Above: Marcus Corowa as Yadaka and dancers in Opera Australia’s The Drover’s Wife’ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari.
Following Opera Australia’s walkabout through productions ranging from loved repertoire, musical theatre, and through production revivals, they have now come home. In a way that no other opera company can.
An honest, inclusive national theatre of sorts is reborn here, via Henry Lawson’s tale of loneliness and violence in the Snowy Mountains. The no-holds-barred history highlights the parallel and interlocked trajectories of First Nations survival and the colonisers trying to prosper in harsh natural and emotional landscapes.
The Drover’s Wife – The Opera arrives via a stunning collaboration with the Queensland Performing Arts Centre and Oombarra Productions. A First Nations opera – Opera Australia’s first- has been launched onto the Dame Joan Sutherland stage with powerful design elements plus direction and makes our hearts burst.
A cast of local opera and musical theatre trained vocal talent, many being First Nations performers, premieres this piece, with libretto by Leah Purcell AM and George Palmer AM. George Palmer’s colourful score follows the dialogue in new musical territory of sweeping sung conversation and some extended song. There is setting of both English plus Aboriginal language with equal expression and success.
We are captivated by this score’s agility, flexibility and directness as some traditional operatic gesturing exists alongside some very concise, contemporary instrumental writing to evoke loneliness, cultural tension, love and loss. This is a significant new instalment of opera music, based on texts developed from Henry Lawson, one of our literary greats. The new score is from the composer who gave us the opera music for Cloudstreet, setting the story by Tim Winton.
Above : Nina Korbe as Molly, Marcus Corowa as Yadaka, Shauntai Abdul-Rahman as Black Mary and Dancers in Opera Australia’s ‘The Drover’s Wife ‘ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari
This opera is devoid of a sung chorus, but includes Aboriginal dancers and characters who are deceased in the story returning as a empathetic troupe. These dancers in traditional paint or ethereal spiritual silk, guided to support characters or memory by superb choreography by Bidjara woman Yolande Brown.
A strong representation of First Nations culture, and the violent treatment of all variations in skin throughout our colonial history by the authorities, drovers, merchants and swagmen characters is emphasised by this chorus of dancers in reaction to the brutal stage action. This is a plight in parallel to the wife and mother Molly. Her suffering at the hands of a drunken husband and other men plus society’s attitudes and action to take her mixed race children away remains ongoing at the end of the opera.
Above: Nina Korbe as Molly and dancers in Opera Australia’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari
In the role of Molly, emerging opera star Nina Korbe is a vocal and dramatic powerhouse. Having studied opera in Queensland, and as the first Aboriginal student at London’s Royal College of Music, she proves herself from the outset as a perfect choice for this project and storyline.
In character, she supplies a staunch representation of a single mother on the land. She sings with shotgun handy and with bulletproof accuracy in her rendering of Palmer’s fresh, athletic vocal writing. This writing demands her to smoothly deliver lines that twist back on themselves and flick into the high country in an instant.
As well as showing diva-like dramatic focus, with an incredible range from rough severity to broken vulnerability, we settle into otherworldy and recurring moments of aria-like reflection that compare herself to strung snow gums, talk of escaping breath as she survivng the landscape and predicament.
Above: Dancers and Shauntai Abdul-Rahman as Black Mary in Opera Australia’s The Drover’s Wife 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari
Korbe, a Koa, Kuku Yalanji, Wakka Wakka woman, is joined onstage by Bundjalung tenor Marcus Corowa who has had acclaimed performances in Bran Nue Dae, Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits as well as Beautiful: Carol King the Musical. Corowa’s Yadaka, the Aboriginal man fleeing authorities to work and have shelter around the Johnson hut emerges with endearing, capable voice, is a lithe spirit on the stage and a gifted ensemble performer.
His layered creation of the character is an important link between cultures, the true story of Molly’s birth mother. His past and present fluidly expressed love interest are both clearly explored, with a history of loss and life challenges depicted like for Molly in memory sequences and dance as well. Through his character’s treatment we are reminded of the treatment of Aboriginal people still shamelessly harsh and ruthless at the turn of the twentieth century.
Above: Nina Korbe as Molly and Marcus Corowa as Yadaka in Opera Australia’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari.
Lyricism plus a blend of the elegance and sharp scars of survival are depicted also in the compelling set by Isabel Hudson. A gnarled snow gum wrapped around the ring of the active space ends in the family hut. Its gnarled and weathered arc passes over the top of some rocks used by the cast to move over and sit on. Aboriginal dancers in Tess Schofield’s silky costumes complete with possum headbands sourced traditionally leap to the top of the twisted tree then down the rocks to enter the earthly area.
Molly’s parents (Opera Australia regular John Longmuir’s richly voiced Jock, plus the hauntingly beautiful Black Mary so expressively realised in mute or svelte sung moments by Wiradjuri performer Shauntai Abdul-Rahman) appeared often in memory or as spirits watching from this stage left tree area also.
From the back of the stage, a torn line opens and closes to reveal video snippets of the more gentle landscape than what we are witnessing on stage. The music often swells to acompany this reveal exactly. Video design by Craig Wilkinson is to be commended here.
Above: Marcus Corowa as Yadaka and Shane Lowrencev as Douglas Merchant in Opera Australia’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari.
Enter Central Queensland performer Nick Smith in the role of Molly’s eldest, all-seeing son Danny and the dynamic core cast is complete. Smith sings with musical theatre crossover voice that is true and so appropriate for this story on this stage. His vocal precision and comfortable movement plus hope and group sentiment is a key cog in the work’s comment on cultural co-operation.
Performing with appropriate youthful enthusiasm and level of expression, his work with Marcus Corowa is a joy to witness- both theatrically and on a human or story level. Smith’s final spear-in-hand declamation- ‘I know who I am’ with the painted male dancers will level any audience member watching.
Above: Nick Smith as Danny and dancers in Opera Australia’s ‘The Drover’s Wife ‘ 2026. Photo Credit Carlita Sari
Playing the roles of the intruders to the Johnson patch whist Molly’s drover husband Joe is ‘away’ are Australian Opera artist Shane Lowrencev as the dangerously curious peddler, Biripi tenor Elias Wilson as a convincing trooper and Barry Ryan as an exemplary swaggie. Joe Johnson’s fellow drovers, rapists and murderers were played with visceral and measured intimidation by Gourmjanyuk Wemba Wemba and Greek man Zoy Frangos alongside Australian Opera regular Simon Meadows.
Harsh language, confrontations and admirable physicality abound in this verismo opera. Truths and ferocities and predicaments for country women in history as well as First Nations people we need never to forget and never to repeat are the keen verismo elements on display here.
This new work is not to be missed. For any first timer to opera it excels in its expression and accessibility. For those of us already saturated with singers, instruments and dancers from other operatic centres’ traditions, it is a shift from this routine and a significant study of Australian and Aboriginal mythologies and history.
It is also proof that similar collaborations need to successfully twist the growing tree of our national opera company over future years – sprouting fuller, finer artistry, imagery, language and sound than ever before.
