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Roland Robinson’s poetry is cast in deceptively simple terms. On superficial reading he may appear to be a “nature poet”, but careful scrutiny of his text reveals a strong metaphysical current running throughout the body of his work.

“Celtic Harp” invokes the powerful ancient instrument of the Celtic bards, who held positions of great authority and power. Their voices were heeded as they recorded, advised, and often helped formulate, Celtic history. The blood-feuds between clans were long-lived, and could span generations; the people were honour-bound to avenge their ancestors, thus the sword “thrust beneath roof-thatch” is a constant memory of past injury, and a reminder of vengeance to come.
So it is that “the harp cannot heal”; these are “unappeasable keens (laments)” and the outpourings of art, artefacts and poetry emanate from them : “the wound’s source is deep. the melodies well from it in transfigured ecstasies”.

But all of this is placed in contemporary time as well - the “roofless abbey, hall and shieling” are ancient ruins in our time and they “sough” - a word of complex meaning, implying deep sigh, the rushing of wind, and also the sigh of death.

So the poem begins in contemporary time - a barrren landscape and the memory of ancient seas and “twanged dark chords, plucked from a score (both a musical score and the number twenty) of blood deep memories” - but we are still here, in our time, living beneath the “sword in a flowered sheath”. A terrible vision that war is inevitable, that art may be beautiful, but its roots are human hostility, lamentation and destruction.

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	1. Wind Dust on a Butterfly Wing
	2. Challenge
	3. Bounty
	4. Wild Flowers
	5. Moon Track
	6. Affinity
	7. Victors

Notes:

The texts for the song cycle “Dust on a Butterfly’s Wing” were selected from seven poems by the Australian poet Minnie Agnes Filson, better known as ‘Rickety Kate’. Born in 1898 this remarkable Australian woman was an accomplished pianist, singer and dancer until she was struck down by rheumatoid arthritis early in her life. Yet her creativity continued in poetry. ‘Rickety Kate’ died in 1971 and it was her daughter-in-law Edda Filson who first introduced me to her work. She is mainly remembered to for her collection “Rhymes & Whimsies”.

The cycle was commissioned for the 20th anniversary of Sydney Radio station 2MBS-FM for whom Edda worked then as programmer and announcer.

The first performance was a live-to-air broadcast on the 29/1/1994 with soprano Rosemary Signorelli and the composer. This version for piano and voice is arranged from the original for guitar.

Notes on the songs:

The cycle opens with a song about the enigma of the “wind” - it takes no heed of rich or poor, great or lowly – it is unchanged through the ages of time. A scurrying figure is representative of the wind rushing by.

The 2nd is the challenge of “age” and growing old, and a meditation on “time” itself. How we handle our mortality when time tells us, “you will grow old and cease to be”.

The 3rd song deals with the age old scourge of “hunger” – the outrage that, with all earth’s bounty, children still starve. The final line asks, “where are wisdom & justice fled when men & women are crying for bead?”

In “Wildflowers” we hear them cry out, “lift us out of the vessels of silver & glass we are alien to their sheen & their gloss”. They speak lovingly of the dull earth and the feel of the wind. - they tell us that they are not meant to be inside and, had they the power they would “shatter the ceiling”.

“Moon-Track” tells of the true nature of moonlight and in “Affinity”, a cabbage contemplates a rose.

The last song speaks of the miracle of “Spring” – the victory of infinitesimal things. We hear the buzzing and crawling of tiny life and the grass growing as the great “contending of tiny green spears” against the earth’s “Brazen shoulder”. In some ways it alludes to the “Butterfly” effect – that the tiniest things affect the biggest things.

R. Charlton Dec 2007

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Nerida & Birwain

Would I Might Find My Country

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The Man From the Land of Fandango

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What Will They Think Of Me

Time

The Mother Strikes Back

contents >

1. The Statues Awake

2. Venus & Apollo

3. Flowers

4. The Ghosts of Flesh

5. Reality

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Roland Robinson was a firebrand, what would now be called a “conscientious objector”, and intended to fight the system to the last gasp when he was called up during the Second World War.

As a writer he was eager to travel, and as it was wartime joined the Civil Constructional Corps in order to go to the Northern Territory. He was eventually sent to Katherine to take charge of the electrical store attached to the Power House. As he remarks in his autobiography “I scarcely knew a piece of conduit from a double adapter” but “Like my South Coast country, there are certain regions which have enriched, excited, stimulated, and given me everything of the colour, adventure and discovery of life. These places have medicined my whole being.”

Roland’s South Coast country is that area of the NSW Royal National Park, generally north of the small town of Waterfall : the bush and the coast from Wattamolla, Curacarang, Curacurong, south through Era, Garie and Burning Palms. One of the strangest aspects of this is that composer Dindy Vaughan was raised in Waterfall . Dindy, and her siblings, one of whom is a poet, would wholeheartedly agree with Roland, who declared this as his Sacred Country. It’s Aboriginal name is Tharawal country. Stranger still, Dindy did not know any of this background when she first asked for permission to set some of Roland’s poems to music - but by the time she had set them, she knew from the internal feelings of the poems that they were about “her” country.

“As I worked on the music I became more and more convinced that this was MY bush, MY country; when they were finished I was sure this was so. Roland was as astonished as I; in this sacred country, while he as a young man walked and wrestled and wrote, I grew as a child. When such coincidence spans so many years and such deep distance the Spirit of this country is powerfully alive.”

The Northern Territory experience introduced Roland to new dimensions. He became increasingly interested in, and close to, aboriginal people, perceiving a way of life, a culture, and spiritual concepts far removed from white preoccupations. The country led him to the Dreaming : the aboriginal concept of the Spirit world, the Eternal Present, an active spiritual infusion in all nature which governs all creatures including man, and to which man holds strong ties and obligations.

Thus his poetry becomes in many cases an exploration of that spiritual dimension : Gul-ar-dar-Ark, the peaceful dove, ‘sending his callings over the many springs’ draws the poet to a universal dimension. This dimension is distant from the tangible world, from the outpourings of ancient legends, from the physicality of bodily manifestation; as if floating in outer space, where stars ‘pass beyond my trailing hand’, a mystical peace engulfs the spirit.
So too, the white egret ‘standing as one with the furthermost reeds’ is far more than just a physical bird - it stands with the manifestations of Dreamtime figures, now manifesting in the living world as the reeds. And it is the white egret, in aboriginal Dreaming, who is able to fly out of the physicality of existence to a far-distant spiritual dimension - a concept of soul which transcends beyond human knowing.

Roland Robinson is sometimes represented as a ‘nature’ poet - he is not. He is a mystical writer exploring worlds upon worlds as they unfold in spiritual terms, manifested in the objects of the created world and within the individual human psyche.He may focus on aspects of earth, on aspects of love,on aspects of human behaviour but he is a poet above all, of the mystery of the Divine Creation.

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This piece is a setting of one of the famous Ern Malley poems. Ern Malley was a literary hoax, a fictitious poet invented by Harold Stewart and James McAuley as a means to ridicule the Modernist art movement in the 1940’s. The poetry they created was published in a progressive magazine called “Angry Penguins.” After causing an initial stir the poetry was exposed as a hoax.

“Young Prince of Tyre” is a typical Ern Malley poem, full of “stream of consciousness” ideas and pointless ramblings. I have treated the words like traditional lyrics, searching for high points and quieter moments to build momentum before dying away at the end.

The work is part of a series of Ern Malley settings organised by the Centre for Studies in Australian Music, which is attached to the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne. The project involves publishing song settings of the full set of 16 Ern Malley poems - all by composers who have had an association with the Faculty of Music.

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