"People say 'you must have been living somewhere really inspiring when you wrote that,' " says Davies. "But I was living in the front room of my first house on Catherine Street in Leichhardt with a bus stop right out front, under the international flight path.

"When I sang on the demo I had to wait and record inbetween buses pulling away and planes overhead."

Cold Chisel's post-Vietnam War anthem Khe Sahn, the Divinyls' debut Boys in Town and the Go-Betweens' indie classic Cattle and Cane were the others - choices partly inspired by Fairfax readers, who were asked by the National Film and Sound Archive to nominate their favourite 1980s songs in August.

Davies' inspiration came from several ideas, not least his reaction against "the creeping invasion" of American fast food outlets at Circular Quay, the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games television ads ("they incorporated all the cliches you'll find on a tea-towel") and a "lightbulb moment" on a cross-country plane trip which led to the song's famous first note.

"We ... did our first international tour and that included the experience of flying across Australia. I remember going to sleep over the desert and and waking up two hours later and we were still over the desert and just going 'wow, I had no idea about the size of this place'.

"The lightbulb moment in that plane trip was the scale of Australia. The other thing was not only the terrestrial horizon but also the ocean that surrounds it. I was graphically drawn to describe that horizon [with] a single note.

"The song came in about 5:15, almost radio suicide ... everything had to be three minutes-something. The record company wanted me to edit off that first note. I said 'not on your life'. I just said point-blank 'no'."

Ten recordings are added to the Sounds of Australia archive each year.  This year's cohort includes the usual eclectic selection.

The first recording by an Australian artist, Syria Lamonte (aka Sarah Cohen) is inducted (They Always Follow Me recorded in London in 1898), as is Deadly Sounds (a long-running indigenous interview program hosted by Rhoda Roberts), the speech marking the opening of the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1926 (said to mark the start of the recording industry here) and the howling of a dingo in the Finke Gorge National Park in the Northern Territory in 1990.

Perhaps the most interesting addition is the recording, by ABC war correspondent Chester Wilmot, of a concert by 400 Australian soldiers held in an ammunition cave at Tobruk in October 1941.

The most unusual is the first electronic music recording released internationally by an Australian on a commercial record label, a pair of erotic tracks entitled Fireworks and Orgasmic Opus, made by then-Melbourne anaesthetist Dr Val Stephen in 1967 using " high-pitched electronic noises above a persistent background throb" to suggest "a brief sexual encounter".