In 1955, Simonne Moffitt’s maternal grandmother, Marjorie Kunze, entered a competition to create a ballet to celebrate the centenary of the gold rush in Victoria. An avid lover of nature and the bush, Kunze dreamed up a charming narrative featuring native birds in a classic Australian setting. Simonne Moffitt with some of the dancers who will bring Gold to life.
Credit: James Brickwood She sent her synopsis, complete with watercolours of her costume designs, to the competition organiser, Edouard Borovansky, whose company, Borovansky Ballet, was the forerunner of the Australian Ballet. Then she waited. It was a time when the cultural cringe was practically a way of life and all artistic activity in the colony instinctively referred back to the “mother country”.
Marjorie Kunze had the idea for the ballet nearly 70 years ago. When Borovansky responded, he said he liked Kunze’s work but it would never do because it was “too Australian”. Audiences wanted to see European-style ballets that most definitely did not feature backdrops of wattle and gumtrees and a cast of cheeky native animals.
Fast-forward nearly 70 years and Kunze’s ballet will finally get its world premiere after Sydney-based Moffitt, herself a dancer and choreographer, committed to the Herculean task of bringing it to the stage. “It was around 2018 that my mum showed me the synopsis and we started looking at the 20 or more beautiful watercolours of the costume designs,” says Moffitt. “The first i.