Life for Deborah Cheetham changed in row L, seat 23, writes Larry Schwartz.
Had it not been for her musical talent, Deborah Cheetham might never have met the mother she’d been told had abandoned her in a cardboard box in a field.
The soprano, who will perform with a young protege at a fund-raising concert this week, was twentysomething when she looked out into the audience in a Canberra theatre and saw a stranger who “could be my identical twin”.
They met afterwards and discovered a common relative in the singer Jimmy Little. “Would you like to meet your mother?” the young woman said of Little’s younger sister. “And I thought yeah, sure, why not? I was almost careless about it.”
Cheetham, now in her late 40s, was taken from her mother weeks after her birth in Nowra on the NSW south coast and raised by a white couple.
“You can only be in the life that you are in,” she says over coffee at a restaurant near the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts, which she heads, at the Victorian College of the Arts.
“So I can’t really compare the struggles I have had to anybody else’s. But it is a pretty marginalised space – Aboriginal, stolen generation, lesbian, recovering Baptist, opera singer. It is fairly unique.”
Cheetham will sing The Flower Duet from Lakme with soprano Shauntaii Batzke, a second year bachelor of music student and development artist in a program run by Cheetham’s Short Black Opera Company.
They’re taking part in Sista Act, a night of comedy, opera, dance, cabaret and more, initiated by writer and performer Fiona Scott-Norman. Others include sisters Rachael and Lisa Maza, Deborah Conway and Hannah Gadsby. They will be helping to raise money for the Worawa Aboriginal Girls College in Healesville, whose principal, Lois Peeler, was one of the original Sapphires.
Batzke is a NSW opera and gospel singer, who sang on Archie Roach’s recent album Into the Bloodstream, and is in the second year of the bachelor of music program at the Melbourne Conservatorium at Melbourne University. She is a developing artist with Short Black Opera Company.
Batzke made her opera debut in Cheetham’s 2010 opera Pecan Summer.
Cheetham, who played a mother of a child taken away, says she had not sung onstage with other Aboriginal singers until Pecan Summer.
Cheetham was just 14 when her music teacher took her to the Sydney Opera House to hear Dame Joan Sutherland sing in Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow. “I was sitting in row L seat 23 when she came floating down the stairs. My whole life changed. I wanted to be a singer from that moment.”
Cheetham explored her emerging racial and sexual identity in her late 1990s autobiographical play White Baptist Abba Fan and based Pecan Summer on the February 1939 walk-off by 200 people from Cummeragunja Mission near Barmah, on the Murray River. She did not know until a month into her research that her maternal grandparents had taken part. “I’m still … how deeply it affects me today.”
Her mother, Monica, died weeks before opening night. It had taken nearly a decade to form a close relationship. She was wary when they first met in her early 20s. “Right at that point I had no idea I had been taken from her,” Cheetham recalls. “At that point we were not even acknowledging that there was a stolen generation.”
Cheetham had found her battered and bruised in a hospital bed in St Marys, western Sydney, after a motor accident. Nurses had helped her put on make-up for the occasion. The reunion was “beautiful, painful, unwieldy, necessary”.
“You’re not only meeting someone who has never been in your life but someone you have never seen a picture of, have no knowledge of except potentially she left you to die in a cardboard box in a field. That’s what I had been told. Of course, it wasn’t true.”
The Age, 13-May-2013
Larry Schwartz Writer 