One of the few Australian novels dealing with the first world war, David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, has been adapted for the opera stage – and the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production is a great success.
An opera based on David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter opens in Sydney this weekend.
Carriageworks/Toby Burrows
Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter opens this weekend. It’s not the first opera adaptation of Australian literature – and there are reasons to hope it’s not the last.
David Malouf’s Imaginary Life plays out in the hillsides of the Black Sea. What’s so Australian about that?
Hans Juul Hansen
… further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands…
A sense of unease that comes with visiting the past is palpable in several of the works on show.
Anna Carey, Costa Vista 2014, giclée print mounted on aluminium, Museum of Brisbane
Last year I re-read Johnno, David Malouf’s 1975 novel, with a group of students. I was intrigued to find out how young men and women living in Brisbane today would relate to a novel that has cast such…