ABSTRACT
Australia is a hybrid postcolonial society, and this hybridity is reflected in its cultural production, not the least in opera, which will survive, and may even flourish in forms and media that are but vaguely discernible at the present time. The policy of the major opera companies in commissioning new resource-intensive operas, while not completely discarded, seems to be in decline. The artistic director of the State Opera of South Australia, Timothy Sexton, describes the recently premiered Cloudstreet as being marketed as a music theatre work: 'It straddles that middle line between a musical and what people think of as opera'. The National Opera Review was published in November 2016. This was an examination of the health of the operatic scene and the continued viability of the artform in Australia. All of the arts are being squeezed and opera is certainly not immune; one response has been the growth of the small companies who can operate on very tight margins.
