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In the lead-up to a NAIDOC Week concert that celebrates her groundbreaking career, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon reflects on her journey from Stolen Child to opera star. By Anna Snoekstra.

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon on music and seeking certainty

Soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon.

Credit: Stefanie Zingsheim

I meet Deborah Cheetham Fraillon on a chilly Melbourne morning. We sit on the deck of a small cafe, the pale winter sun on our backs and our hands wrapped around our coffees to keep them warm. Even in her puffer jacket and scarf, Cheetham Fraillon radiates creative power.

After a huge career in the arts, she is being honoured during NAIDOC Week with a celebratory concert of her work at Hamer Hall. Recently, Cheetham Fraillon was updating her artist bio and decided that, instead of trying to jam her expansive CV into one paragraph, less was more. “I distilled it down to just a couple of things: Yorta Yorta by birth. Stolen Generation by government policy. Soprano by diligence. Composer by necessity.” She smiles slyly, then adds, “And lesbian by practice.”

Deborah is newly married after a whirlwind romance with Australian Ballet conductor Nicolette Fraillon. Although she lives with her wife in Melbourne now, she was raised in Sydney. She grew up in the southern suburbs with the white Baptist family she was placed with by the Australian government. “I was taken from my mother when I was three weeks old,” she tells me. “The family that I grew up with, they didn’t take me, they just received me as stolen goods, but I was fortunate. I had a very loving family.”

Even as a child, Cheetham Fraillon loved music. She says, “I can’t remember a time really, when I wasn’t singing.” The Cheetham family were working class and the idea that Deborah might have a career in music was never something they imagined. Instead, they saw Deborah going to secretarial college like her older sisters, but her teacher at Penshurst Girls High School, Jennifer King, noticed Deborah’s musical ability in the school band and championed it.

Initially, Cheetham Fraillon was a flautist, but when she experienced her first opera, everything changed. “It was the 19th of February, 1979. That’s the first time I went to the opera,” she recalls. “Jennifer and her husband, Lionel, took me to see The Merry Widow, which was staged in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House, a Belle Époque, grand, lavish production. And of course, at the centre of that was Dame Joan Sutherland. And that changed the course of my life right then and there.”

Opera was Cheetham Fraillon’s calling and she decided the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music was the place to realise it. She says it was “that turning point in your life when you realise that music was more than something that you could do, it’s actually who you are. And that certainly happened for me in my high school years.” Her music teacher spoke to her reluctant adoptive mother on her behalf and won her over. Cheetham Fraillon went to the conservatorium and excelled there, which led to the opportunity to study in New York with the Metropolitan Opera and The Juilliard School.

But when she returned to Australia she found it difficult to reach her goals. Before Cheetham Fraillon, there had only ever been one other Indigenous opera singer, Wuli Wuli tenor Harold Blair. As she was knocked back from countless auditions, Cheetham Fraillon worried that perhaps the cultural embracing of his talent was an anomaly. “I realised that I had a choice to make,” she tells me. “At first you think, instantly, Oh, well, then I’m not good enough. Then I realised, Well, hang on a minute, I know I can do this, so what is going on here? Either I can accept it and be defeated by it or see what opportunities I could create for myself.”

Cheetham Fraillon decided to write her own opera. At the time, there had never been an opera in Australia written by an Indigenous person, but that only motivated her further. The title, Pecan Summer, came first, stimulated by a conversation where someone had questioned her ancestry. “Throughout my life people try to define the colour of my skin,” she tells me. “That day they said, ‘Oh, are you Aboriginal?’ Yes. ‘Oh, you don’t look that Aboriginal, and your skin’s not that dark. It’s really quite fair. What colour would you say your skin is?’ These are the icebreaker topics that people will sometimes initiate a conversation with you. Strangers.”

Later that day she’d gone to get a coffee and cake at a cafe. Musing over the conversation, she compared the skin of her hand to her latte and then to her piece of pecan pie. “At that stage it was just a bit more pecan. It was summer at the time, so I thought Pecan Summer and I wrote it down in my diary.”

Six years later she was awarded a two-year fellowship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Board of the Australia Council for the Arts to write her first opera. She had her title, but she didn’t have a story. She spoke to Boon Wurrung Elder and Aboriginal rights activist N’arweet Aunty Carolyn Briggs, who advised her to go to Yorta Yorta Country and find her own story, telling her she might be especially interested in the walk-off from the Cummeragunja mission. Cheetham Fraillon took her advice.

The Cummeragunja walk-off was one of the first mass civil protests of First Nations Australians. In 1939, residents of the Cummeragunja station walked off the reserve to protest gross mistreatment by the white station manager, which included poor living conditions, cruelty, reneging on the promise of land and threats of forced child removal. Cheetham Fraillon didn’t initially know that her own grandparents had participated in the walk-off.

She travelled to Yorta Yorta Country to learn the history but found she had her own mental blocks to work through. “You know, once I moved through the guilt that I didn’t know about this history and cut myself enough slack to say, ‘Well, you’re Stolen Generation. You’re piecing together all of your personal history. Why would you know this?’ ” she says. “But you still blame yourself for not knowing. Once I got through that I started to meet Elders who lived that experience and gained permission to tell this story.

“In every way it was a life-changing moment. Here I am writing an opera and that vehicle becomes the means by which I connect with the community that I belong to. The Country I belong to. Yorta Yorta Country. I felt like an impostor. I’d never lived there, how could I call it home? I didn’t understand, even in my 40s, I still hadn’t had the experience of what it was to belong to a Country. And Pecan Summer gave me that belonging.”

In 2009, Cheetham Fraillon founded Short Black Opera, a company that provides training and opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians and includes the Dhungala Children’s Choir. Pecan Summer was Short Black Opera’s first performance and is now hailed as Australia’s first Indigenous opera. The season was a huge success, firmly establishing both Cheetham Fraillon’s career as a powerhouse composer and soprano, as well as the legitimacy of her company, which has continued to grow with further operas, children’s productions and its own chamber ensemble. In 2014, Cheetham Fraillon was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for her “distinguished service to the performing arts as an opera singer, composer and artistic director, to the development of Indigenous artists, and to innovation in performance”.

Yinya dana: lighting the path will mark the 50th anniversary of NAIDOC Week and honour Cheetham Fraillon’s life with a concert partnering the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra with Short Black Opera and the Dhungala Children’s Choir. It will bring together four generations of Indigenous musicians onstage to perform some of Cheetham Fraillon’s most seminal works, including Long Time Living Here, a musical Acknowledgement of Country that opens every performance of the MSO, as well as other main stage performances across Australia, Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace inspired by the voices of the Gunditjmara people who lost their lives protecting their Country, and 2024’s Earth. The work was created to complement Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets, a fixture of international orchestral repertoire for the past century.

Cheetham Fraillon was commissioned in 2023 by the MSO to create Earth. It came just as the country was going through the Voice to Parliament referendum. She was crushed by the experience and describes the outcome of 60 per cent of Australia voting “No” as gut-wrenching.

“It had been an awful, awful process. A divisive, hateful process,” she says. “It emboldened those haters who otherwise would have their opinions but not feel that they could express them so freely and so openly.” She found her ability to develop a work that was meant to celebrate the beauty of the planet and humanity impossible. “I questioned if I could ever write any music again in this country. I seriously didn’t know where I would find the will, the spirit, to write something again and, if I did, what would I say? How would I bring anything at all uplifting to that piece?”

Nicolette Fraillon was invited to conduct the National Ballet in Oslo, so the couple went to Norway. “It was minus 26 degrees,” Deborah says. “We were, you know, knee deep, thigh deep some days, in snow. Something about the muted pristine beauty of that environment gave me the inspiration to write the work. I found an incredibly rich environment in which to extract those ideas that are lying within me, some of which I couldn’t hear because the noise in my own head of that crushing defeat had drowned out just about everything beautiful.

“In Oslo, I found two things. I found a way of speaking about, in musical terms, what Earth is, and I found the belief in what it could be. In Oslo, with the snow falling every day and the beauty of that environment, I realised I could reconnect to what was joyous and beautiful in the world. I’m really proud that I was able to write that work, actually, because I seriously didn’t think I could. It will always hold a special significance for me. It was a turning point of deciding that I still had more to say.”

Later this year, Cheetham Fraillon will travel to the Edinburgh International Festival for the premiere of her most recent work, Treaty. It couldn’t be more topical. After the defeat of the Voice referendum, Cheetham Fraillon believes all other states bar Victoria have essentially abandoned their Treaty processes. But she is seeing the processes begin and believes the dialogue with the Victorian state government is progressing. “I decided that I would call this Treaty because that’s where we’re up to. That’s the single most important thing that Aboriginal people are looking to achieve here, because all the other change we want to effect can stem through that potentially. I don’t use the word hope very much. Hope can keep you on a treadmill. I want certainty. In order to be entitled to any kind of certainty you have to contribute to the process and the way I contribute is through writing music.”

Cheetham Fraillon believes music can create the space for people to respond to what she is saying in their own time, without being asked anything. She says her work opens up that space “whether it’s in Hamer Hall or at the festival in Edinburgh, wherever it is in the world, or just coming out of the speakers of your phone”.

Treaty features didgeridoo soloist Willam Barton, who Cheetham Fraillon is confident can encompass the power of the work. “There’s everything in that piece,” Cheetham Fraillon muses, “just like any day that any of us live, the complexities, the things that do and don’t work, the things that set you back, the things that you have to strive for, the things that always remain out of reach, the joy, the despair. It’s about humanity, and what we long for is to be acknowledged and recognised and valued.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 2, 2025 as "A transcendent Voice".

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