Re: Forget Them Never, or Be Yourselves Forgot

Date: April 21, 2004

"Air hero's words settle the score

By Carolyn Webb

Thomas White, a heroic pilot, RAAF group captain and former federal aviation minister.

Five Melbourne men, aged from 22 to 80, have breathed new life into an epic Australian war poem: Sky Saga has been adapted for orchestra and choir for an Anzac Day performance at Melbourne Town Hall.

An ambitious, elegant paean to the heroism of World War II Australian airmen, the poem was published in 1943, but has faded from public memory. It was written by Sir Thomas White, a heroic World War I pilot, World War II RAAF group captain and later federal aviation minister.

Actor Kirk Alexander stumbled on Sky Saga two years ago in the Kay Craddock Antiquarian Bookshop in Collins Street. He was so moved that he read the entire poem - a 57-page, powder blue, A5 booklet - while still in the bookshop.

"I thought, this has got to be done as a performance piece," he recalls. "It is an emotional epic."

Alexander, 58, who has acted on TV (The Sullivans, Neighbours), stage (Les Miserables), and done hundreds of TV ad voice-overs, asked his friend, fellow actor James Condon, to be Sky Saga narrator - the role of a veteran looking back on war service.
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Condon, 80, himself saw action over Europe in World War II as a navigator with the RAF and RAAF. The pair decided that the poem was too big for one narrator, and a friend of Condon's recommended young actor Damien Fotiou (Blue Heelers, Head On) to read half of the poem, as a young airman. Fotiou, 31, says Condon invited himself over to Fotiou's house one Sunday morning.

"James just launched into the script, started reading. And I was so shocked and taken aback by it. Suddenly, he transported me into this story, this world."

Despite the 50 year age gap, Fotiou sat there, "absorbed".

"It just really blew me away - James's passion for it, and the fact that he'd been there."

Fotiou postponed his own engagement party to take part in the first two public performances of Sky Saga, at Brighton's Clocktower Theatre last July, because weeks earlier, a psychic had told him he had been a Spitfire pilot in a former life.

Meanwhile, Alexander had enlisted young composer Nicholas Buc to write a piano accompaniment for the Brighton concerts, a task which Buc accomplished within a week. Like Fotiou had been with Condon, Buc, at age 22 the youngest of the Sky Saga team, says he was infected by Alexander's enthusiasm.

"A lot of how I felt about it came out of his passion for it. And he left it with me. It's funny, because I really didn't have much connection with it. My grandparents came from Ukraine before World War II. But, between the script and Kirk's enthusiasm, I got really really pumped and inspired by it. Just the story, it's really human, very non-Hollywood.

"It gets down to facts. It goes really intimately into these guys' lives, everything they went through: the training, the parties, the ups and downs. It explains how they feel when their friends die. They were my age, so I guess that was a bit of a connection."

Buc particularly loves the final three stanzas "that really sum up everything about what they went through, about the war and the futility of it".

"All these guys, so young, dying for their country. It's the age-old thing that you hear all the time, but it's the way it's written, it's really beautiful. It's just a very beautiful poetic ending, very poignant: They gave their all. We who are left have not. Forget them never; or be yourselves forgot.

In September, Alexander, Condon, Fotiou and Buc performed the full (75 minute) Sky Saga for veterans at the RAAF Air Forces Club in South Yarra.

"You could see the smiles on their faces, these old guys, because they've lived it."

Unprompted, Buc then wrote an orchestral score, drawing on Gershwin-influenced 1930s and 1940s jazz and romantic music, and war songs. It was first performed by the Melbourne Youth Orchestra at Melbourne Town Hall last November. Because it was a concert of war movie themes, Buc edited the music down to a 12-minute version.

Andrew Wailes, director of the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic, who has worked with Buc at the Melbourne Youth Orchestra, was so impressed when he heard the orchestral Sky Saga piece that he commissioned Buc to add a choral score for the 2004 Anzac Day concert that Wailes was organising.

"I felt that (the choral element) was the one dimension emotionally that the music was lacking," says Wailes.

"The human voice can express things that instruments can't: life, breath, humanity."

Wailes describes the result as "like a film score without the film".

The dialogue fits in over, under and between the orchestral and choral music.

"It combines the feel of a 1950s radio play with the epic film scores of the golden era and elements of music drama," says Wailes.

"It's performed and narrated live, but you can close your eyes and still see what the music is describing. Each section of the music is describing, in music, a different stanza of the verse."

It is divided into three movements: Prologue, Battle of the Skies and Epilogue. The Prologue music introduces the romantic Sky Saga theme, while the words introduce the young men who fight and die in the war. Wailes says the middle movement, called Battle of the Skies, takes the audience to the "physical reality of war", musical manoeuvres depicting the roar of the engines as they take off. Wailes continues:

"A long drone in the lower strings places us in the air amongst the pilots, who wait patiently for the enemy. The throbbing of engines and an eerie calmness soon give way to a massive dogfight, with different sections of the orchestra representing both the allies and the enemy."

The Epilogue commemorates the living and the dead with a variation on the mournful bugle piece The Last Post.

Alexander wants others to discover Sky Saga, which he says is on par with classics such as The Man From Snowy River.

Sir Thomas White, who died in 1957, was in the first group of pilots to train at Point Cook for the Australian Flying Corps, the forerunner of the RAAF. In WWI, he was a prisoner of war in the Middle East after landing behind enemy lines. In WWII, he trained airmen in England and Australia. White was a federal MP for Balaclava for 22 years, aviation minister under Prime Minister Menzies and later High Commissioner to England. White's two surviving daughters have given Alexander copyright of Sky Saga, and are expected to see the work performed on Anzac Day.

Alexander now wants to take Sky Saga on a tour of Victoria.

"If we leave it too late, the warriors of the airforce will be gone."

"We've brought this poem to the forefront, and it should never be forgotten again. And the music that young Nicholas has written, it just gives it so much meaning," says Alexander.

"I think it's just brought back a wonderful Australian story, spoken by Australians, and recognised the indebtedness that we have to the Australian air force."

Sky Saga (the 12-minute version) will be performed by Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir as part of the Spirit of Anzac Day Concert, April 25, at 5pm at Melbourne Town Hall. Also to be performed at the Spirit of Anzac Day concert:


For the Fallen, Elgar's 1916 musical setting of Laurence Binyon's famous poem that includes the words, "age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn" featuring soprano Lisa Harper-Brown and baritone Lucas de Jong.

Agnus Dei, an a capella choral arrangement by Samuel Barber of Adagio for Strings (1936), a work popularised in the 1986 movie Platoon.

© 2004 The Age Company Ltd."