Advance Australia Fair

ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR
THE NSW CONNECTION

The name Peter Dodds McCormick is unknown to most Australians.

But every time we sing Advance Australia Fair, we are singing words and music written by this NSW school teacher who lived most of his life in Sydney.

Peter Dodds McCormick was born in Glasgow in 1834 or 1835 (date uncertain) and came to Australia in 1855.

He trained to be a teacher at Fort Street Model School (an early teacher training institution) and from 1863 to 1885 taught at schools in various parts of Sydney, including St Marys and Woolloomooloo.

McCormick's main interests were choral music, Scottish heritage and the Presbyterian Church, and he retired from teaching in 1885 to concentrate on these interests.

As an amateur composer, McCormick wrote about 30 patriotic songs on Scottish and Australian themes. None of these are now performed – with one huge exception.

Some time in or around 1878, McCormick attended a concert of national anthems and was dismayed by the fact there was "not one note for Australia". So he decided to write his own, and began composing a song in his head on the way home in the bus.

Thus Advance Australia Fair was born.

On November 30, 1878 the song was performed for the first time at a Scottish Highland gathering in Sydney.

Advance Australia Fair remained popular for the rest of the century and was performed by a massed choir of 10,000 voices at the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in Centennial Park on January 1, 1901.

In 1907 the NSW Government of Premier Joseph Carruthers awarded McCormick £100 for composing Advance Australia Fair.

McCormick died nine years later in 1916 and was buried in Rookwood Cemetery, where his grave can still be visited today.

He is also commemorated by a plaque in the Grahame Memorial Uniting Church in Victoria Street, Waverley.

The obituary for McCormick in The Sydney Morning Herald (October 31, 1916) observed that Advance Australia Fair had "come to be recognised as something in the nature of an Australian National Anthem."

That may have been true but it was another seven decades until the song permanently and formally became Australia's national anthem in 1984.

Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography Volume 10
(General Editors Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle – Melbourne University Press, 1986)

National Anthem Advance Australia Fair
http://www.pm.gov.au/aus_in_focus/nat_symbols/anthem.html

DFAT
http://www.dfat.gov.au/facts/nat_anthem.html

Government House, Canberra (It's An Honour)
http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/singing_anthem.html