Today I went to the Australian National Maritime Museum and met Hamish Palmer, the Creative Producer. I saw the current plans, look and feel and narrative ideas that have already been worked through – an awful lot of work already!

Next we took a walk through the vessels – HMAS Vampire, an imposing destroyer, and HMAS Onslow, an Oberon class submarine, still semi-submerged in Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

I really liked Hamish, and the ideas that the team had come up with so far. That said, I left with probably too many ideas, because when I got home and looked at my notes, I couldn’t work out how the musical/sound ideas could possibly fit together into a coherent work – I’d written down:

• Industrial
• Push emotional buttons
• Use the silence in Onslow
• Popular music of several decades
• Filmic soundtrack
• Electronic
• Acoustic

And so on!

One idea that did come to me very clearly as I was leaving was that this was a large scale work, and including the patrol boat, it would have four separate movements, like a symphony. So I was conceiving a multi-movement work, something on a grand scale, and so this could definitely achieve many moods: the challenge would be to make it stylistically consistent.