On 2–3 August 2024, I convened a symposium on the theme of “Musical Nationbuilding and Cultural Exchange in Interwar France and Australia” hosted by the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and supported by the Macgeorge Bequest as well as by my Melbourne Research Fellowship, “Nationbuilding through Twentieth-Century Franco-Australian Cultural Exchange”. It was held across the Southbank and Parkville campuses.
The symposium opened on 2 August with an enlightening keynote lecture by Macgeorge Visiting Speaker Professor Barbara Kelly (University of Leeds), an expert in French music from 1870 to 1939, and on internationalism and transnationalism in the interwar period. Professor Kelly’s keynote was titled “A Question of Perspective: Musical Internationalism in the Interwar Period (France, Europe and Australia)” and was followed by a small concert by staff and students of MCM and a reception. The concert was curated by Professor Kerry Murphy to showcase works related to the Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre Archive at the University of Melbourne, particularly the work carried out by Australian music publisher Louise Hanson-Dyer in the early years of the music press in interwar Paris. Included were wonderful performances of works by Louis Couperin, François Couperin, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Francis Poulenc and Noël Gallon.
The second day of the symposium comprised papers from local and international scholars on the following topics:
Sarah Kirby, “‘Home Made Music’: The British Music Society and Musical Exchange Between Australia and the United Kingdom in Interwar Sydney”
Ross Chapman, “Cosmopolitan Connections: Concert Saxophonists in 1930s Australia”
Kerry Murphy, “Louise Dyer and the Exposition Internationale, Paris 1937: Forging the Amitié Franco-Australienne”
John Gabriel, “The National Limits and Transnational Appeal of Catholic Universalism in Darius Milhaud and Paul Claudel’s Christophe Colomb”
Samantha Owens, “‘A German Martyr’? Gerhard von Keussler’s Contribution to Musical Nationbuilding in Australia, 1932–1935”
Helena Tyrväinen, “New Times, Old Affinities: Association française d’Expansion et d’Échanges artistiques as a Sponsor of the Finnish Opera”
Peter Tregear, “‘Putting One’s Hart in the Right Place’: Reconsidering the Reception of an Australian Composer between the Two World Wars”
Also included in the day’s programme was a fascinating session at the Baillieu Library where the Curator of Rare Music, Jen Hill, displayed and spoke about items from the Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre Archive, including a number of items related to the conference papers.
To read speakers’ abstracts and bios, please visit the Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre International Research Network website.
Rosemary Richards, one of the editors of Memories of Musical Lives (Lyrebird, 2022), writes about an intriguing find in country Victoria that connects her research interests in Georgiana McCrae with Robert Burns.
Gordon Castle, Moray, Scotland. https://www.gordoncastle.co.uk/
Fans of Scottish art history, Scottish poet Robert Burns, and an immigrant to early Melbourne named Georgiana McCrae may be intrigued by the forthcoming auction of a painting by Scottish artist Charles Martin Hardie (1858–1916) that features portraits of Robert Burns and the Duchess of Gordon at a meeting of Edinburgh society figures in 1787.
The painting has hung above the fireplace at the Olde Horsham Restaurant in country Victoria since 1977 after its purchase by Evan Mackley (1940–2019). Mackley was an art and antiques collector and dealer, as well as an artist, restauranteur, and motel owner, among many aspects of a fascinatingly widespread career.
The large painting in its ornate frame weighs around a quarter of a metric ton. It had earlier belonged to the Adelaide businessman Thomas Elder, who had displayed it in his mansion called Birksgate in Glen Osmond, Adelaide.
My interest in the painting arose from a mention by Associate Professor Alison Inglis from the University of Melbourne at a symposium connected to an exhibition focusing on Scottish-Australian art at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in 2014. Research over many years into the manuscript music collections of Georgiana McCrae (1804–90) meant I was familiar with interactions between Robert Burns and the fourth duke and duchess of Gordon. Georgiana was an illegitimate granddaughter of the duke and duchess, and Burns’s songs feature in Georgiana’s music collections now housed at McCrae Homestead on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne, run by the National Trust of Victoria, and also at State Library Victoria and the University of Sydney Library. The most recent result of my immersion in Georgiana McCrae’s musical and biographical legacy can be found in the Lyrebird Press book published in 2022, Memories of Musical Lives: Music and Dance in Personal Music Collections from Australia and New Zealand, which I co-edited with Julja Szuster.
I was fortunate to be able to view the Hardie painting in person on Monday 26 February 2024 with the assistance of Janet Allan from the Horsham Historical Society, who arranged my visit to the Olde Horsham Restaurant with Michael Peterson representing the Mackley estate. We were joined by artist Amabile Smith and Mackley’s daughter, Lynn Mackley. The four of us had a lively discussion about the Hardie painting and the multitude of other items which indicate the extent of the Mackley family’s activities. A large green model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex marks the entrance to the property off the Western Highway leading into Horsham from the east. The grounds contain a wealth of sculptures. Inside the sizable restaurant complex can be found an old Geelong tram, not to mention stacks of paintings, works of art and antique furniture. Janet Allan, who has been very generous with her research expertise, also invited me afterwards to go on a brief visit to the Horsham Historical Society’s headquarters at the Horsham Mechanics Institute. They can be contacted via their website. My drive to and from Horsham was luckily on a day with reasonable weather, though evidence of bushfires was visible at Dadswells Bridge and many areas were affected by smoke haze.
The auction of items from the “Mackley Estate Collection Part 2” on Sunday 17 March 2024 will be held online from 11am in conjunction with Phillip Caldwell Auctioneers (Melbourne) and Elder Fine Arts Auctions (Adelaide). More information, as well as images of the Hardie painting, may be found on https://fineauctions.biz/ and https://elderfineart.com.au/.
Australian-born music patron and publisher Louise Hanson-Dyer settled in France in 1928 and in 1931 founded the music publishing house Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre and then began releasing recordings under the L’Oiseau-Lyre label (issuing the first long-playing records in France). When she died in 1962 she bequeathed her estate to the University of Melbourne.
I first became conscious of Louise Hanson-Dyer in the 1980s when I was doing research for my PhD in Paris. My supervisor, François Lesure, had known her and was sorry that I hadn’t: “Une femme formidable”, he said. Sometime also in the early 1980s, when visiting my English cousin Ulrich Scharf in London, he told me that an Australian historian was coming to talk to him about his grandfather Eduard, who had taught Louise Dyer the piano in Melbourne. The historian was Jim Davidson, whom I met and who told me many fascinating stories about Dyer, later of course to become transformed into his path-breaking book on Dyer and Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre.
When I joined the staff at the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne, I was on occasion given tasks to do when I was in Paris doing research or presenting at conferences relating to the university and Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre. One task was organising the microfilming of Dyer’s valuable collection of rare early imprints and music manuscripts, to be sent back to Melbourne (the full collection is in Melbourne now, with most of it digitised). During this period I was privileged to visit Dyer’s stunning apartment in the 16th arrondissement in Paris, which was occupied by Margarita Hanson, the second wife of Dyer’s second husband. The apartment was virtually untouched from the 1930s, with extraordinary art deco decorations and furniture; I would have coffee out on the little balcony looking over the Eiffel Tower. In retrospect, I curse myself: why didn’t I take photos of the apartment? Why didn’t I pay closer attention to the details of the decor? Too late. The apartment is now sold.
In 2013 an outstanding doctoral graduate of the Music Faculty, Simon Purtell, was sent to Monaco, to the office of L’Oiseau-Lyre press to arrange the transfer of stock back to Melbourne. It was Simon who first alerted me to the portrait of Louise Dyer, by the Italian Expressionist painter Giovanni Costetti, hanging over the downstairs mantelpiece in the apartment in Monaco. Dyer was a patron of Costetti’s.
I loved the portrait and began a campaign to try and get it to the University of Melbourne. I was actually in Paris when the portrait arrived there from Monaco, to the new apartment of Margarita Hanson, and was given the task of slitting open the wrapping. It was not a disappointment. It is a long saga, but the portrait arrived at the University this year thanks to a wonderful collaboration between Archives and Special Collections and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University. It will be unveiled at a ceremony next year.
A detail from this portrait is on the cover of Lyrebird Press’s forthcoming book, Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, Publisher and Collector, edited by Jennifer Hill and myself, with some preliminary perspectives by Jim Davidson and contributions from ten distinguished authors. We hope readers will be as excited as we are by the book’s exploration of the extraordinary achievements of Louise Hanson-Dyer.
Images:
Louise Dyer at her apartment in Paris, c. 1930. Rare Music, Archives and Special Collections, 2016.0014.00062, EOLA.
Dyer apartment, 17 rue Franklin. Photographic print (cropped). Rare Music, Archives and Special Collections, 2016.0014.00001 (Unit 1), EOLA.
Congratulations to Shane Lestideau on the publication with ABC Classic of her CD, Wintergarden Fantasias, which presents a selection of Scottish fiddle music derived from the collection of Robert Baillie, a Scottish-born violinist who arrived in Australia in 1912. This is one of three personal music albums Shane discusses in her chapter in Memories of Musical Lives (Lyrebird, 2022), where she explores how “Scottishness” is expressed in this repertoire. More information about the CD can be found on the ABC website here.
Congratulations also to Rosemary Richards, one of the editors of Memories of Musical Lives, who presented a lively talk about the nineteenth-century music collections of Georgiana McCrae and Robert Wrede on the site where McCrae herself lived for a time, the McCrae Homestead near Arthurs Seat. As well as selections from McCrae’s albums beautifully sung by Clara Adams and accompanied by David Adams, Rosemary recalled her very first visit to the homestead, where she discovered one of McCrae’s albums sitting on the shelf of a bookcase. That album is still held in the homestead, cared for by the National Trust, and was available for everyone present to look over. Our thanks go to the Mornington Peninsula branch of the National Trust for hosting the talk and afternoon tea, and enabling us to make the Memories book available to those present.
Memories of Musical Lives will be launched at the 2023 conference of the Musicological Society of Australia on Thursday 30 November at the University of Adelaide.
Rosemary Richards, one of the editors of Memories of Musical Lives (Lyrebird, 2022) will present a talk about the book and about her research in music and dance collections found in libraries, archives and private homes in Australia and New Zealand at 2pm on 29 April 2023 at the McCrae Homestead in McCrae. Refreshments will be served after the talk. Further details and updates are available on the Trust’s website here.
Podcast now available
Kay Dreyfus, author of Bluebeard’s Bride (Lyrebird, 2013), a biography of the Australian-born violinist Alma Moodie, has given a talk about Moodie and about her published collection of Moodie’s letters. The talk, which includes contributions from Dr Diana Weekes and Dr Goetz Richter from the Sydney Conservatorium, is now available online as a podcast on the Tall Poppies website. See Part I and Part II.
Congratulations
Professor Emeritus Linda Barwick, editor of Italy in Australia’s Musical Landscape (Lyrebird, 2012) has been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the recent Australia Day 2023 Honours List. Read about her research and her advocacy for the National Library’s Trove database on the Cosmos Magazinewebsite.
Routledge is soon to release Musical Collaboration between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous People in Australia: Exchanges in The Third Space, edited by Katelyn Barney. The 12 chapters expand on a topic Katelyn first explored in her Lyrebird book, Collaborative Ethnomusicology: New Approaches to Music Research between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians (2014). She writes about the new book: “This edited collectiondemonstrates the processes of intercultural musical collaboration and how these processes contribute to facilitating positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Each chapter examines specific examples of Indigenous/non-Indigenous musical collaboration in Australia in diverse contexts and reflects on key issues that underpin musical exchanges including the benefits and challenges of intercultural music making. The book brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous leading scholars, educators and early career academics working in the interrelated fields of Indigenous Australian ethnomusicology, music education and community music to make visible the often invisible relationships, negotiations and exchanges that underpin the “third space” or “borderlands” of intercultural musical collaboration. The majority of chapters are either written by Indigenous researchers or co-authored with Indigenous collaborators. This is significant as it foregrounds the voices of Indigenous authors (Lou Bennett, Clint Bracknell, Deline Briscoe, Uncle Ossie Cruse, Debbie Higgison, Candice Kruger, and Yin Paradies) and reflects the dialogical nature of musical collaboration itself.
Relationships and musical exchange are at the centre of many of the papers in the volume. Certainly there is much work to be done to continue to improve relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and collaborative music making can offer one way for them to work together. Lou Bennett eloquently describes musical collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as “sharing breath” and reminds us that it takes courage for Indigenous people to collaborate with non-Indigenous people because of the deep traumas and ongoing effects of colonisation in Australia. The collaborations discussed in the volume highlight the ways music making between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can be a space of shared joy for those involved. As Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru historian and author Jackie Huggins writes, “there are many stories about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people working together. Perhaps more than we are prepared to realise” (Huggins, 2022, p. 178). This book is about such stories. Overall, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how music provides an effective platform to allow Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to work together, to learn from each other and importantly to improve and strengthen relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples”.
The book is due out in December 2022. Also newly released from Routledge: The Symphony in Australia, 1960–2020 by Rhoderick McNeill. See here for more information.
A concert and symposium celebrating the centenary of the British Music Society (now the Lyrebird Music Society), founded by Louise Hanson-Dyer in 1921, is to be held on 5 June (details on Evenbrite here).
The concert will include performances of English madrigals, French 18th-century airs, and chamber music by Gustav Holst, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and César Franck as well as a newly commissioned work by Kate Tempany. Hanson-Dyer herself is the subject of a forthcoming Lyrebird book based on the collection of her papers now held in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.
Picture credit: Clarice Beckett, Collins Street Evening (c. 1933).
The composer Barry Conyngham wrote the foreword for Lyrebird’s latest book, Take Note: Interviews with Australian Composers, edited by Madeline Roycroft. At the launch of the book at the conference of the Musicological Society of Australia on 11 December 2021 he was interviewed by Suzanne Robinson. Below is an extract from the interview when he talks about his experience of being interviewed and what he sees as the value of a book such as this one.
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SR: I’m sure you’ve been interviewed many times – is there any interview that stands out in your memory?
[At the World Expo in Osaka in 1970] I’d been involved in creating the complex sound tracks for the Australian pavilion. As it happened the pavilion next to the Australian one was the West German one (the Germanys were still east and west). That pavilion was dedicated entirely to the music of Stockhausen. Twelve hours of live performance of Stockhausen seven days a week for six months!
The interview I’m thinking of was as a result of the two governments deciding on a meeting and interview between the two composers, which given our relative status was very flattering. Karlheinz in his wisdom, and somewhat evidently typically, said he would be happy to talk to me but he would only talk in German. So we had an interview that consisted of his German being translated into Japanese which was then translated into English so that I could understand it. That’s all I need to say. The whole conversation had a kind of Monty Python quality and I’ve never forgotten [it] because I knew that Stockhausen’s English was better than mine, it was a piece of nationalism gone mad.
Another experience of a more formal interviews was more recent. Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to have another orchestral piece done in St Petersburg. I couldn’t be there obviously, travel’s not permitted, and they wanted to have an interview with me online. This was with the interviewer and other musicians on stage. The laborious nature of translation combined with the fact that it was online and hard to hear made for problems. Indeed sometime I was not sure if the others were speaking Russian or their English. Thankfully kinds of interview are unlikely to be in a book.
SR: Do composers or you see interviews as a necessary evil when a new work is performed, especially a big one, and maybe especially one in a country where people wouldn’t perhaps know you as well as they do here? I’m sure it’s a requirement but is there any benefit to the composer in doing that?
BC: Usually the people putting on the concert, publishers or whatever, external people, these are essentially publicity marketing kinds of interviews and I did refer to them in the foreword, saying that they have certain perilous elements to them, especially if it involves translation, because you don’t know what the translator is doing, so that can become an issue. But I must say I can’t imagine any composer or any artist, or maybe any person, not being willing to be interviewed if it’s actually promoting or assisting in the understanding of their work. And once again to draw back to the book, these are particularly valuable interviews in my view because they’re done by people who are musicians, in many cases composers [and] academics. They have a level of technical capability and presumably interest so that the conversations are very useful and perhaps more penetrating. First of all to people who are interested in the music, but also to academics or just the two people involved.
SR: You mentioned that there’s a capacity I suppose if you’re interviewed by a composer that it would be analytical and actually I’m quite surprised that some interviews went down that path but not nearly as many as I might have expected. And some of them, as you said in your foreword, are quite revelatory, some very candid and frank. But you use the word kaleidoscopic and, just to quote what you say, “They exhibit a wide variety of perspectives and styles, eras and concerns, character traits and individual revelations”. Was it a surprise or do you think the kaleidoscopic nature of the interviews is perhaps reflective of the breadth or diversity of Australian composition at the moment?
BC: Yes – the actual music is very diverse but the people are too. First of all, what’s really interesting is the age range. Not that I know the age range of everybody. Larry Sitsky is well into his 80s and Helen [Gifford] too. They are one end of the spectrum. Some of the other composers must be several decades younger. That alone is an interesting thing in terms of their perspectives. And I think those kinds of musical interests reflected in the book and in the work of the composers comes out in the interviews, in the conversations. I forgot to look up the definition of kaleidoscopic, but my definition would suit the idea that on a number of dimensions – age, social area, gender perspective, there may even be undercurrents of other kinds of political interest, but lots of diversity there. A lot of that comes out in these interviews because they are deeper and more personal than many other kinds of interviews. Also in this context, the character of the composer I know well is often revealed. I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing. I don’t know everybody in the list but I know a percentage and their voices bring their personalities back to me very quickly. I won’t embarrass people in the audience who are in the book, but it is interesting that these interviews are of the kind that reveal not just the people’s thoughts or what they want to talk about, but also can reveal some unconscious element of their personality. Hence the point I make about these interviews being particularly revealing and interesting.
Going back to bad experiences, perhaps the worst experience I’ve had, and it hasn’t happened too often, is being interviewed for television. It happens when on a program where the interviewer, the host of the program, has no idea who the hell you are! They’ve been told this person has just done something newsworthy and are handed a list of questions. So they just ask a question and you answer it. Then they ask the next question. It feels as if it doesn’t matter what the answer is. I don’t know whether anyone else has experienced this, but I can assure you it’s extremely unnerving. Most interviews are a kind of conversation, but in this situation of a television or a news [program], where it’s very tightly timed, they just ask the questions and move on. You could say anything. You could say something very provocative, they would move on. I mean you could probably even say, “That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever been asked I think you’re an idiot” and they would just ask the next question. It seems they are not interested in what the answer is. These perils of interviewing are not present in this book.
SR: You’ve reminded me that we put some pages of score in the book but because of copyright and other problems we couldn’t have a page for everybody, which is quite a regret because even if you just rifled through the book and had a look at those scores you’d see just how diverse this group is. So that’s a regret in the book, but there are some pages, for instance a page of Julian Yu’s orchestral music and a page of Helen Gifford’s Music for the Adonia, so there’s quite a lot of variety. But we’ve got the opportunity to ask you what you’re working on at the moment. You mentioned the orchestral work, is there something else in the pipeline?
BC: Those of you who know my music know I am obsessed with writing orchestral music. By the way, every time I see a young composer I say don’t do that, it’s not smart to do that. But too late for me, so my mid-Covid escape was to write yet another orchestral piece. Moreover a number of years ago I was approached, or finally convinced, to write a symphony. I had avoided writing something called a symphony up till then, this was 2012. No thought of another until now. I don’t know, maybe it was a sign of trying to turn the page. Hence I spent much of this year writing a work at moment called Symphony 2. It’s an attempt to do probably what every artist on the planet is doing at the moment, which is reflecting on the pandemic. The potential emotional content, the structural content of the pandemic is I’m sure going to echo through the whole artistic world. I have been thinking maybe we’re going to have lots of novels, paintings, plays, choreography and music about what we’ve all been through. As it’s an experience shared by everybody on the planet it will be an interesting experiment. So that piece has taken much of my year. And almost in contrast, I’m very thin on the ground in piano music, so in the last few months I’ve been writing some piano music. I have been reminded what most composers will tell you, it’s just as hard to write a piece for piano as it is to write for orchestra, and in some cases more interesting. So, since I’ve had more time to focus of my own music this year, with less outside distractions, that’s what I’ve been up to.
SR Thank you, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much for writing the foreword and being with us today.
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of Context: A Journal of Melbourne Music Postgraduates. Congratulations to everyone involved!
Initially proposed by Michael Christoforidis, then a PhD student, the journal’s concept was developed by its first editors, all PhD or MMus candidates in musicology and composition: Faye Patton, Patricia Shaw, Gary Ekkel and Joerg Todzy. Their aim, as stated in the first issue in Winter 1991, was “to provide a forum for the publication of material concerning all aspects of music—musicology, composition, therapy, education—and to encourage discusson of a broad range of issues”. The very first issue was representative of what was to come: it had an imaginative cover designed by Ross Hazeldine at Red House (an extract from a score by Barry Conyngham), articles on Tippett, Conyngham, Boulez, Cage and Debussy, on twentieth-century aesthetics and on music theory in the eighteenth century, and incorporated compositions by David Young and Mary Finsterer.
Having now reached issue 46, the journal is fully refereed and published online. It still incorporates a mix of musicological studies, interviews with composers and extracts or complete scores of new works. Lyrebird Press will shortly publish all of the interviews with Australian composers that have appeared in Context. Beginning with Larry Sitsky in 1996, they are Elena Kats-Chernin, Chris Dench/Bruce Petherick, Julian Yu, Brenton Broadstock, Richard Mills, Nigel Westlake, Neil Kelly, Carl Vine, Elliott Gyger, Joseph Twist, Felicity Wilcox, Gordon Kerry, Liza Lim, Linda Kouvaras, Helen Gifford, Paul Stanhope, Stuart Greenbaum and Melody Eötvös. More details soon!
New books and chapters in books by Lyrebird authors:
Akhurst, Graham, and Katelyn Barney. “Articulating My Own Black History: Success and Inhibiting Factors in an Aboriginal Student’s Pathway From Undergraduate to Postgraduate Study”. In Indigenous Postgraduate Education: Intercultural Perspectives, ed. Karen Trimmer, Debra Hoven and Pigga Keskitalo, 47–60. Charlotte, NC, United States: Information Age Publishing, 2020. (Details)
Barney, Katelyn, and Lexine Solomon. “Considering Issues of Identity and Belonging in a Collaborative Music Research Project on Torres Strait Islander Women Performers”. In The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields, ed. Lawrence Bamblett, Fred Myers and Tim Rowse, 124–140. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019. (Details)
Barwick, Linda, Jennifer Green, and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, eds. Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond. Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press, 2020. (Details)
Burk, Ian. The Winds of Change: The Music at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne 1947–1973. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2021. (Details)
Leane, Elizabeth, Carolyn Philpott, and Matt Delbridge, eds. Performing Ice: Histories, Theories, Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (Details)
Martin, Toby. “‘They surprised them with national airs’: Aboriginal Brass Bands, Tourism and Sentimental Colonialism”. In Colonialism, Tourism and Place: Global Transformation in Tourist Destinations. Edited by Denis Lineham, Ian D. Clark, and Philip F. Xie, 58-76. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. (Details)
Philpott, Carolyn. “Mixing Ice: DJ Spooky’s Musical Portraits of the Arctic and Antarctic”. In Performing Ice: Histories, Theories, Contexts. Edited by Elizabeth Leane, Carolyn Philpott and Matt Delbridge, 87–112. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (Details)
I first became conscious of Louise Hanson-Dyer in the 1980s when I was doing research for my PhD in Paris. My supervisor, François Lesure, had known her and was sorry that I hadn’t: “Une femme formidable”, he said. Sometime also in the early 1980s, when visiting my English cousin Ulrich Scharf in London, he told me that an Australian historian was coming to talk to him about his grandfather Eduard, who had taught Louise Dyer the piano in Melbourne. The historian was Jim Davidson, whom I met and who told me many fascinating stories about Dyer, later of course to become transformed into his path-breaking book on Dyer and Les Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre.
I loved the portrait and began a campaign to try and get it to the University of Melbourne. I was actually in Paris when the portrait arrived there from Monaco, to the new apartment of Margarita Hanson, and was given the task of slitting open the wrapping. It was not a disappointment. It is a long saga, but the portrait arrived at the University this year thanks to a wonderful collaboration between Archives and Special Collections and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University. It will be unveiled at a ceremony next year.
