ABSTRACT
Australia is a highly urbanized society and it would be expected that reflections of city life would loom large in recent cultural output. A trilogy of recent operas set in Melbourne reveals how a national mythology is evolving from the centrality of the bushman and its complex of related myths, into the current pervasive reality of urbanization and city life. The Children's Bach by Andrew Schultz is an affectionate, but clear-eyed examination of a group of middle-class people in the 1980s, whereas Paul Grabowsky jazz-inflected Love in the Age of Therapy offers a similar, but more jaundiced view of a group of somewhat better-off but still resolutely middle-class city dwellers coping with the pressures of their existence a decade later. Suburban anxiety and passion explode into murder in Gordon Kerry's bleak view of twenty-first-century society in Midnight Son, somewhat controversially based on actual events which occurred in 2005.
