THE newest opera to be staged by Victorian Opera this month is “The Visitors”, by ANU composer Chris Sainsbury.

It is common for plays to be adapted into operas – for example, “Macbeth” or “Tosca”. Neither Verdi nor Puccini is around to share creative insights, but Sainsbury is, so I caught up with him for coffee at The Street Theatre, where he described the background to the opera, which is now on the Victorian Certificate of Education 2023 curriculum.

“The Visitors” is set to Jane Harrison’s play (now also a novel) of the same name. In it, six indigenous elders and a young woman on shore watch the tall ships sailing up the coast in 1788 and ask questions. 

Sainsbury, an associate professor at the ANU, is the founder of the Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers Program. On his father’s side he identifies as Dharug/Eora, and was for years head of Arts and Media at the Eora Centre in Sydney. 

The original commission came from Richard Mills, retiring director of Victorian Opera, who had firm stipulations: “The opera needed to have a good story, a strong trajectory with metaphorical content, good interplay between the characters, a beginning, middle and end and a rise to the finish”.

Above all, he told Sainsbury, he wanted what the punters wanted – “give us tunes”.

Sainsbury thought it was a bit like asking him to write a commercial, but then decided he could create something of about an hour’s length that could be on-sold to festivals.

He’d seen Harrison’s play at the Sydney Festival in 2020 and she eventually agreed to turning it into an opera even though, he told her, “when I create an opera, I bring my own expression”. 

Harrison and Sainsbury, both First Nations creators, insisted on an all-indigenous cast of singers, so they ended up with six Australian Aboriginal singers and one indigenous Samoan. As well, it’s directed by Noongar artist Isaac Drandic, from WA.

After Harrison created a set of songs and recitative, Sainsbury read it through.

“On the first day I sketched three tunes, and on the second day I marked out what could be ensemble pieces, arias and recitative,” he says.

Sainsbury says the work is full of Aboriginal humour and it’s mostly fun, but there are “a few salient points here and there”, especially when the local Eora people watching “the visitors” arriving in tall ships remember how other “visitors” arrived 18 years before with Captain Cook and a gun was fired.

Harrison was able to find some common words shared through NSW Aboriginal languages, but also put in Dharug words, such as the onomatopoeic “gooraberra” for gun and the repeated “winima” for coming.

In the music itself, one theme that echoes between the cello and violin links to the sandstone of the Sydney region, while elsewhere the music draws on the song of the pied butcher bird. 

“All the songs using birdsong move towards a voting point or stream from them and give a great deal of structure,” Sainsbury says.

The opera is structured around three different votes by the elders. First, they won’t let the “visitors” in. In the second vote, people change sides, considering the traditional protocol of welcoming strangers, then in the third vote they achieve consensus, but Sainsbury won’t tell us what it is. 

With the recitative, Sainsbury relied on his own knowledge of traditional Aboriginal melodies, leaving the orchestration “light and elemental”, performed by a chamber orchestra of around 12 with strings, guitar, percussion, woodwind and brass.

The fact that the elders would all have been male in 1788 gave him a limited tonal spectrum of voices, so they brought in female voices. After all, that there would’ve been women in leadership positions in their own domain.

This is an opera, and makes demands on its performers, but Sainsbury found he could draw on his own interest in jazz, modernism and impressionism, as well as birdsong, so that, given the limited pool of opera singers available, it was possible to use soul and rock singers.

Even so, there are some trained stand-outs, such as Biripi tenor Elias Wilson, Canberra folk singer Lillian Fromhyr who has Yuin ancestry, and well-known operatic bass Eddie Muliaumaseali’I.

“All the voices seem to blend well,” Sainsbury says, and considering that he has Eora/Dharug ancestors who were there during first arrival, he says “it’s a full circle for me and it has some meaning”. 

“The Visitors”, Victorian Opera at the Arts Centre, Melbourne, October 18-21. A Sydney Theatre Company and Moogahlin Performing Arts production of the stage play (on which the libretto is based) is at The Playhouse, November 8-11