In this remarkable memoir of a remarkable life, Barry Conyngham makes clear his intentions at the outset. The acclaimed Australian composer and respected academic wanted to see his life “through the lens of being a ‘gardener of time’” but soon realised there have been many ways he’s been a gardener, with many overlapping stories to tell and many ways to sequence them.

“My solution,” he writes, “is to tell them as a series of separate stories. A number of stories about one life.” The chapter titles, such as Time at Home 1944–1965 and Gardening Time with the Orchestra 1968–2019, reflect this.

Through the telling of these separate stories, Gardener of Time essentially unfolds as a meditation on the cultivation of a life well lived at the intersection of creativity and academia.

From the fertile soil of post-war suburban Sydney emerges a narrative of transformation, as Conyngham abandons the prescribed path of legal studies to venture into the less certain terrain of musical composition. This pivotal decision, made amid the cultural ferment of the 1960s, sets in motion a journey of artistic discovery guided in part by two musical luminaries – Peter Sculthorpe in Australia...