The article examines what Malouf sees in music, and 'how this relates to his engagement with the conspicuously silent textual space of the opera libretto'. It is particularly concerned with 'two recent collaborations with the English composer, Michael Berkeley, both of which tendentiously retell founding expressions of English colonial discourse'. The author's aim is 'to use Malouf's aesthetic of music as the starting-point for a generically-informed identification of a quite particular postcolonial voice at work in these two texts' (p.5).