The quest to find Australia’s favourite animal sound is building to a crescendo!
After more than 90,000 votes in the first round, we can reveal the final 10 contenders in the race for the nation’s hearts and ears, as the ABC celebrates National Science Week with a festival of sound and noise.
From the starting pack of 28 animals carefully selected by our panel of experts (with a bit of help from social media), 18 have now been eliminated. Their melodies and trills, squawks, bellows, growls and howls are gone from this competition forever.
Those “going home” include the growl-grunting Tasmanian devil, the bellowing koala, the annoying koel and both the ringtail and brushtail possums.
Sadly, the singing humpback whale narrowly missed out — by just 17 votes — finishing in 11th place. You can see the full rankings below.
The 10 that remain are all animals with iconic and unique calls. In alphabetical order, they are: the banjo frog, black cockatoo, boobook, butcherbird, cicada, fairywren, kookaburra, lyrebird, magpie and whipbird.
And what makes voting even harder in this final round is that you can only choose one favourite!
Listen and vote below, and keep an ear out for two of the challengers — the cicada and the lyrebird — in a two-part Catalyst documentary exploring the Soundtrack of Australia.
