Deborah Cheetham
June 2013
Master weaver of words and song
To talk with Deborah Cheetham is to experience a private audience with a master storyteller; the integration of dramatic cadences and musical intonation, her articulate delivery and a trove of stories both personal and ancestral. She is as adept at this form of wordweaving as the Tjanpi Desert Weavers of Central Australia are at weaving materials into the creations she extols.
We meet in a glass surfaced meeting room of a curvaceous St Kilda Road apartment building. Cheetham is of theatrical bearing, elegant in a cream and black ensemble. Whilst her necklace speaks of fine European provenance, it is her draped scarf which quietly resonates. For Betty Mbitjana’s effulgent artwork depicting Awelye (`Women’s Ceremony’) epitomises the message Cheetham is intent on delivering, that Australian Indigenous culture is vibrant, rich with hidden systems of knowledge and deserving of pride, respect and learning.
To be in her presence is to risk becoming supremely enthralled; Phillip Adams recently interviewed her and sounded not unlike a besotted man, referring to her being `a wholly remarkable human being’ and claiming that she was not merely able to `sing like an angel’ but that she had one of the most beautiful speaking voices he thought he had ever heard.
Listening to Cheetham is akin to listening to an admired teacher introducing you to the wonder of the world, only to find the serious tone being derailed by her subversive humour. Her dark eyes radiate an impish spirit and an earthiness sits alongside a continual engagement with ideas. She lives life passionately, arduously, mindfully. Soprano, composer, mentor, Head of the Wilin Centre at the Faculty of the VCA and the MCM (Melbourne Conservatorium of Music), University of Melbourne and Associate Dean of Indigenous Development, much more besides. Cheetham’s ambitious vision encompasses a meeting point of “fair exchange” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, a “reciprocal model” in which “the performing and visual arts as a way of knowing” is valued.
She is strikingly suited to the role of ambassador for this “quiet revolution” as that very meeting point is to be found within her experience. As her solo show of the late nineties attested, she grew up perceiving of herself as a White Baptist Abba Fan. A member of the Stolen Generations she was taken away from her mother Monica Little as a baby of three weeks, through an act of deception, and given to a family who adopted her under the misconception that she was abandoned. After coming out at the age of 21, and the subsequent exclusion by her Baptist church community, she turned to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian community. It was there, in the eighties, that her Aboriginality was originally championed.
But it wasn’t until a decade later, whilst researching Australia’s first Indigenous opera, Pecan Summer, that Cheetham learnt of the power of cultural destiny. Its subject, the Cummeragunja Mission Walk-off in 1939, was an audacious act of Yorta Yorta people which precipitated legal reform. What she didn’t know was that her own maternal grandparents, James and Frances Little, had been part of this extraordinary event, a mass strike against exploitation. The story, one so integral to her own obscured personal history, had been calling to her. To hear this told is to feel the presence of unexplained happenings and hauntings. I have heard Cheetham tell it over the radio and watched her emotional narration on YouTube. It acknowledges the power of a long-hidden identity laying claim; nothing short of a kind of religious calling. Here, instead of God’s voice descending from the heavens was elderly Aunty Frances Matheson sitting at a kitchen table in Shepparton. “It was the simplicity of those surroundings and the seemingly incidental nature of that conversation which made it all the more powerful. It’s like here is your belonging. Here is your knowing of who you are. Here is your opportunity to know. And see, I think if you broaden that and apply that to Australia more generally . . . without being able to own our histories confidently we can’t actually know who we are, we can’t deeply know. We can have a caricature, which is why there are so many caricatures of the Australian nature or it’s sometimes overly simplified.”
Reappearing throughout her conversation, one that incorporates somersaults of terminology and thinking liberated from old tropes and `issue’ laden speech, is this hope for a national understanding. As Cheetham explains, “If you’d like Aboriginal people to value everything that’s Western and modern about Australia, then you’ll need to value Aboriginal culture as well.”
She is a gifted spokesperson for an ancient, breathing culture, “I would argue if there is one culture in the world that can lay claim to being the longest continuing culture, and that the way that they continue that culture is through the visual and performing arts, that’s a fairly proven model, then wouldn’t you say?”
Her newest project is in its infancy, a requiem titled Eumerella that will bring to attention the Eumerella Wars of the nineteenth century and the over 6,500 year-old stone dwellings of the Gunditjmara people at Budj Bim, a sacred site otherwise known as Mount Eccles. She attributes the idea of the form of the requiem to a colleague at Wilin, Tiriki Onus. This is another one of those strange instances of confluence, for Onus, the son of acclaimed visual artist Lin Onus, is also the grandson of Bill Onus, one of the architects of the Cummeragunja Walk-off. A visual artist who always dreamed of becoming an opera singer, he is now pursuing it as a career. To hear Cheetham speak of Budj Bim is to feel that we are living in a country with so much to be illuminated, not mapped out and renamed as past European explorers, but listened to and recognised. Thus the weight of responsibility is transformed into the buoyancy of stories “that can elevate the spirit, that can help us understand and know our country and its history”.
Where does opera fit in? “I just loved opera from the moment I went, because it does what Aboriginal people have been doing for a thousand generations. This is why I know that I’m hardwired for this, we tell our stories through song, dance, costume, makeup, ceremony . . . I was just tapping into something that my ancestors had done forever.” Her epiphany of opera’s magic was experienced at the age of fourteen, where as a student she witnessed Dame Joan Sutherland performing in The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House. The love affair with both opera as an art form and Sutherland began at that point. She credits Jennifer King, her music teacher at the time, with instilling a sense of belief in herself. King paved the path for excellence by repudiating other people’s low expectations, which “a lot of Aboriginal people have to suffer in this country even today”. There is the sense of a relay race being played out, one that King began and that Cheetham is continuing through her quest to open this artform up to other Indigenous people through Wilin.
Cheetham began writing songs from a very young age. Her first significant commission was for the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games, the Welcome to Country, Dali Mana Gamarada. Pecan Summer, which she composed, wrote the libretto to, appeared in and directed, was a career turning point. It was also punctuated by loss that is still keenly felt; Monica, her Aboriginal mother, died two weeks before the premiere and her role model, Dame Joan died the day after. The premiere, which played on country in Mooroopna, was thick with feeling; it was only a kilometre away from where many of the participants of the Walk-off had ended up. Her uncle Jimmy Little, esteemed country and western musician, who at eighteen months was carried off Cummeragunja by his parents, was in the audience. Two grandnieces of William Cooper, another architect of the Walk-off and revered social rights campaigner, were in the children’s choir. Pecan Summer will be touring to Adelaide next year and Cheetham hopes to bring it back to Melbourne in 2015 for its fifth year anniversary.
At least the journey is not always lonely. Cheetham sees herself continuing a long held family tradition of music; her mother had “the finest voice” of the family, her grandparents were musicians. She derives strength from her culture and others who have gone before her, the Yorta Yorta men and women who walked off Cummeragunja thus taking “hold of their own destiny”, and contemporary Indigenous arts practitioners like Stephen and David Page of Bangarra Dance Theatre, Wesley Enoch, Leah Purcell, Gurrumul Yunupingu, “too many to mention”. She draws on “Dame Joan’s work ethic”. She collaborates artistically with her partner, pianist Toni Lalich, head Repetiteur and Company Manager of Short Black Opera, Cheetham’s opera company. They met in 2006 and Cheetham acknowledges “for me it was love at first sight. We have been together ever since.”
At one point, I refer to the dismay felt at her being sidelined during a recent appearance on Q & A. She responds with an irreverent, “I need my own show.” Yes, I assure her, she does. “That would be fun,” she laughs, “Australia’s Oprah. I’d have my own book club and gratitude journal. Ingratitude journal.” Of course it’s said in jest, but it would be brilliant. One imagines she would amass hordes of adoring fans, Phillip Adams and myself included.
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