Goodnight Kiwi

About

A "landscape prelude".

Everyone of my generation remembers the ‘Goodnight Kiwi’ - the animation that used to signal the end of television for the night in the days when we only had two channels to choose from.

I remember the rare occasions I was allowed to stay up late enough to see the Goodnight Kiwi carry out his nightly duties. It was always way past my bedtime and therefore overwhelmingly exciting. But I always felt very melancholy afterwards. I would lie awake for hours thinking about the kiwi shutting down the power and climbing up to sleep in the sky. It seemed so final.

As I was composing this piece in 2004, my mother was approaching the end of a long illness and she and I were going through a process of looking through photographs, telling the stories that accompanied them and wondering what lay ahead. It made me remember long summers, lawn-mowers, barbeques, pohutukawa trees at the beach and a time in life that wasn't weighed down with responsibilities or fears for the future. This piece is an emotional landscape that tries to evoke that feeling of nostalgia, presenting childhood memories into which the future begins to creep.

I imagined my mother was setting off on the same journey as the kiwi... wandering through the building, shutting down the power and then climbing up to sleep in the sky. I wrote this piece for her.