“I thought, it’s time to distil,” Deborah Cheetham Fraillon says when we meet in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Albert Park on a gloriously sunny Friday morning, her ruffian cavoodle Charlie sniffing expectantly at our feet. “What are the necessary things, the essential things that define me?”

She’s referring to her bio, which, given her achievements over a 40-year period – as a renowned soprano, then a playwright and now an internationally recognised composer – takes some work. “What I came up with was: Yorta Yorta by birth, Stolen Generation by government policy, composer by necessity, soprano by diligence and lesbian by practice.”

As we explore the Gasworks Arts Park where Short Black Opera – the Indigenous opera company Cheetham Fraillon founded in 2010 – has established its Melbourne offices, her wit and disarming honesty are on full display. It brings warmth and generosity to her formidable presence as one of this country’s toughest and most determined champions of Australian opera.

Cheetham Fraillon has built and sustained a career in an industry not known for its diversity. It has taken a not insubstantial amount of grit. “There are plenty of opportunities to summon that determination, and that seems to be unrelenting,” she says. Citing Ciaran Frame’s Living Music report from 2020, Cheetham Fraillon says with an exasperated laugh, “there were more composers that year whose first name were Johann than all the female composers included in programming across all the orchestras in the country.” Little has changed in the interim.

Before we set off on our walk, as we wait for our coffees from the Gasworks cafe, the conversation turns to another walk that might explain the origins of Cheetham Fraillon’s tenacity – the mass strike orchestrated by the Yorta Yorta people, known historically as the Cummeragunja Walk Off.

“That political action of walking off Cummeragunja station and crossing the Dhungala [Murray River] from New South Wales into Victoria in 1939,” – and here our coffees arrive – “un-fuelled by strong lattes as they were … the strength and determination of my grandparents in basically saying we’re drawing the line here, the mistreatment of our people has gone on for almost a century now, we’re taking matters into our own hands – I’m glad to have inherited in any measure.”

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Part of the Stolen Generations, Cheetham Fraillon was removed from her birth family as a baby. She was raised by a loving white Baptist family in Sydney, which is where her obsession with music took root. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t singing,” she says as we step off the pavement on to the browning grass. “And the same is true today. My wife would attest to the fact that I sing about everything. If I’m having a thought which needs to find an external expression, I’ll sing it.”

A school excursion to see Dame Joan Sutherland sing in The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House in 1979 (Cheetham Fraillon remembers the actual seat, L 23) wasn’t just formative, it “literally changed my life. I would defy anyone – being enveloped by that voice – not to be moved. But for me, the sung narrative is woven into my DNA.”

While Cheetham Fraillon means this in an expansive, cultural sense, she also means it literally. She was an adult when she reconnected with her Aboriginal family. “My Aboriginal mother, Monica, was a singer. Her mother, Francis, was a singer; in fact, quite a renowned singer in the community of Cummeragunja before the walk-off. After that, sadly, she didn’t live long beyond giving birth to my mother.” Cheetham Fraillon’s uncle was the legendary Jimmy Little, inducted into the Aria Hall of Fame in 1999.

A discussion of the Baptist movement and its influence on Cheetham Fraillon’s music is interrupted when Charlie bounds off to steal another dog’s ball, diligently bringing it to the nearby bench on which we’ve sat. We get up to intervene and return the ball, but Charlie’s soon nicked it again, and suddenly we’re surrounded by other people’s dogs in a frenzy of fur and genial panting. “Never work with kids or animals,” Cheetham Fraillon says wryly.

Soon we head off again, this time with Charlie safely on a lead, the scent of eucalypt in the late morning air mingling with the breeze off Port Phillip Bay. Cheetham Fraillon returns briefly to the topic of the Baptist church. She recognises in it a key tenet of her own philosophy, “to live a life in service of your community, so you might make a contribution that helps others. That’s one of the fundamentals of Baptist doctrine. Sadly, one of the other, much stronger doctrines is … no gays.”

Cheetham Fraillon “stayed perhaps longer than I should have” in the church, largely because she’d become fully immersed in its choral traditions, “but when it was discovered I had a girlfriend, I had to resign all my positions of authority. I was welcome to stay in a pedestrian, congregational sense, but silent observer is not something that’s going to be written in my eulogy.” She laughs, and there’s surprisingly little rancour in it.

We discuss Cheetham Fraillon’s transition from singer to composer – “I’ve been writing music my whole life, but it’s only been in the last 20 years that I’ve considered myself a composer” – and the origins of Short Black Opera, starting with her first major work, the haunting and powerful Pecan Summer and culminating in the extraordinary symphonic work Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace in which she based her sonic landscapes on the Dhauwurd Wurrung languages of the Gunditjmara people of Victoria’s western district.

“When you’re writing in those ancient languages, you get a unique rhythmic and textural composition that is linked to this country in a way that nothing else can be,” Cheetham Fraillon explains. “Because that language is coming out of the geography of country.” The Eumeralla wars were the bloody and devastating battles between British settlers and the Gunditjmara people, one of the country’s most shameful acts; the requiem thrums with that violence but also resolves into music of astonishing grace and absolution.

We stop to give Charlie a drink of water before heading back to Short Black Opera’s offices, dominated by a huge poster of Pecan Summer. It’s an opera that drew heavily on her own autobiography, from the Stolen Generations years all the way back to the walk-off at Cummeragunja.

“You know, that’s something you keep working out for the rest of your life,” Cheetham Fraillon says of that primal wrenching, “if indeed you ever work it out. Many Stolen Generation children never find their way home. I did find my way home. Music led me home.”

Cheetham Fraillon believes passionately that, rather than being obtuse or difficult, opera and classical music is for everyone. Which is why Australian opera companies’ almost perverse obsession with European music, especially their financial reliance on musicals, is a source of constant frustration. (Opera Australia is staging its third production of Phantom of the Opera in four years.)

“One of the reasons Short Black Opera was established was, indeed, to perform opera. And those First Nations singers who’d searched their whole lives for a path into classical music and not felt supported, had been either passively or aggressively kept out, I would provide opportunities for them to train.”

As Charlie snuggles into her bed, and the morning lengthens outside Short Black Opera’s office window, Cheetham Fraillon contemplates the role of classical music in an increasingly fractious world. “It’s important to be serious about what you’re doing,” she says. “That doesn’t exclude all the fun and laughter. Watch a dog in a dog park and you’ll feel that joy. But these are serious times. Sometimes it’s overwhelming,” she concedes.

And yet, Cheetham Fraillon still believes music, and the arts more broadly, might be our best way out. “The arts is where we develop critical thought and emotional maturity. We do have agency, and art can help us understand and come to terms with the really big questions of life. What on earth is our purpose here, if not to do that?”

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon will appear at All About Women at the Sydney Opera House on 8 March