Melbourne

CHILDHOOD

Ernest Glanville Hicks and Myrtle Hicks had three children, Garth (born in 1911), Peggy (born in 1912) and Beric (born in 1918). After moving from Wellington, New Zealand, to Melbourne in 1912, they lived in St Kilda and Elwood, and then in a number of houses in the Hawthorn and Camberwell area before building their own at 442 Barkers Rd, Auburn. They moved into that house in about 1925, when the area was still regarded as a rural retreat for city dwellers. Although grand for its date there was nothing remarkable about its appearance, with a steep roof, large eaves, a porch at the front and probably a sleep-out at the back but Myrtle Hicks had insisted on extra cupboards, a walk-in pantry, timber panelling, a dressing room for the parents and a heater for the water in the bathroom. They named it “Muritai”, the Maori word for “sea breeze” that refers to a place on the eastern shore of Wellington harbour. Ernest and Myrtle Hicks were to live there until Myrtle’s death in 1952. The house was sold in 2007, when the Australian described it as moribund, suffering from mould and rising damp (” the deep green pool puts the sump in sumptuous”). It was sold again in 2017 (for $3,000,000) and has since been bulldozed.

Milverton School, located at 3 Fermanagh Rd, Camberwell in Melbourne, was originally a girls’ music school. When PGH was a student there in the early 1920s it was a day school. A grand Victorian house with a library, leadlight doors and windows, it was used by the Australian army during World War II and later as a bed-and-breakfast establishment.

PGH attended the Methodist Ladies’ College in Barkers Rd, Kew from 1922 (when she was nine) until term 3 in 1926. It was a school that aimed to “encircle its students with an atmosphere absolutely pure, and into which, as far as human vigilance can ensure it, no evil influence enters” (History of Hawthorn, 79). In the grounds were a science lab, a business school, a model kitchen, swimming baths and tennis courts. A new domestic science building, named Nicholas House, was opened on 30 July 1926 (left) by Mrs George Nicholas (née Ruby Campbell), the mother of PGH’s friend Nola Menuhin.

CLYDE SCHOOL, WOODEND

Clyde Girls’ Grammar School was founded in 1911 by Miss Isabel Thomson Henderson and first located in Alma Rd, East St Kilda. In 1919 it moved to Braemar House on Mount Macedon, near the village of Woodend. Built in 1895, with 50 rooms, a servant bell system, speaking tubes, a dining hall and an octagonal tower, it had been a sanatorium and guesthouse. In the cottage kitchen they had a chemistry bench, there was a pantry for the cooking class and down the mountain there was a golf course. At first PGH was assigned a room on the first floor on the south side facing the croquet lawn. In 1927, the year she arrived, there were 22 staff, including matrons and sub-matrons, a drama teacher, a mathematics and science teacher and a sport teacher. The headmistress was Miss Tucker, who succeeded Miss Henderson in 1924. Though PGH knew it was terribly expensive, she hated hockey and had run-ins with several teachers, she later described the setting as heavenly and appreciated her Clyde education as a means of entry to an elite social circle.

ALBERT STREET CONSERVATORIUM

In the early 1930s in Melbourne there were three conservatoriums, the Conservatorium at the University, the New Conservatorium in Spring Street, near Parliament House, and the one generally known as the Albert Street Conservatorium, housed in the Victorian Artists’ Society building in East Melbourne. PGH attended the latter, which since 1913 had been presided over by the composer and conductor Fritz Hart, a charismatic, chain-smoking Englishman who so firmly believed in the education of women that many of them fell in love with him. Nellie Melba had established a singing school at Hart’s conservatorium and on her death it was renamed the Melba Conservatorium. Among the past students were the singers Strella Power and Gertrude Johnson, and the pianist Max Pirani who became a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. The vice-director was the pianist Harold Elvins, who may have taught PGH in the absence of Waldemar Seidel. Her composition studies were with Hart, who taught harmony, counterpoint, elements of music, form and analysis, history and aesthetics, and interpretation of works as well as ensemble, operatic class and choral class. A diploma was awarded after three annual exams, but as PGH commenced in 1930 and left for London in mid-1932 she would not have completed her diploma studies.

Standards of piano playing were low: in the first year students were expected to practice their scales at a slow pace and attempt only the easiest pieces by Bach. In the third year they might graduate to studies by Moscheles or Liszt, the more difficult of Bach’s preludes and fugues and even, as PGH did, a movement from a Mozart concerto. But several of the girls studied the same Mozart concerto and played it in public, suggesting that repertoire choices were very limited. Elvins however enjoyed Ravel, Stravinsky, Holst and Bax and Hart personally knew Vaughan Williams, Ireland and Holst from his days as a student at the Royal College of Music. As well as conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hart was vice-president of the British Music Society, which aimed to encourage Australian composers by offering them performances of their works. Virtually all of his composition students were young women who loved his vigorous enthusiasm, his love of English literature and belief in their future. His circle of friends included opera singers, artists and writers. The painter Max Meldrum, whose portrait of Hart dates from 1931, was married to a former singer at the Opéra Comique in Paris but unlike Hart, Meldrum believed that there would never be great women artists. Several of Hart’s artistic friends held salons attended by conservatorium students and the linocut artist Christian Waller created a black-and-white linocut poster for the performance of Hart’s operas Pierrette and St George and the Dragon in 1931.

As a composer was interested in opera and the art song, often writing several songs a day to nostalgic, quintessentially English poetry by figures such as William Sharp (Fiona Macleod), AE and Robert Herrick. Some of his songs were expressly Australian, referring to bell-birds, Gippsland ferns and the coastline near Melbourne at Sorrento. His musical language was often modal or pentatonic, as was PGH’s, and she inherited his fussiness in text-setting as well as a conviction that any sort of text could be set to music. Even after years of living and working among the most prominent British and American composers she credited Hart with her “lifelong stock in trade”, her ability to set texts as varied as the poetry of David McKee Wright or Wallace Stevens or Paul Bowles. After her departure for London in 1932, and Hart’s emigration to Hawaii, she may have seen him only once, in London while she was still a student.

Featured image: Colin Colahan, Elizabeth Street (1929). Art Gallery of Ballarat.