Interview with Christopher Sainsbury

Tell us about your involvement with Victorian Opera.

I studied composition with Richard Mills 39 years ago. So, when he rang and suggested an opera it held some kind of ‘full circle’ meaning, I think, for both of us. Also, I love the fact that Victorian Opera are always staging new works, so I would think they are the preferred opera company for any Australian composer.

What drew you to adapt ‘The Visitors’ into an opera?

The Visitors, although a work of fiction, is centered on the eve of colonisation in Australia, and as we know that wasn’t fictitious. Colonisation began in my Aboriginal country – the Eora or Dharug lands of Sydney, a people of which I’m a part. So that context attracted me to the work.

Talk us through the sound world for this piece. What has shaped your musical decision-making?

Influences are jazz, modernist composition, birdsong from the Sydney region, and one or two songs of traditional Aboriginal music from Sydney – my traditional music, in fact. I can write a good tune, and even if in this work they are at times influenced by the bird songs, I kept things quite tuneful. I orchestrated more thickly and traditionally for the songs, and more skeletally and informed by Aboriginal elementalism for some parts of the recitative.

The bird motifs appear frequently in reference to situating us in a place, to latitude 33 degrees, pre-Sydney, as does an echo theme which is a natural phenomenon amongst the sandstone outcrops and gullies of Sydney and its surrounds. I’ve lived with those sounds all of my life, so to turn to those local birds, and that echo in the local natural environment was an obvious inclusion. Significantly, apart from the last page of the score, the English don’t have a voice in the whole opera. All of the vocal parts are for Indigenous characters alone as Jane explores the possible world of their discussions in that last hour as the ships sailed in.

This work is an adaptation of a play. How have you found the process of adapting a work to be sung, and how has the collaboration with Jane Harrison been?

As librettist, Jane Harrison was given the role of turning her play into a libretto. Some parts were wonderfully poetic, and others more prosaic. I loved the embedded Aboriginal sense of humour in parts. I mentioned to Jane at the outset that I might need to create rhymes here and there for some existing lines for the purpose of creating songs, and with my experience as a songwriter, I think I came up with a few good ones, which do not change the story but simply make the song. The original play was too large to set, and even the second draft of the libretto necessitated some edits to keep it to the one-hour length that I was allocated by the company, so we all had to compromise – me with some music and Jane with some lines.

Can you name some musical influences on this work and your work in general?

Jazz music, Hans Werner Henze’s El Cimarron, my traditional Aboriginal music, Sydney birdsong, so-called ‘British light music’, Pucini-style voicing for string writing here and there.

As far as I can find in my research, this is your first stage work. Tell us about that process. How you are feeling writing for the theatre?

Actually, I’ve written many shorter musical theatre or dance works over the years including a children’s operetta Dream Journey in 1989 as part of a residency at the Lismore Conservatorium Centre. In the same year there was a setting of a lecture by Dr David Suzuki (with his permission) called The Mayfly for mezzo-soprano, flute, guitar and percussion – it was a dramatic song cycle exploring species extinction. I did the score of incidental music for the play Aboriginal Protestors (director Noel Tovey) for the Sydney Festival in 1994, and many similar shows in the Koori community of Redfern in the early 1990s. More recently there was Scar Tree for the Primal Dance Company with screened images too, for the Sydney Fringe Festival. There have been quite a few. Although the children’s operetta Dream Journey was huge – with over 100 children involved, this is my first opera with a professional company.

It is very exciting for Victorian Opera to be presenting the world premiere of this work. Why do you think it’s important for this work to be heard and what can it tell audiences in Melbourne and Victoria about this important story from the early days of European settlement in Sydney on Gadigal Land?

Whilst it is an important story, it is a work of fiction, and we must remember that it is also a work of entertainment. Colonisation wasn’t fiction, of course, nor the fact that Jane really makes a point that there were traditions and protocols being practiced by Aboriginal Australians in 1788. I love the way she imagines what possibly went on in the minds of the elders and what they discussed in that last hour of freedom when they first saw the ships in the harbour. So yes, it’s important to say we had culture and practices – that’s a great part of this story for me, more than the detail actually. It’s also great the way Jane has placed species extinction, and environmental change way back then as omens, and even growing community fractures and factions that happen between the elders throughout the show. I think that stuff has been done with a real awareness of the longer impacts of colonisation which results in all of those things.

And you mention Gadigal, but let’s call it Eora and Dharug land, for most people don’t know that the Gadigal were only one clan of about 30 on the plains of Sydney – which is more and more being accepted as the language region of the Dharug speakers, and the Eora (meaning simply ‘people’). So, to say Gadigal kind of makes those other 29 clans of Sydney disappear, yet the whole 30 clans lived with colonisation alone for one to two generations before for instance the Wiradjuri experienced it over the Blue Mountains. That’s a big deal! And if we think about sounds, the Darawal tribal group are to the south of Sydney, the Dharug are in Sydney, and the Darkingjung are to the northwest of Sydney and the Central Coast (where my father is a member of the elders group), and the Hawkesbury River to the north and west of Sydney is actually Dyarubbin. So we have ‘Dar, Dhar, or Dyar’ sounding in the region of the tri-nations of Darkingjung, Dharug and Darawal. And where does that stem from? One Darkingjung elder I know says it is from Daramulan – the local important sky hero or creator who is carved into our local sandstone. So that ‘Dar’ is an important sound, a sacred sound, and it is another reason we shouldn’t simply say one clan’s name whilst we ignore the other 29. Yet indeed the Gadigal clan were centred at Sydney Cove and surrounds, but that’s just one area of Sydney, and we need to think of the broader overall Sydney region a little more. And I love the sound ‘Dar’.