Below is an index containing both questions and references to names of individuals and Opera companies which appeared in the interview. Click on the link to be taken to the relevant part of the interview.

No, totally unmusical. My mum had dancing lessons when she was a child and apparently was very good, in fact had the opportunity to join a professional troupe travelling to London when she was eighteen but her mother refused to allow her to go with all these immoral theatrical folks, so my mother, and it explains a lot about my personality I think, said 'well damn it I'm never going to dance again' and she never did. That was it mate, hung up the shoes, finished, but she was apparently very talented.
My Dad used to sing little Scottish songs when we were children so I don't know, that's not really musical is it? No real theatrical background or musical background at all, certainly nothing classical.

Were you musical as a child then, I know you play piano well?

Oh no I don't! My God! I wish, I wish (much laughter) I think I actually play piano just to give my students practice in dealing with difficult situations musically. If they can cope with my non playing of the correct chords they'll never be thrown by anybody ever!
My Godmother used to swear at the age of eighteen months I sat on the counter of their little corner shop and sang to her customers. Now I obviously don't remember that but she used to swear on a stack of Bibles it was true, and when I was at Kindergarten I do remember that the day of the fete, my mum being a committee member she was always busy with those things, it had been planned that we would to do Christopher Robin. All the other kids in the Kinder were in their pyjamas, and I was too. They were forming this tableau, of kids kneeling down saying their prayers and I was to stand in the corner of the stage and sing the song. When the great day arrived I flatly refused to open my mouth, would not do it. Now it's never happened since, never been known since, but on that day I actually showed Temperament. I can remember sitting at the back of the ice cream stall and my mother wouldn't give me an ice cream, she was so mad with me. Not that she was ever a theatre mother but on that particular day she was cross!

What did you parents do?

My Mum was the youngest of an English family, but she didn't discover until she was in her forties that she was adopted, which explained a great deal. She was a lot younger then the rest of the kids in the family and was taken out of school at the age of eleven and sent cleaning people's houses. She was also required to clean their own house and she was pretty much treated as the servant of the family. When she was old enough to be accepted she went up to ICI in Deer Park and worked in the zip fastener factory up there which is where she met my Dad. Dad was a Scotsman who'd come here in 1927 after the general strike in the UK. He landed here just a matter of a couple of weeks before he turned seventeen. He always used to say he had two and six in his pocket and what he was wearing on his back, nothing else. Of course at that stage this country was going into recession and depression and he ended up going out into the bush just working for meals and killing rabbits or whatever else just to eat. After a couple of years, he caught the first train to arrive at the station and ended up in Melbourne.
He'd gone down the coal mines in Scotland when he was twelve, digging with the rest of the family and he ended up at ICI at Deer Park, shoveling coal into the boilers…so he moved a long way, shoveling coal underground to shoveling coal over ground! He was chief boiler man, and that's where he and my Mum met.
When I was a kid, he and my uncle got together and built an ice plant in Ballarat Road where they actually made ice and delivered it to customers all around the place. In winter they had a wood yard going so they had the two things happening. As that started to go out of favor Dad moved into his own little business, once again a wood yard, but they used to sell chook food and garden stuff and so on as well. Mum used to run the shop and Dad used to do the deliveries. It was a really hard life for both of them, heavy duty laboring sort of work but they both had the get up and go the initiative to decide, yes, they were going to take the chance and it was an opportunity to work for themselves. Which was pretty remarkable really.

Especially back then….

And given the kinds of lives they'd had. Dad was always disappointed he wasn't allowed to go to the war because his occupation was deemed essential to the war effort. ICI at Deer Park were making an awful lot of the explosives and the armaments etc and he always felt slightly guilty about that I think. And then to have the courage after that to decide yes he was going to go out on his own and make a life for himself and his family was pretty remarkable.

So in this environment when did you discover you had a voice?

I'd just always sang. It never occurred to me not to. I suppose the first time I was aware that I didn't sing like other people was when I went to school aged five to North Footscray Primary School. We had visiting music teachers and this teacher went around and made everyone in the class sing and divided us into two groups, the Larks and the Mud Larks. Now the Larks were all in the choir, the Mud Larks weren't…and I had to sit with the Mud Larks because I sang too loud for the rest of the kids and I couldn't be in the choir. So that was my very first disappointment you see, it sort of set the pattern! In those days schools' used to have school balls and things like that and I always sang a solo at those school functions, concerts or whatever. Not that there was ever much music happening at North Footscray Primary I have to tell you because most families were in the same financial situation we were, music just wasn't considered an option.
But it's very strange, when I was little, right up until my teens or early teens anyway, I was always quite sure I was going to be a concert pianist. Now I don't quite know how this was going to happen because we didn't have a piano, and if we'd had a piano my folks couldn't have afforded to pay for piano lessons anyway, but the ambition was there! I had musical ambition at a young age……

So how did your aspirations to be a concert pianist transfer themselves into early vocal training?

Well the voice was there so you didn't have to buy one. When I got to secondary school, Footscray Girls,' the music teacher there, Iris Plummer, had a very good choir, a really good choir, it was one of the best in Melbourne. I was the only form one in the choir and she I'm quite sure chose repertoire quite often with a view to extending me. Things like for instance, after I'd been in the choir about three years or so, she chose the Mozart Alleluia. The rest of the choir sang the straight bits and I did all the twirlies. When we got to the last page the rest of the choir sang a harmonic and I sang the top C. It never occurred to me that maybe this was strange, never occurred to me that this was anything out of the ordinary; I was just able to do it.

Is this around your mid teens?

This would have been around the age of thirteen-fourteen…..

That's quite amazing really…..

Certainly it became amazing because, around about that time when I was fourteen, a friend of mine from the local church choir, because I was also a member of that, All Saints North Footscray started singing lessons. All Saints was an interesting place. We had an extraordinary priest there who was very musical and very cultured and I think he was fairly stunned by the lack of any of that in any of our lives. He set about tying to broaden our experience which was fantastic for all of us, though we didn't realise at the time. That group of kids included Robert Fordham, who became deputy premier of Victoria, sister Jan Friedl, well known Melbourne actress and singer and the Leunig family Micheal Leunig, Margaret Leunig, Mary - Mary was my assistant Sunday school teacher - and a few other bods around the place. It's quite remarkable that out of that group of youngsters so many emerged and made careers out of things that had to do with the cultural environment. Extraordinary really given our backgrounds were all pretty similar, we all came from families which were plain ordinary working people with fathers who worked in factories or the equivalent there of. I mean the fact that my dad had a business really didn't make him very different from his friends he worked just as hard in a physical sense and so did my mother, more so then most of her peers I guess because most of them were at home all day.
Sorry I digress…one of my friends from the church started having singing lessons with a local teacher and she said why don't you come? So mum said yes alright, I could have lessons so off I went.
This teacher had done singing as a second study at university with piano as her first study and unfortunately I ended up singing as a contralto and started having laryngitis on a fairly regular basis. A visit to the ENT specialist said that there was nothing wrong with my vocal chords so the teacher concerned actually said that I would be better off working with someone more knowledgeable then her about singing and handed me onto another person at the university.
This person decided that I was a dramatic soprano! When I went to her at age sixteen I could just get to the G at the top of the stave but I had a hell of a G below the stave. The G at the top wasn't really secure, the F was but the G wasn't. This woman in the space of a term actually got me back to a B flat, and as time went by I got to a B but it was always flat and it was always like a train whistle. By the time I was seventeen-eighteen I was singing Die Freishütz arias, Pace Pace, that was another, Ritorna Vicitor, that was one of my triumphs….Voi Lo Sepete I was really good with that one; Terrific! I was doing some Mahler songs and some Respigli songs and Sibelius songs and Puccini of course. I was "singing" (if you can use the term loosely pretty heavy duty gear but I would be hoarse after a forty minute lesson but the next day my voice would be clear. I could sing full boar or not, two speeds, flat out or stop….and I could sing slow or not. Don't give me anything with runs in because there's no way I'll get around them.
I was singing at places like Dandenong and adjudicators were saying 'Oh you have the most beautiful quality dear' and how promising you are, all that stuff so I thought I was on the road to great things.
Now you also have to understand around this time I was singing with a pop group. Three boys and me. We'd met down at Angle sea on the beach and they had a group going, they lived in Box Hill, I lived in Footscray…every Sunday they used to drive over and pick me up and we'd go to whomever's house, whose turn it was to host and practice all Sunday afternoon. That mum would feed the four of us and we'd practice Sunday night and then they'd drive me home again.
We were quite successful actually and in the early sixties we were doing 'In Melbourne Tonight'. Channel two were doing variety shows so we were singing on them as well and because I was sort of a soprano, as well as singing the popular stuff, ballady things, the bluesy sort of things. We were able to choose things that I was able to put an soprano obbligato sort of thing into and do 'woo woo woo' things. Everyone thought it was wonderful, they just loved it. That all fell apart because we were offered a tour with the Tivoli, the last of the Tivoli tours and I didn't want to be away from my 'real' singing teacher for the six months I think it was that we were going to be away. It all fell in a heap, which was my fault.
Hard on the heels of this, this teacher retired and I was devastated because I thought I was going great guns with her, and compared to my early training yes I was. So I asked who I was going to work with and she said 'Well being replaced by Antonio Mosetti-Pananti, and I think you should work with him'. So I found his phone number and went over to Canterbury to have an audition and walked in singing a Respighi song 'Nebbie' very flat. The higher it went the flatter I got.
He had about six words of English and I had no Italian and he kept racing to the door and whistling up his wife and saying 'E Tesoro come se dice' and she'd say 'What he wants you to know is….' And off we'd go again. That audition lasted for two hours. I hadn't sung for two hours straight since before I'd started having singing lessons, and I walked out of that door on cloud nine, singing 'Nebbie' in tune. I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. I couldn't tell you to this day what it was that he did, I never managed to analyze it, I never managed to distill whatever it was but all of a sudden after two hours I felt I could sing for another two hours and that was the most miraculous feeling in the world.
At the start of lessons with him I'd already been asked to do Lauretta in Gianni Schichi with the Opera school at the university and he allowed me to do that.
I was doing Oh mio bambino caro, in English of course so it was Oh my beloved father, and those A flats were exceedingly flat. Alan Barker was conducting and every time we got to those A flats he just put the baton straight up in the air, moved it upwards and it never made a blind bit of difference, I was still flat. After working on it for two sessions with Antonio, surprise surprise it was in tune and I had a huge success with that. I mean my first wander onto a stage in an Opera per se, I'd done concerts but never an Opera before and I had the best time in the whole wide world and had everybody saying 'Oh, yes this little girl with this huge, big voice' and you know I thought I was made. Twelve months later I was still singing the scales and appeggios and Antonio was yelling 'piano, leggerio, piano leggerio… why you push eh your breath what it does- anything or nothing' and I was so frustrated! Then one day he said learn Ah forse lui and Sempre Libera. After I stopped laughing he said to me 'You want one lesson you learn the aria, you don't want you don't bother, you ring me when you know the aria eh'. Well, I wanted a lesson. That man was so generous to me, it started right from the word go, if he had a student ring and cancel he would ring me and say can you come and take that lesson. He never charged me for those extra lessons. Occasionally he'd have me there on a Saturday afternoon, his wife must have hated the sight of me, and we'd just do our scales and apeg' for two hours …I mean he was determined it was going to get there.
Having left school and gone to work as we all did, I was working nine to five. So he was restricted in the times that I was available to actually work on singing. Anyway off I went, learnt the aria, got the shock of my life, I could do the A flat octaves in the first section, I could do those damned appeg' things in the middle in the recit'. I could even start on the top D flat and then when I launched into the Sempre Libera I can't tell you how excited I was. I could do those repeated A flats, I could do all those runs I could do all that agility I could do the top C's I could sing an E flat at the end. I sounded like a choirboy and I didn't care. It was just a joy to sing again. And I hadn't had that kind of freedom and joy since before I started having lessons, and you know that's pretty remarkable, we're talking five years on from when I started having lessons I finally got the pleasure of singing back. It still happens to an awful lot of people I know, and I was just purely lucky, and it was luck, that at the time when needed someone who could teach me how to use the instrument, and who would stop the destructive path that I was on, he was the person who came into my life. I had no idea whether he was good or bad and given my family background and friends background none of us knew. As things proceeded I had friends, people I trusted, other singers and even my mother say to me 'are you sure this man is good, that this man knows what he's doing. You've lost that wonderful round rich quality you had'? And I just had to say, yes I know I have and I don't care because for the first time in years I can actually work on my switchboard, (because I was a telephonist / receptionist / typist / invoice Clark / filling Clark / anything you care to name really.) I can work on that from nine till five and then I can sing till midnight and the voice never gets tired. Now I don't care whether you like the sound I'm making or not, in fact I'm making that sound so easily and so freely that it can't possibly be wrong. And I'm quite sure that whatever the quality is in my voice is going to come back, but come back in a different way. So it proved to be. Gradually the quality and the tone started to happen again and I started to sound like a young woman instead of a little girl trying to be 'mature' and sounding like I was fifty three years old with a voice that had been hashed. Gradually as it settled, and as I settled and become more familiar with the technique he was giving me, I started to move into the repertoire and the voice started to bloom more and became a really usable instrument. Thank you Antonio!

How long did you study with him for?

Well I started with him in 1963 and, I mean I've never had another teacher. I went to the UK in 1970 and I worked with coaches but mainly they were people attached to the Opera companies. I did try having lessons with a couple of other teachers while I was there because I wasn't arrogant enough to think I knew it all but I found that the people I went to wanted to change the way I was singing in the first couple of lessons. Now hang on a minute, I was the only singer out there who was singing everything from the Queen of the Night through to Madam Butterfly through to Donna Anna, to Leonora in Trovatore and all shades between…and doing it all in one season. There was nobody else out there that was getting around this broad range of repertoire that I was. They all thought that my breathing was wrong, that it shouldn't move around the way it does, that I needed to keep the air channeled and 'supporting' more. Well excuse me how many people have you got in your stable who can actually sustain top E's with the ease that I can and still sing G's below middle C. And how many of them can actually sing the coloratura or the Fiora with the kind of accuracy that I can at the same decibel level and the answer was none of them.
They either had people who were light and could do the agile stuff or they had people who were heavy and produced dark tone, they didn't have anybody whose voice just sort of changed of it's own volition, depending on the repertoire that being sung at any given moment so why would you want to change that? I just didn't continue. I relied on coaches to tell me 'hey there's something you're doing with this particular note that's taking it out of line with what I'm hearing with the rest of the phrase'…or something like that and they wouldn't tell me how to fix it but if they told me it was out of line I could instantly. Sometimes it was just being told it was out and the problem just fixed itself without me thinking too much about it which I suppose sounds quite, I don't know, egotistical does it? It's not meant to be, it's not it's just …..

Being aware of it really

Yes, its just having someone point it out to you and your brain just fixes it.

Could we just double back to before you went to the UK and just talk about the amateur companies, particularly with the Victorian Opera and some of the things you did there, some of the people you may have performed with…

Well Vic' Opera was an extraordinary company. It grew out of a coup deta that was mounted, as these things are, (much laughter) with I think Hawthorn G&S, or something like that it was called which had a fantastic history anyway because people like Marie Collier and Greg Dempsey had cut their teeth on stage with that company. Hawthorn Light Opera actually had their first encounters with light opera performance as a completed entity rather than as bits of a concert with that company. Now I don't know details because I wasn't a member of it but there was a big bust up and one half of the company stay put doing the G&S and all of the light stuff and the other half of the company became the Victorian Light Opera Company now this was about the same time as I'd started with Antonio and in fact the first thing I did with them was as a result of the coup. They were doing Yeoman of the Guard and Elsie Maynard had elected to remain with the Hawthorn group rather then go with Victorian Light Opera. So, Bob Tuttleby who had been Gianni Schicchi in the Opera School production where I'd done Lauretta suggested that I might be a good Elsie Maynard…so I went in and did that. I was petrified, you know, singing on a stage I could do but talking on a stage…bloody hell! All those pages of G&S dialogue terrified me.
The woman doing Phoebe, who's quite well known, was married to the director, and she used to take me aside to go through the dialogue. She used to say things like 'oh what a pity, your dialogue's terrible, another singer who can't act'…it gave me lots of confidence!
Anyway the next thing they asked me to do, and can you believe this after having done Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi and Elsie Maynard in Yeoman of the Guard, the very next time I did a stage Opera performance was Jenny Smith in The House of Mahagany (extreme laughter!). Talk about ignorance is bliss! I look back at it now and think bloody hell did I really have the gall to do that…oh but the arrogance of youth. At least put to the lie the 'fact' I couldn't act. That actually gave me confidence. Yeoman terrified me because I was quite convinced that I was yet another soprano who couldn't act and certainly couldn't cope with dialogue but Mahogany …and the response I got from audiences and from critics and my amateur colleagues, really did give me confidence in my own performance capability. I realised yes I could act, I didn't know how it was just a purely instinctive thing.
That company just went from strength to strength, the things that we did were just extraordinary. We did L'Elisir d'more with John Pringle as Dulcamara. David Ashton-Smith did Belcore. We did Carmen, David and John were both in that…Janice Taylor, who now has a very big teaching practice in Warne, Perth as Janet Taylor-Warr, was in the channel nine singers which was a professional group attached to In Melbourne Tonight and she was doing leading roles with us. Graeme Ewer did Jupan in The Baron Gypsy, which we did down at the Palais Theatre would you believe. We did L'esire d'more down at the Palais Theatre, three thousand seat theatre on two layers and here was this amateur company in there. They were really good to us because they gave us the theatre for no rental virtually, and it cost us almost nothing. They made that a donation really, they were very generous. I don't remember who the management was, they were very kind. When we did Carmen I did Michaela one night and Frasquita the next, and worked my switchboard nine till five every day as well, which wasn't unusual, we all did those sorts of things. I remember a matinee where there were twenty-seven people in the audience in the Palais theatre. It was hysterical we brought them all down to the front two rows and introduced ourselves, well not quite, but that was virtually the way of it!
That was when I first met Stuart Challender. Stuart came in to assist Len Spira who was the conductor at that time and he got to conduct the matinees. Stuart and I became great mates because by then I had a car and I used to pick him up at the University. He was sharing a house near Melbourne Uni' where he did his degree. I'd drive him to and from rehearsal and oh God we set the whole world to right Stuart and I on many occasions. Soon after that we moved back into the Union Theatre and we started doing two operas back to back. We did things like Die Freischütz, I wasn't in that because I was doing Constanza in Seraglio. My Belmonte was Brian Clough who's well known around amateur music now, he conducts and directs…I don't know that he sings much anymore. He also does singing classes in at the CAE. Graeme Ewer was Pedrillo, Janice Taylor was Blonde and John Pringle was Osmin.

Our next show was Albert Herring. That was the first time that Stuart conducted in his own right. The person who was supposed to do Lady Billows actually withdrew I was going to do Miss Wordsworth, but we had somebody else in the company who could do that role so I learned Lady Billows in a fairly short space of time. It was Stuart who taught it to me. My mother used to laugh, every time he'd walk into our house she'd have food on the table for him because he was so skinny. He looks so cadaverous, her mission in life was to feed Stuart. I'd pick him up and wheel him into our place and we'd sit down at the piano. He'd start teaching me notes and mum would start cooking, and then he'd eat and we'd do some more notes. I remember one of the critics at the time, in fact I think it was John Sinclair, saying that he was of the opinion that Mr. Challender could one day become a very fine conductor of Opera if only he could be stopped in the meantime from stabbing himself in the back. Stuart's beat was a little larger then life at that time. Soon after that Stuart and I did Gypsy Baron with Williamstown Light Opera Company, which was performing here in Footscray. I'd done Merry Widow with them about twelve months before with Geoffrey Simon who now conducts all over the UK, his name's on an awful lot of recordings, mainly the Bournemouth Symphony. Geoffrey was another local boy with a big conducting career in the UK who learned his trade working with local amateur companies here.
I remember doing Nabucco and Cenerentola as a double. I was doing Abigail in Nabucco and Clorinda in Cenerentola, so I was doing those alternate nights whilst working on my switchboard, and I tell you what you built stamina, boy did you build stamina. It was difficult, I'm not saying it wasn't, but at the time none of us thought of it as being difficult and in some ways it was good because the big problem that I see now for youngsters coming through is that there are so many potential performers to contend with for a limited number of jobs. Now everyone always says there's not enough work, well sorry, in a population on nineteen million spread over a huge geographic area I think there's an extraordinary amount of work. It's not like Europe where people from the town twenty kilometers away will drive in to see something that in the town next particularly appeals to them, because their own Opera House is producing something they don't want to see that week. Here it's just not feasible if someone in Townsville is doing something to be too interested if you live in Melbourne. I think the amount of Opera that we produce is quite remarkable given our circumstances but I think the kids now really face a lot of competition. People fell off back there in the sixties because if you were working at a 'real job', for want of a better expression, nine till five as most of us were, and you were singing all night, you wouldn't get home till eleven o'clock, half past eleven-midnight and it took all your energy and attention.

I used to fall back through the door of my mum's house in North Footscray (and I'd have left there at half past eight that morning,) I'd fall back through the door at half past eleven that night, I'd have had a sandwich for lunch and I wouldn't have had anything else except the odd cup of tea, glass of water through the day so I would then cook myself a steak and have a quick salad, or sometimes just a steak if I couldn't be bothered and fall into bed and get up and do it all again tomorrow. Weekends were the same. Saturday afternoon, Saturday night you'd invariably singing in a charity concert somewhere. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen I was in three different charity concert parties. My mum used to drive me around to all the mental homes and the old age homes and the elderly citz' clubs and the hospitals where I'd sing. It didn't occur to you that this wasn't the way to live, you never felt yourself to be deprived. But an awful lot of people didn't want to live that way, they wanted a social life and wanted to go to teenage parties and whatever else so they dropped off. They'd only be around for a year, two years, whereas now people are encouraged to be around for ten years. There's a grant for this, I'm putting in a submission for something else or there's a scholarship for something and I think a lot of people who don't really have whatever that, I don't know what it is, that steel in the soul, that need, I don't think anyone's ever defined what keeps you going have they? That makes you pick yourself up every time you fall down…

Psychosis….

Yes, well psychosis is probably close to the mark in fact. It meant that only those people who had that strong drive within them kept doing it year after year after year so only a small group of people in the amateur scene. Really and truly when you look at the repertoire we did The Rape of Lucretia for instance with Lauris Elms. We did the Gluck Orfeo with Lauris. The Arts Council paid all of her fees and costs to come and work with this amateur company. She was full time and able to sing, we were all working in our day jobs, doing those things. When you look at the range of repertoire that we did it was remarkable, it was quite remarkable…Tales of Hoffman, The Secret Marriage, Faust, Count Ory, that was the last thing I did before I went away and Traviata, I did Traviata as an amateur.

Vic' Opera evolved into what became the Victorian State Opera…: From Victorian Light Opera it became the Victorian Opera Company, we dropped the light because from there on we just did Opera had you moved to the National Theatre…? (St Kilda)

No not at that stage, that happened after I went to England. I was on the board…the company collapsed in a big heap in 1968, because the guy who'd been running it went overseas and it was in the six months or so after that we discovered he'd used every printer in town and hadn't paid any of them and he'd bought stuff from all kinds of places and hadn't paid any of them. We got to the point where we were putting levies on people, you know, everybody cough up twenty dollars so that we can keep going so, pay the rent on the theatre etc. In fact we fell in a big heap just as we were about to do a repeat season of Nabucco which had been a big success. There was a crisis meeting and it was decided that we'd have to pull the season and restructure. I was devastated because I was about to do Abigail again and I'd put so much time and effort into trying to keep the thing afloat anyway in the few months before hand. I really felt the rug had been pulled from under me at that point and wasn't contributing much to any of the meeting so I disappeared out of it. The next thing I knew I had a delegation come and ask me if I would be part of the board that they were electing and I said no, I can't and that's it.' Their reply was 'we need you' because one thing that I've found, that I've always had, apart from singing is an ability to help people get along…

A mediator…

No I'm not really a mediator but I have a way being able to make people laugh at situations that get a bit fraught and it's not something I've ever aimed at doing particularly I guess it's just my native sense of humor and ridiculous that…

Tension alleviator…

Yes, tension alleviator …that's good. The delegation that came to me said to me, and I was hugely flattered. Obviously it's a long time ago and I've never forgotten, they said, 'we really need you because you're the person that everyone trusts and likes in the organisation and we need you to be in there'. Ken and Val Taylor and Val Taylor principally did all the work. She was a remarkable woman that woman and no one has ever acknowledged it. I think that's a shame and it's dishonest too. Val principally, and me, and her husband Ken as well, went through all the papers and wrote down every company we found listed. We rang them all, or went to see them and said, (oh God the humiliation), this is the situation. We found that we actually owed twelve thousand dollars and in 1968 that was like saying a million dollars, devastating! We said, look, new management, we promise you we will pay you back, we don't know how long it will take but we will pay you back. We are working like crazy, none of us are paid to do anything, we put our own money into this, would you be good enough to put that debt on the back burner and not hassle us for it. We give you our word, our personal word that it wont be forgotten and it will be paid as soon as we're able to do it. And there wasn't one person, not one person we approached who didn't agree, which in itself was some small miracle. Then we set about rebuilding.
The first show we did was the Traviata and that was a huge success, we sold out. Soon after that, John Cargher came to us and said that he would like to help us in any way that he could. He'd already approached the Australia Council, we were starting to get on track, we were selling tickets, we had quite a loyal public (not just mum's and aunties). People from outside company members who actually loved Opera didn't get much of it in those days would come into our performances and we were getting quite reasonable reviews. I never got really good reviews it was always yes, well she is improving or this role isn't suited to her voice…nothing I ever did was right, but I was sort of used to that and the audiences liked me so what did I care whether the critcs did.
Anyway bit by bit we started to claw our way back and when I went to England in 1970, (Count Ory was the last show that I did with the company) we were getting to break even point. I'd been away for a year, Val and I were still having very expensive conversations at that time between Melbourne and London when she rang me in a great state of excitement and said 'Maggie, we've paid the last of the bills today'. That was just under four years, about three and a half years and we'd paid the last of those bills.
That's when Peter Burch came on board, the next year was first time anyone had been paid to sing with the company and I think Eileen Hannan was one of the first people to be paid, not very much, but they were paid.
I don't know if it was 1968-69 we'd actually started the country tour thing. We had a visit to Sale with each Opera that we did. So already we were starting to build in that thing of yes this is a state facility, it is for everyone in the state. It was pretty limited but hey, considering our situation, and we were all still working at those nine till five jobs, it was a start.
I was working for a company called Ormeiston Rubber Company up in Moonee Ponds, which still exists. I went to the managing director, when the Opera company was reformed, and told him what it was and said 'would you mind if at times when I'm not busy with my work here, if I spend time on the phone for the Opera company and I will pay into petty cash for all of the calls that I make'. He was so impressed that we were going to try and pay back this twelve thousand dollars that he said 'yes, please do, I'd be pleased if you did'. So I used to be on that phone for half the day on Opera company business. If I got to the point where the only line that was left on the board was the one that I was on then I had to terminate my conversations so it was free for business obviously, but they were very, very generous in the way they responded, which was very kind of them, very kind of them. I can't begin to tell you the number of hours that went into building a viable organisation. .