Overheard at Inveresk

David Young with Michael Hewes
sound installation & chamber opera · 2001
Ten Days on the Island, Launceston, Tasmania

The Inveresk Railyards Workshop was left exactly as it was when it shut down. The machinery was still there. The tools. Coffee cups and timesheets. Two thousand workers had streamed out through the gates every evening in the seventies, and the place had simply stopped.

Inveresk Railyards Blacksmiths Shop — as it was left, Launceston, 2001

The Blacksmiths Shop, Inveresk Railyards, Launceston. From the Ten Days on the Island 2001 festival brochure.

Overheard at Inveresk was commissioned by Robyn Archer for the inaugural Ten Days on the Island festival in 2001. Working with sound designer Michael Hewes, I spent months in Launceston on residency — interviewing former workers, learning the names of machines, getting the machinery running again and recording it. The resulting audio was broadcast from outside the building. From the street, the workshop appeared to be alive. You could hear it working.

Inside, there was silence until soprano Maria Lurighi and percussionist Tom O'Kelly performed it back into life.

“O'Kelly conjuring crystalline sounds from the rusted rollers of a 3 metre ex-industrial gamelan.”

Jeremy Eccles, RealTime #43, 2001

Within that silence, we made a small chamber opera in ten parts — for soprano, percussionist, and electronics. The sound world drew on the machinery recordings, but also on the local university choir, a brass band, and the Launceston Pigeon Fanciers Club. The libretto wove together the voices of the former workers with the Tasmanian Government Railways Book of Rules and Regulations from 1950, and the myth of Icarus — in the figure of Naucrate, his mother.

Above the performers, a boy soprano sat on a girder. He was silent for most of the work, looking down. He sang only briefly, towards the end.

Maria Lurighi and Tom O'Kelly — Inveresk Railyards Blacksmiths Shop, Launceston, 2001.

“Positive blocks of light in this smoke-blackened negative world.”

Jeremy Eccles, RealTime #43, 2001

About 500 people flocked to see what was going on inside this building that had been such an important part of Launceston's life. After the festival, the Queen Victoria Museum commissioned Michael to make the sound installation permanent.

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Film

ABC profile — interviews with David Young, Michael Hewes, Maria Lurighi, Tom O'Kelly, and former Inveresk workers. 2001.

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