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It was Dame Nellie Melba who would become the household name, but in 1878 – years before Melba’s debut – Amy Sherwin was the young Australian soprano everyone was talking about.
That was the year that Sherwin, a farmer’s daughter from Huonville, Tasmania, dazzled crowds at Melbourne’s then Opera House in Bourke Street by singing the lead in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.
The Argus newspaper lauded Sherwin’s voice for its “purity, sweetness and power” and declared her performance a complete triumph.
It kick-started a dazzling career, which saw her tour the world for decades from South Africa to Japan and the US, and perform for British and Russian royals.
In later life, Sherwin fell on hard times, looking after her invalid daughter and teaching in London’s East End until she died, reportedly penniless, in 1935.
Today Sherwin, known as the Tasmanian Nightingale, has been largely forgotten.
However, a campaign to return Sherwin to the spotlight is under way, driven by conservationist and former Australian Greens leader, Dr Bob Brown.
Brown formed The Amy Sherwin Fund, run by a committee, and says they are on track to raise $250,000 to fund a new marble life-sized statue of the singer, which is set to be unveiled in Hobart in February.
Brown first learnt of Sherwin via a plaque on a Hobart building that mentioned her, and was amazed someone who brought such joy to the world had been “buried by history”.
He said one reason Melba’s fame lasted and Sherwin’s didn’t may be that Sherwin’s heyday came before the era of records and radio.
The statue, made by sculptor Peter Schipperheyn and carved from Carrara marble, began taking shape in Italy, before being shipped to Australia and completed at his studio in Melbourne’s east.
The statue was originally set to be installed on a balcony of Hobart’s Hadley’s Orient Hotel, but the marble was deemed too heavy for the balcony and can deteriorate outdoors, so will now stand in the hotel’s atrium.
The Orient’s proprietor, Don Neil, has also commissioned Schipperheyn to make a second statue in bronze.
Joseph Refalo and his daughter Isabelle, from Master Gilders, applied 23-carat gold leaf to the bronze statue’s chest, face, jewellery and lacework.
On February 15, both statues will be unveiled by Tasmanian Governor Barbara Baker, and soprano Jacqueline Ward will sing Home Sweet Home and Lo, Here the Gentle Lark.
Also unveiled, a new dessert named after Sherwin and created by local chef Jack Lark as part of the hotel’s high tea.
La Trobe University historian Professor Clare Wright, co-convenor of the A Monument of One’s Own campaign calling for more memorials to women, said it’s wonderful to see this project come to life, and to see Sherwin’s place in civic and cultural history being restored and preserved.
Brown says recognising Sherwin is “putting to right a great injustice”.
“It’s introducing Amy Sherwin to an Australian audience that doesn’t know about her.”
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