Written for 17 instruments, A Walk In The Paradise Garden was commissioned by Artology for its To Country program, which encourages using musical works, with or without words, to acknowledge the Indigenous heritage of Australia. The intention is for these very brief works to be played at the start of a concert as Acknowledgements of Country. This fantastic recording was made by the Australian Youth Orchestra and conductor Thaddeus Huang. Cover image: detail from Séraphine de Senlis, L’arbre du paradis. My gratitude to all.
The music suggests a slow, wafting warmth, thick with the intoxicating ambrosia of earth, plant, sea, a piquancy of airborne fauna, a tanginess of earthbound fauna – suffused by species, the dappled sunlight falls on a figure, half-seen through foliage, walking, giddy in it all.Paradise. I love the multitudinous in the word, that its origin is Persian, that Fraser Island is now K’gari, the Butchulla word, that the Miltonian connotations of loss and the Delian connotations of a village inn all make up the meaning of Paradise. We get the paradise we deserve. This music ultimately pays tribute to the Indigenous Australian management of land and sea estates developed over millennia and recognizes that whatever the solution is to our climate condition, there is no solution that does not incorporate the wisdom of the oldest people on earth.
A Walk In The Paradise Garden was gratefully written in Woolloomoolooo Bay on the land of the Gadigal people. Its layers of the diatonic, pentatonic and dodecatonic are foreign to one another, but here harmonious, a metaphor for things belonging together that don’t start off belonging together. Every time it is performed, the music acknowledges the Indigenous people of the land where the performance takes place, including those outside of Australia where such people permit and welcome it. May they all be Paradises Regained. At the time of writing, geneticists have embarked on a startling journey to de-extinct the thylacine. A making up for the past. We get – we regain – the paradises we deserve.
