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Most early immigrants and visitors to Australia were disturbed by what seemed to them to be a hostile landscape. One writer went as far as to suggest that Dante must have had the gum tree in mind when he wrote his lnferno, and, he added, ‘the wretched things… give no shade.’ Even Darwin was troubled by the 'desolate and untidy appearance of the woods’

During the nineteenth century, then, there developed a melancholic convention in Australian literature and painting. Music, however, remained untouched by this convention until after the Second World War. At that time, as composers in Europe began to rebuild their particular worlds, many Australian composers, unaffected by the conflict, began to look more closely at their own world. For some decades, a sense of loss tended to pervade much Australian music.

The Lament for Strings is my farewell gesture to this melancholia. Indeed, the downward-turning motives of the work’s central section can be found in their inverted and more optimistic forms in many subsequent pieces. In one movement, the music is in three clearly-defined sections: the first is desolate with the melodic line shared between solo 'cello and first violins; the second is somewhat impassioned; and following the climax, the last, dominated by solo ‘cello, is again desolate.

PS

This work was written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It was first performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Gerald Krug on April 8, 1976, at the Odeon Theatre, Hobart, Tasmania.