FLINDERS QUARTET
Elizabeth Sellars • violin
Wilma Smith • violin
Helen Ireland • viola
Zoe Knighton • cello

AGATHA YIM, POLYPHONIC PICTURES filming and editing
THOMAS GRUBB, MANO MUSICA sound engineering, editing and mastering

Filmed October 2025 in the Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, Wurundjeri Country/Southbank

This project was made possible through support from Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and FQ’s Fifth String donors

BRYONY MARKS (b. 1971)
Australia Fair? Volume I: The Australian Dream (composed 2020, rev. 2024/25)
for String Quartet and film from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

A note from the composer: 

“In March 2020, like everyone in my field and huge numbers in other fields, my work was postponed indefinitely. A hectic year-long schedule of writing music for film and TV was replaced by home schooling, a precious walk with kids and dogs, and a grim watch of the nightly news. But I also found myself with time to write, whatever I wanted, just for the joy of it, something I’d been too busy to contemplate for years.

As a screen composer, I revel in setting music to image. On the better projects, score can contribute a substantial and sometimes subversive counter narrative. But you are still, always – willingly, gloriously – in service of the film. For this project, I thought it would be fun to invert that hierarchy, writing a piece in which the quartet is at the fore, with the images functioning as underscore.

For over 100 years, screen culture has reflected current mores, ideals and fantasies. Interested in fluctuating notions of Australian identity across the decades, and how that identity is moulded and reflected in our screen culture, I approached the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and trawled, online, through their archival footage.

This first Volume of Australia Fair? is an assemblage of previously unrelated footage from the first half of the twentieth century. On display is the monoculture that was deemed acceptable and aspirational in Australia during that time: exclusively white, strictly gendered, defined in relation to the beach and World Wars fought on foreign soil. Home videos of post-war 1950s leisure pursuits join footage of bombing trials. A 1920s advertisement for Berlei Corsets gives way to a 1960s promotional video depicting a day in the life of a suburban housewife, contrasting with the masculine tomfoolery of 1950s beach wrestling. A fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at the stirrings of what is now ubiquitous celebrity screen culture is seen in a rare silent screen test from the 1920s. In it Isabel McDonagh, under the stage name ‘Marie Lorraine’, acts out various scenes, in competition with two other young actresses. Isabel, with her sisters Paulette and Phyllis, were a pioneering force in Australian silent films, and the first Australian women to own and run a film production company. Across all this footage, the music does not obediently reinforce what unfolds, but instead expresses a separate, autonomous point of view.

I’ve called this work ‘Volume I’ because an examination of screen depictions of Australian identity only becomes meaningful with the accumulation of layers and layers of different footage, promulgating many differing historical narratives which challenge and extend those ‘halcyon’ ones presented in Volume I. In Volume II and beyond, I intend to collaborate with other composers and ensembles, addressing the gaping holes inherent in the dominant narrative, documenting formative waves of immigration and most importantly recognising the place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the rightful owners of unceded land, and the layers of injustice and trauma stemming from invasion, dispossession and colonisation that, whether we acknowledge it or not, are at the core of our collective Australian identity.

Is Australia Fair? Who are we, who were we and who do we want to be?”