Music Composed byClive Douglas Robert HughesCharles Mackerras Joseph Post

Played by Members of theSydney Symphony OrchestraConducted by Joseph Post

Clive Douglas had previously worked with Robert Hughes on the federal government financed documentary Mike and Stefani.

The addition of Charles Mackerras and Joseph Post and the SSO provided additional classical music respectability of an Australian kind, suitable to the pomp and circumstance required by parts of the score. Mackerras had previously worked on a number of Australian feature films.

Robert Hughes:

Robert Hughes was a Melbourne-based composer. In 1952, he won second prize of £250 in the Jubilee Composers' Competition. Ironically third prize went to Clive Douglas of Sydney, who collaborated with him on the score for Mike and Stefani (the first prize of £1,000 went to British composer David Moule-Evans). In 1949 Hughes had won the £100 prize offered by the A.B.C. for a ceremonial or festival overture to be performed during the Royal visit.

Hughes later wrote the music for The Forbidden Rite, the first ballet written specially for Australian television, a 45 minute commissioned by the ABC and APRA, produced by Will Stirling at the ABC's Melbourne Ripponlea studios. It was scheduled for broadcast in 1962. At that point Hughes, who had been writing music since he was 17, was music librarian and arranger for the Victorian Symphony Orchestra. There is a detailed wiki of Hughes' career here.

(Below: Robert Hughes)

Clive Douglas:

Clive Douglas (1903-1977) was a well-known composer and conductor, based within the ABC, who composed a variety of works interested in conjuring up the Australian landscape, such as Carwoola, premiered by Eugene Goosens with the SSO in August 1949. Joseph Post conducted his score Warra-Wirrawaal in London in July 1950.

In 2011 Lynne Gavin Douglas published a 51 page, 12 plate look at Douglas and his work, The golden age: Clive Douglas - composer, conductor (Wollongong, Wirripang). It was accompanied by a fifty minute audio CD of his work. The ADB has a biography of Clive Douglas here.

(Below: the book on Douglas, and Douglas conducting).

Hughes and Douglas at the time of the 1952 competition:

Charles Mackerras:

Charles Mackerras was one of the most significant Australian musicians active in the 1950s.He went to England in 1947 to further his career in classical music, but he had alreadyassisted Charles Chauvel on The Rats of Tobruk in 1944. He would go on to a diverseprolific and lengthy career in classical music, becoming particularly noteworthy for hischampioning of the works of Leoš Janáček. He has a detailed wiki here.

(Below: a young Charles Mackerras and Mackerras in the nineteen fifties as he embarked on his recording career).

Joseph Post:

Joseph Mozart Post (1906-1972) was an Erskinville-born composer and conductorwho worked from 1947 to 1950 as associate conductor of the Sydney SymphonyOrchestra, about the same period as when Sir Eugene Goossens' was in chargeof the band. Post had an ambivalent relationship with the ABC, which then ranthe symphony orchestras in Australia, and there are more details of his lifeand career at his wiki here, and in the ADB biography here.

(Below: Joseph Post, left, discussing the score, with producer Stanley Hawes, right).

(Below: Joseph Post featured in The Australian Women's Weekly on 3rd February 1951).

(Below: Joseph Post featured in The Australian Women's Weekly on 11th February 1950).