In Moonlight – 28 April 1915
Glenda Cloughley
About
A Passion for Peace
In April 2015, Glenda Cloughley’s new choral drama A Passion for Peace gave a big Canberra citizens’ voice to the same love of harmony that drew 1300 women together from 12 warring and neutral nations for the only international peace conference of the First World War. Forgotten by military historians but influential and prescient of all the 20th century’s great advances in international human rights law, the 1915 International Congress of Women took place in The Hague during the same week as the Anzac forces' Gallipoli landings.
The 90-minute work is a passion in the same sense as Christians’ traditional Easter passions –– showing how human love, imagination and wisdom can be strong enough to bring renewal, even from the midst of appalling destruction and suffering.
Canberra’s A Chorus of Women presented the world premiere season of A Passion for Peace in Albert Hall for the Congress centenary. With musical direction by Johanna McBride, the Passion cast and production team included some of Canberra’s finest soloists and instrumentalists, a 50-strong Chorus of Women, Arawang Primary School Choir in the role of Children’s Chorus, and the voice and rap beats of Canberra-grown producer-singer-songwriter Danny Pratt.
The Passion season was the centrepiece of a five-day Festival for Peace, also organised by A Chorus of Women. The production was supported financially by: the ACT Arts Fund; the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture; the New Zealand High Commission; the embassies of Belgium, Denmark, the European Union, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden; and numerous generous citizens of Canberra.
The Children’s Chorus move at full tilt to Danny Pratt's Morse beat in The Telegram Rap, A Passion for Peace, April 2015
About ‘In Moonlight – 28 April 1915’
This excerpt from the Passion libretto is set on 28 April 1915, the first night of the Congress. Beginning in moonlit country surrounding the two-year-old city of Canberra – a habitat of the Powerful Owl – the poetry opens into a worldwide view as the full moon flies around the Earth. Gallipoli, France, Belgium, the south coast of England and the Dutch capital are all illuminated on the way to the Chorus of Women’s dramatic voicing of the first Congress resolution.
The excerpt includes the names of 24 soldiers who enlisted from the Canberra region, and quotations from the Gallipoli diary of George Cloughley, Glenda’s grandfather from the beautiful town of Riverton on the south coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
Note on Text and Layout
Unvoiced words in the text are singers’ roles and stage directions (shown in italic script), and place and song names (bold text).
In Moonlight – 28 April 1915
Storytellers Trio
28th of April
1915
The round earth is wrapt
in the spell of a huge moon …
CANBERRA
Where Molonglo River
crosses the plain
People round Canberra
hear Powerful Owl call
Canberra Ngambri
Ngunnawal country
Here, where an ideal city is planned
Traumatime stories engraved in the land
Here, where an ideal city could rise
New names enlist on Traumatime’s roll
Individual chorus women call each Canberra soldier’s name as though from a dream
Edwin Oldfield… Charlie Lee… Frank Cotter… Billy Clark… Wilf Monk… Stan O’Grady… Len Brownsmith… Henry Buckpitt… Michael McMahon… Michael Scannell… Ernie and George McLaughlin… Charlie and Ernie Mayo… Charles Campbell… Bill Carney… Mack Southwell… Tom Maxwell… Ernie Murray… Jack Cregan… The Chaplain Frederick Ward… Andy Cunningham… Walter Moore… Jack Webb
Storytellers
The frosted ground sparkles
dusted in silver
Two-year-old city
with men gone to war
Trees breathing quiet
Round hills silent
Only Owl’s call
Powerful Owl calls, continuing
in the soft nest of night
Oracle bird
singing of change
Dark song piercing
stone and bone
Storytellers and Women’s Chorus
28th of April
1915
High in the sky
The full moon’s gone sailing
GALLIPOLI
Storytellers
At Gallipoli moon floats in the night
spreads silver shrouds over beaches and hills
where three thousand bodies of young men lie still
Women’s Chorus
These are the three thousand three-day-old dead
Young Turks and Anzacs gone to war
Sons, brothers, husbands who will come home no more
Storytellers
After his first day up Shrapnel Gully
caught among corpses of men and mules
a lad from Service Corps our 20-year-old Grandad
on a hill above the lines lifts his gaze to the sky
There in the moonlight
this dreamer and singer
confines in his journal confides to his grandkids
the noises he’ll hear the rest of his years
Already in his ears that Traumatime music!
Trying to pour out of his head …
The Young Grandfather
Vibrating shocks! Shrieking shells!
Shouts and cries! Pounding dread!
Down in that gully sharp snipers’ crack
Whistling bullets criss-cross the dead
Where shrapnel rips water
there at the Cove blood on the beach…
… The beach is bathed in light
like the sea at home …
so far away yet almost here
EUROPE
Storytellers
And now westward and north
the quiet moon flies
covers battle-worn Belgium
in silver and black
fills mirrors of water all over France
lakes and rivers ponds and streams
with tranquil illusion of beauty and peace
And over the Channel bright sleeve of sea
women are waiting one hundred and eighty
Passports cancelled because it’s said
The very official English voice of Lieutenant-Colonel Walker, Chief Permit Officer
‘There’s much inconvenience
in holding large meetings of political character
so close to the seat of war.’
Storytellers
They’re still listening for news of permits to travel
Listening for news of a Netherlands ferry …
Women’s Chorus
The opening bars of Resolution One sing softly at a distance
Storytellers
Can they hear the women singing?
Can they hear the women bringing
their longing their grief
to the moonlit Hague?
Music swelling mightily in full Congress session
Performing ‘In Moonlight: 28 April 1915’ in A Passion for Peace
Robin Dalton, The Young Grandfather at Gallipoli, with Storytellers (from left) Glenda Cloughley, Maartje Sevenster and Judith Clingan
(Photo by Peter Hislop used with permission)
Resolution One
Chorus of Women led by Jane Addams
Now, we women
in international congress assembled
protest against the madness and horror of war
involving as it does
the reckless sacrifice of human life
and the destruction of so much –– so much
that humanity has labored through centuries
to build up
Recordings
1. An April 2015 premiere season live performance recording of Resolution One can be viewed at youtu.be/dA0iE1OLU_8
2. A Passion for Peace was live webcast and an entire performance, including ‘In Moonlight’, can be viewed via www.chorusofwomen.org
3. Glenda’s Centennial Fanfare ‘We Women are a WILPF’, recorded by A Chorus of Women, can be viewed as broadcast into the 2015 Centennial Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in The Hague at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab7jC8gNTFk&feature=youtu.be
