Our Duty to Care (2023) written for Bridgette Kelsey, Georgina Lewis, Stephanie Arnold and Isabel Hede as part of a 2022-23 Wattle Fellowship

(song cycle soprano and piano trio)

Our Duty to Care is a cross-disciplinary music composition based on the legal case Sharma v Minister for the Environment [2021] FCA 560, where eight Australian teenagers (namely Anjali Sharma and Isolde Raj-Seppings, Ambrose Hayes, Tomas Arbizu, Bella Burgemeister, Laura Kirwan, Ava Princi & Luca Saunders) represented by an octogenarian nun (Sister Marie Brigid Arthur) as their litigation guardian, sued the Minister for the Environment (Cth) and Vickery Coal Pty Ltd. They successfully argued that the Minister owed them and other Australian children a duty of care, which was supposedly breached when the Minister approved the extraction of coal from a coal mine. Whilst this decision was later successfully appealed by the Minister, this case monumentally established that climate change is legally real – with all submitted scientific evidence uncontested. This denotes a significant shift, as we are no longer fighting to prove our climate crisis, but rather urging all to fight the crisis itself. This work sets newly commissioned text by poet, close friend & regular collaborator Savanna Wegman, who has re-interpreted my own legal research about the case into a 3- part poem, which has in turn structured the song cycle. It embodies climate anxiety, the nervous excitement of the trial and its success, and the melancholic yet hopeful transference of ideology: how far we’ve come & how far we still have left to go.

Timing: ~ 18 minutes

1: Robed in Apocalypse (~6min):

2: they will rise, as birds fall (~5min)

3: The Changing Wilds (~7min)

Dedicated to all current and future generations of Australians who inherit a climate crisis.

Score available at the Australian Music Centre:

Composed as part of and made possible by a 2022/23 University of Melbourne Wattle Fellowship. “The Wattle Fellowship is a year-long leadership development program for students at the University of Melbourne. We aim to build leadership skills, support action on sustainability and create a cohort of leaders with the skills and networks to create positive lasting social and environmental impact. Fellows will participate in retreats, workshops, events and have the opportunity to implement their own action project. Our vision is a world where Wattle Fellows are embedding sustainability practices and principles into every social endeavour. This program is made possible through philanthropic support, including the McCall MacBain Foundation.”

Our Duty to Care © Robert McIntyre 2023 www.roberttmcintyre.com