Theatre Royal, Hobart
April 13, 2018

Near a chilling waterfront, a small chorus sings: “My whole and sole object was to kill them. The laws of God and Nature render this my duty.” This is a line from A Tasmanian Requiem. Three years in the making, this 83-minute oratorio for voice and brass shares the history of the Black War. In an opening address, it is made very clear that this requiem was not created to entertain. Its intention is to allow us space to grieve for lives destroyed; for an Indigenous population that lost more than 90 per cent of its people in the two decades after British arrival on Van Diemen’s Land.

A Tasmanian Requiem features a score by composer Quin Thomson, a libretto by Greg Lehman, and video by visual artist Julie Gough in partnership with Michael Gissing. Lehman also commissioned a poem by Elder Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta,while producer/writer Frances Butler also contributed collaboratively to the libretto. ​

The work has its world premiere in the Theatre Royal – Australia’s oldest theatre still in operation, which opened in 1837 to provide entertainment for a growing European colony. There is an unsettling irony in the venue’s Tasmania state crest. Mounted near the royal box, it looks down upon a...