Skinner’s subtitle – ‘the making of an Australian composer’ – is therefore an apt one, imbued with multiple meanings. The book’s treatment of Sculthorpe’s formative years and influences is painstakingly thorough; perhaps, at times, too much so. For example, Skinner dutifully traces Sculthorpe’s ancestors back three or more generations, with minimal relevance to the composer, who owes little to his ancestry beyond his immediate family, and who began quite early on to construct an image for himself. Skinner’s account of Sculthorpe’s early life in small-town Tasmania is, similarly, most revealing for the contrast to his later career, in terms of pace, intellectual milieu and even landscape; the lonely desert panoramas of his mature works are every bit as fictitious as the musical invention of America’s Wild West by Brooklyn boy Aaron Copland.

While Sculthorpe received support and encouragement from teachers at various stages, none seems to have had much influence on his musical direction. The most crucial encounters were rather with his peers, especially his fellow students in Melbourne in the 1940s. Skinner paints a sometimes dizzying picture of Sculthorpe’s young adulthood, with endless social occasions and multitudes of artistic friends. Although I wonder whether this impression simply reflects the available source material, individual pursuits such as composition inevitably leave fewer documentary traces. If the impression is genuine, it points to a contradiction in Sculthorpe’s nature that the book does not confront directly: between the love of solitude that dominated his childhood and that led him to music in the first place, and the gregarious interactions of his adult life.

The most fascinating part of the book deals with the Sculthorpe myth’s transformation into a collaborative endeavour in the early 1960s. Skinner deliberately singles out Sculthorpe as the ‘key player’ in Australian music’s coming-of-age, but his role comes across at times as almost passive, alongside the powerful advocacy of such figures as Bernard Heinze, Donald Peart, Robert Helpmann, ‘Nugget’ Coombs, and, above all, the Sydney music critics Curt and Marea Prerauer, and Roger Covell. From the vantage point of these more cynical times, such close relationships between reviewers and the reviewed appear dubious; but Covell, the Prerauers and others evidently saw their role in a proactive and idealistic light, as catalysts and promoters of cultural development rather than merely as evaluators after the fact.

The faith of these other key players in the value of Sculthorpe’s music is all the more remarkable given how little they had to go on. By the end of 1963, the year in which Sculthorpe (at the age of thirty-four) emerged as one of the nation’s most important composers, he had only about half-a-dozen polished works to his credit, all small-scale chamber pieces, with the exception of Irkanda IV (1961) and The Fifth Continent (1963). He was yet to write the first string quartet to earn a permanent place in his catalogue (No.6, 1964–65), and his distinctive mastery of the orchestra also lay in the future. The enthusiasm of his early partisans, despite the paucity of raw material, speaks volumes for the freshness of Sculthorpe’s idiom at the time, but also for their eager sense that the climate was ripe for something new.

Skinner makes an unusual but shrewd choice in closing his account (for the time being, at least) in 1974, the year in which Sculthorpe’s major opera Rites of Passage was premièred, long enough ago for events to have receded to a respectable distance. The justification for this choice of date is that Sculthorpe had by then achieved the quest for a distinctively Australian character in his music. But other reasons also suggest themselves. Rites of Passage constituted the composer’s last skirmish with modernism, and the ensuing years were to see a significant aesthetic shift in his work. In addition, after a long and sometimes painful process of evolution, Sculthorpe was by 1974 well and truly part of the musical establishment, and his career thereafter has been more consistently productive and less eventful.

Indeed, the sheer messiness of Sculthorpe’s career throughout the period covered by the book is little short of astonishing. While I previously knew something about the complex history of the Sun Music series, and of the abortive operatic collaboration with Patrick White which ultimately materialised (Whiteless) as Rites of Passage, I had no idea how much work Sculthorpe did on radio projects, films and even musical revues, up to as late as 1964, when his concert music career was already taking off. Again, the nature of the documentary evidence may skew the picture – convoluted and failed projects generate much more paperwork than straightforwardly completed ones – but Skinner produces here a litany of missed deadlines, fallings-out between collaborators, hasty reworkings of existing material to fit new contexts, and crises both personal and artistic. He traces, perhaps for the first time, the full extent of the self-borrowing that has remained ubiquitous in Sculthorpe’s oeuvre, hinting at the reasons with-out ever quite spelling them out. Reading between the lines, Sculthorpe’s compositional process in his early music was often quite laborious, with material only taking fully satisfactory form after passing through several provisional works (the Irkanda series being a classic example); and this perfectionism very soon came head-to-head with a heavy demand for new works that Sculthorpe found impossible to meet.

If I have one quibble with Skinner’s achievement, it is that the sheer profusion of detail runs the risk of overwhelming the big picture. Perhaps he mutes his own voice too much: parts of the book read as undigested raw material, awaiting the selective attention of an authorial viewpoint to put them in order. This results in some problems of pacing, which might be solved by including some lengthier and more reflective discussion of particular works. The grand narrative of Sculthorpe’s development does ultimately come through, but Skinner might have done better to sacrifice a few trees for the good of the forest.

The book is handsomely produced and laid out, with some delightful and well-chosen photographs. Unfortunately, there are more typographical errors than there should be, including missing or extra words, and in several places extraneous mid-word hyphens (presumably as a result of changed line-turns). I noted one or two more substantive errors: Tanglewood is mistakenly located in Vermont instead of Massachusetts, and a photograph of Anniversary Music’s Sydney première is dated 1968 (instead of 1967, as described in the text). Larry Sitsky’s famous barb about opening a can of sardines is also, oddly, quoted in connection with the Australian Opera production of Lenz, in March 1974; I have always understood it to refer, much more pointedly, to the UNSW Opera performance of his The Fall of the House of Usher, which took place in the Opera Theatre in August 1973, making it the first opera of any kind to be staged in the Sydney Opera House (predating the ‘official’ opening night in September, Prokofiev’s War and Peace).

In sum, however, Graeme Skinner has put together a remarkable piece of scholarship which will stand as an invaluable tool for research – not only for aficionados of Sculthorpe’s life and work, but for anyone with an interest in this tumultuous period of Australia’s cultural history.