Published last year to mark Thomas Edmond’s 90th birthday, Ev’ry Valley is a remarkable account of the Australian tenor’s life and, as his life-long friend and accompanist Peter Tillett notes, “an example for anyone aspiring to an artistic career”.

However, as Edmonds tells Limelight, he only ever meant to write it for himself.

“A few years back, I set down a few facts about what I remembered of my childhood on our rather impoverished farm in the upper north of South Australia, where the rainfall is fairly sparse.”

Thomas Edmonds on the western steps of Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide – the picture used on the cover of his autobiography Ev’ry Valley. Photo © Grant Nowell

 One of six children, Edmonds was born in 1934 to tenant farmers outside Peterborough.

“It was post-Depression and mostly mixed farming,” he recalls. “Mum and Dad scratched away, and we ate what we grew and shot.”

Taking its title from an aria in Handel’s Messiah, Edmonds’ memoir traces his life according to the addresses he’s lived at, from Hillside Farm to the UK and back to Duck Heights in Mount...