Sydney

When PGH and Stanley Bate arrived in Sydney in 1940 they chose to rent a studio flat at 17 St Neot Ave in Potts Point. The building, named “Trent Bridge” is one of the art deco buildings in the Potts Point / Elizabeth Bay area to the east of the city named in Wikipedia’s list of art deco buildings in Sydney. Although the flat was tiny, with room for a bed in a corner, its architectural details were modern and stylish: frosted glass doors with geometric patterns, a fireplace with geometric surrounds and an elegant timber staircase to the ground floor. Outside the panelled brown brick façade is an example of Interwar Functionalism, and opposite is “St Neot’s”, another block with stylish Art Deco elements. The street is littered with frangipani and at its end is a spectacular view over Finger Wharf and Woollomooloo to the city. In nearby streets are other blocks symbolic of architectural modernity, such as “Cahors” on Macleay St, which had a bell boy, a night porter and a restaurant on the eighth floor. In Kings Cross was the unmistakably modern Minerva Cinema and a café that sold American-style sandwiches. Cafes stayed open after 11pm, gambling as well as coffee drinking took place in the Arabian Coffee House and even the corner store could sell some illicit sherry. There were immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greek food, Russian food and Hungarian ghoulash. Francis Broadhurst described it in Home in 1938 as “the ultimate height of heterogeneity. It is a salmagundi of caviar, truffles and fish and chips. It is a cocktail of rum, tomato, sauce, raspberry vinegar and Chateau Lafite. It is a bouquet of rhododendrons, forget-me-nots, stinging nettles and pansies”. For a pair of composers lately from Paris at home with ballet dancers, down-at-heel artists, writers and refugees from fascist Europe it was as far from suburban Hawthorn that they could find.

PGH returned to Sydney in 1975, buying a house in Ormond Street, Paddington. For a time her nephew Roger Glanville-Hicks and his girlfriend shared the house with her. Nearby lived many of her friends, including the composer Ross Edwards. Peter Sculthorpe, a composer and composition teacher at the University of Sydney, lived a few minutes drive away in Woollahra. James Murdoch invited her to have a role as advisor on Asian music at the Australia Music Centre located at The Rocks in the oldest part of the city, and she frequently attended functions there, meeting many visiting composers she had known previously such as John Cage. She vigorously campaigned to have one of her operas performed at the new Sydney Opera House, though with no success, but many of her other works were performed in Sydney, particularly under the influence of Murdoch and the young composer Vincent Plush. Only Girondelles for Giraffes dates from the return to Sydney, a work written to go with an exhibition of sculptures by her American friend Pam Boden. In the last few years of her life she was involved in a biography being written by Wendy Beckett, in a biographical film with James Murdoch and a bio-bibliography by Deborah Hayes.

Featured image: Sydney streets, WikiCommons.