Readers Poll: which is the best chart-topping Australian album?

Who made the best chart-topping Australian album of all time: Delta or Barnesy? INXS or Savage Garden? Missy or Farnsy? Oils or Icehouse? Kasey or Kylie? | VOTE NOW

Delta Goodrem’s Innocent Eyes.

Delta or Barnesy? INXS or Savage Garden? Missy or Farnsy? Oils or Icehouse? Kasey or Kylie?

Each of these iconic Australian artists has topped the album chart. Some have managed it multiple times: raucous rock ’n’ roller Jimmy Barnes has hit No 1 with 12 releases between 1984 and 2019, making him the most successful artist of any nationality in modern chart history — ahead of U2, ­Madonna, Bon Jovi and Eminem.

By numbers, Barnesy is the king. But in terms of time spent at the top, pop singer-songwriter Delta Goodrem earned the throne with her 2003 debut Innocent Eyes, which spent 29 weeks at No 1 — four more than John Farnham’s 1986 monster-seller Whispering Jack.

That’s all nerdy number stuff for chart geeks like me, though.

John Farnham performing in the SA-FM Kickstart concert in 1991.

The average music fan — that’s you — probably doesn’t give much of a stuff about how many singles Savage Garden’s 1997 debut album spawned (answer: seven, incredibly).

You know what you like and what you don’t like — and this is where your opinion comes in, ­because we’re asking you to pick the best chart-topping Australian album.

The criteria for whittling this list down to 10 was simple: the ­albums all had to have spent at least five weeks atop the weekly sales chart calculated by the ­Australian Recording Industry Association.

So they’re all etched in the pop cultural history books for being highly successful in their own ways, although perhaps they’re not all albums that found their way into your CD collection of yesterday, or into your streaming music library of today.

Maybe you’ve never been a fan of the country grit of Kasey Chambers or Kylie Minogue’s glossy pop or the glorious vocal melodies of Missy Higgins.

Perhaps the songs of INXS will forever be tied to the memory of being rejected by your teen crush circa 1984, which is why you’ve never been able to stand ’em. Maybe you’ve heard the bagpipe solo in You’re The Voice so many times in your life that its opening bars trigger musical PTSD.

For me, the answer to this question is obvious: Diesel and Dust, the sixth album by Sydney rock band Midnight Oil.

Its origins lay in the urban quintet deciding to venture deep into the deserts of central Australia and the Top End with Warumpi Band in the winter of 1986 to learn about the plight of our indigenous people, between offering live performances that they soon realised were way too brash for wide open spaces.

“It didn’t work, and people just left,” drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst told The Australian last year.

“We realised there was a different rhythm out there, so we took a leaf out of the Warumpis’ book: we turned down and slowed down.”

The result was a life-changing experience for the band members that fed into an extraordinary collection of songs.

Released in 1987, the year ­before I was born, Diesel and Dust represented the band’s commercial peak.

While it contains a handful of signature songs such as The Dead Heart, Sometimes and Beds Are Burning — whose opening three-chord flourish still rates among the most effective album openers of all time — it also features Warakurna, a striking mid-album track with a shifting tempo that manages to encapsulate everything that was — and still is — great about this band within the space of 4½ minutes.

In much simpler terms, though, it’s an album of timeless music that never fails to make my heart beat a little faster. But I’m just another music fan with an opinion. What’s yours?