Elizabeth Alice Silsbury (nee White) OAM
Musician and critic
Born: December 4, 1931; Adelaide
Died: July 11, 2025; Adelaide
Elizabeth Silsbury was South Australia’s leading music and opera critic through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Her impact on music, but also on music education and the performing arts generally, was much larger than that.
Her authoritative, sometimes cheeky and always witty reviews in South Australian, national and international media gave her a wide public profile. Her equally energetic, all-embracing if not abrasive involvement in the arts meant she was a force to be reckoned with.
She survived an unusual upbringing to be combative and absolutely sure of her place in the world and in her view of the world.
She was born the second daughter of Marjorie and car salesman Eustace White. When Marjorie was heavily pregnant with Elizabeth and living in Melbourne she was assaulted by Eustace, who was arrested and charged by the Victorian Police. Marjorie returned alone to Adelaide with Patsy, aged 2, before giving birth to Elizabeth.
The girls were to be raised by their deeply devout Presbyterian grandparents, Jane and Heenling Norris, who along with Jane’s father, William Russell, ran a ships chandlery in Port Adelaide. The Norrises lived on a one-hectare semi-rural property in Woodville.
Marjorie, an early female graduate of the University of Adelaide, soon found work as a temporary teacher, and would spend her life working in country and metropolitan primary schools. She would claim she was widowed.
The girls never met their father.
Patsy and Elizabeth came from families rich with musical backgrounds and both took to the piano early on. Elizabeth had perfect pitch and began playing organ for her local church when still a child. She went to Woodville Primary School and Woodville High School, before taking her matriculation at Adelaide Girls High, outstanding in all her subjects.
At Adelaide Teachers College alongside fellow students such as the future operatic tenor Thomas Edmonds and composer Peter Narroway she would be introduced to the wider world of music and theatre. And when she began teaching at Adelaide Girls High in 1956 she worked with teachers such as the intellectually and socially progressive Didi Medlin, Rae Blesing and Margaret Ward who would remain lifelong friends.
Her interests in performance and her strong mezzo voice and perfect pitch led her to join the South Australian choir for the nascent Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust touring national opera productions.
She first studied at the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide in 1948, aged 17. She would go on to take her diploma and music degrees there. Later in life she would become a founding board member of the University of Adelaide’s Alumni Association.
She joined one of Adelaide’s main theatre companies at that time, The University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. It was there that she met her future husband, agricultural scientist Jim Silsbury. The occasion was a production of the Lorca classic, Blood Wedding.
They were married in 1957. In 1960, with children Catherine, three, and newborn Kendall, they moved to the UK for a year on the first of Jim’s sabbaticals.
Back in Adelaide Elizabeth joined the teaching staff at Western Teachers College at a time when it was becoming a progressive force in education. Elizabeth made the deliberate decision to put career before the still-dominant ethos of a wife’s domestic duties. The family was supported by housekeepers from then on, although it took a substantial portion of Elizabeth’s income to make that possible.
When Elizabeth was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1967, Jim was able to take sabbatical leave as well and the family spent a year abroad. Elizabeth visited music education institutions in Canada, California, UK and the Netherlands. The Fellowship enabled her to further study music teaching, particularly the Kodaly method, with its emphasis on singing to introduce children to music. She would go on to be involved in the selection and orientation of Churchill Fellows in the arts in South Australia for many years.
Back in Adelaide she joined the newly established Bedford Park Teachers College as head of its school of music in the years before it was absorbed into Flinders University.
Her experiences overseas had convinced her that music education in primary schools could not be taught by general classroom teachers. With the Education Department’s supervisor of music, Alan Farwell, they campaigned for funding for a program of specialist music teachers to visit primary schools.
In the 1970s, when the Education Department was under the direction of Labor’s Education Minister Hugh Hudson, she was a member of the team establishing specialist musical high schools in Adelaide, starting with Marryatville High School in 1976.
It was a time of the liberalisation of the arts in Adelaide. Professional arts companies were emerging and growing under the Steele Hall and Don Dunstan Governments at State level and through Prime Ministers John Gorton and Gough Whitlam at the Federal level.
Elizabeth was closely involved in these changes, particularly when it came to establishing a professional opera company in SA.
In 1972 she was part of a team including James Murdoch and Len Amadio with Federal Government funding to put together a one-act opera, The Young Kabbarli, by Australian composer Margaret Sutherland, drawn from the Daisy Bates story. It included dance by David Gulpilil. Elizabeth was also repetiteur.
It led to State and Federal funding for local SA company Intimate Opera, a forerunner of New Opera which evolved into today’s State Opera Company of SA.
The Australia Council was boosted during Gough Whitlam’s term as Prime Minister and Elizabeth was appointed to its Music Board, from 1973 to 1975. In 1977 she was appointed to the board of management of The Australian Opera (now Opera Australia), a position she held until 1994, one of the longest terms by a board member.
She began reviewing music for The Advertiser in the early seventies. The rise of professional performing arts companies in Adelaide had given room for critics to take a tougher stance on standards of inspiration and performance. Elizabeth used her wide skills and knowledge in music and opera to write lively and rewarding accounts of performances around Adelaide. She was capable of making waves where she felt it necessary and firmly established herself as the final word in music criticism in the State.
She contributed to magazines including opera and music publications nationally and Opera Magazine internationally.
Her book, State of Opera: An intimate new history of The State Opera of South Australia 1957-2000 (Wakefield Press) was a comprehensive guide to the way opera had developed in SA until it was capable of staging Australia’s celebrated first modern production of Wagner’s massive four-opera Ring Cycle in Adelaide in 1998. State Opera would follow that with the first Australian designed and produced Ring Cycle in 2004.
Unlike the supposed tradition of critics lurking in the shadows Elizabeth was socially outgoing and held frequent soirees and musical evenings at her home in Tusmore, especially after Adeliade Symphony Orchestra and State Opera productions.
She was equally adept in involving herself in arts politics in Adelaide and nationally, reinforced when her sister Patsy, by then better known as Patricia Giles, became an ALP senator for Western Australia from 1981.
In 1985 Elizabeth was awarded an OAM for service to music and music education.
Her career as a critic coincided neatly with a flourishing of the professional performing arts and arts criticism in South Australia and ended when she was in her 80s.
Her husband Jim died, aged 60, in 1991. She is survived by her daughters, six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.
Elizabeth was cremated in a private ceremony and there will be a public memorial celebration at 2pm on Sunday, October 5 at Elder Hall. Free tickets are available through Humanitix (https://events.humanitix.com/elizabeth-silsbury-memorial)
Magnificent. Eloquent. I think we are all deeply grateful for the love and expertise you have poured into this obit and our dearly departed Elizabeth would be proud of you.