I’m going to say something that might annoy some of my colleagues: I’m tired of watching Australian opera companies treat Australian works like vegetables — something to serve alongside the main course so they can say they’re being nutritious, but never the centrepiece of the meal.

Look at Opera Australia’s 2026 season. Eight mainstage productions. Not one of them is by an Australian composer. There’s a chamber opera in the smaller program by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, and I’m grateful for that — Cheetham Fraillon is a national treasure and her work deserves every platform it can get. But a small-scale production in the Joan Sutherland Theatre is not the same as a full mainstage staging in the main theatre with orchestra, chorus, sets, and the marketing budget that comes with being a flagship production.

The Pipeline Isn’t the Problem

The usual excuse is that there aren’t enough high-quality Australian operas to programme. This is simply not true anymore.

Consider what’s been composed in the last decade alone. Elena Kats-Chernin’s Whiteley, which premiered in 2019 and was genuinely good — musically rich, dramatically engaging, and it sold well. Brett Dean’s Hamlet, which won the International Opera Award for Best World Premiere in 2018 and has been staged by major houses around the world. Mary Finsterer’s Biographica, which premiered in 2017. Kate Miller-Heidke’s The Rabbits, based on the Shaun Tan book, which packed houses in Melbourne.

There’s also a generation of younger Australian composers writing operatic work right now — people like Joe Twist, Andrée Greenwell, and Peggy Polias — who are creating work that’s dramatically compelling and musically distinctive. The Australia Council for the Arts has been funding new opera creation for years. The works exist.

The Real Barrier

The real barrier is risk aversion. A new Carmen is a known quantity. Marketing knows how to sell it, audiences know what they’re getting, and the production can be rented from another company to keep costs down. An Australian work requires new sets, new costumes, rehearsal time for unfamiliar music, and a marketing campaign that has to convince people to see something they’ve never heard of.

I understand the financial pressure. I really do. When I was in the OA chorus, I watched management agonise over every programming decision, knowing that a single poorly-selling production could blow the annual budget. But the irony is that playing it safe isn’t actually safe in the long run. Audiences are ageing. Subscriptions are declining. The companies that will thrive are the ones that give people a reason to come that they can’t get from a recording.

An Australian opera, told in our accent, about our stories, in our landscape — that’s a reason to come.

First Nations Stories Especially

I want to flag something specific: the opportunity — and responsibility — to tell First Nations stories through opera. Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Pecan Summer was a landmark. Her opera company, Short Black Opera, has been doing extraordinary work developing First Nations opera singers and creating new works that draw on 65,000 years of storytelling tradition.

This isn’t about tokenism. It’s about the art form. Opera is fundamentally about myth, community, and the stories a culture tells about itself. First Nations Australian stories are some of the oldest and most powerful on Earth. They belong on the opera stage, told by and with the communities they come from.

What Would It Take?

Here’s my wish list:

1. One mainstage Australian work per season. Not a chamber piece. Not a concert reading. A full production. Every year.
2. Commission pipelines that start early. It takes three to five years to develop a new opera from commission to premiere. Companies need to be commissioning now for 2029-2030 seasons.
3. Co-productions between companies. If Opera Australia, Victorian Opera, and West Australian Opera co-commission a work, they share the risk and the costs, and the opera gets seen by audiences around the country.
4. Trust audiences. Every time an Australian work has been given a proper production and a proper marketing push, it has sold. Whiteley sold. The Rabbits sold. Pecan Summer sold. Audiences will come if you give them something worth coming for.

I love Puccini. I adore Mozart. I will happily sit through my nine-hundredth La Boheme. But I also want to see operas that sound like us, look like us, and tell stories that belong to this place. We’ve got the composers. We’ve got the singers. We’ve got the stories.

What we need is the courage.

— Margot