George Palmer

I thought on opera, obviously.

So I was going to say foolish enough, foolhardy enough.

to think of approaching Tim Winton and his agent for the rights to do Cloud Street as an opera.

Fantastic novel, quintessentially Australian.

I really wanted to do Australian work.

Opera is the most powerful vehicle for telling a good story that I know of because if done right, if done well, it combines the emotional force and signals of music with the drama.

It reinforces the drama if it's done properly.

And I wanted to tell these Australian stories as forcefully, as imaginatively, vividly as possible.

And I wanted them, absolutely wanted them to be Australian.

We know we've got terrific Italian and French and German and everything else, opera.

Do we have enough terrific Australian opera?

It's about time we started.

So that's why I thought of Cloud Street.

And it's a sort of book that you'd never expect to be turned into an opera.

It's full of vernacular.

There are some lines in it that I can't repeat on live radio, but they are vividly four-letter words.

And that should be an opera if you're telling that story.

That story of Tim Winston's is so honest.

It's the real characters, real people dealing with the depths of human emotion.

And that's what I wanted to convey.