Scenario for Summer: Verses for Broadcasting

Abstract

Scenario for SummerVerses for Broadcasting Paul Kane Notes for production 1. The verses spoken slowly onto a tape-recorder take approx. 20 minutes without allowance being made for music. 2. The only Section which can be omitted without destroying continuity is that entitled Flashback. 3. Titles of Sections in capital letters in the margin are not intended to be included in the broadcast reading, but are given as guide to change of voices and to voice mood. Where they occur in the text for the same reason, they are not intended to be unduly emphasised. 4. Short lines should be given their full value, although it will be found that they compose into regular, if protracted, metres. 5. Distinct preference is felt by the author for male voices in the speaking of the two parts. 6. Suggestions for Background Music: As Overture, and at end of page 2 … "En Bateaux" Debussy At beginning of Entr'acte (page 5) and at end of Afternoon (Page 6) "Golliwog's Cakewalk" Debussy Fade-out (page 9) … … … … "Clair de Lune" Debussy. Overture (First Voice) The towns where the boats come liltingly with sails to the brown wharves of Spain or the enamelled bays of Italy— they are a pale embroidery stitched in squares of rose and apricot and pearl silky in the mild sun, gathering thickly down to the tame strand of the old locked Sea. Their beauty is too rich to be taken quickly into bemused memory. Beauty wreathes [End Page 169] in vine, is ballustraded, adorned with fountain and urn and gushing grotto, lies lolling on a shallow stair and feeds on wine and gazes with warm eyes from walls stained with legend. Beauty breathes the dark pervasive scent of history. Prelude (Second Voice) That was a dream, receding. This is Australia: the plain but cheerful face, self-satisfied and unconcerned with wonders, that yelled "So long!" to the mad wanderer: and this is going back—to Summertown by the sea and knowing it stays: that blue blares like a band, blind summer feels you with dust, and a banner of wind spells Home. Welcome is a slow flat voice that calls from the boxy fibro shacks set thoughtlessly on the burnt verge of the main street like a game with faded blocks left to the sun und ruin by a bored child. This paraphernalia of wire-drums-bottles-cartons-tins tipped on the cliff proclaims with rugged ease that nature ends where civic right begins and this is a beauty-spot, the Look-Out. To help the view municipal pride has cemented a cairn of stones and gilded the dates of the great battles and the names of the brave slouching sons who fought them and died so surprisingly for the R.S.L., the Progress Association and Summertown's liberty to dump. (First Voice) You have to belong to a childhood here, to have paddled this sea when school was an iron-roofed shadow on February; or to wartime leave, days like a tender fruit found in a desert: you must have seen your firstborn make his first discovery of sand [End Page 170] on this shore: and then the eye will be lenient and affectionate as the pines that sigh like uncles reluctantly accepting the new Bar stuck like a monstrous scab on the face of bluestone. For beauty does abide here, in verandahed farms peeling in a hot wind; or stirs the gold pasture above the dune where grey sheep streal and a huge and native sky forgives our ugliness. The heart must be loving to set the small town against the dramatic bay, to see one's fellows like rustic actors shoving in the wings, and the slow play moving as sea-mist lifts the veil from a glittering day. (Music) Morning (Second Voice) The jetty's the life of the town and all the holiday boys go down at a canter on the spanking air of morning—Oh sing morning!— once there, stop, frown solemnly through the fearful yawning cracks of the jetty where green water slops, slap in the blackened hollow teeth of mussels, and great yellow strops of weed flick out, withdraw, like...