Charlie and Matt Ottley (The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness) discuss Matt’s type I bipolar disorder and how it has influenced this, his latest book, and his life in general. As Matt is also a composer and illustrator and the book involves both, we also discuss in detail the creation of the music and artwork.

Please note that there are mentions of child sexual abuse and attempted suicide in this episode.

General references:
The Sound Of Picture Books on YouTube
Film trailer for The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness
Tina Wilson set up the Lester Prize

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Matt Ottley: The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness

Buy the books: UK

Release details: Recorded 16th April 2024; published 26th August 2024

Where to find Matt online: Website || Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

00:01:36 The whys of the book – why this story, why produce it in this way, why now (this turns into a larger discussion of Matt’s bipolar disorder and how it affects him)
00:13:18 Matt’s musical initiative for children, The Sound Of Picture Books
00:19:45 The artistic process of the book, the artwork
00:24:35 The image of the pregnant mother in water, Matt’s painting of water in general, and the elephants
00:29:08 The animals in terms of metaphors of unreality, evolution, and mania
00:32:32 Where Matt started in illustration, music, and writing – the discussion revolves mostly around music – and also inspirations
00:42:01 All about the music – composing, recording, the orchestra, choir, and so on
00:52:01 [An extract of music from the score, courtesy of Matt]
00:58:34 Discussing the narration and narrator, Matt’s wife, Tina Wilson
01:02:04 The book’s text – starting point and so on
01:04:38 Matt tells us about his childhood, family, and experience of bipolar growing up
01:09:34 What’s next? (A variety of projects are discussed.)

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 104. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Matt Ottley to talk about his latest book, for readers 15 and above – he’s created a lot of books, won lots of awards. It is called The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness. It is an inter-modal work. The book is a short graphic story told with the most beautiful artwork, some more sketch-like, some pretty much fine art – Matt is an incredible artist. However it goes further than that – Matt is also a musician, a composer, and he has created an orchestral piece that is included in the book as a CD and is the backdrop of the effective audiobook. It’s got a choir as well, it’s fantastic. So that leaves us with the content – an unnamed child is born and as he grows older he starts experiencing things that others don’t understand, told in metaphor here as the fruit and flower of a tree that is inside him. This book looks at the journey he goes through being a person who has a mental illness. We’ve going to get into it more fully, we’re going to talk about everything I hope. Hello Matt!

Matt: Hello, Charlie. Thank you for having me here.

Charlie: It is lovely to have you. It has been an absolute pleasure experiencing your work – I’m not going to say just ‘reading’ because it has been an entire experience. So I want to ask first, if I can ask the whys of the book, like, why produce it? Why this story in this way?

Matt: Well, let me start with the last part of that question; because I’m a musician and a composer, as well as a writer and visual artist, it just seems natural that I combine all of those creative elements, and I’ve been doing that for the past ten years. Most of my work is for children; I’ve had a couple of books now for adults and young adults, but in the last ten years at least, they’ve all involved music as well. And I have a, what would you call it, an initiative, called The Sound of Picture books, in which we do live performances. I’ve been working regularly with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, small ensembles from within the orchestra, and we do performances of each book. And that has led to me doing permanent recordings. So all future works from here on in will have recordings included with them, probably as QR codes so people can download the music. So the first part of the question – I’ve lived all of my life with type one bipolar disorder, and I’ve kept it very private until recently, because I felt I do have a voice, I can communicate with others what it is like to suffer from a psychotic mental illness. And I wanted to do it in a way that really hits people sort of viscerally and hence there’s a lot of visceral imagery in the paintings. Not repulsive, I hope; I hope the whole work is aesthetically beautiful, but there are some slightly confronting sort of ideas in some of the imagery. And I did that because I want people to feel, at a gut level, what it is like. Put simply, I just wanted to add my voice to the ongoing conversation around complex mental illness to engender more compassion and more empathy, basically.

Charlie: So I’m going to pick up on something that you are saying here and ask, so why now, effectively, what has made it that you wanted to share this now?

Matt: It’s because for most of my career – I’m 61 and I’ve had a 35-odd year career in literature – for a lot of that time, I’ve had loved ones, people that I have very close relationships with. For example, the director of a place called The Literature Centre in Fremantle in West Australia, who have carried my work, promoted my work for me during times when I’ve not been able to have any kind of public face. Because I’ve had, on average, one to two episodes per year. I am what psychiatrists call a rapid cycler, which means I can have up to four episodes in a year. But I’m also an ultra-rapid cycler in that I can have more than that. So I would often spend up to half a year being unwell, basically, and so not having any ability to have any kind of public profile. But I’ve had others who’ve sort of pushed and promoted my work and I’ve had a fairly successful career. With really good treatment and the most beautiful and loving relationship with my partner, Tina, over the past decade, I’ve been stable and I’ve been well, and well enough that I felt it’s now time for me to speak out about my experiences and to share those with the world, because like anyone with a complex mental illness, particularly that it does involve psychosis, I have experienced the stigma that people like me experience and how deeply humiliating that can be. And, you know, it’s the fear, the loathing, of people with complex mental illness – it just comes out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding, you know, fear born of ignorance, basically. And so I just felt it’s time that I can lend my voice to this ongoing conversation.

Charlie: Do you feel that things are getting better in society, are people being more accepting nowadays?

Matt: I do. I do. I think wonderful things are happening, particularly around depression and anxiety. It’s much more acceptable now and people are much freer to speak out about it, and it’s because it’s touching so many of our lives, and I suspect it always has historically, but because there has been so much shame attached to being mentally unwell. And that’s a very deep historical question that we would need hours probably to talk about to get to the bottom of, but I think it involves things like military, like conflict – particularly with men, it was seen to be a weakness not to be fully in control of your mind. Of course, we know that that’s completely not true. I have to say some of the most resilient, the mentally toughest people I have ever met are people who suffer from mental illness. We have to be because it’s a hard society to survive in [Charlie: yeah] when you have these kinds of conditions. So I do think things are changing. There is one taboo that still remains, and that is psychosis. We’re very happy to talk about depression and anxiety, and that’s absolutely fabulous, but people are still very afraid of psychosis, and it is still horribly misrepresented in the media. For example, if there’s been some crime of violence committed and the person happens to have a psychotic mental illness, it’s always mentioned, but within the 12 to 24 hour news cycle, not even a psychiatrist is going to be able to tell you whether their psychotic illness is implicated in the crime. It’d be a bit like saying, ‘so and so robbed a corner store, and so and so suffers from fibromyalgia’. [Charlie agrees.] It’s like, ‘and?’ – what is the connection? So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of work to be done there. In my country, Australia, for example, statistics show that anyone who has a psychotic mental illness who is being treated and under some sort of treatment plan is no more prone to violence than anybody else in the society. So we still have a lot of work to do in that area.

Charlie: It’s definitely getting better, yes, I would agree with you on that. And I would agree with you also that there is lots more to be done. I’m going to stick on the subject, if that’s okay with you, and then I’m going to go back in a bit to more about the inspiration, because I would like to ask you, your bipolar and your psychosis, can you tell us more about how it affects you, if that’s okay to talk about?

Matt: Yeah, sure, sure. My bipolar, it’s type I bipolar, which means that I am prone to longer periods of mania and more profound periods of mania, which can tip into delusion and psychosis. It started when I was a child. I wasn’t actually formally diagnosed as bipolar till I was in my forties, but there is a long backstory to that that included me having a huge amount of fear of the medical fraternity because of something that happened when I was a teenager. My first diagnosable episode of bipolar occurred when I was 13. I had a fairly high manic spike that lasted about three or four weeks, followed by about six months of intense suicidal depression. But the psychotic aspects of my illness actually emerged a lot earlier; I would have been about nine years old when I first started hearing and seeing things that are not there. So the psychosis side of it, basically, is a loss of contact with reality and hearing things, seeing things, that don’t exist, hearing voices in one’s head. It’s the crossover between type one bipolar and schizophrenia, it’s sort of a fine line. Like, I’ve had a psychiatrist describe me as bipolar with schizoid tendencies. But of course, these things are very treatable by medication for most people. I have found an antipsychotic medication that works really well for me. But I also carry two genes called the MTHFR gene, which make it very difficult to metabolise psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately, people with that genetic combination can be very hard to treat. But ultimately, especially now with a lot of the allied health industry, there are pathways of treatment that are available, especially in the last decade, that haven’t been in the past. So, for example, for me, [they] have worked really well. I live basically a very stable life now. What else can I tell you? I mean, without going into too much detail about what happens during psychosis [Charlie: sure], it can be incredibly frightening, it can be terrifying, in fact. The inspiration to The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness came out of an episode where I did think I had something alien living inside of me. And it was growing like mycelium, like the network of fungi, and it was growing through my body, and it was slowly sort of encasing my brain. Of course, this was all totally delusional; there was nothing like that really happening, but that’s what I felt was happening. And I could see it moving underneath my skin. So, you know, it’s extraordinary what the human mind, when chemically it’s out of kilter, can conjure up. Yeah.

Charlie: That’s interesting to hear about the tree itself; I know that you’ve got a lot of allegory and you’ve got a lot of metaphor in here, in the book, but I wasn’t aware of how realistic, I suppose, how much it touches the boundary, I suppose, between realistic and the metaphor, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I will ask you more about that. I mean, actually, before we go on, you mentioned your initiative with the children, and it’s just gone out of my head, what you’ve called it…

Matt: The Sound Of Picture Books, yeah.

Charlie: That’s it – The Sound Of Picture Books. Could you tell us more about that? Because I believe there’s a bit on YouTube that I can link people to so they can get more of an idea after they’ve listened to this.

Matt: Yeah. You also used the word ‘intermodal’, which I was thrilled, because that’s actually a term I coined. When different art forms are combined these days, it’s generally called ‘multimodal’. Film is a good example – you’ve got literature, i.e., the screenplay, you’ve got the visual element, and you’ve got music.

Charlie: Very good point.

Matt: They’re different art forms coming together in a multimodal way. And composers will compose the music so it syncs beautifully with dialogue and with action, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s art forms that are really being created to work together. I call what I do ‘intermodal’ because at a very methodological level, they are connected. So, for example, I’ll take the lines of a character’s face that I’ve drawn, and I’ll put those on a music stave and use that line to create the melody for the music. And I’ll do that in reverse. Each art form at a deep technique level is informing the others, which is why I call it ‘intermodal’ rather than ‘multimodal’, because they are all profoundly connected. So what I do is I write music for each of the picture books I’ve worked on. Then we have an ensemble on stage that, either with a conductor or with earbuds, with a click track, they are syncing perfectly with a semi-animated movie of the images from the book, just on a big screen behind the players, and then a narrator. And if it’s been a collaboration – me working as an illustrator with an author on the book – then hopefully we have the author there to narrate, otherwise, it’s an actor. A lot of the time, it’s my partner, Tina, because she has beautiful reading voice. It’s her voice you hear on the recording of The Tree Of Ecstasy. And so there’s a live performance, with music, of the story. And following that, I basically talk about how I work across these different modes. So I will, for example, get an audience member up and do a portrait of them on stage and then turn that into a piece of music on big music staves on a whiteboard. So I’ll literally write a piece of music while I’m standing there and then direct the musicians to play it. There’s a few other things that I do that combine music and drawing, which is why the show is called The Sound Of Picture Books, because it’s all based around the narratives, the stories in the picture books I’ve worked on, but it goes beyond that. There’s lots of improvisation. It’s a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun during performances. The biggest work I’ve done to date is The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness, because that is for a 97-piece orchestra and a 40 voice choir and a solo tenor singer. It’s unlikely we’re ever going to get an orchestra of that size on stage for me to improvise with. But normally we work with small ensembles, so it might be a quintet or an octet. This year, it’s a quartet, working with two wind instruments and two stringed instruments in the shows that are going to happen later on this year.

Charlie: Well, I’ve seen the video – I think it is The Sound Of Picture Books – on YouTube, and the children are absolutely loving it [chuckles], which is lovely to see – you want children to get into music and certainly, like, orchestral music as early as possible and get them to really enjoy it. But I have to ask you, where did this idea of drawing, on the musical stave, people’s faces – where is this from? It’s fascinating.

Matt: Well, as part of my bipolar condition, I have the condition of synaesthesia [Charlie: okay]. Which is a cross-wiring of perception. So, for me, when I hear sound, particularly pitched sound, I see shapes and colours. It’s not an imagined thing, it’s automatic, it just happens. So, for me, sound and image has always been very intricately connected. And at times that I’ve been really unwell, I can’t tell the difference between music and image – sound and image, it all becomes the one thing. So it occurred to me, why don’t I utilise this? Why don’t I make use of it? So, very early on, in my mid twenties, I often painted scores. So I drew and painted scores because I kind of reverse engineered – what happens is if I hear a sound, I’ll get shapes and images, but because I’m so used to knowing, for example, the shapes and colours that, say a certain combination of strings will elicit, I reverse engineer that; I can paint that kind of imagery and then later on go back and turn it into dots on a page for other musicians to read. So it sort of evolved that way. And nowadays if I’m looking at someone’s face and I turn my head sideways and look at the lines of their face, I can hear the sound. So I just simply put that onto a music stave. It’s quite simple, really.

Charlie: It’s really interesting. You said… I’m going to probably struggle to pronounce it – ‘synesthea’?

Matt: Synaesthesia.

Charlie: Synaesthesia. Okay. Because, yeah, I’ve read it loads of times, but I’ve never heard it, and YouTube pronunciations aren’t always correct, I know. But yes, when I was reading your book – and I like to do my research on people, if I haven’t already talked to them, I like to do research afterwards – so I was looking at your book and thinking, there’s something here about that. So it’s interesting that it comes across in your book as well. But that’s really interesting to know, and it’s great, obviously, that you can take something that’s maybe seen as a neutral, I suppose, and really turn it into something amazingly positive and wonderful. So I’m aware that listeners might be going, ‘oh’, you know, ‘you’re not talking about the story of the book’, so I will draw us more into this. So you’ve got the art in the book, you’ve got different styles, you’ve got what seems to me, looking at the book as a kind of 2D and not the original, but it seems to be different mediums. You’ve got sketches, you’ve got full-colour artworks. I suppose I want to ask about your art, about your decisions that you made for this book and decisions that I suppose they probably go across all of your work – the artistic process of this book in particular, if that makes sense?

Matt: Yeah. So you’re talking just about the paintings?

Charlie: Yes.

Matt: Yeah. Well, it starts in a, as you say, a sketchy, drawn sepia style. And that’s because the book is a metaphor for a journey into a psychotic episode, basically. So the boy is born with this seed deep within him. I should explain that there’s a lot of discussion these days about complex mental illness and even biochemical illness, like schizophrenia and bipolar. Do they come originally from trauma in childhood or are they genetic? The jury is still out, but it seems to be there is a genetic component, but it is triggered by trauma in childhood and switched on. The genes are switched on, basically. I didn’t want to stray into the territory of childhood trauma at all because I wanted to leave that question hanging, basically. But I did want to reference the genetic component because I’ve had a friend who was profoundly schizophrenic and other friends who are bipolar, who had really lovely childhoods, really loving families and parents. So I think it was important that it made that reference. So the book begins with this seed growing inside the boy, which, as he grows older, turns into a tree that’s growing inside him, whose flower is ecstasy, but whose fruit is unbearable sadness. All through his childhood – the beginning section of the book – it’s all in sepia or graphite, black and white, because when the tree finally is too strong for him and the medicine stops working and the tree grows, as, you know, it comes out of him, it grows out of his body and encases him, but his mind is then free. That’s the metaphorical point at which he is moving into psychosis, because his mind is leaving reality, it’s leaving his body and it’s travelling to this fantastical place. At that point, the works start becoming colourful, and that’s simply because I wanted people to really feel how powerful that experience of mania and psychosis is – the world is its normal black and white sepia space until this zone of unreality happens, and then it becomes really colourful and it also starts to distort. So there’s a little bit of abstraction that happens the further we go into this episode.

Charlie: Obviously, I can see the replications of the work in your book, I mean, are we talking big paintings? Have you got things that could go in an exhibition in real life and things like that?

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve just recently exhibited the works. Not all of them, there were about half a dozen works that simply wouldn’t fit. But it took up something like 45 metres of wall space, so it’s big. Some of them were begun, particularly the earlier works, were begun digitally, and then I printed those out onto cotton rag paper and drew over the top of them. Some works were painted oil on canvas to a point. Then I photographed them, very high-res photographs, and then finished them off digitally on a graphics tablet. And others are just straight oil paintings. So it’s a variety of mixed media works, basically. The smallest is probably, I don’t know, maybe ten centimetres by ten centimetres, and the largest is almost two metres wide. So they vary.

Charlie: Wow. Yeah. I mean, I can see some of them being smaller, but that’s quite a difference in size and, yeah, fascinating. I mean, I love them anyway, so finding out more about them is lovely. And listeners, I will link the film trailer on YouTube for you so you can get an idea of these images as well. I want to ask specifically in this, you’ve got the opening pages, and something that really struck me was actually… I think it’s the first image – the pregnant woman, the mother, she’s kind of under the water somewhat. It looks like she’s trying to breathe the air. And I want to ask you more about the metaphor of this and where this is from.

Matt: Of her being suspended in water?

Charlie: [Agrees.]

Matt: It’s just this idea. The first thing is that I just find images of people suspended in water quite beautiful. And this is where it becomes metaphorically important as well, because it’s where there’s no gravity. All of the normal things that anchor us to the planet are not happening. But also it’s this idea that we come from our mother’s water. We are born of water, if you like. We can’t exist without water. But I also wanted to give a sense of this woman as being in a space of complete and utter freedom, if you like. Her head’s sort of touching the surface, so she’s breathing, but she doesn’t look like she’s struggling. Her body language is one of surrender. So altogether it’s creating this idea of her being completely connected to this pregnancy, to this child, to her being; there’s no sense of struggle. I wanted to start the work with a sense of love, of complete – how can I say it? – of complete surrender to something that’s really beautiful. I tried to make that image as beautiful as possible with the light rays and just this gorgeous woman’s body suspended in water. So it really is a kind of felt thing. It was important to me, the idea of water. There’s a much bigger story behind that as well, because I’ve become really interested in the idea of blood family and water family because, you know the origins of that expression, that blood family actually originally comes from, is a male thing, and it’s about men who are bonded to their brothers through blood. Water is actually the biological family. We’ve kind of switched it around. But originally the expression meant ‘water family’ meant your biological family. So I was just playing with all of those sorts of ideas.

Charlie: Yeah, no, you say about the phrase, I think there’s some people trying to change it back to the original. I see some people saying ‘no! It’s wrong! We’ve got to talk about it the other way.’ Me asking about the water and then you expanding on it has made me think, actually, that one of the things that I found most compelling about your artwork was your illustration of water. I mean, I’m interested in that, anyway – I like a good Monet, and things, you know, I like the water in the artwork – but, yeah, your water is something else, and you’ve got it in different styles and everything. One of my favourite pictures in your book is of the elephants, the double page spread going through the river and the greenery. And I was noticing all the dot work you’ve got there in the marshes, I suppose, of the grass, and, yeah, it was really lovely. So that’s interesting to hear more about the water and your use of water.

Matt: Yeah. Thank you. Well, that image… I was actually born in Papua New Guinea. There are no elephants there, of course, but we had these beautiful marshlands and they were places that I felt at such deep peace, where you’ve got that crystal clear water where you can see the sand on the bottom and there are water lilies around the edges of the watercourse. And the elephants, they’re so slow moving, and I find them incredibly graceful animals, and when they’re in water, they are incredibly graceful. And again, it’s like the mother at the beginning of the story – gravity is sort of slightly suspended in water, so everything becomes a lot freer, a lot… fluid. Well, fluid’s the word, I suppose [chuckles].

Charlie: Yeah.

Matt: So, yeah, I wanted, in that particular painting, just to get a sense of stillness, of beautiful sunlight, a sense of serenity.

Charlie: I love so many of the paintings in your book. I mean, you’ve got one of the sovereign’s throne room, effectively her court, and again, so much detail, phroar, that took my breath away. But talking about the elephants, and they are elephants in their own right, they aren’t a metaphor so much in terms of the boy in the book; I wanted to ask you about the animals in terms of the metaphor where they come into the boy’s story, how you’ve worked this into it, how this is a metaphor, I suppose, more about the allegory here in terms of the animals and the changes and things like that throughout the book. Does that make sense?

Matt: Yeah. It does, yeah. Thanks. That’s a great question. I’ll start with the elephants. And you notice there’s a rhinoceros in the throne room as well? [Charlie ‘umms’.] If you look really closely at those animals, the elephants are not actually elephants. They’re not mastodons. They’re not mammoths. They’re something in between. If you look at the rhinoceros, its horn arrangement is around the wrong way. So it’s very subtle. And you first look at them and go, ‘oh, they’re elephants’. Well, that’s rhinoceros. But there’s something not quite right about them. And it’s this otherworldness. Everything is kind of as it should be, but it really isn’t, you know, it’s not right. The boy – first of all, when he leaves his body, when the tree encases him, he becomes a lizard and sprouts wings and flies. And then he becomes a cow. And what’s interesting there, very few people have picked up on the fact he becomes a cow, he has an udder. So I’m not commenting on gender fluidity here – that’s not the point. The point is fluidity of reality. Everything, nothing, that is real kind of matters because there is no reality, everything can change. Then he turns into a bird. So if you like, he’s kind of also, going through an evolutionary process, from origins of life on earth, reptilian through to mammalian, through to birds, which are a connection with origins. But they also have brain arrangements that are not original reptilian. So there’s a reference to the evolution of life, if you like, in that simple sequence of changes. There was also a practical reason as well – later on in the story, when the boy comes to what he perceives as the edge of the world, and he goes beyond the edge, if he was anything other than a bird, how was he going to do this practically? [Laughs.] You know? [Charlie: Yeah, okay.] So thinking about that part of the story, well, he has to morph into a bird. So right back at being in this story, I thought, ‘okay, I’m going to establish the main creature that he morphs into as a bird’. So there was a bit of practical narrative thinking that went into my decisions about what animal to make the boy. But also, when he meets the sovereign, and speaks to the sovereign, it’s of no matter to her that she’s speaking to a bird. Again, this is the distance from reality that this place exists in, that she can speak to a bird, and that’s completely kind of normal, if you like.

Charlie: I would like to ask where you started in illustration, where you started in music, where you started in writing. If that’s doable in a question?

Matt: [Laughs.] Okay, the short answer… well, let me preface it by saying that I don’t have qualifications in anything.

Charlie: Uh huh.

Matt: And that’s because of my history of bipolar illness. I failed high school. It’s interesting – I say I struggle with drawing, but the only subject I really passed – I did pass English, but marginally by two marks or something, I failed everything else – the only subject I passed was Visual Arts. And I had to have an affidavit from my parents to say that it was my work because they thought I’d got someone else to do it.

Charlie: Gosh. Okay!

Matt: Because obviously the standard was very high. But like I said, I always struggle with drawing. It is something that I work very hard at. After failing high school, the very first job I ever did was as a jackaroo on cattle stations. And that was basically following in family footsteps, that all of the men in my family had been men of the land. They’d worked as cattlemen, as horsemen, etcetera. So feeling like the failure that I felt I was as a teenager, I really wanted to win the approval of my family because I was always a square peg in a round hole in my family anyway, because I was such a weird little kid. But I wasn’t really very good at being a jackeroo. In fact, I was hopeless! So I abandoned that after some time, and I went back to Sydney, where my brothers and I had lived with my mother, and I studied at a place called the Julian Ashton School of Art; I showed them a folio of drawings and they let me in. And I didn’t make it past the first year there. During that time, I also started practising the classical guitar. I was self taught; I took myself to a place called the Sydney School of Guitar – it’s now called the Australian Academy of Music – and I played for them and they enrolled me in that course. And my teachers there wanted to groom me as a concert classical guitarist because I showed a lot of promise. So this is all in my very early twenties. About that time, I also got really interested in writing music and I started studying privately with an Australian composer called Ann Carr-Boyd. So I was practising the guitar for several hours a day, I was drawing, I was writing, and I was composing music, which all of course fed into a gradual increasing episode of mania, and I had a massive burnout crash. And it took me years then to really come back from that. But I guess I would call myself an autodidact; I am really self taught. I have studied with some wonderful people privately, but it’s been a very unorthodox education. So it took me a very long time because I am very much self taught. So I taught myself, before ever we had YouTube, through books on orchestration, on how to compose. I worked with a couple of really wonderful composers and writers and I did the odd lesson with some wonderful painters. So bit by bit by bit, I taught myself.

Charlie: You said about the classical guitar – I want to know what other instruments you play. I’m guessing piano…?

Matt: Yeah, I play piano, not very well! Again, I’m self taught on that. I use that as a tool for composing. I did a little sort of online performance just a few weeks ago for the Literature Centre in Australia as a promo for the next upcoming Sound Of Picture Books series, in which they handed me images and I had to improvise music to those images. So I can and do, do little bits of performance. I used to perform on the classical guitar a lot when I was young because that was going to be my career. At one point I used to play the oud, which is an Arabic lute, basically. But I was taught by an Australian composer – he’s actually British, originally – a guy called Andrew Ford. He’s a well known Australian composer and musicologist. He taught me very painstakingly how to write music, basically straight from my head onto the manuscript paper.

Charlie: Yeah.

Matt: And I find that that is the best way to compose – a musical instrument can get in the way because it can define how you should write. Like he pointed out to me, if you listen really carefully to the great composers who were fabulous pianists, you can hear the block -like structure, piano structure, in their orchestral music. Someone like Beethoven steps outside of that. Sometimes his orchestral music sounds a little lumpy when you reduce it to piano music. Someone like Hector Berlioz, he basically wrote straight from his mind onto paper. And I think there’s a freedom in that. But I have synaesthesia, so I can sometimes basically tell when I hear things, that particular pitch or the key it’s in or whatever. But when I’m writing music, I will then use an instrument to test out my ideas. So I don’t find my ideas on an instrument and then write them down, I write them down and then test them out. So yeah, I’ve just started re-practising the guitar; I’m working with a baroque recorder player in Australia, we’re going to be doing some sort of mediaeval baroque, classical pieces, to perform. So I’m sort of starting to get back into that.

Charlie: Wonderful. Will that be online at all for people to checkout, do you think, at some point? Or are you still in the very, very early stages?

Matt: Very early stages, but we are intending on recording, so, yeah, at some stage.

Charlie: Okay. Listeners, keep an ear out, I’m going to say, in this respect. No, that’s interesting. And, yeah, when you’re like, writing on piano or something – yeah, if you’re thinking of, ‘oh, this is going to be for the violin’, it’s obviously going to sound different. So, yeah, I get what you’re meaning there. So I want to ask then about influences or inspirations or that kind of thing for, like, art… I think I’ve heard you say you quite like Vermeer; and also for music and writing as well, I think.

Matt: Yeah, well, starting with painting, yeah, Vermeer is a huge influence. I love the work of Jackson Pollock. I don’t know if you know the work of Shaun Tan, Australian artist, illustrator?

Charlie: The graphic novels…?

Matt: Yeah.

Charlie: Yes, yes.

Matt: Yeah, so, oh, huge number of influences. I mean, obviously, you talk to any writer, any artist, any musician, you could talk for hours about the people that inspired them. With music, huge fan of Beethoven’s writing, because I think he just sits right outside of his time period. As do some of the writings of Mozart. It wasn’t until I started playing Mozart on the piano myself that I realised that some of what he writes you could actually call jazz. He sort of does these weird, out of key things that you just can’t spot. It’s incredibly sophisticated writing. Gy&omul;rgy Ligeti, the Romanian composer. There’s a composer called Brett Dean in Australia, Elena Kats-Chernin, who’s an Australian composer. Absolutely love their work. Deep Purple, I love [chuckles]. When I was a teenager, I used to love listening to their stuff, or Jethro Tull. I mean, there’s right across the spectrum from sort of classical music, contemporary art music, contemporary pop music. I have a huge amount of musical influences. Literature… Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, Australian writer Rodney Hall, who’s a currently living writer, Markus Zusak – love his writing. Lots of influences. I was always a massive fan of Doctor Seuss. I really don’t like a lot of rhyming children’s literature because some of it is so forced, but his rhyming is almost like free jazz. There is a structure there, but there’s also an incredible amount of freedom in it. It’s very tight, it is very constructive, but you don’t get a sense of that – it just flows, it happens. So, yeah, I’m always looking for new and interesting writers, poets, music. Love being in Prague, where we are right at the moment, just because of the architecture, it’s absolutely extraordinary.

Charlie: I want to delve more into this music – in terms of the music, we’ve been going around it and we’ve been going here, there and everywhere, but I would like to know more about the actual process, I suppose, of the recording and working with other people. Because you see it on the film trailer and you’ve got, I think there’s a couple of YouTube videos on it, and obviously you don’t get to think about this so much when you’re doing literature – I can’t say I’ve had a time where I’m talking to someone, before you, who’s done an entire orchestration of their work and composed for it. So I’d love to know about how this all went, about the recording itself, putting it all together.

Matt: Okay, maybe I should just start with the origins of the music itself. Sometimes when I’ve had really severe episodes, it’s only happened three or four times, but I’ve lost the ability to understand spoken language. So what comes out of people’s mouths is just gobbledygook. But during those periods, for some reason, I can hear music in my head in absolute crystal clarity. It was during one of those times I just stayed in my room and I wrote what is the first five minutes of The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness. It wasn’t written for this project. It was long before I’d written that diary entry in the recovery journal. So I just called it the Fremantle Symphony, because I was living in Fremantle at that time, and so I started writing what I thought was going to be something other. And I just literally wrote what I was hearing in my head, which happened to be for a 97-piece orchestra, which is a very big orchestra. There’s a lot of darker sounds in there. So we’ve got contra bassoon and bass clarinet and a bass flute. I deliberately chose instruments that have a darker sound to them. Then years later, when the editor looked at the text and said, ‘oh, this would make an interesting picture book for adults and young adults’, I knew immediately that it also had to be a musical work, and I’ll get to the reasons why. So I was looking through lots of sketches I’d done for other things and I came across that sketch, all handwritten, of that first five minutes, and thought, ‘oh, actually, this would make an overture to a larger symphonic work that I could use in this work,’ because it had a lot of different themes in it. So that became the first five minutes of The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness, and I expanded on that. Now, when I hear those first five minutes as a composer, I think I would maybe change something, but I wanted it to reflect my unwell mind at the time. So I thought, well, this is what was coming out at the time, so this is how it has to stay. So for the rest of the music, I just simply expanded on that. There is about 10% of the entire score – it’s a 50 minutes score – so 10% of it was a collaboration with a friend of mine, a keyboard player, piano player, who has been working in The Sound Of Picture Books, playing the keyboard parts for the past ten years. I invited him; he was really chomping at the bit to try his hand at composition. And he’s a great musician, so I said, ‘well, do you want to contribute?’ And I felt that was a great idea because the entire thing is my voice, and he knew me so well, I thought it’d be nice to have the voice of an outsider commenting. So his parts of the music occur just before and during the time that the boy meets the sovereign. So it’s only about 10% of the entire score. And what I’m really pleased at is no one’s been able to pick where his bits are and where my bits are. He supplied me with these short piano fragments, I orchestrated them and just dropped them into the score, basically. So I wrote the entire score. It took two years. We had a philanthropist in Australia, an extraordinary man called Sam Silipo, who set up an entity called GALT, Gabby Arts Legacy Trust, in memory of his 22-year-old daughter who passed away from severe mental illness. He wanted to support a project that would reach out to young people and inspire conversation about complex mental illness. So he came on board and he supported us. So he had an amount of money with which we could use to record but we couldn’t find an Australian orchestra, despite the fact that I’d worked with the West Australian Orchestra and they really wanted to do the project, so they reduced their costs all over the place, they were still a tad too expensive. Australia is a very expensive country in all aspects of life, I’m afraid. So Tina, my partner, just started looking around the world and she came across an amazing man called Mikel Toms, and his organisation, which is called First Creative, that work with some of the best Czech orchestras. So we reached out to them and to the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno, and so together, with Mikel conducting the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno, they all came together, and we worked with them and we could afford it, and we’ve got, I think, some of the world’s best musicians. So it was just a confluence of events that have turned out so well. So we flew to Austria, spent a couple of days acclimatising because with bipolar, sleep deprivation is a huge trigger for mania. So we needed a few days to settle down. Then we caught the train into the Czech Republic and we had two really intense days working with the orchestra and choir, during which we made the whole recording.

Charlie: It sounds wonderful and it was lovely to see. And that’s interesting, you said, is it – your fellow composer – Alf?

Matt: Yeah.

Charlie: Yes. Yeah; it’s interesting, you say, about the part of the sovereign, because there is a slight change there, and I suppose I had put that down – which I suppose isn’t wrong – but I’d put it down to the change in the atmosphere of the book. But I suppose there’s a bit more going on there, definitely, with what you said. But I also want to ask about the choir because, certainly, I think it’s fair to say that one of, or the most compelling part of this musical score, is the part of the lantern tree. And it’s just… it is exquisite. And you’ve got this amazing tenor and the choir is fantastic. Did you always want to have a choir? Was that something you always wanted to have, when you started on this project and the musical part? Yeah. And tell us about having a choir involved.

Matt: Yeah, I, love choral music. I’d always wanted to write for choir and I’d written a couple of pieces in the past – a piece a couple of years ago that was performed a few times in Australia. But I actually had a dream in which I was in a natural setting and there was this sound coming out of the trees and it was exquisite. So I’d always wanted to somehow reproduce that. And of course, you never can; things in dreams are always so much more heightened than in reality; but I worked very hard to try and get something of that sense, that ambience. And I just love the idea of a tree whose flowers sing. The text is for a thousand voices, now, obviously that’s logistically nigh impossible to do… well, it wouldn’t be, it’s just it would be extremely expensive to make a recording of a choir of a thousand. I mean, it has been done, I have seen Mahler’s 8th Symphony with 860-odd singers.

Charlie: Gosh, yeah [chuckles].

Matt: And my dream one day would be to have an orchestra and a choir of 1000 to do this. But that choir, the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno had just won an award ranking them as the top choir in Europe. So we knew we were going to have world’s best to work with. And they were extraordinary. We went into a first rehearsal, because we went into rehearsal separately before the orchestra and choir came together, we just went in and saw, watched a rehearsal with them, and the choir master turned and asked if I had any comments. And I was speechless, there was nothing I could say, they did such an extraordinary job. Because the thing about a choir is you’re trying to get a really uniform sound, almost as if the entire thing comes from one voice just multiplied and multiplied and multiplied. And that way you can get, even with a relatively small number of voices, you can get a very big sound. And 40 voices is a big sound anyway. But, yeah, I just love the human voice and the human voice en-mass like that. To me, it’s a metaphor for just how profoundly we can work together and we can achieve extraordinary things, you know, a choir singing. Well, like an orchestra playing together, it’s representative of the absolute best in humanity, I think. Every time I see the images, those images of the choir singing that’s in the film, I just fall in love with them. I just feel such a sense of love for all of those people.

[Recorded later] Charlie: With the very kind permission of Matt, here is an extract of music from the section we have been discussing.

[Music understandably not transcribed! It includes narration from Tina Wilson, the tenor and choir, and the orchestra.]

Charlie: Yeah, it’s an incredibly… I mean, yeah, you’ve set it up in a way that is incredibly moving, but also just the choir themselves are incredibly moving, it’s a wonderful part there. And, yeah, I mean, I totally see why you say to people in the back of the book, you say, you’ve read this, reread it with the music as well. So I’m gonna have to ask, I think, more about your wife, the narrator. I suppose I want to ask how this all came together in terms of your wife being included in the music, where and how you decide to insert the audio of the text into the music. Because it’s interesting – it’s not your regular audiobook, by any means, where you’ve got someone just speaking or even with things that I’ve heard before, where you’ve got music in the background and people talking, you’ve got specific spaces where you’ve got a sentence here, you’ve got a sentence there, you’ve got a paragraph there. If you don’t mind, if you can expand on this, on setting the words to the music itself?

Matt: Yeah. Well, first, a little bit about Tina. She’s an extraordinary visual artist and a writer in her own right. She’s an incredibly talented person. In fact, Tina, she set up a major visual arts award in Australia and as a result, has been awarded a Medal of Australia, which is one of the highest accolades you can get in Australia. So she’s an amazing artist in her own right. We discovered very early on with The Sound Of Picture Books, that she has this talent for voice-over. And there was a happy accident there – we actually wrote to Cate Blanchett’s agent because we thought her voice would be perfect for this work. But I don’t think it ever got to Cate, I think her agent just basically knocked us back, which was such a fortuitous thing because much and all as I would love to work with Cate Blanchett, I think Tina’s voice is perfect for this work. I wanted to set the words – because I do this as all of the Sound Of Picture Books works – as part of the orchestration. It’s not something that’s separate, that’s laid over the top – it’s intrinsic to the overall sound, which is why sometimes you need to lean in to actually get clearly what’s being said, because her voice is another instrument in the orchestra. And I very consciously did and do that to make it an intrinsic… I learned that I got that idea from the song cycles of Richard Strauss – I don’t know if you have ever heard his four last songs? They’re the most gorgeous love songs, basically. And you realise that the sopranos voice, it’s not a song set over the top of music; it’s an intrinsic part of it, it’s part of the orchestration in a way that you hear very few composers do. They gave me the idea that the narration should work that way, which is why it’s spaced and paced the way it is and why the dynamics work the way they do in the voice.

Charlie: Okay, that’s very interesting to hear because, yes, there were times where I was listening to the music and I had to turn it up. Yeah, it didn’t actually occur to me. I think maybe I was thinking, ‘oh, I just didn’t hear it correctly’, or something, or I was so taken by the music, I wasn’t ready for the text. I realise we’ve spoken about this, and it’s been absolutely fascinating to speak about everything so far, but we haven’t actually touched on the writing as well. So I’m going to need to ask you about that. I suppose, where you started in terms of that and any inspirations or thoughts that you came to along the way. Just the process in general, I suppose, of the text itself.

Matt: Yeah. Okay. Well, two things I should say is I’m known mostly as an illustrator, which is interesting for me because the two art forms that come easily, much more easily to me, are writing and composing music.

Charlie: Gosh! Okay.

Matt: I struggle. Drawing is something that I really struggle with, and I work very hard at. Music tends to come a lot more easily. And I don’t know why, but I love poetic turns of phrase in wordplay, and that tends to come a lot more easily than drawing. But the text for this book began as part of a recovery journal. I had a particularly severe episode in the early 2000s, and I was very unwell for a very long time. It took me maybe half a year to recover. And as part of that recovery, I kept a journal. And the text to this book was actually a poem I wrote as part of that recovery. And that was the episode in which I felt I had something growing in me. So the first thing that came to me was the title. And much, much later, I was in a discussion with an editor, an editor that I’d worked with for years and years and years who had become a friend. And we were talking about things, and I talked about this recovery journal, and she very cheekily asked if she could see some of the poetry that I’d written during that process. And she saw that one and said, ‘you know, this would make a picture book for adults and young adults’. And really, that was the birth of this book. I hadn’t intended on ever publishing that because it was very private – it was part of a diary. I started working with her on the text and it went through many different iterations and basically cycled back to the original. It pretty much is what I originally wrote.

Charlie: Sometimes it takes someone else coming in to help us see things differently, I suppose, and see a lot of worth in there that we might not have even realised ourselves.

Matt: Yeah.

Charlie: There is something I noted down because I want to ask you about it – you’ve said a few things that make me feel that this is a question to ask. Did you have support in your childhood from your family for your illnesses?

Matt: Uh, no. No is the short answer. No, no, it was always a very, very solitary journey. My mother was wonderful, she was very supportive. But we lived in fairly unusual circumstances in that… I don’t know if you know much of the history – I suspect not, because why would you in this part of the world – but the history of Papua New Guinea. The first Australians to walk into the central highlands occurred in the 1930s. It was made a mandated territory of Australia by the United Nations to bring towards independence, which happened in 1975. But those central highlands were closed territory until… not sure when, but it was much, much later, ’40s or ’50s, some time, because a lot of the Australians going in there were being killed, basically. My father went in there as a teenager in the 1950s, basically looking for adventure. My mother went in – she was one of the first Australian women into cannibal country in part of the Highlands. She was first married to a patrol officer when she was 18; he was 19. She fell in love with the country and stayed there, but it was a difficult place. My father left us – she then met my father up there, but he eventually left us – so she was bringing up three boys on her own in the central highlands of New Guinea. And then as independence approached and the country was becoming very volatile and not very safe for Australians, she took us and came to Australia and that was a massive adjustment for all of us. And my mum was basically, I think, struggling to maintain equilibrium herself. She really struggled. So I have nothing but love and respect for my mother. Having said that, she wasn’t really aware of what was going on for me and she didn’t really want to have much to do with it. She basically – when I was 13 and I was just going right off the rails, I was taken to a child psychiatrist – so she kind of had to confront the issue, but she never wanted to talk about it and she instructed my brothers never to talk about it. So all through my teenage years, when I felt episodes coming on, I basically locked myself in my room and just rode them out. And, of course, that led to suicide attempts and, you know, it was… But then it kind of gets complicated because I was also sexually abused by a psychiatrist as a teenager. So I had a huge fear of the medical fraternity, which is why I was a loose cannon, really, right up into my forties. And it was at that time I became so unwell, I was sectioned. I was basically taken off the street and put in a psych ward. And that’s when I started to receive proper treatment. But, yeah, no, I had very, very little support. But, you know, my story’s not uncommon.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I’m sorry to hear that. Yeah, about the psychiatrist as well. Is your relationship with your siblings, is it okay now, is it better?

Matt: With one of them it is. I’m pretty much estranged from the rest of the family and, look, that’s really okay. It’s okay. I have my blood family now, as against my water family, and I’m rebuilding a relationship with one of my brothers. Both my parents have passed away. But, yeah, I feel… this is going to sound very strange, but I do feel blessed. I do feel that, in one sense, all of that life history was a gift to me because it has made me, at least I hope it’s made me, more empathetic and more attuned to other people’s pain. And it’s also made me realise that cultural strictures can be so utterly damaging, that ideological difference is one of the most destructive forces in the world, and that gentleness is really the only answer.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I get you. Yeah. I’m going to go to a very different subject, but what are you working on now?

Matt: Well, what am I working on now? We’ve just been talking about ideological difference. I’m working on a new choral symphony, which is basically about the history of warfare and how religion has been implicated in warfare.

Charlie: Wow. Okay.

Matt: It’s not militaristic, it’s not sort of thumping drums, and it’s nothing like that. It’s a lot of it’s very contemplative; it’s a choral symphony. It’s an orchestra that’s roughly the same size, but I may actually scale it down so that it’s a bit more playable. So, yeah, I’m working on that. That’s going to be about an hour long, and possibly that’ll be an exhibition of paintings as well. I’m also 50, almost 60,000 words into a novel for adults. And I have now four picture books that I’ve begun work on for new picture books. And I’m building up this repertoire of early music for performance as well. So I’ve got quite a lot on.

Charlie: Yeah, well, I would love to ask you about everything, but I will stick to my podcast subject and ask you, can you tell us more about this novel?

Matt: The novel? Well, again, it centres around a character who has bipolar disorder – this is obviously a subject that I feel compelled to write about because it’s been such a huge part of my own life. But more interestingly, it’s an exploration of the no man’s land that exists between what is regarded as sanity and what’s regarded as insanity, both in the individual and collectively. So, for example, part of it is set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. It’s about a young Australian who finds himself with a warlord in the border country between Thailand and Cambodia in 1980. So it’s after the Cambodian civil war, but when that part of the country was still embroiled in conflict, basically. And it’s so interesting, the idea that in an individual, everything that was expressed collectively by the Khmer Rouge and by the followers of the Khmer Rouge, everything that they did, if that was expressed within an individual, we’d call it psychotic behaviour. I reference also Rwanda in that. When neighbours – the genocide in Rwanda – who had been friends for years, suddenly turned on each other with machetes. Why is that not called psychosis on a collective scale? Why is it dressed up in the language of politics and not simply called madness? I’m really interested in that. I read a book by [philosopher] Arthur Koestler who talked about years and years ago, about each one of us having two minds, two personalities. One is the individual personality, the other is the person that gets switched on when we are in the collective. He called it the en-masse mind as against the individual mind. So it’s an exploration of that, basically.

Charlie: Well, we’ll look out for that, then. It sounds like you are very deep in the process. So it sounds like it could be next year. It could be in a couple of years.

Matt: I’m hoping it’ll be next year.

Charlie: Okay. All right. Okay. Brilliant.

Matt: Intending on completing it this year, if I can.

Charlie: In which case I would also ask, have you got a working title for it?

Matt: Grace. Because there’s a story running through it. This main character, he’s reflecting. He’s an older man reflecting on his youth because obviously 1980 was a long while ago and he’s looking after an injured pigeon, whom he calls Grace. So, yeah, the story revolves around his tender, caring, and love for this bird, which is, as you know, people often call them flying rats in cities because they’re everywhere, they’re ubiquitous, and they can be a bit of a pest. But he has got to know this one particular bird and discovered that it’s the most beautiful thing. And so it’s these two stories running together. One is the story of this pigeon and the other is his recounting of these horrific days in Cambodia.

Charlie: That sounds like two strands of a story that are definitely going to go well, yes. And yeah, you said about asking the question of, like, saying that things are madness – I think we’re definitely in a place – in the world, I suppose, nowadays – that, yeah, you can absolutely ask that question and explore it, and people will get it. So that’s going to be very, very interesting. Matt, it has been amazing having you here today, and there’s been so much to talk about with you; I knew from when I was first kind of booking to talk with you that we would have to cover so much, but it has been amazing. Thank you very much for being here.

Matt: Thank you, Charlie. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I love the way you’ve couched your questions, it’s just been fluid. It’s wonderful. Thank you.

[Recorded later] Charlie: And thank you for listening. Do join me next time, and please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! The Worm Hole Podcast episode 104, was recorded on the 16th April and published on the 26th August 2024. Introductory music and production by Charlie Place. The extract from The Tree Of Ecstasy And Unbearable Sadness is by Matt Ottley, performed by Tina Wilson, the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Czech Philharmonic Choir of Brno.

Photo credit: Tina Wilson

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