Composer Jonathan Mills on new opera Eucalyptus — and why the arts should reject identity politics
From the STC to the MSO, Australia’s arts community is deeply divided over the Israel-Gaza conflict. Knighted composer Johnathan Mills says it’s time to stop beating around the bush on the Middle East and identity politics.
In 2006, when Jonathan Mills was appointed director and chief executive of the Edinburgh International Festival – one of the world’s most coveted arts jobs – relatively few Britons knew who he was.
Then 42, Mills had two operas under his belt and had headed the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Brisbane Biennial International Music Festival. Most British critics and journalists waited to see the Australian composer’s programming line-up before casting judgment on his surprise elevation to Edinburgh’s top role.
Most critics, but not all.
In a caustic column, music reviewer and controversialist Norman Lebrecht called Mills a “minnow” and said his appointment was “so fantastical in its disproportionality, the sheer disparity of peg and hole, that, when apprised of it … I had to lie down … and practise the Alexander technique (another Aussie imposition) to restore the harmonies of the universe”. Lebrecht snootily dismissed the Melbourne festival as “an event that styled itself international but made no waves beyond Tasmania”.
Eighteen years later, over a sparkling mineral water on a cool winter’s morning in Sydney, Mills says the British music journalist’s barbs “were actually very easy to refute. And in the end, extremely helpful, paradoxically”.
He says Lebrecht had limited exposure to the Edinburgh Festival in the years before he was appointed and, to his knowledge, did not come to see his programs.
“I am sorry he’s no Oscar Wilde,” Mills says archly. “Oscar Wilde is the only person who could write his reviews in advance of going to the show. You have to have the genius of Oscar Wilde … Nor did he know anything about me.” Mills’s initial five-year Edinburgh Festival stint, in which he wrestled with an inherited deficit of more than $2m and devised themed programs such as Enlightenment and the New World and Asia, was so successful, his contract was twice extended. The first extension coincided with the 2012 London Olympics and the second took in Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games.
In the end, Mills scored a knighthood for his eight-year tenure leading the globe’s pre-eminent arts festival. “He (Lebrecht) was so ill-informed that it was easy to deal with. Especially as he continued not to come to Edinburgh,” says the composer, who delivers this riposte with a nonchalant air.
The Edinburgh Festival comes up repeatedly while we are discussing Mills’s latest project: the long-awaited Eucalyptus – The Opera, based on the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel by Murray Bail and a centrepiece of this year’s Brisbane Festival.
A modern fable, unconventional love story and celebration of the Australian bush, Eucalyptus has had a lengthy gestation: Opera Australia commissioned Mills to create the score in 2006. “No sooner had I been commissioned to write it than I got a little job in Edinburgh,” the composer quips. He insists “the actual gestation of it wasn’t that long. It was just put on hold while I did the Edinburgh Festival.”
The opera – directed by Michael Gow and featuring Desiree Frahn in the central role of Ellen, a young woman living under the control of her grieving widower father – was meant to be launched in Sydney in 2020, but the Covid pandemic put paid to that.
A concert version of Mills’s opera, set on a property planted with hundreds of species of eucalypt trees, was performed earlier this year at the Perth Festival and sold out. Eucalyptus’s Brisbane outing will mark its debut as a fully fledged opera. Mills says he “loved” working with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and West Australian Opera for the Perth Festival season, but adds: “You bet I’m looking forward to seeing it (in Brisbane) because it was not conceived as an oratorio, it was conceived as an opera. It’s a drama. It’s a story. It’s a fable. It’s a contemporary, ageless fairy story in a uniquely Australian setting.”
For its Brisbane Festival debut, the opera is co-presented by three opera companies, QPAC, the Perth Festival and Queensland Symphony Orchestra. In October it will transfer to Melbourne as part of the Victorian Opera’s season.
Even allowing for its fairytale-like contours, Eucalyptus has an eccentric, even sexist proposition at its heart: Ellen’s father Holland (Simon Meadows) decrees that only a man who can name all of the 500 or so eucalypt species on his property will be worthy of marrying his daughter. Suitors come and suitors go, and things get interesting when a nameless stranger turns up and is more interested in spinning exotic stories inspired by different trees than reciting their names.
Is there a risk 21st-century audiences will see Holland’s arranged marriage plan as impossibly dated? Mills responds that patrons will quickly catch on that this contemporary love story is a fable because the “audacity of opera takes you into the world of eucalypt trees, (and) the vivid imagination of a young woman as she is coming alive to her womanhood … When we translate the novel from page to stage, Ellen becomes a much more vibrant, vivid and central character.”
Mills also says the relationship between Holland and Ellen is far from cliched. The widower “created a sanctuary to look after his precious daughter Ellen and to grieve – he’s very human. He’s very protective but he’s very dignified and loving. But the sanctuary, if you are not careful, becomes a prison.”
This conversation plays out against a soundtrack of clinking crockery and roaring espresso machines in a Sydney cafe near the Botanic Gardens, where Mills has been photographed in a eucalypt grove for this story. Sitting next to us is a man speaking so loudly he might be an unmiked actor projecting his voice to the upper circle, but Mills is not easily distracted.
A visiting professor of music at Yale University, he has a formidable intellect and a swag of high honours. Apart from his knighthood, the 61-year-old has four honorary doctorates and a prestigious French culture gong (the Chevalier de l’Ordre National des Arts et Lettres). In 2024 he was one of only six Australians – including former Labor premiers Daniel Andrews and Mark McGowan – to receive a Companion of the Order of Australia in the King’s Birthday Honours List.
He speaks quickly yet with an almost forensic precision, as his focus shifts from the challenges of transferring Bail’s novel to the stage, to the polarising issue of how arts companies should respond to deep divisions over the Israel-Gaza conflict. He also tells Review why he thinks identity politics in art is reductive and, in vivid detail, he recounts his father’s wartime experiences as a POW surgeon under the Japanese.
Eucalyptus is the composer’s third opera and he knew he would need “a functioning libretto” by the time he left the Edinburgh Festival in 2014. Before then, he started collaborating with London-based Australian librettist Meredith Oakes. “Meredith is probably one of Australia’s greatest playwrights that no one in Australia knows about,” he says. “Her libretti have been performed in opera houses around Europe.”
Mills sought out Oakes partly because she grew up in Australia and “you absolutely needed someone who had been in a eucalypt forest. Who had smelt the smell, who had seen the light, who had seen the haze of the eucalypts’’. Being in a eucalypt forest is “an intense visceral experience that you have to have lived if you are going to write an opera like this”, he says.
To evoke the sounds of a eucalypt forest, he came up with a novel solution: he deploys a backstage chorus as well as an onstage chorus, with both depicting townsfolk, suitors and gossips. The backstage chorus will sing the Latin names of scores of species of eucalypts. “They become a musical evocation of the forest … they are a very active commentary through the drama,” he says. Sometimes they are “drone-like”, at other times “gossipy” or screeching like native birds.
Peter Sculthorpe was another composer who famously invoked the Australian bush and Mills studied with him when he was a student at the University of Sydney. Was Sculthorpe a big influence on the young Mills? “Not in any direct or conscious way,” he replies. “I think what we do as composers or any artists is to absorb influences, making them our own.” However, “the very fact that Peter wanted to think about the evocation of the sound of the bush; of the sound of Australia, is probably his most enduring influence on me and many composers.
“Before Peter, people weren’t asking the question ‘What does Australia sound like?’ ”
From the Sydney Theatre Company to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Australian arts world has struggled to deal with the deep divisions engendered by the Israel-Gaza conflict. Drawing on his experience running the Edinburgh Festival, Mills argues that arts organisations “need to be on these fault lines and arguing for their plurality”.
He advocates recruiting artists from opposite sides of a conflict to the same company, play or concert.
“The arts is a convening place for all of this,” he says. He cites the example of Saravejo arts company East West Theatre Company, which brought together performers from different sides of the 1990s Bosnian war.
He engaged this company to perform at the Edinburgh Festival in 2008 and says that during the Balkans conflict many of its performers did not know if they would survive the siege of their city. Years later, “they are all together in a theatre company – that’s what we need more of. Not separating our identities … My worry at the moment is that if we don’t allow ourselves to engage with other cultures, we will all retreat into our silos. We will retreat into our tribes and we won’t have engagements with each other.”
He also mentions the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra founded in 1999 by Palestinian scholar and author Edward Said and Jewish maestro and pianist Daniel Barenboim. This ensemble includes Arab and Israeli musicians and is still performing today. It is, he says, “a great example of a peacemaking project between Israelis and Palestinians”.
He does not pretend that addressing armed conflicts directly will be easy.
“It’s going to be difficult,” he says.
“There are going to be lots of arguments, but if we don’t have that cross-cultural engagement then we won’t achieve anything … I think the arts are the safest way for dangerous conversations and (provide) a certain neutrality, a certain kind of allegory.
“We hear the world through composers differently. We see the world through painters differently.”
Mills says his time at Edinburgh taught him “we should not be fearful about the nature of the engagement. This (the Edinburgh Festival) was a place that was built out of the rubble of a civilisation that nearly killed itself (during World War II).”
The composer also raises the issue of cultural appropriation and casting. He says provocatively that these days, “you’re not allowed to play a black person as a white person or a white person as a black person or a purple person as a green person … I’m saying quite the opposite – that we should all be playing everyone.” Similarly, he does not want to be narrowly defined by his sexuality. He says: “We all have multiple identities and we have them every day. I happen to be a gay man. But I don’t want to be defined by that. I’m more complex than that.”
He argues that addressing injustices that minorities, including the gay community, have suffered is important. But he adds: “Beyond the question of redressing wrongs and evils … what I would seek is an acknowledgment of the absolute complexity of each individual and their identities.”
Australian poet Dorothy Porter wrote the libretto for his first two operas, Ghost Wife and Eternity Man, which were both performed in Australia and the UK. “The first one was about a woman isolating in the middle of nowhere in a very bleak environment,” he says. Drawn from a “relentlessly savage” Barbara Baynton short story set in the early 20th century, it was a kind of “Australian bush gothic”.
“The second opera that I wrote (Eternity Man) was based on our particular take – Dorothy’s and mine – of the nocturnal meanderings of Arthur Stace, the man who wrote the word Eternity on footpaths all over Sydney.”
Mills says this demonstrates how the psychology of place and space – which also informs Eucalyptus – “are very important to how I want to write operas”.
In 2005, his oratorio Sandakan Threnody – inspired by the experiences of his father, Frank Mills, a surgeon in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp – won the prestigious music award the Prix Italia. Did his father talk to him about his memories of that time? “He did but he never initiated it. If you asked he would talk to you directly and in detail,” he recalls.
After the fall of Singapore, his father was sent by the Japanese to the Sandakan POW camp in Borneo which, Mills says, “made Changi look like Club Med”. Of more than 2400 Allied troops interned at Sandakan at the start of 1945, only six survived. Most died as a result of death marches. That was “the greatest individual calamity” for Australian soldiers during World War II, Mills says.
He says about 80 prisoners including his father were moved from Sandakan to Kuching, also on Borneo, in early 1945.) His father worked as a surgeon in the POW camps and “nothing was wasted”.
Ash from fires was ground down and put in saline solution to treat tropical ulcers. Frank Mills operated on people using improvised scalpels – razor blades with bamboo handles attached.
Mills puts on a posh British accent, mimicking a British officer who once asked his father why Australian mortality rates in Japanese-controlled camps were (before 1945) lower than the British death rate. “We feed according to need. You feed according to rank,” his father said. In the Australian part of the camp, “the sickest got more”. “Very Aussie,” a proud son says all these decades later.
Reflecting again on the art world’s nervousness about the Israel-Gaza conflict, he recalls how his father went to Japan for his honeymoon in 1960. The former POW was keen to investigate other aspects of a culture under which he and others had suffered so grievously.
“This is the most extraordinary culture I’ve ever been in,” his father said after that honeymoon trip. Today, his son asks rhetorically: “How can I dare not engage, when that’s what my father did, given what he had done to him? If he can go to Japan on his honeymoon, we can all do better at engaging people you have every right to despise.”
Raised in Sydney, Mills usually lives between the harbour city and Edinburgh, avoiding the winter months in each country. “I normally live my life with perpetual summer,” he says, although he has spent winter in Australia this year while he prepares for Eucalyptus’s debut.
He has been in a relationship with his partner Ben Divall, a textile curator and designer, since 2008.
These days he has swapped festivals for teaching, musical and other projects at prestigious universities, including Yale. He has degrees in architecture and music and is working with the University of Melbourne on the creation of a vast new cultural precinct at Melbourne’s Fishermans Bend, a former industrial wasteland.
At Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, he is collaborating on a project related to ancient wind instruments. The oldest instrument, a whistle made of elk bone and found in Spain, is 45,000 years old and he and his fellow researchers are hoping to 3D print it.
Asked about his knighthood and the other honours he has garnered, the composer and polymath says: “I have been at times controversial, so I didn’t expect to be a person who would attract a few honours. I just go for it. If someone’s recognising you, that’s great.”
Eucalyptuspremieres at the Concert Hall, QPAC, for the Brisbane Festival on September 4 and at the Palais Theatre, St Kilda for Victorian Opera on October 16.