ACROSS THE SEA

ST KILDA: the remotest islands of the outer hebrides

Several years ago I travelled to the Outer Hebrides for the first time, making the trip out to the St Kilda archipelago where I spent several days on Hirta. I camped in Village Bay, and walked over the hills with my violin; playing outside in the landscape as well as inside the St Kilda church. The place made a powerful impression, and my short expedition was followed by a period of research into the surviving music, poetry and stories of the St Kildans. I was intrigued to discover that there were links between St Kilda and Australia: in 1852 thirty-six people left Hirta in 1852 to seek a new life in Melbourne, Victoria.

I’m gradually creating a work based on this story; an interdisciplinary performance piece combining music, song and storytelling.

There are many things about the journey of the St Kildans that is intriguing to me. It’s a timeless human narrative of travel, hardship, tragedy and new beginnings, and is a fascinating example of the countless emigrations that have irrevocably shaped the history of both Australia and Scotland. It also has personal reverberations: I'm Australian, but my British and European heritage has shaped so many aspects of my life. My father's great-grandfather left Germany to settle in Australia in the 1800s; my mother emigrated to Australia with her family at the age of 11. As a musician I intensively studied European classical music from an early age, and in my twenties I (like many Australian musicians) travelled to Europe to perform and study. Five years ago I retraced my family's steps and crossed back over to live on the other side of the world, and have now just recently returned to Australia. I find myself asking: What does it mean to belong? Where is home?

"One of the oldest stories we tell is the story about leaving home... The vast number of such stories... across many cultures, suggests how necessary they may be as models for what, as humans, we are and what we must learn to bear. To hear them is healing to us. They give shape to everday living, but suggest as well a shape for those larger ventures - war, exploration, painful but necessary migration - that make up so much of what we call history, including the history we are living now. In no other age, perhaps, have so many men and women been forced to leave the place they were born in to make a new life elsewhere."

-David Malouf: A Traveller’s Tale

I've been fascinated by what we call folk songs for as long as I can remember - folk songs, traditional songs, songs so old we've forgotten the names of those who wrote them. Songs that are passed from person to person over the generations, that travel across countries and borders and oceans. Songs that are changed a little by every journey from one hand to another, from one voice to the next. Songs that belong to everyone.

Of course I often respond strongly to stories that reverberate with some kind of personal experience, but I am always looking for an abstract, more universal way to explore and describe those stories: to find ways of telling them that seek out the human similarities and shared experiences - the things that unite us, rather than divide us.