After 80 years of silence, the Dunera Mass by Dunera Boy Mat-Peter Meyer is about to be performed at the Canberra International Music Festival as part of the re-enactment of a concert that took place in the Hay internment camp in 1941. Violist, researcher and educator Nicole Forsyth explains how the re-emergence of a long-lost part of Australian music history came about.

Dunera Mass
The front page from the original manuscript of Max-Peter Meyer’s Dunera Mass. Image courtesy of the Wolkenstein and Forsyth families.

My father, Dr James Forsyth, was the Parish Music Director at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Lindfield, NSW. This was his Sunday job; he was also a music education academic at the Australian Catholic University (ACU)...