Musical lake journey with a message

All aboard… Five Short Blasts, a one-hour experience organised for Canberra International Music Festival. Photo: Helen Musa

Canberra International Music Festival / Five Short Blasts. On Lake Burley Griffin, until May 4. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

“Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing” were the words that came to mind as a small electric boat swanned by a solitary piper performing The Skye Boat Song on Acton Peninsula.

It was all part of Five Short Blasts, a one-hour experience curated for Canberra International Music Festival by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, along with local water and sound communities.

The title takes its name from the signal known to mariners as a warning blast meaning, “what the hell are you doing?”, and was realised with two opposing groups of brass and wind players underneath the two ends of the Commonwealth Bridge, sounding their five short blasts in conversation with each other.

The performance/happening was an invitation to allow the special environment of Lake Burley Griffin in its 60th anniversary year to merge with instrumental sounds played by musicians onshore and a soundtrack recorded and replayed on each of the five boats involved.

Flynn and Humphrey had assembled an impressive line-up of artists and interviewees to create an experience that was thoughtful and personally challenging. But all the ducks needed to be lined up for this to work, as our affable steersman Peter noted, mentioning a momentarily glitch the other day when the Carillon sound was too soft and the recorded sound didn’t quite synch in. No such problems on Friday.

The mini-voyage and the soundtrack opened with the boat itself, seen from ancient times as a source of protection and comfort.

We then took a quick jump into the present-day debate between indigenous elders and modern proponents of the lake, like the Canberra woman who believed the lake to be an essential part of Canberra’s spirit and another who explained how Landcare groups were working hard to protect and revive our habitat around the lake.

But the penetrating voice of a First Nations elder returned time and time again to remind us of the degradation to the Murrumbidgee River, which had resulted from damming for the lake and the dangers of human intervention in natural water-courses.

The same voice returned to point out that Australia boasts one of the highest rates of native species extinctions in the world.

Many viewpoints were heard in the interviews, including that of an officer responsible for Scrivener Dam, boaters, rowers and fishermen, each with a different perspective.

While the boat sliced its way silently through the water past the National Carillon, we heard from carillonist Thomas Laue how he was a performer who never saw his audience, only the lake.

Then, passing alongside Regatta Point and under the big bridge, we heard some geological analysis of the contours of the Limestone Plains that had made them, seemingly, an ideal place to fill with a constructed lake.

That, we heard, had been part of Walter Burley Griffin’s utopian vision of Canberra, a vision that is not entirely realised.

As voice, music and birdsong mingled, the one hour was quickly over and while we filled out a manifest, our steersman served us black tea and biscuits.

Near the final berthing point, the voices returned with a paean to the humble wooden boat, reminding us that “boats were here before us”.

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