G. Puccini's La Rondine (VIVA! Opera 76)
Ayako Ohtake, a Sydney-based Japanese soprano singer, hosts monthly music segment called VIVA! Opera for SBS Japanese.
SBS Japanese
22/05/2025 05:47 You can listen to both the segment and the music via our catch-up link (available for one week after broadcast).
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ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
Geraldine Brooks on her memoir Memorial Days and travelling to Flinders Island to do 'the work of grief'
In 2019, Geraldine Brooks was sitting at her desk at home in Martha's Vineyard, working on her sixth novel, Horse, when the phone rang. On the line was a doctor from a hospital in Washington DC, calling to say her husband, journalist and author Tony Horwitz, had collapsed in the street. "I'm expecting her to say, 'And now he is in surgery,' or, 'We're keeping him for observation,'" Brooks tells ABC TV's Compass. "And instead, she says, 'He's dead.' Just like that." Horwitz — a Pulitzer Prize-winner, like his wife — was midway through a busy tour promoting his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. Brooks couldn't understand how a man so fit and full of vitality had died so suddenly. "I just couldn't assimilate it." She wanted to howl in pain but feared that if she lost control, she might never regain it. In her new memoir, Memorial Days, she describes how, from that day on, she put on an "endless, exhausting performance" to give the impression she was fine. Eventually, however, Brooks realised she couldn't go on pretending. "I felt like this love had not been acknowledged by the capacious grief that it deserved. That's when I thought of Flinders Island," she says. In 2023, Brooks travelled to the remote Tasmanian island to confront her feelings, a cathartic experience she recounts in Memorial Days. And now, two years later, she returns to Flinders Island with ABC TV's Compass to discuss the important work of grief. Now one of Australia's most celebrated authors, Brooks began her journalism career at the Sydney Morning Herald. After covering the Franklin Dam controversy in the early 80s, she got a scholarship to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, where she met a fellow journalist by the name of Tony Horwitz. "I was initially attracted to him because he was such an idealist. He had this high moral seriousness and a great sense of humour," Brooks recalls. The couple married in France in 1984 and moved to Sydney for a brief stint, before life again took a different direction. "Out of the blue, the Wall Street Journal called and said, 'Would I like to become the Middle East correspondent?'" The answer was yes, and an adrenaline-filled decade followed, reporting on geopolitical crises throughout the region. As foreign correspondents, Brooks and Horwitz often shared joint bylines, earning the tag 'Hobro' in the Wall Street Journal newsroom. "We were always getting calls in the middle of the night [to cover a story] … We lived with a duffel bag packed with crazy things; I had a chador and a bulletproof vest. "We often worked on different sides of the same story — [if] he was in Iraq, I would be in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and vice versa." Brooks eventually gave up journalism to write fiction, publishing the bestselling plague novel, Year of Wonders, in 2001 and winning a Pulitzer in 2006 for her US Civil War novel, March. She and Horwitz remained in the US, raising their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, in an 18th-century mill house on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the New England coast. "Their relationship is probably one of the all-time love stories," Bizu says. "More than anything, [he] revered and respected and loved how smart, intelligent and passionate she was about everything." Brooks first visited Flinders Island with Horwitz in 2000 to research a novel. Together they'd toured the island, marvelling at its natural beauty. They were confronted by its dark history too. At Wybalenna, they viewed the unmarked graves of Aboriginal people who died on the island after being forcibly removed from Tasmania in the 1800s. Brooks ended up abandoning the project, but she was taken with the island and toyed with the idea of one day buying a block there. When she returned in 2023, it was in very different circumstances. "For three years after his death, I'd been pretending to be normal. And I wasn't normal. I wasn't right … I wasn't myself," she says. "You're supposed to work through denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, and I'd vaulted all the intermediate steps and pretended that I'd arrived at acceptance. You can't do that. "I needed to go back and work my way through those steps." For Brooks, Flinders Island offered "time and space … to do the business of mourning". "Grief counselling would've been one way," she acknowledges. "But I thought, 'Well, what do writers do? Writers write.'" She rented a shack overlooking a goblet-shaped bay, gazing out at the granite outcrop known as Mount Killiecrankie. There, alone and without distraction, Brooks returned to the worst day of her life to work through her grief. "I would get up in the morning and … do the work, write my thoughts, and then when I realised that I had a cramp and hadn't moved in hours, I'd go for a walk." She found solace in the rocky, windswept landscape. "I fell in love with granite," she says. "The rocks on Flinders Island are in these sculptural shapes. They're great works of art, monumental sculptures that completely moved me in the way art moves you." She also found another kind of comfort in her solitude. "I realised I wasn't alone. I was with Tony. I was able to be with him night and day. And it was wonderful." Brooks fell into a routine on the island, ending each day with a swim in the ocean. "At first it was just a swim. But as I got deeper and deeper into the work, I realised that there was something almost ceremonial about it," she says. "It became this gift to myself to be fully immersed and completely alone in my skin, in the water, like some kind of aquatic creature. And it felt cleansing and healing." Brooks felt a connection between her daily swim and the mikvah, a purifying bathing ritual that had formed part of her conversion to Judaism when she married Horwitz three decades earlier. Horwitz's Judaism was cultural rather than religious or spiritual. "If he had died and I was an Orthodox Jew, there would've been a very set road map to travel, a pathway into and out of grief," Brooks says. "There are strict rules. The first one, I think, is incredibly insightful: in the first hours after somebody experiences a loss like this, you don't even offer them condolences. They're in a state of 'stupefying grief' is how it's put. All you do is help them. "It's only after the burial that the grieving and condolences start." Known as Shiva, this formal mourning period lasts for seven days. "You sit and let people come and talk about the deceased. You don't bathe, you cover the mirrors, you're taken out of time," Brooks says. In her travels, Brooks has observed similar mourning rituals in other cultures, but found these customs largely absent from Western society. "I had no idea what a brutal, broken system it is when somebody dies suddenly far from home among strangers," she says. "I wasn't allowed to see his body. I got to Washington thinking that I could be with him and hold his hand and say goodbye. And I get to the hospital, and it's not allowed. They just show you a photograph and it's horrible. It wasn't until days later when he was finally released to the funeral home that I was finally able to see him." Alone on Flinders Island, Brooks found herself instinctively adopting the practices of Shiva. "I realised, I'd been swimming every day, but I hadn't had a shower, and there was no mirror in the shack," she says. "I was making it up as I went along but finding my own way to some of these things that have been enshrined for millennia in old religious practices." During her stay on Flinders Island, revisiting that terrible day in her mind, Brooks felt the howl of grief return. "I felt it coming back and I let it come," she says. "And after that, I realised that the time had done what it needed to do, and I was ready to go home." Brooks will never stop grieving for Horwitz, but she's found a kind of peace. "What I have been able to do … [is] set down that life I'd expected to have — growing old with him — and just accept that that life is gone. I ain't getting that back. I have to make the most of the life that I do have." Writing Memorial Days was instrumental to this process. "When you're in grief, the best thing you can do is tell your story … It wasn't until I wrote my story that I was able to feel like a normal human being again," she says. Watch Geraldine Brooks. Grief, A Love Story on Compass on Sunday night at 6:30pm on ABC TV, or stream now on iview.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength
This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings. 'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie. Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.' Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend. The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season. Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay. The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.' Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish. As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2. Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'. '[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.' The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.) 'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame]. 'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.' Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'. Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.' In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.' Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.' Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects. After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight. 'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.' I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.' She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it. 'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.' Loading She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!' Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.
The Age
3 hours ago
- The Age
‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength
This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings. 'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie. Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.' Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend. The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season. Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay. The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.' Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish. As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2. Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'. '[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.' The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.) 'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame]. 'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.' Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'. Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.' In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.' Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.' Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects. After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight. 'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.' I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.' She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it. 'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.' Loading She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!' Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.
