Multiskilled Kim Beamish turns to painting

Detail of three Kim Beamish works on show in Phnom Penh.

By Helen Musa

Multiskilled documentary filmmaker and 2018 Canberra CityNews Artist of the Year, Kim Beamish, has been turning his hand to painting.

Acknowledged for his films Just Punishment, The Tentmakers of Cairo and Oyster, Beamish spent years living in Hanoi working on a film called What Remains, about a former Vietnamese soldier searching for the missing bodies of National Liberation Front fighters.

He also took time out in 2024 to make his directorial debut at The Mill Theatre in the courtroom drama Terror, by German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach.

Multiskilled Kim Beamish. Photo: Daniel Abroguena

Now Beamish has emailed us from Phnom Penh, where he lives, to say he is about to open his first solo exhibition in Cambodia, a series of pictures initially inspired by a piece of political graffiti hidden in a laneway near his home.

Described by a Cambodian artist friend, when he first saw the work, as “quick, rough and direct”, the exhibition comments on a world that Beamish often feels is upside down and very much not perfect, hence the title, NoT PerfEct [sic].

“When we spoke I mentioned that I was looking to put an exhibition of my painting and pictures together,” Beamish has written, “Well that time has come and while it is not in Canberra, not even close, I thought I’d reach out and let you know about it.”

First published at Canberra City News, October 14, 2026

Australian opera sensation Nellie Melba lived a life filled with fame, fortune and ultimately tragedy

By Hannah Reich

Dame Nellie Melba, fan of opera, French princes and interesting headwear. 
(Supplied: Wikimedia Commons, PDM 1.0 / ABC Archive)

Dame Nellie Melba was the Kylie Minogue of her time, an opera singer from Richmond, Melbourne, who became a global superstar in the early 20th century.

The prima donna is immortalised on our $100 note (if you've seen one of those around lately), yet she seems to have a lost a bit of currency and is now seen by some as a bit musty, fusty and boring.

But when we made an episode about her (or two, as it turns out) on ABC history podcast The Dead Can't Sue, we discovered that her life was filled with drama and tragedy worthy of the best operas.

It's no wonder a dessert, snack and an exit strategy all bear her name.

'Colonial gem'

Melba, whose real name was Helen Porter Mitchell, was born in 1861, the eldest of 10 surviving children. She played instruments and sang from an early age, under her mother's influence.

Her father was a building contractor whose fortunes were on the rise, but as a conservative presbyterian, he was opposed to music as a career for his daughter.

However, singing at church events or for charity was acceptable, so in 1869, eight-year-old Melba had her first public performance. The 700-strong audience demanded three encores from the kid.

Nellie Melba, her father, David Mitchell, and Nellie's niece,
 in Melbourne, 1903. (Supplied: Bain News Service)

Historian Leigh Boucher, co-host of The Dead Can't Sue, says: "She already had a reputation as this growing colonial gem."

At the same time, Melba was also a tomboy, which led her father to pack her off to a boarding school for young women.

"[This] was more of a finishing school rather than a robust, rounded education. She ended up getting booted out for misbehaviour," Boucher says.

Melba did end up with a well-rounded education, including in music, at Presbyterian Ladies College. Her cheekiness continued; in one instance she dressed up as a nun and solicited donations for a fake charity.

But Melba's joyful adolescence well and truly ended after her mother and a beloved sister died in 1880.

After that, her father moved the family to Mackay in Queensland to run a sugar mill, and Melba, being the eldest daughter, had to run the household.

Melba gets hitched and finally makes her debut

Happily, Mackay was not, as she might've assumed, an uncultured colonial outpost and Melba slotted right into the town's thriving amateur music scene.

The 21-year-old also met Charles Nesbitt Frederick Armstrong, a son of an Irish baronet who had been sent to the colonies for being a troublemaker.

After a whirlwind romance, they married in 1882 and had a son shortly after. Conflict quickly arose between them.

"This is a young woman who has a controlling, dour, respectable father, and she's been swept up by this man with aristocratic heritage who's a bit wild," Boucher says.

"But it turned out that she probably made the mistake I think many people have made … of trying to escape the rule of a patriarch and then ending up choosing another one instead."

Nellie Melba started to dream of a life outside the colonies, Leigh Boucher says. (ABC Archives)

Melba found herself raising a child, mostly on her own, and rarely getting to perform. She decided to return to Melbourne, ostensibly to raise her son alongside her family.

Once in Melbourne, she worked with a new vocal coach to train her in the bel canto style, which was popular in Europe's concert halls.

In 1884, Melba made her professional debut at Melbourne Town Hall and it was a raging success.

"In Australian history, it was one of the most momentous debuts you could possibly imagine," Boucher says.

Melba leaves Melbourne

Melba's father finally appeared to support her ambitions. He had financed her singing classes and brought her to Europe where he was working, giving her a chance to pursue her operatic career.

But Melba's husband also went along.

"On the trip to London, Charles began to try and exert a lot of control over her. There are stories about her turning up at breakfast [on the boat over] with bruises on her face," Boucher says.

It's no wonder that on her arrival in London in 1886, abused by her husband, hampered by nerves and without the right clothes or accent, Melba flopped her pivotal audition at Covent Garden.

Undeterred, Melba travelled to Paris and became the student of German opera singer and teacher Mathilde Marchesi. She looked after her son and was barely scraping by.

"But Mathilde Marchesi identified Nellie as having a singular talent," Boucher says.

Marchesi was a maternal figure to the young singer; she improved her vocal technique but also taught her European etiquette and encouraged her to take on her stage name.

Mathilde Marchesi helped Nellie Melba work out how
to make her way into the world of European opera,
Leigh Boucher says. (ABC Archives)

"Together they came up with this identity that both harked back to her roots — Melba being Melbourne — but nonetheless, had an air of sophistication … it was not really a rebranding, I think, but a rebirth."

Melba debuted as an opera singer in Brussels in 1887 and picked up roles across Europe, making a name for herself playing mad women.

"She quickly became renowned as having a possibly once-in-a-generation voice … by 1890 she had broken through at London's Covent Garden, wiping the memory of that failed audition away."

She also began an affair with Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, a dashing heir to the French throne.

Eventually, after Charles used the adultery as grounds for divorce and essentially abducted their son to Texas where he had relocated, the marriage was over. She didn't see her son for 12 years.

"She was not destroyed by the divorce, and she was not destroyed by the loss of her son. In fact, she sunk herself into work," Boucher says.

Farewell to Melba

Melba returned to Australia for a hugely successful tour in 1902.

"There were these amazing scenes of her returning to Melbourne and the streets being filled with thronging masses of people," Boucher says.

"Nellie was an Australian celebrity who not only was making it in Europe but was making it in European elite culture. She was proving that this was not a crass colony, but in fact a place of modernity."

One source said travelling with Nellie Melba during this tour
was like "travelling through France with Marie-Antoinette". 
(Supplied: State Library of Queensland)

But after returning to London and, whipped up by the press who claimed she had been replaced, Melba stood in the wings and rudely outsang a rival at the Royal Opera House.

"In this moment, an emerging celebrity culture just got the better of her," Boucher says.

Melba regained her perch at the top of the opera hierarchy; beloved by the royal family, she had her own dressing room at Covent Garden.

Then in World War I, she raised money for the war effort by going on a US tour. There she was reunited with her son, but the tour was also plagued by strange accidents.

"Nellie became convinced that the Germans are out to get her because she was such a useful tool for the morale of the war efforts," Boucher says.

By the 1920s Melba was in her 60s and decided to retire. This is how the phrase "doing a Melba" was invented, as she spent many years giving farewell concerts.

It was on one of those many extended farewell tours that she contracted a fever. In 1931 she died quite suddenly in Sydney of septicaemia, a complication from what the press described as "facial surgery".

Boucher says, in a time without antibiotics, it was probably an early face lift.

"Her story is not reducible to this moment, but there is something in the ways in which she had to negotiate these gendered norms, negotiate the gendered restrictions of celebrity culture, and ended up dying from a face lift … that is tragic. It was a brutal end to an incredible life."

Fans and the press across the globe mourned the death of Melba.

The New York Herald Tribune declared that she "was the last of those soprano empresses of song … Doubtless the gold age of song will return, but no Melba will sing for us again".

First published at ABC News, October 11, 2026

Nation's oldest flamenco company celebrates its 60th in SF

By James Ambroff-Tahan

Carola Zertuche, pictured above, has been Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco’s artistic director for 20 years. This year, it honors its 60th anniversary home season with a one-night only celebration.

Carola Zertuche has been Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco’s artistic director for 20 years and she wanted to do something special for its 60th anniversary home season.

So she curated “De Ayer a Hoy,” a one-night-only celebration which honors the company’s six decades of artistry, the legacy of founders Adela Clara and Miguel Santos, and looks toward its continuing evolution. The program of nine works — three world premieres and six reimagined pieces from its repertoire — will be presented Oct. 17 at the Herbst Theater.

“While I’ve been preparing the 60th anniversary home season I’ve watched videos from when they started, and they used to do a lot of classic Spanish dance, like boleros and jotas, and flamenco,” Zertuche said of the troupe, which is the oldest flamenco company in the nation and the second-oldest dance company in the Bay Area. “But since I became artistic director I’ve done more flamenco, and I want to see how we can move the traditional in a different way, not just the way they taught us.”

Zertuche, who started her dance career in Mexico City, has performed at numerous venues, toured the globe extensively and collaborated with other artistic companies via her choreography. Notable partnerships include her San Francisco Opera debut in 2017, as the choreographer for “La Traviata,” and her 2019 production with The Glide Ensemble of “Soul y Alma,” which was a tribute to gospel and flamenco. Both productions showcased her fondness for cross-genre artistry.

“I like incorporating different musicians and the piano, and I have invited contemporary dancers,” Zertuche said of her penchant for expressing the pillars of flamenco — cante, baile and toque (song, dance and musical accompaniment) — in creative ways.

“The cante is one of the main things in flamenco and super important for me, so I told Miguel Santos I need to bring singers from Spain.”

Santos (1925-2024) served as principal dancer and choreographer for the company since its inception and was its artistic director starting in 1987 until Zertuche assumed the post. His company cofounder, Clara (1932-2026), is widely recognized as a foundational figure in American flamenco, and under her stewardship Theatre Flamenco became the first resident dance company in the United States to stage full-scale productions of Spanish dance.

Amparo Heredia from Granada and José Cachito Díaz from Barcelona are among the notable Spanish singers who will perform in “De Ayer a Hoy,” which translates to "from yesterday to today." 

Dancer Adrian Santana, who is from Málaga, is another renowned Spanish artist on the program; he will reimagine Santos’ “Zapateado/Farruca” from 1989 and join Zertuche in a new duet honoring Santos.

San Francisco native Cristina Hall is among the luminaries who will perform one of the world premieres of the evening — an opus Zertuche commissioned. Hall first became interested in flamenco as a teenager in The City.

“I was drawn to the art form as a necessity to express myself, and I felt that flamenco was something that just came to me and I needed to do,” Hall recounted. “So I grabbed the Yellow Pages and found a teacher, Virginia Iglesias, and started taking classes with her for two years before I moved to Spain.”

Hall moved to Seville — the epicenter of flamenco, in Spain’s Andalucía region — when she was 18 and has lived there for 25 years. She recalled her initial immersion in Spanish culture as a revelatory experience.

“I didn’t speak any Spanish and didn’t know anyone there, and it was difficult back then because foreigners were not really accepted or allowed to dance anywhere; it took a lot of time for me to prove myself,” Hall said. “It changed my life because I’m still there, and I’m working professionally there as an artist, throughout Europe, the States and all over.”

Hall, who has choreographed numerous pieces and has her own company, noted that Americans relate to flamenco differently than Spaniards.

“Over there it’s part of their culture, and here it’s something exotic, and sometimes Americans have a clichéd way of thinking about it,” Hall said. “Over there, it’s an art form, not just an attraction or entertainment, and they take it very seriously.”

Theatre Flamenco guitarist Jesse Torre is another San Francisco native who will perform on Saturday. He studied at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in New York but developed an appreciation for flamenco through his studies with Bay Area guitarist and composer Jason “El Rubio” McGuire and his wife, Yaelisa, an Emmy Award-winning dancer and choreographer.

“They left a really good impression on me for my flamenco studies; she’s an incredible dancer and they both trained me quite a bit in the art of accompanying,” Torre said.

Torre said what he loves the most about flamenco is that it speaks of a history and legacy of the suffering, disenfranchisement and persecution of the Gitano, or Romani, people of southern Spain, which is evident in dancing, singing and guitar playing.

“Everything involved has an element of expressing pain and sorrow,” Torre said. “I love how the guitar is supposed to be grittier and rough in comparison with a classical context.”

Unlike classical ballet, where the ability to interpret the rhythm, tempo, melody and mood of music is a key skill for dancers, flamenco musicians respond to the singers and dancers.

“When the singer sings, we have to play chords that are appropriately supporting the notes the singer is singing, and when the dancer dances we have to be appropriately responding in the moment to what they are asking for,” Torre said. “We have to keep up with the energy of both.”

Torre said “De Ayer a Hoy” promises to be an exploration of the history of Theatre Flamenco, and that it involves a natural progression of time.

“The audience can expect to have an experience that is a beautiful presentation of flamenco not bound to any one moment in time, but truly representative of the art form as a whole,” Torre said. “And every art form in that sense is always changing.”

First published in the San Francisco Examiner, October 12, 2026

'They were people who took chances': The Vikings who reached the Americas 500 years before Columbus

By Fiona Macdonald

The Norse made it to Canada around the year 1000, and used it as a base to explore. The BBC has delved into the "lost history" of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic.

Christopher Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue in 1492 – arriving in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492, to be precise – but he wasn't the first European to reach what we now know as the Americas. His predecessors did so without much fanfare: no royal proclamations or crowds lining the streets to greet them upon their return. And they didn't sail directly across the vast Atlantic Ocean from one continent to another.

Instead, they hopped their way there, with Iceland and Greenland as staging posts. Their exploration was retold, centuries later, in sagas that were the stuff of epic literature rather than history books. And they made their first journey to American soil 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

The Norse sagas – Viking stories written down by their descendants – have come to be recognised as containing reliable historical truths. In 1966, BBC presenter Magnus Magnusson described the 14th-Century Flateyjarbók, or Flatey Island Book, as "one of the most valuable Icelandic manuscripts in existence". The book is so valuable, he added, that when, in 1893, the organisers of the Chicago World's Fair asked to borrow it for their belated 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus's voyage, "they offered to send a warship to Denmark to pick it up and an armoured train to transport it across America and to insure it for a sum of $1 million [the book was housed in Denmark at the time.] But even at that, the Danes didn't care to take the risk."

And the reason the Americans "wanted to borrow it so badly"? Because the book contains "the account of the Norse settlement of Greenland in the 10th Century, and even more astonishingly, the story of the Norse discovery and attempted colonisation of North America a few years later – five centuries before Columbus".

In 1960, a Norse transit camp was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. And in 2021, researchers using a new dating technique found that Vikings had occupied the site 1,000 years earlier. It is believed to have served as a base camp for exploring deeper into North America. "This is the start of a lost history, the centuries when Europeans visited America in voyages whose records are written only on the water," said Robin Ellis in a 1997 episode of the BBC documentary series, Timewatch.

The Norse had found Iceland in around 870, and Greenland 100 years later. From there, it was just 200 miles across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island in modern Canada, which they called Helluland, the land of slabs. According to the sagas, they followed the coast southwards to Labrador, or Markland, the land of forests, and then further south to what they called Vinland, the land of vines. "The sagas describe not only these guys stopping off in one place, but stopping off in a number of places," Emily Lethbridge of the University of Iceland said on Timewatch in 2016. "And they left for several years. They had a whole new world to explore."

The sagas say that the most famous settler, Erik the Red, arrived in Iceland in around 960 after his father was banished from Norway for murder. In the year 932, the Icelanders had established a parliament, the Althing. It was an open-air assembly of the whole nation, meeting every summer for a fortnight for legislative and judicial purposes – and it took place in a remarkable setting, inside a ravine that made an extraordinary natural amphitheatre.

"It isn’t just the acoustics that make this place special," Lethbridge told the BBC. "This is a natural fault line. We’re on the point where the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates meet." The first Europeans to explore North America happened to have sited one of their parliaments in a rift valley between the two continents.

At the parliament, said Lethbridge, "Sentences of outlawry would be imposed on members of society who had broken all of the rules. You could go anywhere else, but you couldn’t set foot on Iceland for the period that the outlawry stood."

The Althing banished Erik the Red from Iceland in 982, following a violent dispute with a neighbouring farmer – and his exile launched an astonishing chapter in Viking exploration. "Erik the Red was the first Icelander to discover Greenland and then make a permanent settlement there," said Lethbridge.

He started a colony on Greenland that would last for around 500 years and be the launching point for the Norse exploration of North America. "They were people who took chances and were prepared to undergo huge physical trials," said Lethbridge, "such as sailing in open boats across the Atlantic, to see what they could find." 

The Norse settlement on Greenland continued until the early 15th Century, and the Vikings – led by Erik's son Leif Eriksson – appear to have made not just one but multiple journeys across the sea from there to North America. 

"Most people assume that after Leif Eriksson and his friends came to Vinland and then gave up and went away, nothing more was heard of the New World," Robert McGhee, an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, told Timewatch. "But archaeologically, we have evidence which shows that the Norse were at least making occasional trips to the New World for the following two or three centuries."

Did Columbus know about Vinland?

"We have so many good reasons to know that travels did take place throughout the entire Middle Ages on the two coasts that we call Greenland and North America," Kirsten Seaver, a historian of medieval shipping, told Timewatch. "By 1480, we know that they deliberately tried to sail to North America, or what they called the Isle of Brazil. We shouldn't look upon that as their first voyage, but as their first attempt to do it directly, without going via Greenland, which was the ordinary navigational marker."

Seaver also cited a document which implied that Columbus himself knew about such voyages. "In the winter of 1497-98, an Englishman named John Day wrote to Christopher Columbus to tell him about John Cabot's successful 1497 voyage to North America. And among many other things, he mentioned as a matter of course that as Columbus knew, men from Bristol [in England] had made this voyage to the northern part for many years already." 

By the time Columbus reached the shores of the Bahamas in 1492, then, the place the Vikings called Vinland could already have been on his radar. There are even theories that Columbus was deliberately attempting to avoid a land he knew had already been discovered by Europeans. 

"Columbus knew as well as any navigator does today that if you want to travel across oceans [in the Northern Hemisphere]... you move up into the north where the latitudes are short, and you zip across, and then you go back down again," McGhee told Timewatch. "Instead, Columbus took the long way around directly across the ocean. Perhaps he was trying to avoid Canada. Maybe he was trying to avoid Vinland… which was not what he was looking for. I think Columbus's intent was to bypass America and therefore try to get to the riches of the Far East." 

So while many US citizens celebrate Columbus Day every October, they shouldn't forget all the Atlantic crossings that came first. 

First published at BBC, October 12, 2026

Piano taken down gold mine for unique underground concert in Bendigo

By Anna McGuiness

A unique piano concert 61 metres underground in an old gold mine.

That was the brainwave of Bendigo Fine Music chair Thomas Heywood.

And yesterday that brainwave became reality, with a piano descending into the Central Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo for a one-off evening performance.

The 300kg piano was formerly owned by Mr Heywood's mother, who was a renowned concert pianist.

"It's one of those classic 'don't drop the piano' scenarios," Mr Heywood said.

"We couldn't find any evidence that this has been done before.

"It's really quite emotional; it sounds fantastic in here. It is an amazing room for sound. There's a timber ceiling and hardstone walls, and they're ideal for musical performance."

Thomas Heywood came up with the idea of holding the concert in a gold mine to mark 175 years since gold
was discovered in Bendigo. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

The Bendigo Fine Music event celebrated 175 years since gold was first discovered in the central Victorian city.

"In 1851, it changed our wonderful country forever,"  Mr Heywood said.

"We were always taught in school that basically the riches that followed from gold made possible what would have taken 500 years in European history to be achieved in a mere 50 years to Federation."

Friday's concert was limited to 60 attendees, who were allowed to remove their hard hats once in the concert room.

Pianist Yasmin Rowe said performing this rare and unusual concert was exciting.

"I've never played underground before, and this is just so special. When I entered this room, I thought it was so, so beautiful," Ms Rowe said.

"You've got this millions-of-years-old rock there right behind the piano; the light, the colour, the atmosphere is wonderful."

Yasmin Rowe and Ian Munro played before an audience of 60 people. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

Ms Rowe and fellow pianist Ian Munro said the underground concert made playing the piano interesting again.

"It's quite a dry acoustic. We have to adjust in real time, so using less pedal cause it's quite reverberant."

Mr Munro said the rare and unusual concert brought back the memory of a conversation with his piano teacher at the age of 14, who questioned whether he would continue to love playing the piano as an adult.

"When I was 30 [and still loved playing piano], and now I'm very much older than 30, I'm still very interested; it's still got that magic for me."

The operation to get the instrument underground was a family affair by Joshua McPherson, his wife Jo and son Sam.

Mr McPherson said it was "definitely the most unusual" place he had ever taken a piano.

The disassembled instrument was wheeled on a trolley into a lift and rolled along the rocky tunnels of the mine.

"We were worried about moisture dropping from the ceiling — that was our main concern. [It was] a little bit rough underfoot but nothing scary really," he said.

Nic Hamilton was tasked with making sure the piano stayed in tune.  (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

Once in place, it was over to piano technician Nic Hamilton to ensure nothing had gone awry on the journey and to tune the piano before the concert.

"It's on the humid side but it takes some hours, perhaps even overnight to seep into the piano and cause any problems,"  he said.

"It's a fun thing to do, and it's very typical of Thomas [Heywood] to come up with projects that are interesting and exciting."

The piano is moved into the entrance to Central Deborah Gold Mine. (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

First published at ABC News, October 10, 2026