Two new and important Australian operas within a month: Gilgamesh (Symons/Garrick) in Sydney in late September, and now Eucalyptus (Mills/Oakes) in Melbourne in mid-October. This certainly hasn’t occurred for quite some time, if ever. Composer Jonathan Mills, mentored at Sydney University by Peter Sculthorpe, is probably best known for two acclaimed operas. The Ghost Wife – a dark, brooding work with libretto by Dorothy Porter, based on a short story by Barbara Baynton – was a critical success when it premièred at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 1999, with subsequent seasons in Adelaide, Sydney, and London. A bleak and confronting work, it revealed a young composer of promise with an impressive grasp of the form.

A complete contrast was the later chamber opera, The Eternity Man (2003), Dorothy Porter again the librettist. This had as its protagonist the historical figure of Arthur Stace, an enigmatic character who famously chalked the single word ‘Eternity’ on walls and streets in Sydney over a period of thirty-five years. The opera was premièred at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2003 and revived in Sydney in 2005. It was less well-received than The Ghost Wife; the subsequent film adaptation (2008) garnered more plaudits than the stage version.

Probably the record for the longest gestation period for an operatic work is the more than twenty-five years that Wagner spent on his mammoth Ring Cycle. Mills’s Eucalyptus was commissioned in 2006, but his appointment as director of the prestigious Edinburgh Festival from 2006-14, a role for which he was knighted in 2013, interrupted the work. Covid-19 then stymied plans for a Sydney première in 2020. Unusually for a new opera, Eucalyptus has been workshopped as well as enjoying concert performances at the Perth and Brisbane Festivals, before the three performances in Melbourne under the auspices of Victorian Opera and Opera Australia. One hopes a Sydney season will follow soon.

Eucalyptus is an adaptation of Murray Bail’s eponymous and enigmatic 1998 novel, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1999. The work was in the process of being adapted into a much-publicised film starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, with sets already built, but this was ultimately cancelled because of differences between Crowe and director Jocelyn Moorhouse. Peter Craven has written of Bail’s novel: ‘His sentences sing no tune, and he is always in danger of defying the very comprehension of the reader because his material seems so undramatic’, but then qualifies this: ‘It is a fiction – novel is scarcely the word – built on the abyss of the impossibility of writing fiction.’

Michael Petruccelli as the Stranger, Simon Meadows as Holland, and Desiree Frahn as Ellen (photograph by Charlie Kinross)

A novel essentially ‘about’ the naming of trees, the beauty of a young girl, and the art of storytelling; at first glance it might seem unpromising material for a full-length, large-scale opera. There are four principal characters: the widowed landowner Holland (Simon Meadows, baritone); his ‘speckled beauty’ daughter Ellen (Desiree Frahn, soprano); the tree inspector Mr Cave (Samuel Dundas, baritone); and the unnamed Stranger (Michael Petruccelli, tenor), as well as the fairy godmother-like Sprunt Sisters, played by Natalie Jones and Dimiti Shepherd. The plot revolves around the challenge that Holland sets for the hand of his daughter – the successful candidate will have to name the various types of eucalyptus trees on his extensive property. The opera reflects the idea of the fairytale established in the novel, oscillating between fact, epitomised by the pedantic tree expert Mr Cave, and fable, presented by the unnamed spinner of tales, the Stranger; the one able to name everything contrasted with the ultimately successful figure who never directly names anything, remaining unnamed at the end of the work.

There are strong echoes of the contest to win the title figure in Puccini’s Turandot, and even elements of a similar theme in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The endless storytelling in Scheherazade is also suggested. As Mills points out, the setting of his opera also taps into a fascinating tradition of operas set in forests such as Der Freischütz, Hansel and Gretel, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The forest becomes a magic, sometimes numinously threatening realm where transformations occur. Bail’s novel is never specific about the time period or the setting, but director Michael Gow has used a line from the novel describing a character’s eyes as being ‘like Lawrence of Arabia in the film’. The David Lean epic appeared in 1962, so the setting for the opera is a small town in the early 1960s. Simone Romaniuk’s very effective costumes evoke the Australia of this period.

Mills sees a difference between the Ellen of the book and the opera, where the impact of the death of her mother during Ellen’s birth more strongly colours the depiction of the relationship with her over-protective father whose well-meaning but often inexplicable decisions regarding her future she attempts to understand; she certainly has more agency than her novelistic counterpart, and hers is a rite of passage at the core of the opera. Frahn gave the character substance and coherence amid this often surreally mysterious landscape. A particular vocal high point for her rich soprano was an aria in the second half: ‘I hang the washing on the line’, where the lyrical qualities were enhanced by her acute sense of the drama of the approaching climax. The voice has a gleaming warmth of tone and rises effortlessly to a high C on several occasions.

Frahn’s scenes with Petruccelli as the Stranger, whose lyric tenor blended well with her voice, were arresting, the potent fascination this character evokes in her contrasted with the dry and austere Mr Cave of Samuel Dundas. The second act is dominated by the scenes with Ellen and the Stranger as he tells her a series of stories which engenders their growing fascination with each other. Petruccelli has a voice capable of nuance and subtlety, but with tenorial ring and ‘bite’ when necessary.

Both men’s baritones are mellifluous and give these characters depth and substance. Dundas creates the buttoned-up, rather nerdy character of the expert with deliberately rather tight vocal tone, only occasionally allowing it to flow more fully as suppressed emotion bursts through to the surface. Ellen describes him as ‘bare as a sawmill plank, as neat as an unused room’. Cave is aware of the somewhat ridiculous figure he cuts with his rueful observation: ‘By the time you’ve got through naming names, everything else has left your brain!’ A strong guffaw broke out when he named a ‘Eucalytus i brockway Dundas’ – the singer riffing on his own name.

Meadows’ role has more vocal contrast, with an often aggressive defence of his desire to protect his daughter; ‘I don’t want you riding their motor bikes; I don’t want you smoking their Lucky Strikes.’ But there are several moments of intense emotion as he remembers the death of his wife and Ellen’s twin brother. Here Meadows displays a vocal depth and lyricism that is most impressive, creating a complex, deeply flawed, but ultimately sympathetic persona.

Jonathan Mills

Mills’s music is difficult to categorise. He uses standard operatic orchestral instruments, often played in unusual ways, such as rubber balls dragged across bass drums, or cymbals bowed as well as struck. A clarinettist plays a slide whistle, evoking different birds, and there are many other equally striking examples. A mesmerising, drone-like opening suggests Aboriginal musical tropes, while an off-stage chorus repeat the word ‘eucalyptus’, broken into its separate syllables. There is frequent use of polytonality and the use of instruments for their percussive qualities, the orchestral sound enveloping the action, often creating angular and dissonant shapes. Also prominent are folk-like elements in the shaping of vocal lines.

Mills has absorbed and synthesised much of the operatic music of the twentieth century with the influence of the German modernism of Alban Berg and Alexander von Zemlinsky apparent. At the same time, there are elements of the impressionistic qualities of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, as well as the operatic music of Benjamin Britten. However, probably the operatic composer that comes to mind most strongly is Leoš Janáček, with a similar fusion of folk elements into a modernist sound world. Ellen could be a twenty-first century contemporary of one of Janáček’s great female roles. All of this creates a unique sound world that builds on much of what has gone before but that is very much operatic music of today. A word to describe much of Mills’s music is ‘beautiful’ – seldom used in discussion of much contemporary opera.

The orchestral sound emerges from the imagination of Ellen, with the trees embodied by the Victorian Opera chorus being an ever-present ‘character’ in the drama (there is a ‘Vocal Soundscape’ pre-recorded by the West Australian Opera Chorus). The performance is expertly conducted by Tahu Matheson, as in Perth and Brisbane. It is excellent to see a large chorus deployed when so much contemporary opera has either a small group or none at all, sometimes for practical reasons, and also indicative of the fact that many contemporary composers seem daunted by large vocal forces.

The chorus and orchestra create, in Mills’s words, a world where ‘landscape and memory become intertwined through imaginary time and space, both unfolding on stage’, evoking the unique sounds and smells of Australia. Despite the second act being considerably longer than the first, it has more of a sense of momentum and invention, and Mills’s music is exhilarating and deeply moving at times. The musical contrasts between the various stories the stranger tells adds to the often kaleidoscopic variety of colours, tempi, and changing atmosphere as the denouement approaches.

It is a happy circumstance that the librettist is Meredith Oakes, who, among many other important outputs, wrote the celebrated if controversial libretto for Thomas Adès’s The Tempest (2004) – undoubtedly, together with Brett Dean’s Hamlet (2017), the two finest twenty-first century Shakespeare operas. Eucalyptus is a novel that one might link closely with Shakespeare’s island play. Oakes’s libretto captures much of the essence of Bail’s work, and she has the gift of finding the pithy, often poetic, and eminently singable phrase which succinctly sums up the situation. In Ellen’s monologue, which opens the second act, she describes the atmosphere in the forest of an evening: ‘You could smell the tractors rusting in their sheds. You could hear the tree bark peeling when the children’s moon wore a diamond earring and even the air stopped moving’, all underpinned by Mills’s slowing, moving chords in the orchestra. There is also an appealingly laconic and very Australian sense of humour at work, eliciting many chuckles from the audience.

The staging has strong meta-theatrical elements, with the sense of performance ever-present in the stunning Palais Theatre in St Kilda. The orchestra is concealed at the back of the stage behind screens on which vivid images are projected. The main playing area has rows of chairs, as in a conventional concert performance of an opera, but a natural interaction of characters occurs as if the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the performance were not clearly visible. It is a hybrid staging, and one hopes that there might be a future production where the full resources of operatic theatre could be employed. Eucalyptus joins a growing canon of Australian operas, virtually all sadly neglected; perhaps it might find a place in the contemporary repertoire.

Eucalyptus (Victorian Opera and Opera Australia) continues at the Palais Theatre until 19 October 2024. Performance attended: October 16.