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Archives of Australian Composers
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material are held for the following composers:
Prof. G.W.L. Marshall-Hall
Elsa Marshall-Hall (Elsa Inman)
Ian Bonighton
Mary (May) Brahe
Florence M. Donaldson Ewart
Mona McBurney
Henry Tate
Leon Caron
Anne Mackey
Philip Nunn
Edwin Burchett
Violet Vernon
This collection is fully listed in the publication: G.W.L. Marshall-Hall: A biography and catalogue by Thérèse Radic (Marshall-Hall Trust, 2002).  It is well-known to those familiar with the life of Percy Grainger (1882 –1961) that Marshall-Hall arranged the fundraising concert that would send the young Grainger to Frankfurt in order to commence his music studies in 1895. George W.L. Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) arrived in Melbourne in 1891 to take up the position of first Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne. Possessed of a seemingly boundless passion for all forms of art, Marshall-Hall contributed much to the development of musical culture in Melbourne.  He established the Marshall-Hall Orchestra as well as the University conservatorium of Music. He was also patron to a number of emerging Australian visual artists. In 1934, Percy Grainger contacted Sir James Barrett (then Chancellor of the University of Melbourne) and Marshall-Hall’s family to negotiate the purchase of his music manuscripts for inclusion in his proposed museum. By 1939 (just after the Grainger Museum opened), the Marshall-Hall material formed the first of a series of collections relating to Australian composers featured in the Grainger Museum. Far from being a simple collection of printed music and manuscripts, the Marshall-Hall collection also contains his published literary works, news clippings and articles, scrapbooks, correspondence, photographs and artworks. The range of disciplines represented in this collection demonstrates Grainger’s notion that his Museum should shed light on the ‘process of creative genius’, not just the fruits of that genius.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material. Mona McBurney was born on 29 July 1862. She graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1896, becoming the first woman in Australia to obtain a Bachelor of Music.   McBurney was one of the founding members of the Catalysts’ Society and the Lyceum Club, networks of women who had distinguished themselves in art, music, literature, philanthropy or public service. Her compositions were regularly performed in Melbourne and her opera The Dalmatian (composed in 1905 and produced in its entirety in 1926) holds the honour of being the first opera by a woman composer to be performed in Australia.   A donation of Mona McBurney’s musical works in manuscript form, several of her published songs, programs, photographs and dolls were made to the Grainger Museum by the family of Mona’s nephew, Archibald McBurney, through his widow Linda and son James. Some of the dolls are dressed in tiny replicas of the costumes created for the characters in her opera The Dalmatian, complete with name tags.      
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.
Manuscripts, published scores and supporting archival material.