Opera Australia is the nation’s premier opera company, engaging with contemporary audiences through innovative programming and community initiatives to ensure that opera remains a vibrant, evolving artform. Opera Australia strives to bring an Australian stamp to sharing great stories through music and song, and with a commitment to develop and nurture new generations of Australian talent on and off the stage.
In 2026, The Balnaves Foundation is supporting Opera Australia (OA) and the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) as Production Partner on The Drover’s Wife – The Opera. The groundbreaking new work is directed and written by Leah Purcell AM and composed by George Palmer AM.
The Drover’s Wife – The Opera is co-commissioned by QPAC and OA in association with Oombarra Productions. It is OA’s first opera by a First Nations director and librettist, claiming the stage and placing First Nations voices at the centre of an established operatic tradition. First Nations soprano Nina Korbe, in the role of the drover’s wife leads the cast, alongside First Nations tenor Marcus Corowa as Yadaka, with a company of First Nations and non-First Nations singers, dancers and orchestra.
Inspired by Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story, Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife reimagines the original tale through a First Nations lens, following Molly Johnson, a heavily pregnant woman left alone on the colonial frontier. Molly must defend herself and her children against the harsh Australian bush and the violent, racist forces around her while gradually uncovering the truth of her own identity.
Leah Purcell began writing The Drover’s Wife as a play in 2014, while she was the recipient of The Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwrights Award (now the Balnaves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Fellowship) at Belvoir St Theatre, a long-term Foundation partner and champion of telling First Nations stories. Starring Purcell as Molly Johnson, the play premiered there in 2016 and went on to win multiple awards in 2017, including Best New Australian Work at the Sydney Theatre Awards, The Helpmann Award for Best Play, and the Major Award at the Australian Writers Guild Awards.
Building on this success, The Drover’s Wife continues to capture audiences in its many iterations, from the book The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson published in 2019 by by Leah Purcell to the 2021 film of the same name, where Purcell was director, co-producer, writer and lead actor, once again embodying Molly.
The Drover’s Wife – The Opera presents a spectacular opportunity to continue Molly’s story and bring such an important work to new audiences. This first-time collaboration combines operatic traditions with First Nations storytelling and is fundamental to cultivating new opportunities for First Nations talent in an artistic discipline that rarely spotlights First Nations voices, storytelling or music.
Premiering in Brisbane at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (13-22 May 2026), ‘The Drover’s Wife – The Opera’ will then be performed at the Sydney Opera House (7-15 August 2026).
You can find out more about Opera Australia here.