Matthew Dewey together with Tasmanian Baritone Michael Lampard have won a grant from Arts Tasmania to fund their first recording together. The CD will consist of three works by Matthew Dewey for baritone voice and piano: the recently premiered chamber opera ‘The Buzz of the Sea’ with Libretto by Alexander Dick; Isolated State a song cycle based on the poetry of Anne Kellas; and Southern Ocean a new song cycle based on the 5 part poem of the same name by Margaret Scott.
The works will be recorded my Michael over the coming year and the CD is scheduled fro release around October of 2009. More details of the launch to come.
ABOUT THE WRITERS
Margaret Scott
(1934 – August 29, 2005) was an Australian author, poet comedian, educator and public figure.
Margaret her first husband Michael Boddy and her first son Daniel, migrated to Tasmania from the United Kingdom in 1959. Two further children Kate and Marcus were born in Tasmania. From 1979 she lived with the Legal scholar Michael Scott and had her final child Sarah as well as becoming the step mother to Jane, Christian and Katherine Scott. In 1978 Margaret received her PhD from the University of Tasmania, and was head of the English department at the University until 1989. She worked at the University for over 25 years but left to devote herself full-time to her writing career. Her publications include four books of poetry, two novels, a libretto and numerous articles. She became well know in Australia in the 1990s as a regular guest on the television show Good News Week. She was also know for her activism on environmental issues and human rights.
In 1995 a portrait of Margaret Scott by the painter Geoffrey Dyer was a finalist in the Archibald Prize. The prize is awarded for a painting, “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics”.
In 2005 she was selected for the inaugural Tasmanian Honour Roll of Women and received the Australia Council Writers Emeritus Award. She died following a long battle with emphysema.
Anne Kellas
is a South African poet, reviewer and editor.
She was born in Germiston in 1951 in what was then the Transvaal, now Gauteng, in South Africa. Her earliest work appeared in 1968 but she began writing seriously in 1975 when she met up with a group of writers associated with Lionel Abrahams who at one stage called themselves the Circle of Eight. This group gathered around Lionel Abrahams had included at various times the writers Anne Schuster, Sinclair Beilis, Basil Du Toit, Debbie Aarons, novelist, critic and editor Ivan Vladislavic, academic and publisher Shirley Pendlebury, Michael Gardiner, Francis Faller, and others. An earlier incarnation of this group had included Robert and Eva Royston, who later moved to the UK.
Anne Kellas’s first book of poetry, Poems from Mt Moono, was published by Shirley Pendlebury’s Hippogriffe Press in 1989. By this time Kellas and her husband, the journalist/photographer/writer Giles Hugo had already emigrated to Australia. In Tasmania she served for many years as poetry editor for the small magazine Famous Reporter and from circa 2003 was web content editor for Island (formerly Island magazine). Her second collection, Isolated States, received funding from Tasmania’s arts funding body in 1993 and was later accepted for publication by Australian poet/publisher Tim Thorne. Thorne’s Cornford Press was active until 2004 in publishing poets on the political left and/or non-mainstream poets, such as Liz Winfield and the late Selwyn Hughes and Jenny Boult/Magenta Bliss.
In 1995 Anne Kellas and Giles Hugo had set up one of the first Australian online magazines, The Write Stuff, which they jointly edit. Among its other content, such as book reviews and interviews with writers, their web site documents the vivid poetry landscape of Tasmania, with an online Showcase of Tasmanian poetry holding vignettes of over 40 Tasmanian poets.
In 2004 Kellas established Roaring Forties Press, a small literary press which, though based in Tasmania, Australia, published the posthumous collection of poetry by Lionel Abrahams, Chaos Theory of the Heart, produced in conjunction with Jacana Media in Johannesburg. They also published the Australian short story-writer Geoffrey Dean’s seventh collection, The Literary Lunch.
