Bravo to a stellar career

Once a farm boy in SA’s Mid North, opera tenor Thomas Edmonds sang on world stages.

Story Kirsty McKenzie  Photo Daniel Cazzolato/Hills Wanderer Magazine

As a child growing up on family farms near Peterborough in SA’s Mid North, celebrated tenor singer Thomas Edmonds developed his work ethic from a young age. “We had 18 draught horses and they were tremendous workers, but hungry beasts,” he says. “They had to be fed morning and night.” The youngest of 6 children, this task often fell to Tom, who says it was good training for later in life, when he would have to devote 6 months to learning an entire opera before rehearsals started.

“It was the greatest bugbear of my career,” he says. “There’s no shortcut to memorising, you just have to slog away at it until you are word perfect. So, it was good to understand the importance of sticking with a task from the farm. Opera singers need a working knowledge of Italian, French and German and when we sing we have to know the meaning of every word. I had studied German in my arts degree so that made that one a bit easier. Most opera companies provide language coaches, which helps enormously.”

There was little in the Adelaide Hills nonagenarian’s early life to suggest that he would go on to a stellar singing career that took him from Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium of Music to Covent Garden and Royal Albert Hall in London, the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, Sweden and Sydney’s Opera House. Times were tough for the tenant-farming Edmonds family, eking out a living in the post-Depression 1930s at Morgan East. It was marginal farming country just north of surveyor George Goyder’s Line, and therefore in country deemed too unreliable for cropping. “Being a stubborn South Australian farmer, my father persisted with growing wheat and occasional cereal crops,” Tom says. “I wasn’t aware of how hard up we were. We ate mostly what we could grow or shoot, so that meant a lot of rabbit.