Page 3524 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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It is as arts minister that I would like to speak this morning. It is as arts minister that I would like to mark Barbara’s contribution to music in this town, and her capacity to leverage the positions of influence in which she found herself in order to make lasting and measurable differences to the cultural life of our city.
Yet, in some ways, the discrete compartments of Barbara Byrne’s life were not discrete at all, but inextricably connected. Barbara Byrne’s contribution to the arts demonstrates this perfectly. It was during her tenure as president of the Canberra Labor Club Group that the club embarked on its enduring relationship with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
At the time that the relationship was fostered by Barbara Byrne back in 2001, the orchestra was limping from performance to performance, financially at least. Thanks in large part to the persuasive powers of Barbara Byrne, the Labor club became a major sponsor of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Indeed, the sponsorship was the first-ever three-year deal struck by the Labor club board. No-one hearing the CSO today could credit that, less than a decade ago, grave concerns were held for its future. In some measure, the CSO that plays to packed auditoriums and rapturous applause today is a legacy of Barbara Byrne.
One needs to dig back into Barbara’s early life to get a sense of the depth of her love for the arts—in particular, for music and, to be even more particular, for the music of the human voice. Barbara Byrne enjoyed an early career as a classical singer. Even after she turned her professional sights elsewhere, music and singing remained a lifelong passion. Not content with saving this city’s symphony orchestra from an uncertain future, Barbara Byrne made the most of her time, both with the Labor club and later as a board member of Actew, to promote sponsorship of the Eisteddfod Society’s national operatic aria competition.
I am sure that Barbara Byrne will be in the thoughts of many Canberra opera lovers just over a month from now, when the Australian and New Zealand finalists of this year’s national operatic aria eisteddfod compete at a gala evening here in Canberra for the opportunity to further their singing careers overseas. And her name will live on among a much wider cross-section of local music lovers, in the newly completed studio at ArtSound, in Manuka, which the station has announced will be called the Barbara Byrne Studio.
When in recent weeks it became clear that Barbara did not have long to live, the ACT branch of the Australian Labor Party resolved to confer upon her its highest honour—life membership. That life membership was presented to Barbara, along with a dozen red roses, by the Assembly’s first Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett. Barbara would probably not have sought such recognition. A life well lived, fully lived, may have been enough. But I hope that the knowledge of the high esteem in which she was held by her party and her community sustained Barbara and her partner, Harold, in the last days of her life, and has been of some small comfort and a source of pride for Harold since her death a little over a week ago.
I am sure that many of my Assembly colleagues here today will join me in offering our condolences to Barbara Byrne’s family and friends, and particularly to Harold. A
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