Culture

This Stunning Audio Montage Looks Back At The Biggest Moments Of 2017

It's been a big year.

by Patrick Lenton  9 December 2017
2017 Marc Fennell

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

2017 is almost in its shallow grave, and hoo-boy has it been a long, torrid year. While there are still a few weeks left in which we could all be reduced to irradiated ash, Marc Fennell has decided that now is the time to drop his annual audio montage going over all the things — good and bad — that happened in the year that was.

Weaving together snippets from speeches and news reports along with some of the year’s biggest bangers, 2017 in Sound takes listeners on a 10 minute journey down memory lane. There’s certainly a lot to cover, with the montage touching on Trump’s election, various horrific terror attacks around the globe, the #MeToo movement, the Grenfell Tower fires and the Rohingya crisis.

It also reflects on things closer to home, such as the Bourke Street tragedy, our ludicrous citizenship crisis, the George Pell court case, the marriage equality postal survey… yeah, there’s been a lot.

As far as I can tell, the best things that happened this year were Moonlight winning Best Picture, marriage equality passing in Australia and Lorde’s ‘Green Light’. Oh, and the nugget boy got his nuggys too I guess, although weirdly that wasn’t included in the wrap-up.

Given how easy it is to get caught up in the constant churn of the news cycle, the montage is quite a useful way to look back at everything that happened this year. Fennell and his partner Madeleine Genner have been putting together these yearly collages since 2011, and they’re always beautifully composed and strangely affecting.

If you want to remember simpler times, you can go back and listen to some of their previous efforts, such as this one from 2015 and then one from 2013. Otherwise, you can dive into the rich, exhausting tapestry of the past 12 months below.

Here’s hoping that next year’s compilation is made up of stories about an excess of world peace and a sudden rash of lottery winnings. Hey, it could happen!