Deborah Cheetham sings it like it is about our past and future

There was a compelling reason why Yorta Yorta soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham chose a particular day for her Sydney Festival performance.

Australian soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham gave a powerful performance in Woven Song.

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There was a compelling and emotional reason why Yorta Yorta soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham chose January 25 for her Sydney Festival Woven Song performance – it was to mark “the last day of truly independent self-determination for First Nations people”.

Presented by Short Black Opera and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Cheetham performed seven songs, five of them based on tapestries by the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne of paintings by First Nations artists which have been presented to Australian embassies in nine countries.

Cheetham describes herself thus: “A 21st century urban woman who is Yorta Yorta by birth, stolen generation by government policy, soprano by diligence, composer by necessity and lesbian by practice.”

She has written some of the songs in the mother tongue of the First Nations artists, but she also quotes the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights for her harrowing song, Above Knowing, which deals with the mass arrest of more than 1500 Jews in German-occupied Paris in 1942, known as the Vel d’Iv Roundup after the velodrome where they were kept in abysmal conditions before being sent by train to Auschwitz. The Australian Embassy stands on the site of where this atrocity took place.

Cheetham compared this with the “cultural amnesia” that afflicts Australia when it comes to the chains put around the necks of Indigenous men in the early part of the last century. The Jewish victims were at least memorialised, she told her audience. “Where’s the bronze statue for these men?” she asked.

Equally powerful is her song Catching Breath about the monochrome tapestry which hangs in the Singapore embassy. It is based on an old photograph of an Indigenous warrior. On the back of it is written “Cunningham” – the photographer’s name – “1900” and “Armidale”. Four vocalists – Cheetham, mezzo Linda Barcan, tenor Matthew Reardon and baritone Stephen Grant – sing the insistently repeated refrains “My name, speak my name”, “1900”, “Armidale”, and “My country” accompanied by piano and string quartet.

The stark message is contrasted by some lovely instrumental passages evoking the unknown man’s country, New England.

Cheetham, who was taken from her mother at three weeks and only met and came to know her in her 20s, drew on that experience for My Mother’s Country, painted by Daisy West, which now hangs in the Tokyo embassy.

“These tapestries speak for us in nine countries of the world – Singapore, France, Ireland, India, China, US, Japan, Italy and the Vatican – and a 10th work for Indonesia is being created,” she said.

As an acknowledgment of this diversity she used musicians or instruments from some of these countries – a shakuhachi flute from Japan, and a guzheng, a Chinese zither, for a song about the tapestry in Beijing inspired by Pukumani funeral poles.

But her most personal work was Gulaga, an instrumental trio performed by SSO musicians flautist Joshua Batty, oboist Diana Doherty and clarinetist Andrew Goodwin. Since her teens, for 35 years Cheetham had a recurring dream about a mountain that came down to the sea. She finally found it on the south coast of NSW where the traditional owners took her up it and covered her face in ochre from slopes.

“I hadn’t seen the mountain, but it had seen me.”

DETAILS

• CONCERT Woven Song by Deborah Cheetham

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN Wednesday, January 25