ABSTRACT
The migrant experience is central to the making of contemporary Australia and has developed a potent and often contested mythology that surrounds successive waves of migrants, starting, of course, with those unwilling immigrants on the First Fleet in 1788. Bride of Fortune, an opera by New Zealand-born composer Gillian Whitehead, deals with Italian migrants to Melbourne in the early 1950s. Tim Winton's 1994 novel, The Riders, is concerned with Australians outside of Australia; the country's geographical isolation has made its inhabitants some of the most intrepid world travellers, and it has long been a rite of passage for young Australians to venture abroad. The Riders have their own particular musical texture, described as 'cold and mysterious', with repeated melismatic glockenspiel musical figures creating a distancing effect. The writing of Bride of Fortune began with two images – the domestic violence of an inner-city siege and the snowy fields and candles of a religious procession in a post-war southern Italian village.
