Dame Nellie Melba Love, passion & scandal

There were two significant concerts early in the life of Helen “Nellie” Mitchell. The first was at age eight when she sang and played the piano at a charity concert organised by her local Methodist Church in Melbourne. It earned her several encores and a review from a newspaper reporter who described her a musical prodigy.

The second was as a young teen when she organised her own charity event to repair a fence at the church. She invited neighbours and friends but her father, angry that she was making an unseemly spectacle of herself, went behind her back and ordered that the guests stay away. Only two people turned up but Nellie sang anyway, confused but unperturbed by the turn of events.

The first performance told her that she had a golden voice, a God-given talent to be buffed and polished, and the second left no doubt that she would have to rebel against society’s low expectations of women, including her own father, to be heard.

Born in Melbourne in 1861, Nellie’s was a privileged childhood as the eldest child of a self-made businessman, David Mitchell, who built many of the city’s most iconic buildings as the Victorian goldrush turned Melbourne into a city of significance. But her life changed at the age of 20 with the death of her mother, Isabella, followed soon afterwards when her four-year-old sister, Vere, whom