‘Etched in muscle memory’: beer ad and original Doctor Who theme music preserved by Australian sound archive
You could get it ridin’, you could get it slidin’. And it usually came on at about four.
The words immortalised by John Meillon that became an affectionate and oft-parodied incantation for generations of beer drinkers is among the 10 iconic sounds of Australia preserved for posterity under the National Film and Sound Archive’s 2024 annual Sounds of Australia collection.
There aren’t many Australians over 30 who wouldn’t instantly recognise Victoria Bitter’s campaign with the “big cold beer” tagline, which ran for more than two decades.
But when it comes to nostalgia, the VB mantra faces stiff competition from another hard hitter of a bygone television era.
The fact that the original theme music for Doctor Who, which also made it on to the archives’ 2024 list, was the creation of an Australian is probably less widely known.
Ron Grainer, who spent much of his working life in the UK, collaborated with the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire and sound effects man Brian Hodgson to produce a sound style that was to define the science fiction genre of its time.
The archives’ chief curator, Meagan Loader, says the VB ad, created by the George Patterson agency for Carlton & United Breweries in 1967, is “almost etched in muscle memory” of Australians.
“I feel like we’ve all grown up hearing this as you’re reaching for a beer in the afternoon, it’s so synonymous with that feeling and that moment, what having that end-of-the-day beer meant to so many.”
Meillon returned on repeat occasions to record new versions of the ad over the years, each voiceover laid over Bob (Beetles) Young’s rousing score that felt like Australia’s answer to Bonanza. As society and culture matured, so did some of the ads’ portrayals of manliness – and some of the lyrics. Deleted from the original version: “You can get it swimmin’, arguing with women.”
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Even after Meillon’s death at the age of 55 from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989, his family gave permission for George Patterson to continue using his voice through digital remastering and recutting.
The Doctor Who theme was just as instantly recognisable as it pulsated ominously from Australian small screens of the 1960s and 70s.
While Grainer’s role is now acknowledged by Australia, its success also owed a lot to Derbyshire, who cut, spliced, sped up and slowed down segments of analog tape that had recorded white noise, a test-tone oscillator, and a single plucked string to create what is believed to be television’s first electronic theme music.
“She called it ‘music concrete’,” Loader says. “And while it’s very common now – we produce it through machines – she did that all by hand at the time.”
Another recording pioneer honoured in the list is the first Indigenous Australian to use recorded sound as a tool to preserve and document First Nations culture.
Jimmie Barker, a Muruwari man who grew up on a reservation on the Culgoa River, began his electricity generating and sound recording experiments on a Milroy sheep station in the late 1960s.
“He started experimenting with recording on abandoned water tanks and kerosene tins in mud using really similar principles to the recording techniques that were being developed at the time,” Loader says.
“He saw a lot of change in his lifetime – the development of electricity and the internal combustion engine and telecommunications in the bush – but what he was really interested in was working out how to use this technology to capture the stories and culture of his community’s old people.”
Funding from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) – later AIATSIS – enabled Barker to preserve more than than 100 hours of audio recordings between 1968 and 1972, detailing what he referred to as “the old ways” – preserving his elders’ stories from pre-colonial Muruwari and Ngemba culture.
Another First Nations Australian recognised is Nova Peris, for her 2013 inaugural speech to the Australian parliament.
The Olympic gold medal winner turned Labor senator – two firsts for Australian First Nations women – used her maiden speech to call for more effective strategies to close the gap between black and white Australians, a strategy already in its seventh year.
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The speech serves as a bookend to another speech made almost seven decades earlier by the Australian feminist campaigner Jessie Street, given during the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Street, who was the only female Australian delegate, dared to demand that the word “sex” be inserted into the clause “without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion” wherever it occurred in the UN Charter.
The veteran music artist Tina Arena, also known for her strident support of women’s equality in her field, is recognised with her 1994 hit Chains, from the multi-Aria award winning album Don’t Ask. Sound Unlimited’s 1992 hit Kickin’ to the Undersound is included as Australia’s first hip-hop song to reach the Top 20 in the local charts.
On a final mournful note, the now permanently lost staccato sounds of the Christmas Island pipistrelle microbat were last heard and captured in a single ultrasonic audio recording in 2009. Shortly after the recording of the mammal’s echolocation (the use of sound waves to determine location) was taken from the only pipistrelle environmentalists could locate on the island that day, the species was declared extinct.
