Photo by Robert Jefferson
Deborah Cheetham’s Pecan Summer had its world premiere on country in the Victorian town of Mooroopna in October 2010. The story of the first mass strike by Aboriginal people in Australian history, the opera details the 1939 walk-off from Cummeragunga Mission, when some 200 people of the Yorta Yorta nation, pushed to breaking point by the draconian conditions enforced by the New South Wales Aboriginal Protection Board, walked out of the mission and across the Murray River to re-settle in northern Victoria.
