Helen Porter Mitchell

Abstract

Helen Porter Mitchell was born at Doonside, Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, on 19 May 1861, the third of Isabella and David Mitchell’s ten children and the first to survive infancy. On 25 March William Saurin Lyster, the wild Irish opera entrepreneur, launched his company’s first Australian season with Lucia di Lammermoor, the opera in which Melba made her Covent Garden début twenty-seven years later. Two of the most important figures in the history of Australian opera had arrived together.