Australia's national sound archive may not be as capacious as the Tardis, but it's roomy enough for the pioneering music of Doctor Who.
The opening melody for the long-running television series was dreamed up by Australian composer Ron Grainer, and debuted on the BBC in 1963.
Believed to be the first TV theme made using electronic music, it's one of 10 audio recordings added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia collection each year.
Grainer's theme was first arranged by English musician Delia Derbyshire, who spliced together tape recordings of a plucked string, white noise, and a test-tone oscillator to make its distinctive notes - sounds that would influence the development of electronic music.
Another addition to the sound archive in 2024 is also an example of influential technology that may seem quaint - a recording of the speaking clock telephone service, voiced by ABC Radio broadcaster Gordon Gow.
Two automated speaking clock systems (acquired from the British Post Office) were installed in Melbourne and Sydney in 1954, followed by other capital cities, before a national system was adopted in 1990.
After 66 years in operation, Telstra decommissioned the service in 2019, but a web-based simulation of the talking clock can still be found online.
While these sounds live on in one way or another, the archive has also preserved the final recorded call of an extinct species: the last ultrasonic audio recording of bat species the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, made in 2009.
Endemic to the island off Australia's northwest coast, the species was widespread until the 1980s but numbers declined due to phosphate mining and introduced pests, and the three-gram microbat was declared extinct in 2017.
There's also perhaps Australia's most iconic beer advertisement, Victoria Bitter's big cold beer ad, voiced by actor John Meillon, which first aired in the 1960s and has been used for decades since.
The first Australian hip hop song to reach the Top 20 in the local charts also made the 2024 selection, the track Kickin’ to the Undersound by Sound Unlimited, along with the single Chains by one of Australia's best-selling pop artists Tina Arena.
The 2013 maiden parliamentary speech of Labor Senator Nova Peris has also made the cut - Peris is not only the first Indigenous Australian to win Olympic gold, she is also the first Indigenous woman elected to federal parliament.
There are also recordings made by Muruwari man Jimmie Barker, the first Aboriginal person to document his culture using audio in the 1960s.
More than 100 hours of audio includes descriptions of what Barker referred to as the old ways, or pre-colonial Muruwari and Ngemba traditions.
THE 2024 SOUNDS OF AUSTRALIA
* Women’s status in the United Nations Charter: an address to the first meeting of the Women’s International Radio League, Jessie Street - 1945
* Speaking clock, Gordon Gow (Postmaster General’s Department) - 1954
* Doctor Who theme music, Ron Grainer (composer), Delia Derbyshire (musician) – 1963
* Victoria Bitter ad, John Meillon (voice), George Patterson (agency), for Carlton & United Breweries – 1968
* Jimmie Barker Collections, Jimmie Barker - 1972
* The earliest 2EA (now SBS Audio) broadcast recordings in language – 1975
* Kickin' to the Undersound, Sound Unlimited – 1992
* Chains, Tina Arena – 1994
* Last call of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi) - 2009
* Nova Peris’ inaugural speech to Australian parliament - 2013
