Of all the many projects commemorating the centenary of World War I and the Anzacs’ contribution to it, the creation of an opera from David Malouf’s magnificent novella Fly Away Peter (1981) would seem to be one of the most demanding.

The story follows the young, bird-obsessed Jim Saddler from the almost prelapsarian idyll of the untouched Gold Coast hinterland to the muddy hell of the trenches around Armentières, but it is not the settings that are so challenging. The three main characters – Jim, the young landowner Ashley Crowther, and the photographer Imogen Harcourt – are each, in their own way, taciturn creatures who distrust speech and manage to communicate with each other in a nearly wordless fashion. Indeed, the first half of the book, set in and around the bird sanctuary on Crowther’s hinterland estate, has only the barest of dialogue. When the action moves to the trenches, we hear the semi-articulate words of the terrified young men who are thrashing around in the mud. We have a work in which most of the interaction between characters is non-verbal. But opera is the performing art which can convey unarticulated emotion best. As Malouf himself has said: ‘in opera we are in a world where the natural mode of expression is song. Not simply for what is normally spoken, the everyday exchanges between individuals, but for what is unspoken as well; mental apprehension and reflection and all the action of heart, mind and spirit.’