The Mitchell and Delbridge tapes

This dataset comprises 22,187 recordings of Australian English as spoken by 7736 students at 330 schools across Australia, collected 1959-1960 and specific information about the speakers. The recordings were made on reel-to-reel tapes and were used to create the 1961 publication ‘The pronunciation of English in Australia’ and the 1965 publication ‘The speech of Australian adolescents’. The original reel-to-reel tapes were digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive, transferred to DAT recordings, and the digitised version was reissued as an online database 'The Mitchell and Delbridge tapes' by the University of Sydney in 1997-1998. The website included contextual documents and annotations to the online database, included in this dataset.