AustLit

"The process of composing Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace began with the structure of the traditional Latin text and my original plan was to translate directly from the English into the Gunditjmara dialects. It became obvious the work required a text which reflected seventy thousand years of spirituality and ceremony. In the tradition of Benjamin Britten, who augmented the Latin text with the poetry of Wilfred Owen in his epic War Requiem (1961) in order to capture the gravity and horror of the Great War, I found I too needed to expand and in many cases go well beyond the original text. Whilst the structure and purpose of the traditional mass served my purpose, the substance and spirirituality needed to be taken further in order to honour seventy thousand years of ceremony and the battles fought in the resistance wars. A critical turning point for me in arriving at the decision to write my own expanded text came as I approached a setting of the Angus Dei. As I considered the meaning and imagery of the Lamb of God, sacrificed in order to take away the sins of the world - I was confronted once again by the inescapable truth of our shared history. It was, after all Aboriginal families - men, women and children - who were sacrificed for the lambs...

Deborah Cheetham AO

Source: University of Queensland's Vice Chancellor Concert Series