Glen Tomasetti, singer, novelist
Hyfler/Rosner
Glen Tomasetti
Songwriter, singer, novelist, political activist. Born Melbourne, May 21,
1929. Died Melbourne, June 25, aged 74.
AT the funeral of historian Manning Clark in 1991, a frail woman put aside
her crutches and sang her vocalisation of David Campbell's poem Windy Gap.
The congregation was electrified. The unaccompanied voice was as strong and
true as it had ever been.
Glen Tomasetti's performance was all the more remarkable because she was
afraid that her grief might choke her voice. She had loved Clark and he had
loved her.
Tomasetti was a woman of singular passion that found focus in motherhood,
friendship, art, the environment and justice for the oppressed. Her
creativity was multifaceted. She was a historian, poet, novelist and actor.
She was formidably intelligent and her god had bestowed on her extraordinary
physical beauty.
Glenys Ann Tomasetti inherited an adventurous spirit from her parents Jack
and Muriel who, after travelling in Africa, China and Japan, settled in
prosaic Balwyn, in Melbourne.
She attended various primary schools and completed her secondary education
at the Methodist Ladies College. She excelled academically and studied
music. At home she sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs accompanied by her mother
at the piano.
Aged 17, after receiving a commonwealth scholarship, she entered Janet Clark
Hall at the University of Melbourne. She studied history (under Clark),
English, philosophy and French. She sang in madrigals and larger choirs. At
21, in 1950, she wed fellow student, later lawyer, Peter Balmford and for a
time the couple lived at Leeper House in the grounds of Trinity College.
Two children, Clare and Jonathon, were born to this marriage.
The family moved back to Balwyn where Glen enlivened life in that salubrious
suburb by forming the Making Balwyn Bearable Society. She wrote a poem
articulating her feelings of the time: "Oh Lord, is it my fault that I'm
bored?"
This group's website insists that in the early years members enjoyed jazz
and wild dancing.
Her marriage to Balmford was dissolved and she made a brief and unhappy
marriage to journalist and guitarist Sebastian Jorgensen.
As a further distraction to her unhappy marriages Tomasetti bought a guitar,
wrote lyrics and cultivated her singing. In 1958, with a group of
performers, she toured the relatively new People's Republic of China. For
six weeks and through 21,000km she observed this revolutionary society and
its fundamental changes since her parents' visit 22 years previously.
Tomasetti was indubitably a lefty but, unlike many colleagues, she never
succumbed to the spell of communism.
During the 1960s she cut 11 records, many derived from traditional
Australian folklore. Channel 7 hired her for a program in which she was
required to write a new song each week. How her radical approach survived
commercial television of the time is a matter of historical conjecture, but
she was well received by the viewers, who applied in droves for copies of
her lyrics.
Tomasetti invariably received a good press. In 1967 she made headlines when
she was subpoened to court for witholding one-sixth of her income tax on the
grounds that this was the exact proportion used by the Holt government to
finance the war in Vietnam.
Tomasetti became a hero of the feminist movement after writing, Don't Be Too
Polite, Girls. She was not cranky in her views and expressed her philosophy
thus: "The word protest affirms aspects of life at the other extreme from
the thing opposed ... smiling babies, flowers, crops, dancing and work whose
end is neither deception nor death."
Despite her reservations (similar to those of Katharine Hepburn) about the
strictures of marriage -- not to mention her highly successful career -- she
believed that motherhood was the emotional core of her life.
In 1976, publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble launched their new
enterprise with Tomastti's Thoroughly Decent People, a novel set in suburban
Australia. It was typical of her unorthodox style in that its fictional
derivation came from an abandoned master's thesis on folklore. It is Barry
Humphriesque in style and an interesting example of a Melbourne collective
unconscious.
Her second novel, Man of Letters (Penguin 1981) is, in its clipped style,
reminiscent of Fay Weldon. The central character (some say) is at least
partly based on Clark.
Tomasetti had problems with drink. In 1983 she joined Alcoholics Anonymous
and never drank again. At the same time she underwent a spiritual conversion
from her professed atheism. In her later years she was stricken with a
virulent form of arthritis. Her fortitude was extraordinary and her
creativity undiminished. She has left an unpublished biography of pianist
Hepzibah Menuhin.
Tomasetti is survived by the children of her marriage to Balmford and by
Sarah (also known as Clio) from her union to Montsalvat jeweller Matcham
Skipper.