The Mitchell Library Reading Room is a place built for silence.
So too is the Western concert, where the audience’s job is to sit still, keep quiet, and receive. Earth Flow, presented as part of the State Library’s 200th Anniversary Festival, politely declined both conventions, and was all the richer for it.
Directed and composed by William Barton, Earth Flow is an intense and moving examination of the relationship between the Australian landscape and its First Peoples, bound together through memory. It reimagines the Library as a forest of interconnected knowledge, delivered through soundscape, song, music, poetry, and testimony. Barton is joined by his mother, narrator Aunty Delmae Barton, readings from Uncle Jack Thompson and Ray Martin, the Sydney Street Choir, the Four Winds yidaki quartet, and classical instrumentalists led by flautist Joshua Batty; the performance also premieres Song Book, a new composition by Barton dedicated to the Library.
At the centre of it all is Barton himself, acting as master of ceremonies and conductor of an orchestra of voices, instruments, and people. His voice is breathtaking. With an extraordinary range, bent and manipulated at will, he conjures the full breadth of the Australian landscape. Similarly, Aunty Delmae Barton is a striking presence; one can feel her channelling the deeper, immaterial threads of memory, Country, and culture that hold the work together.
Then there was the room itself. Two very different forms of knowledge shared the Reading Room: that held on the shelves, and that being delivered aloud before us, passed down as it has been since time immemorial. The Library marks two hundred years; the knowledge carried by the voices on stage is older by tens of thousands. Rather than sitting uneasily together, the two were at once juxtaposed and complementary.
What struck me most, however, was how inclusive the work was. Barton may have been conducting, but he did so within a relatively flat structure, sharing the space as readily with the Sydney Street Choir as with household names and his own mother. The Street Choir, a fantastic group, sang from their own songbook, and on face value those songs sat apart from the themes the other performers brought. Yet they belonged on a deeper level, to the inclusive, flat structure at the heart of the work itself.
In a room built for quiet, Earth Flow asked its audience to make a sound, a reminder that the oldest living knowledge on this continent was never meant to be received in silence. It was a fitting tribute for the Library’s bicentenary and a great privilege to be counted, however briefly, among Earth Flow‘s many voices.
