

The song has also been used in a commercial by Coca Cola and featured in the 1987 film North Shore

North Shore (film)

North Shore is a 1987 film about Rick Kane , a young fictional surfer from a wave tank in Arizona, who heads to surf the season on the North Shore of Oahu and see if he has the skills to cut it as a pro surfer...

.

An instrumental version called variously: "Sounds of Then" (Instrumental) or (Surf mix) or (Mad Wax mix) was released as the B-side of 1986 single "Initiation". It was also added to the 1996 release (listed below) with an additional B-Side "Giver of Life".

1985 single

All songs written by Mark Callaghan unless otherwise indicated.

1. "Sounds of Then" -3:57
2. "House of Cards" (live version)

1996 re-release

1. "Sounds of Then" aka "This is Australia" - 3:57
2. "Giver of Life" (Geoffrey Stapleton, Chris Bailey, Callaghan, Graham Bidstrup, K Bidstrup aka Kay Bee)- 3:39
3. "Sounds of Then" (Surf mix) - 3:23