 My name is Laura Radamaker. I'm here with Professor Anne McGrath from the ANU, one of Australia's leading historians and Dr. Andrea Pinto-Carréa, who is a world-renowned composer and musician. Anne, how did you come across Andrea? Well, we first met at Bellagio in Italy at the Rockefeller Foundation, and I was fortunate enough to have a residential fellowship there for a whole month. And the group that I was with was amazing. There were a highly talented group of composers and playwrights and media stars and politicians and people in development. And I got to know Andrea there in a very informal way, because we were always having a lot of drinks and a lot of gelato together. And yeah, it was really a great way to get to know each other, but I also sort of saw her passion for her work and the way she was so dedicated up in her studio, tinkling away, composing and so forth. And I also very soon found out that she was very proud to be Portuguese, and she seemed to have a real connection with her own history and its folklore. Now, Andrea, you're a composer and a musician. Why are you interested in working with historians? Well, you know, for me it's very interesting to work with people outside my field because they challenge me to make me grow and think of ways of looking at my music and the world in a different angle, with a different angle. And I think that's very healthy and positive. Just put myself in a different position and then look at the world and look at my work also through a different lens. So that's very challenging always. Right. And what about you, Anne? What can a historian learn from a composer? Well, we're still starting to find that out. We don't quite know yet. I haven't even heard the premiere performance yet, which is going to be on Thursday of this wonderful piece that Andrea has written on Pleistocene landscapes. And I've been doing work at Lake Mungo for quite some years now. And I shared that with the people at Bellagio. And it's very challenging to look at deep human time. But I think the role of historian is to use your imagination not just about what people did or what they ate in the past or what sort of tools they made, but to try and think of the whole sensory experience of being human. And music and sound is very much part of that. And musicians and composers like Andrea are always thinking in a very finely tuned way about how sound affects people. But also, I'm also very aware of how music affects the emotions. So I think that in trying to imagine people's experience in the deep human past, we shouldn't leave out sound. And I'm hoping, I guess, to have a new experience of the deep past when I do hear this new composition. So, Anne, you mentioned this idea of the deep past. And I know you're both fascinated in the ancient past, the past that goes way back, you know, beyond what traditional history has studied. I guess, what's drawn you both to looking at the deep past? Maybe Andrea? Well, you know, for me it was very interesting. And this was definitely because of Anne. When I met Anne and I saw the film Message from Mungle, I was so inspired by her work, by the history of the place. And up to that point, I mean, I knew a couple of things about Australia. I didn't know about Lake Mungle, and I was totally fascinated. And then, Anne talked about her work while we were at Bellagio. And then, one or two years later, Anne presented that same film at the Pali Center in New York. So it was kind of revisiting Lake Mungle. And she said, I was thinking about Anne's work, but also about a vision about this idea of deep time, which is something, you know, as a composer, I deal a lot with time, right? We're constantly thinking about time, which is a very interesting concept for us in many ways, in many levels. For instance, you know, I can spend two or three months writing a couple of minutes of music, so I'm kind of condensing my time into that. You know, and I want that time to flow well for the listener. At the same time, I have a certain preoccupation about how to use time in my own process. And I tend to use different layers of parallel times in my own music. So, you know, just thinking about time is something that's constantly in my mind. And when Anne started talking about deep time and its ramifications, different angles, I really feel this affinity to the concept itself, and it just kind of expanded my horizon a little bit more. As I said before, these collaborations just keep feeding me into my work and giving me ideas and a different sense of the world and history. Yeah, as an historian, it makes me wonder how musical time can help us reconceptualise historical time and what kind of synergies there might be there. How about you, Anne? What drew you to deep time? Well, I suppose I often say I was trying to break the 1770-1788 barrier for Australia because it's as though everybody believes Australian history began with either Captain Cook landing or Governor Phillip and all the convicts arriving. And we constantly reinforce this by starting Australian history. Even, you know, historians' interests in Aboriginal history still started with the encounter with the Europeans. And it's like we can't have history without the European arrival. And I suppose I want to sort of break through that and think more deeply. And of course, my visit to Lake Mungo the first time I went there some years back was a revelation because I could see time in the stratigraphy and the different colours and then you saw things coming up to the surface like a beautiful fresh shell that looked like it was only on a beach, any old beach. But then you realised it was actually a 40,000-year-old beach that that shell came from. And then you'd see other things coming up, you know, and of course the human remains. They're very sensitive so we don't talk about them or photograph them. But one thing that the scientists pointed out was otoliths, which are the inner ear, a calcium carbonate in the fish. And of course, I didn't think much about that. What's interesting about an ear, you know? And then you hang out with a musician and a composer and you're going, well, this is very, very interesting. Were the fish hearing? And apparently the scientists say they actually sensed gravity, they sensed linear movement through this otolith and apparently humans have evolved their hearing and ears through fish gills or something. So this is this kind of thing historians don't think about because we don't think in deep evolutionary time. But once we start to do a new collaboration with someone that, you know, it seems challenging. You think, well, what do you have in common? You instantly start to be stimulated and think in different ways. And like, of course, the wind is something which is very ever-present. And perhaps André would like to say something about the windy day we had. Yes, I was going to ask, your composition that we're going to hear is inspired by the Australian landscape and your experiences in the landscape. Could you tell us a bit about that? So it was a very interesting process because I actually wrote a piece before visiting like Mongol. So throughout these years, I met Anne in 2014 and I built up in my imagination what Lake Mongol was, right? So I built this idea of Lake Mongol. And it was interesting because when we got to Lake Mongol, I just felt that I could not tell what was real or what was imaginary. You know, when you build something so much that when you actually see the place, it's just part of, I felt truly transported to another time in the sense that we were walking and I was near some dunes for a while. And I could not tell if it was one hour went by, two hours, half an hour. So that was very interesting for me as a composer that constantly thinks about time to be in a situation that I lost track of time. I really didn't know what was now, what was past. And that was a very interesting experience. At the same time, I knew from the film, by watching the film, that the wind had a very important role in Lake Mongol. That the wind was an erosion. They were responsible for the uncovering of these new layers of history. And so the piece is really based on that. Different layers just surface and submerge. And at the same time, this idea of wind and erosion is always present. So that's what conducts the whole piece. It's the idea of the wind and erosion. And of course, the piece was written for alto flut. So that's the perfect instrument for this piece. And the solist, I have to say, is Kiri Solis. Yes, well, I'm very much looking forward to it. And did you want to tell us about how you see landscape and time intersecting? Well, yes. Well, I suppose the game Mungo has lessons for us because we could actually see the dunes reforming in this wind. It's an Aeolian landscape, which of course, you know, so many of the terms in English go back to Greek myths. And then I was also thinking of the sort of Portuguese connection, because usually you don't think much of Portugal having much of an impact on Australian history. But then apparently the earliest winemakers were women from Portugal or something. And then there, of course, there's stories of the Portuguese navigators. But, you know, a lot of them aren't proven. Why aren't they proven? Because there's not written records, you know. But sometimes there are visual clues in ancient manuscripts and ancient maps. And there's this speculation of, well, were the Portuguese also here having encounters with Aboriginal people. But getting back to, before I answer your question, may I just comment a little bit on what Andrea said? I had seen her off in the distance, and I thought this is really good for her to have time just by herself at Mungo without me yabbering in her ear. And anyway, so I could see her off in the distance, and I sort of waved, and I thought, you know, I just had some idea that we'd find each other again. And then she totally disappeared. So I did have this sort of picnic at Hanging Rock moment. And I was imagining the helicopters coming in looking for this visitor from Portugal. The composer lost forever. Great story. So when she said, yes, she lost track of time. Well, I lost her. We lost track of her. But anyway, that was an interesting moment. But the same thing happened to me once when I was driving back from Mungo. And I'm driving after sunset, which is very beautiful there over the dunes. You see the colours change, change, change, you know, to about 20 different gradations over a minute here, and then the colours changed already. So that is a beautiful vista and time thinking of how the sun sets every day and other humans way, long ago, Aboriginal people also experienced this. And, yeah, so I had this experience that, like, I was just going nowhere. I just seemed to be driving, driving, and nothing happened. I got no closer to the landmarks that I knew were there and were supposed to be coming up. So I think there's something about the flat landscape. You've got a 360-degree horizon all around. And there was something about it. It was like I'd been swallowed up by the lake for a while. You lose all sense of time and distance. You just become part of the landscape. It was very beautiful. And Isabel McBride, the prehistorian archaeologist, also had an experience like that. But, yes, as for time and history, there's many things we could say. But for me, one of the very important things about Mungo was also having the mediators of Aboriginal people who didn't see the deep human past remaining to me. They just had a very natural relationship with these ancestors whose remains had come up. They talked about them like they were just an old auntie that died yesterday. They didn't have that scholarly idea that, oh, how do you deal with 60,000 years ago? That's too long. They had a sense of the ever-presence of the past and also the respect they had for the land. And also on the topic of sound, they had stories about sound like that one woman told me that she heard Lady Mungo crying. And that was a very moving story. And she really did break down and get quite emotional as she was telling it. But they see Lady Mungo and these important ancestors as having a surface for a reason for them. So there's a very personal relationship with history. And others of unearthed... Well, the wind unearths things at Mungo on excavators and there was this beautiful hearth that seemed to be the site of a big feast with emu eggs which apparently are eaten to celebrate the coming of a new child. And so quite a few people told me they'd heard the women singing to welcome the child around this hearth. And so these stories are so beautiful and moving and they jump the gap of time and through sound. I love this idea of the wind itself as an historical agent and think about Andrea and your flute composition, think about how the wind might also play that role through the breath. Yeah, I'll also translate that into musical composition that makes sense that we're in a certain context and how to have that wind sound be the connection between the beginning and the end of the piece and bringing this extra musical idea but to make it the focus of the musical piece, I feel that and it was a challenge for me and it was a very interesting way to rethink music for me also. Right, well I'd like to thank both of you for coming in today and I'm looking forward very much to hearing your composition Andrea. Thank you so much. Thank you.