Composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham has been an artistic and social pioneer in so many ways. A Yorta Yorta woman, she has advanced the cause of Indigenous music, particularly through her founding of Short Black Opera, which produced her first opera, Pecan Summer; and the establishment of the Dhungala Children’s Choir. Drawing these and many other threads together, she has created a profoundly symbolic work: Eumeralla: a war requiem for peace. Eumeralla is the name of one of the rivers that flow through Gunditjmara country in southwest Victoria. It was on this land some 170 years ago that war broke out between the traditional owners and new arrivals. Cheetham was deeply moved by a visit to this site in 2013, waking in her a musical response that was to become this war requiem, a work “designed for non-Indigenous Australians to sing alongside their Indigenous brothers and sisters.”

Eumeralla. Photo © Laura Manariti

Sung entirely in the dialects of the Gunditjmara people, the work takes its shape from the traditional Latin requiem, but as Cheetham observes, “the substance and spirituality needed to be taken further in order to honour 70,000 years of ceremony and...