Jillian Graham begins her biography of Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) with a story that vividly captures two themes that recur throughout the book: Sutherland’s activism, and her sometime exclusion from Australia’s institutional musical life as it developed through her lifetime.

The occasion is the opening of Melbourne’s new, custom-built concert hall on the south bank of the Yarra River. Speaking from the stage on 6 November 1982, Premier Rupert Hamer – for whom the hall is now named – spoke of Sutherland’s role in securing the five-and-a-half acre site that was formerly Wirth’s Circus Park for what became Melbourne’s arts centre precinct. Starting as a founding member of the Combined Arts Centre Movement (CACM) in 1943, she ‘kept the venture on the political agenda’ across the four decades that brought her to this moment, marking significant milestones (the laying of the foundation stone by Elizabeth II during her 1954 visit), and fighting off a competing commercial development. In support of the foundation of the CACM, Sutherland organised a petition of some 40,000 signatures.

In the gala concert that followed, not one note of Australian music was heard. Although Sutherland was present, none of her music was included in the program. Graham writes that this deficit was partially rectified when a tribute concert was given in the foyer –– the foyer, not the main hall – in October 1984. By that time, Sutherland was dead.