Clip description
This is an excerpt from the garden scene in Act One of Voss. Nighttime in the garden of the Sydney home of the rich merchant Mr Bonner, who will help finance Voss’s expedition to cross the country. Two of his dinner guests, Johann Ulrich Voss (Geoffrey Chard), the surly German explorer, and Bonner’s young niece Laura Trevelyan (Marilyn Richardson), wander out to catch the night air. They find much in common in their imagination and dreams: 'I will be followed across the continent by your thoughts’, Voss declares. Laura crosses into those thoughts: 'I crossed the threshold. He was there.’
Curator’s notes
Against a shimmering orchestral sound – had Debussy ever visited the Australian outback he may have written music such as this! – we eavesdrop on the first encounter between two cultures, the world of the German Romantic lied floating alongside a culture still unformed and equivocal. The interior passion of this unlikely couple remains sublimated, but the soaring music reveals an intensity that will sustain them over years, distance and fates. In the full 12 minutes of this 'Garden Scene’, Richard Meale has written an Australian liebe gesang that looks both forward and backwards, in and out.
LAURA:
I was alone in the garden.
Rose called. There is a stranger.
I stepped into the house, out of the sunlight,
into a still room. He was there.
So strange. A lightning stroke.
No stranger after all
but the son I had expected. Miss Laura,
Miss Laura, she called, Rose
our awkward, opaque angel.
There’s a stranger, a stranger, and stood
breathing at the door
beside me. I crossed
the threshold. He was there.
All my childhood I had known
this continent was floating
here in the south and waiting
for me. It was my fate
though the land does not need me.
He too is a continent and has been waiting
on the far shores of my life
forever. He needs me. Voss –
Voss. Johann. Ulrich. A strange name,
though he is no stranger. I crossed
this ocean and this land
was waiting. I crossed
the threshold. He was there.
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- You may download materials for your personal use or for non-commercial educational purposes, but you must not publish them elsewhere or redistribute clips in any way.
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- The National Film and Sound Archive’s permission must be sought to amend any information in the materials, unless otherwise stated in notices throughout the Site.
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