DULCIE HOLLAND’S EARLY piano lessons as a six-year-old always started with an impromptu botany lesson. She would take some of the native flowers that flourished in her garden along to her piano lessons, where her teacher’s father would identify them. Throughout her life she took pride in reciting the curly botanical names of Australian plants.
Decades later, she would play her own role in educating immigrants about this strange and faraway land. She composed the music for a series of postwar documentaries that promoted Australia as a place to live and educated would-be migrants about the virtues of their new home.
Dulcie Holland was my grandmother, and it was through discussion of these films around the family dinner table in suburban Sydney that I
