Discoveries
for choir SATB, violin and
organ (1998)
duration: 8’
text by Ross Baglin
GRT • 051
audio sample
score
available from
Australian Music
Centre
program note
Ross Baglin’s
poem, Discoveries, takes the vantage point of an adult
remembering a childhood 'discovery' whose implications are
not really understood until later in life. This reflection
is in some ways a metaphor for Australia as a colonised
nation. The lines:
What is new in each discovery
Of Australia is ourselves
are an invitation, however, to view
'discovery of Australia' in a personal context.
text
First of all to
remember
The dry-leaf colour of antique paper
In scented rosewood drawers ;
Aged five, and disinclined to see
Victorian certainties preserved,
You could hear God in the mahogany
Of sedentary centuries
And Becher’s pedestal piano
Full of bass notes as an iron bell ;
The cowrie shell
An uncle brought home from the Coral Sea
Would whisper the names of Japanese
And other childish enemies,
Their clinkered bones
Fluorescent in the corallite
Or broken under clubs of surf.
Particularly I remember
One drawer always locked. I found the key
One day in velvet knots of dust
Upon the highest lintel, and supposed
Its clave and curlicues the secret code
To that barred place. One night,
Below a waxy moon it swept the lock
Away, and inside, papers,
Smudged with moth-wing, yellow,
Guilty still, deposing that same uncle
Had deserted in New Guinea. That dawn
Drew grey and doubtful, and the days
Lost their unchanging porcelain chill :
The world of adults, of bad teeth
And infidelities, of proppy lives
And all time’s injuries, would never be occluded
By a reassuring wink again.
From now on tall realities
Would be dissolved in things as light as days,
And only sympathy repair the worst
Of what time takes away.
Later I heard
Cook, Dampier, or Hartog
Crept on wind to rumoured shores,
And founded, on the nomad bones
Of men who walked in time’s ecology,
The end of exile -
Steep wood sloping to the cove,
The red stone of a meteor
Cathedral at its heart, the harsh
Autistic soil that an ancient tribe
Had robed in myth and dream
Now lay revealed beyond the sea.
What is new in each discovery
Of Australia is ourselves.