Who wrote Advance Australia Fair?

Advance Australia Fair was written by Peter Dodds McCormick, a Scottish-born Australian schoolteacher and composer who emigrated to Sydney in 1855. He composed both the words and the music under the pen name Amicus and first performed the song at a concert at the Sydney Town Hall on 30 November 1878, the feast day of Saint Andrew, Scotland's patron saint.

McCormick was born in Glasgow in 1834 and trained as a joiner before emigrating to New South Wales. He worked as a public school teacher in Sydney for more than 40 years and was an active church musician at Saint Andrew's Scots Church. He composed dozens of patriotic and religious songs in addition to Advance Australia Fair, but none achieved comparable success. He died in Sydney in 1916, well before his most famous song was officially recognised as the national anthem.

The song was an immediate hit at its 1878 premiere and was sung at the ceremonial inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia in Sydney's Centennial Park on 1 January 1901, before a crowd of more than 60,000. It was played alongside God Save the King, which remained the de facto national anthem of the federation. McCormick's original lyrics ran to five verses and contained references to British military campaigns, which were trimmed to two verses with more universal language when the song was officially adopted in 1984.

The Hawke government's 1984 proclamation of Advance Australia Fair as national anthem belatedly honoured McCormick more than a century after he wrote the song. A bronze plaque marks the site of the song's first performance at the Sydney Town Hall, and McCormick's grave at Sydney's Rookwood Cemetery is regularly visited on Australia Day. He is one of very few individuals whose creative work has shaped the symbolic identity of the Australian nation.