The song cycle The Hermit of Green Light (1979) was commissioned by Hartley Newnham and Nicholas Routley with assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council. The work is dedicated to Hartley and Nicholas, who have performed it many times throughout the world, and whose friendship and collaboration are a much valued part of my life as a composer.

The songs are settings of poems by the Australian poet Michael Dransfield (1948-1973). They form a miniature cycle whose theme is the relationship of human beings to the natural environment.

I was attracted to the first poem, which is set in a recitative-like style, through a somewhat wistful identification of myself with the hermit in his solitude; and to the second and third – both taken from Dransfield’s Geography cycle – by their ecstatic, visionary qualities. The final poem, profoundly calm yet poised on the brink of despair, seemed to require hardly any comment from the piano and is thus largely unaccompanied.