AUSTRALIA.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Photograph album of a school trip to Alice Springs. A personal album kept by the Australian opera singer Una Rosalind Hale. It documents the trip she and 11 other schoolgirls took on 9 May 1940, travelling by train from Port Pirie to Alice Springs and the aboriginal community of Hermannsburg. They were given a tour of Alice Springs by Reverend Harry Griffiths, who designed and opened the ANZAC Hill Memorial.Hale (1922-2005) was born in Adelaide to the Unitarian minister George Ernest Hale. This album dates from her education at Adelaide Methodist Ladies' College. As she describes on page 1, the girls were accompanied by their headmistress and four teachers on a train journey to the Australian inland. The photographs show their stopovers at Port Augusta, Marree, and Coward Springs, where they posed for photographs outside the train and with aboriginal people. Hale moved to Britain in 1946 to study at the Royal College of Music. "On leaving the college she joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company and quickly established herself in such roles as Marguerite (Faust), Violetta (La traviata), Micaela (Carmen), Mimì (La bohème) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), invariably with success. Of a disastrous production of Tannhäuser, The Times wrote: 'The one redeeming feature was the Elisabeth of Una Hale.'" (The Times). She then joined the Covent Garden Company in 1954 and starred as Ariadne in the Australian premiere of Araidne auf Naxos in 1962.Once in Alice Springs the group were given a tour b

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