When I first
set up this website, I found it easy to write about the origins
of each book and my experiences in writing them; they all lay
many years behind me! It was fascinating to cast my mind back
to the sort of person I had been, with ideals and practices
different from those of today. But I keep adding new work,
and that distance between the writing and the reflection on
the writing has disappeared. So what can I say about this latest
batch of librettos?
Looking at the list, the first thing that strikes me is that
they are a motley collection. The second is the boldness. Sometimes
the young are bold and the old grow cautious. I think I’ve
moved in the opposite direction. Some of them are acutely personal,
for the very good reason that, now I am old, I can’t
see any reason to worry about my own individuality because
everything I know about myself is replicated by things I know
about other people. I don’t actually believe that all
people are the same, but we have so much in common that, were
we to be blown to bits by an explosion and then reassembled,
I’m confident that pieces of everybody would get mixed
up in the reconstruction.
A silly idea, you may well think, but that’s another
feature of the events in these librettos: they’re quite
often silly. The
Water Tower is a good example, and so is The
Endeavour. Both of these,
by the way, have important parts for aboriginal people, a sign
that the older civilisation, in ruins for two hundred years,
is coming back into the consciousness even of those who welcomed
the obliteration of the black people. This merger, or re-emerger,
will keep going, I have no doubt. What it will produce I won’t
be around to see, and I regret this profoundly. I am an optimist
and I expect my country to improve, though heaven knows why
I think such a thought. This optimism underlies This
Enchanted World, the libretto that gives the collection
its title, in which events suggest that the world is almost
beyond improvement. So many disastrous things happen! Yet a
few optimistic spirits drive things forward, and are willing
to leave ‘heaven’ and return to earth,
again and again, to keep things moving.
This too is silly, I suppose, but one of the benefits of writing
in one’s third period (to borrow an idea from Shakespeare
and Beethoven, two of humanity’s gods), is that one feels
confident in picking up things one wrote about earlier and
taking them further, further, much further than one had taken
them before.
I say this because, searching through my earlier works to
see if there are models for This
Enchanted World,
I find myself reconsidering Hail
and Farewell! An Evocation of Gippsland. This was my first
published book and I was very proud when it came into the shops,
a published book by my own hand. I thought I was a writer,
not realising that one is only a writer when one writes without
thinking about the self behind the writing. The best thing
about my Gippsland book is that for the most part I let the
people and places of Gippsland speak for themselves. Oddly
enough, this same characteristic runs through this latest collection
of librettos. Each presents an event or an idea and lets it
run until its meaning is made visible, at which point the action
stops. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen once said that when
there is a silent bar in music the listener should imagine – I
think he should have said realise – that the music is
going on in another place. I would like readers of these librettos
to have such a feeling at the point where each one ends. This
is an idea that might run a long way yet!
I concluded my Introduction to the collection by saying that
the librettos have presented me with a challenge which I, in
turn, pass on. ‘Do
what you can with them, dear reader. They’re full of
an old man’s
ideas of reverence, which he hopes to share’.
> back
to TOP > back
to WRITING BOOKS |
