ABSTRACT
The bush is central to The Ghost Wife, an opera with music by Jonathan Mills and libretto by poet Dorothy Porter, set in the bush at the turn of the nineteenth century and using the short story 'The Chosen Vessel' by Barbara Baynton as its source. The Ghost Wife was premiered in Melbourne, and enjoyed subsequent performances in Sydney and London. The pervasive sense of the bush inflects all three operas; in The Ghost Wife and Whitsunday predominantly as a threatening element, whereas in Fly Away Peter, the bush is seen as a regenerative medium contrasted with the horrors of the destroyed French landscape of the war, the most threatening of all. The bush and its role in the myths of national identity also play a central role in Elliot Gyger's opera, Fly Away Peter, libretto by Pierce Wilcox, with events occurring during the same time period as Whitsunday.
