"I invite you to join me in a voyage into the past, to that territory of the heart we call childhood."

Bruce Mason's one-man play The End of the Golden Weather is the story of a 1930's summer spent by the sea, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. It is one of the most popular and enduring works of New Zealand theatre, conveying as it does something of the nostalgia shared by most New Zealanders for childhood holidays spent at the beach. Bruce Mason performed the work nearly 1000 times over two decades from 1959, in towns and cities throughout the country, but it was not until 2000 that the play was professionally revived in a performance by Peter Vere-Jones.

Gareth Farr composed incidental music for the production, and later expanded this material into a four-movement suite for clarinet and strings with harp and percussion. The title, Te Parenga, is Mason's name for the fictionalised Auckland beachfront suburb of Takapuna where the play is set.