Pioneering soprano, composer and educator, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, is amongst Victoria’s nominations for the 2025 Australian of the Year. She has been recognised for a lifetime spent sharing her love of opera with Australia.
A Yorta Yorta and Yuin woman who was a member of the stolen generations, she has also worked with boundless energy and creativity to encourage greater First Nations involvement in the arts.
A childhood far from home
Deborah was raised in a white, working class family in the southern suburbs of Sydney.
The first Indigenous person she remembers meeting was the pop star Jimmy Little, at the Miranda Fair shopping centre, when she was six years old.
She had no idea then that the man who was introduced as “Uncle Jimmy” really was her uncle. Nor was she aware that he and the civil rights activist, Charles Perkins, had visited her adoptive parents and begged to take her home to her birth family.
When she learnt the truth 20 years later, Deborah realised that she hailed from generations of accomplished musicians. And decades after that, she did go home to Yorta Yorta country, listened to the stories of Elders and wrote her much-loved opera, Pecan Summer.
“Their encyclopaedic knowledge has sustained me through that and many other projects,” she told The Weekly when we caught up with her last year to ask about the role of mentors and Elders in her life.
“The Elders are our treasure. They are our greatest wealth in any society, but for First Nations people, they are the most highly valued members of our community…”
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon
“The Elders are our treasure. They are our greatest wealth in any society, but for First Nations people, they are the most highly valued members of our community. They are that great and abiding resource of knowledge. When I think of what they’ve managed to achieve in creating a resilient and vibrant community for First Nations people … I think of our Elders with a deep sense of gratitude.”
A cherished mentor
Deborah met with The Weekly at the Sydney Opera House, where she had just watched the ballet Hum, for which she composed the score – her wife, Nicolette Fraillon, conducting. It had been an extraordinary night – testament to her years of creative work and determination.
Now 60, Deborah’s significance as a mentor in her community is not lost on her. Legacy is, she says, “my most vital role. It’s at the heart of everything I do.”
She will never forget the opportunity afforded her by her high-school mentor, Jennifer King. The dedicated teacher took her music-mad Year Nine student to see her very first opera – Dame Joan Sutherland in The Merry Widow. It changed everything, and Deborah has always seen it as her responsibility to be that change for others.
Deborah’s legacy of creativity
Her Short Black Opera company was born 15 years ago as “a development opportunity for singers of any age”.
“I knew,” she says, “that there would be singers in our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who, if they had not been living in a world of disadvantage, would have had careers in opera. I knew there would be the love of storytelling through music because that’s what we’ve done for millennia.”
She has championed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices as Artistic Director of Dhungala Children’s Choir and as First Nations Creative Chair of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. She also established the One Day in January project to nurture Indigenous orchestral musicians. And she founded the First Nations chamber group, Ensemble Dutala.
She was surprised by the Australian of the Year nomination and feels a deep gratitude to every wise woman who has blazed a trail before her.
