BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
When composer Jeremy Rose first read The Fatal Shore, he was horrified by the “human cost of Britain’s penal experiment” that author Robert Hughes wrote about.
Jeremy chose to confront Australia’s past by setting Hughes’ book to music, and presenting it alongside text, imagery, and the 17-piece Earshift Orchestra.
With the Sydney Festival, the City Recital Hall presents Iron in the Blood — Jeremy’s production that combines his original jazz music with the stories of our colonial history.
In this interview, Jeremy tells us why he composed the work — and importantly, how his music helps bring this past to life for contemporary Australian audiences.
Hi Jeremy, thanks for the chat. Tell me about Iron in the Blood. What is it?
Iron in the Blood is a musical adaptation of one of the best known books on Australia’s founding, Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. Two actors read sections from the book, including voices from convicts, doctors, judges, soldiers, and Hughes himself, against a backdrop of music that I composed for some of my favourite jazz musicians from Sydney and Melbourne, as part of the 17-piece Earshift Orchestra with big-screen visuals.
The story follows Australia’s journey from a prison camp to nation, as well as the displacement and near-destruction of its Indigenous population, bringing to life the experiences of early colonial life; combining colonial history with contemporary musical expression.
When did you first encounter Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, and why did it resonate with you?
I was researching creative processes in the Sydney jazz scene as part of my PhD at the Sydney Conservatorium in an effort to understand how we make music here, and how it might be different to other parts of the world. A friend suggested reading The Fatal Shore to better my understanding on Australian cultural heritage. It did that and much more. In fact, I was quite shocked when I read the book, besides finding it being compelling. I felt Australian history had often been romanticised in my schooling, and this book revealed the human cost of Britain’s penal experiment.
After reading elsewhere that The Fatal Shore inspired jazz composer Wynton Marsalis to compose his large scale work Blood on the Fields, I felt an onus to explore the book through my own personal musical expression.
It also comes at a timely period, with the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain Cook, and renewed conversations around who we are as a nation and the rewriting of Indigenous history.
How did you start to ‘hear’ the composition? Did the book lead you to imagine certain melodies or moods; or did you compose it more strategically for the show?
Yes, a bit of both. There were certain musical ideas that I wanted to use in this work, and then other sections were composed to suit the text. I read the book several times and highlighted certain sections that would tell part of Hughes’ story.
It’s an enormous book, and so one of the challenges was to do the book justice with limited space. I conjured moods and emotions relevant to these and how I could express these in musical form.
I began pulling together various harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic ideas that I had been working on. Composer John Adams talks about composing being like gardening — you grow small ideas until they feel appropriate for a work. I work in a similar way, matching musical forms with the master narrative of the work. The music doesn’t simply accompany the music, it complements and is featured in certain sections, adding much to the experience of the story.
It seems somewhat unusual to combine jazz orchestra with a story of Australia’s colonial past. Why do you think these two very different times and styles of the arts work so well together?
Yes, it is! Jazz music — specifically swing jazz music from the ’40s, such as Duke Ellington and others — can conjure feelings of nostalgia, melancholy and of course the blues, so the style works to express those themes in the work. However, more broadly, jazz is a vehicle that allows the performers to express personal freedom and confront issues surrounding national identity in a way that might be more challenging in other musical forms.
Jazz crosses many stylistic boundaries these days, as does much of the best music. I consider the work to be polystylstic, drawing on a wide palette of influences and more importantly combining them in unpredictable ways.
On a political level, jazz music has an élan vital that allows us to hear stories of suffering and hardship which stem not only from the rituals inherent in African-American blues, but the potential for individual and collective expression through improvisation.
We have learnt to adapt and make the most of our surroundings. The performers in Iron in the Blood say that they feel a connection with this history, as do I. It makes for a powerful experience for both the audience and performer alike.
Were there any Australian colonial-era themes or folk melodies you drew from to include in your work?
Yes. You can hear quotes from Botany Bay, a favourite song of my grandfather’s, and an arrangement of a historical recording of Sally Sloane singing Wild Colonial Boy, held in the National Archive. There’s also some inspiration from Percy Grainger’s folk songs in there.
These songs help connect the work to place and period as well as transporting us to feelings and emotions from our childhood. It creates a sense of nostalgia and familiarity.
As a musician, what do you enjoy about drawing from literature when creating your work?
Music has the power to tell part of the unwritten story of the literature through sounds. Often, the instrumental parts have a greater impact on our emotions than the words. Drawing from literature also gives us programmatic material to work with as a composer, forcing us into new musical territories that we might not have explored elsewhere. It’s a fun and rewarding experience.
In a trailer I watched, a narrator spoke — juxtaposed with your music — about a man who had his flesh flogged away from his back! What are some of the most powerful stories that are included in this production, and why were they chosen from the book — or other historical documentation — for inclusion here?
Yes, that is particularly horrifying! There’s another section that describes how flogging was so common, children were found practising whipping a tree! These anecdotes portray the extremes of the colonial experience — what Hughes’ describes as ‘a strange lottery’, whereby some had it incredibly tough, while for others, life was better than back in Britain.
There are other incredible anecdotes, such as the first meetings between the Indigenous Australians and British. Hughes’ brilliant writing describes these scene so vividly; as well as some of the journal writings of these meetings by Cook, Banks, and Surgeon White, which is particularly revealing.
These important historical moments may be new to some people, while others are well aware of them. However, this project helps bring them to life and add to the renewed conversations about Australian identity and the rewriting of Indigenous history.
More broadly, why do you think The Fatal Shore is a book that’s worth revisiting in the 21st Century?
The Fatal Shore informs us about who we are as a nation, and perhaps where we are going. It’s important to know where we’ve come from so that we can avoid making the same mistakes.
This is a common argument about history, I know, but it is particularly relevant here, given this book’s valuable research for which Hughes’ spent 10 years of his life writing.
Hughes, who was one of Australia’s great intellectuals of the 20th Century, passed away in 2012. He was also an avid jazz fan, and so Iron in the Blood serves to honour the work he put into this book.
What do you hope your show will teach audiences about Australia’s past?
White Australia has done its best to forget and deny its colonial past and the injustices suffered by the Indigenous people. It’s through acknowledging our past that we might move forward as a nation, towards reconciliation, towards a treaty, and towards better respect for our environment.
Why do you believe music is a useful tool for education, as you use it?
Music is a great tool for education, reinforcing connections between memory and the recall of emotions you’ve previously felt. The neural connections between memory and music are well established. Music also reinforces the messages in the story, heightening our emotions and feelings on the subject. This combines effectively in Iron in the Blood, with the music complementing and adding much to Hughes’ monumental book.
See Iron in the Blood at City Recital Hall, 23 January.
We’ve teamed up with City Recital Hall to bring you this story about Jeremy Rose’s production. Stay tuned as we share more stories from this Australian arts community!
Images supplied. Jeremy captured by Nic Walker
