Finding A Way Through The Dark

The Age

Friday October 3, 2008

Anna King Murdoch

Nigel Westlake's musical retrospective has been possible only as a memorial to his son, writes Anna King Murdoch.

SINCE June, when his 21-year-old son Eli died in an accident in Sydney, the composer Nigel Westlake has spent months quietly sailing along Australia's eastern coast with his wife, Jan.

Along the beaches of the Whitsundays they built small shrines and lit candles that they could see from their boat at night. "It was a way of taking him with us on this trip."

In their inconsolable grief, having daily disciplines out on the water gave them at least some kind of form to the day. "There was the day-to-day focus and at the same time you can hang on to your memories and contemplate," he says.

"The time on the boat has given us a great opportunity for reflection." And of course there was silence "and the many sounds of the sea".

Westlake, who began his musical life as a clarinettist and went on to become one of Australia's most respected contemporary classical composers, is probably most well known for his film music, which includes the theme for Babe and Miss Potter.

After June, music lost its relevance for Westlake, except for the sounds he and his son listened to on their last sailing trip together up the NSW coast: the Melbourne singer-songwriter Lior, jazz singer Bobby McFerrin and the Melbourne-based, West African harp player, Toumani Diabate.

Westlake has postponed many projects and wondered whether he would be able to cope with conducting a retrospective of his guitar works with the Melbourne Symphony, for the Melbourne Festival. But there was such an outpouring of sympathy from the orchestra and festival organisers that he felt that he was among friends. And he has found a way to stand on stage: by dedicating the concert to the spirit of his son. "That's the way I'm dealing with it at the moment."

The family has not only received all kinds of help from friends and colleagues from Australia and around the world, and a special organisation set up for victims has also been very supportive. And his son was among a group of young people who, with their families, have been profoundly affected by this tragedy.

"Quite a few of us are in this together. It has forged a very close bond between us all."

Westlake and his wife have also had to cope with the added grief of trying to help their traumatised elder son who held his brother's hand as he died.

"Like all siblings they have had their ups and downs and more recently had reconciled so they were kind of closer than ever really when this all happened. I really feel for Joel. It has been an incredible strain on him."

Grief has led to the family forming a charity called the Smugglers of Light Foundation, which aims to take filmmakers and musicians to indigenous and disadvantaged communities to develop song-writing, story-telling, musicianship and performance skills. This will no doubt become a creative future direction for Westlake.

But at the moment, "I'm just getting to the stage of wondering what the immediate future is going to hold," he says. "Up until now the place in my head that holds all the music has been full of memories of Eli and they're memories that I'm not in a hurry to move aside. It has been impossible to continue working in terms of writing music. I do one day hope to be able to resume where I left off, somehow."

Recently Westlake has gone back into his studio, a renovated garage in Turramurra on Sydney's north shore. "I am starting to explore things a bit more. It has been a strange time, musically speaking. You would imagine music would offer solace in a situation like this but it hasn't really. I've been listening to Stravinsky and Prokofiev, composers I have always admired, searching for the source of my inspiration again."

He lives with a lot of silence "laden with all sorts of complex emotions, mostly sad ones".

With his concert looming, Westlake has been going over his guitar works, which are "sort of like old friends. Eli grew up with these pieces. He was in the next room while I was writing a lot of them and they were very much a part of who he was."

Westlake is not a religious man. "I have had thoughts that it would be good to be a religious person. The closest I come is my recent experience with Buddhism. I have gained a lot of consolation from friends of ours who are connected to the Buddhist faith," he said. After Eli's death, the Dalai Lama's monks were asked to do pujas (Sanskrit for "worship") for Eli for seven weeks in their monastery in Dharamsala. "We listened to one on the phone and found it incredibly moving. We felt for those seven weeks the presence of his spirit in the house. I have also gained great consolation from reading."

At some stage, the Westlake family will have to face the trial over their son's death of the driver of the car that drove into their son. "The trial will be a very difficult time for all of us. We have been trying to focus on Eli and keeping him in our hearts and keeping his spirit among us. I don't know how we are going to deal with that when it happens."

Nigel Westlake will conduct the Melbourne Symphony in Shadow Dances with guitar soloists Slava Grigoryan, Leonard Grigoryan and Doug de Vries and pianist Michael Kieran Harvey at Hamer Hall, the Arts Centre, on October 14 at 8pm.

© 2008 The Age

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