I Still Call Australia Home

"I Still Call Australia Home" is a song written and performed by Peter Allen in 1980. In it, Allen sings of Australian expatriates' longing for home.

It has been used to suggest Australian patriotism and nostalgia for home. An example is the series of Qantas television commercials where it was sung either by individual Australian musicians or one of several Australian youth choirs.

In the 1984 Summer Olympics' Opening Gala TV special (in Los Angeles), Olivia Newton-John performed this song from Sydney, Australia with the choir in a medley with Waltzing Matilda. Later, both songs were used in the musical The Boy from Oz, about Allen's life in which Hugh Jackman starred as Allen.

Use

• The song was used in the evening closing sequence for Tasmanian television station TNT-9 Launceston and later by TasTV.^{[citation needed]}
• In the version of the song popularly used by Qantas, "Rio" is replaced by "Rome". Qantas does not operate flights to Rio de Janeiro, but flew to the Italian capital at the time the video was made.
  • The version of the song used by Qantas in its 2009 advertisement replaces the entire first verse with one sung in Kala Lagaw Ya, a dialect of the Torres Strait Islands. This version was performed by the Gondwana National Indigenous Children's Choir and the Sydney Children's Choir as well as the Australian Girls Choir and National Boys Choir.
• The song is a popular inclusion in the repertoire of several Welsh male voice choirs, including the Morriston Orpheus Choir. The Welsh version replaces "London" in the line "from New York, to Rome, and old London town", with "Swansea".
• Australian comedy team The Chaser composed a parody of the Qantas version of the song, called "I Still Call Australia 51 per cent Home" in response to Qantas outsourcing some of its engineering services to Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa.
• The song was performed by Chris Lilley in episodes one and two of "We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian of the Year" (2005).^{[citation needed]}
• The song was performed by singer Kylie Minogue in the Sound Relief concert in benefit of the victims of the Australian Bushfires on 14 March 2009.^{[citation needed]}
• The song featured as pre-game entertainment at the 2009 AFL Grand Final, performed by the 'Qantas choir' and the Gondwana National Indigenous Children's Choir.^{[citation needed]}
• The song was performed by Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Newton-John and Russell Crowe to close Oprah Winfrey's Australian Adventure during her final season on broadcast television. This performance originally aired on US television on Friday, 21 January 2011.

External links

• I Still Call Australia Home 2004 Commercial
• Lyrics: Peter Allen: I Still Call Australia Home