Great Southern Land echoes throughout National Museum of Australia
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It’s become our unofficial anthem—Great Southern Land—written by a young Iva Davies of Icehouse back in 1981 and celebrating “a prisoner island, hidden in the summer for a million years”.
Yesterday the National Museum of Australia opened its groundbreaking Great Southern Land environmental gallery as part of a $34 million revamp that reimagines more than one-third of the building.
In its biggest redevelopment since opening to the public in 2001, the museum also opened a multi-sensory and immersive Tim and Gina Fairfax Discovery Centre which is a play space designed for kids up to six years old.
Great Southern Land gallery. Image Supplied.
The Great Southern Land gallery was designed by the renowned New York-based Local Projects, best known for their acclaimed work on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York.
Museum Director, Dr Mathew Trinca, said the two new galleries represent a major new offering to the Australia public and “a pivotal moment in the history of the National Museum”.
“The National Museum is celebrating more than 20 years of engagement with the Australian public and these new developments will see it go from strength to strength in the decades ahead.”
The bunya forest inside the Great Southern Land gallery at the National Museum of Australia. Supplied NMA
To celebrate the opening, Iva Davies took to the stage in the Gandel Atriumon hand to reprise his iconic song, after which the gallery is named. Accompanied by preeminent didgeridoo player and composer William Barton, the exhibition incorporates the stories of the First Peoples who have lived on the continent for at least 65,000 years, as well as the stories of all those who followed.
The gallery features more than 2,000 objects, and rich multi-sensory experiences to show how the continent has changed over time and how those changes can guide the nation through future challenges.
As part of the gallery launch, the National Museum had on display the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 synthesiser, which was used by Iva to compose his song.
“To have the song included as a part of the incredible project, that the National Museum of Australia has undertaken, to trace the history, diversity and the magic of our country is very humbling,” he said.
Iva Davies at the launch of the NMA’s new gallery, Great Southern Land. Picture supplied by NMA.
When Icehouse started out in 1977 synthesiser technology was still relatively new.
“The Prophet 5 is so called because it could play five notes at a time, and this meant that it could play a full musical chord. It also could store the sounds you created on it in ‘memory’ slots, and this was incredibly useful especially for live performing,” Iva said.
“The first song that was produced in that exploration was ‘Great Southern Land’ and the Prophet 5 sound is the backbone of that song. You’ll recognise the sound of that very first long note immediately as coming from the Prophet.”
The Prophet 5 model which was the basis for Great Southern Land.
Yet he dispelled some of the mystique surrounding the song, noting that while it is often played to accompany cinematic shots of the Australian landscape, it was recorded in his inner-city Leichhardt home in Sydney between noisy bus routes on the road outside.
Describing it as a song he felt “absolutely compelled to write” following the band’s first international tour which left him feeling incredibly homesick, Iva said he coined the term “Great Southern Land” after much experimentation which included writing words on scraps of paper and shuffling them around on the floor.
“My first decision was ‘what am I going to call this’ and obviously not too much rhymes with Australia. In my mind, the fact it had very early on been referred to by Dutch explorers as The Great South Land, and that had been taken up by William Dampier who was an English privateer, doesn’t scan very well—Great South Land— and so I added that extra syllable in and that’s where it came from.”
To coincide with the gallery launch, Icehouse has announced a one-off concert, supported by Mix 106.3, as part of its national Great Southern Land 2022 – The Concert Series which will be held at the National Museum of Australia on Friday 4 November 2022.
‘The Icehouse band members and team are very excited to be able to play at the National Museum of Australia,” Iva said.
‘The location of the concert in the Museum during the opening months of the Great Southern Land exhibition gives us all a unique opportunity to celebrate not only 40 years of our song, but the unique story of our home country. This is going to be a very special event for us all.’
Tickets to the 4 November concert go on sale at 9am today at www.nma.gov.au/icehouse.
