Opera Australia is the principal opera company in Australia. Based in Sydney, its performance season at the Sydney Opera House accompanied by the Opera Australia Orchestra runs for approximately eight months of the year, with the remainder of its time spent at the Arts Centre Melbourne, where it is accompanied by Orchestra Victoria. In 2004, the company gave 226 performances in its subscription seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, attended by more than 294,000 people.
Radio National, known on-air as RN, is an Australia-wide public service broadcasting radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). From 1947 until 1985, the network was known as ABC Radio 2.
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s.
The Money or the Gun was an Australian comedy/talk-show on the ABC network. It ran from late 1989 to mid-1990, with occasional specials until 1994. It was written by Andrew Denton, Simon Dodd, Bruce Griffiths, and George Dodd, directed by Martin Coombes and produced by Mark Fitzgerald.
John Morrison Clarke was a New Zealand comedian, writer and satirist who lived and worked in Australia from the late 1970s. He was a highly regarded actor and writer whose work appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in both radio and television and also in print. He is principally known for his character Fred Dagg and his long-running collaboration with fellow satirist Bryan Dawe, which lasted from 1989 to his death in 2017, as well as for his success as a comic actor in Australian and New Zealand film and television.
Richard Kingsmill is an Australian radio announcer, music journalist and currently Group Music Director of triple j, triple j Unearthed, Double J and ABC Local Radio.
James Oswald Little, AO was an Australian Aboriginal musician, actor and teacher, who was a member of the Yorta Yorta tribe and was raised on the Cummeragunja Reserve, New South Wales.
John Robert Williamson is an Australian country music and folk music singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, television host and conservationist. Williamson usually writes and performs songs that relate to the history and culture of Australia, particularly the outback, in a similar vein to Slim Dusty and Buddy Williams before him. Williamson has released over fifty albums, ten videos, five DVDs, and two lyric books and has sold more than 4,000,000 albums in Australia. His best known hit is "True Blue". On Australia Day in 1992 Williamson was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) with the citation: "for service to Australian country music and in stimulating awareness of conservation issues". He has received twenty-six Golden Guitar trophies at the Country Music Awards of Australia, he has won three ARIA Music Awards for Best Country Album and, in 2010, was inducted into the related Hall of Fame.
The following lists events that happened during 1966 in Australia.
Blue Hills, created and written by Gwen Meredith, is an Australian radio serial about the lives of families, set in a fictional typical Australian country town called Tanimbla. The title "Blue Hills" itself derives from the residence of Dr. Gordon, the town's doctor.
Smoky Dawson AM, MBE, born as Herbert Henry Brown, was an Australian Country, Western and folk performer, radio star, entertainer, and icon. He was widely touted as Australia's first singing cowboy complete with acoustic steel string guitar and yodel, in the style of American's Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
David Hobson is an Australian opera tenor and composer.
Pinchas Cargher AM, known professionally as John Cargher, was a British-born Australian music and ballet journalist and radio broadcaster.
Warren Hedley Williams is an Aboriginal Australian singer, musician and songwriter from Hermannsburg in Central Australia. As of 2013 he worked as a broadcaster on CAAMA Radio in Alice Springs.
Lucky Oceans is an American pedal steel guitarist and a former member of country and Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel. From 1995 to 2017 he was a broadcaster in Perth, Western Australia with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Donald Sydney Smith OBE was an Australian operatic tenor. His voice had a bright Italianate quality which could match, in size carrying power and tonal allure, the voices of most sopranos and mezzos. He attracted a fiercely loyal public following, and many Australians who had no prior experience of opera became opera lovers through Smith's work. His performances were regularly sold out with The Australian Opera at the Sydney Opera House.
The Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts are a regular series of weekly broadcasts on network radio of full-length opera performances. They are transmitted live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network airs the live performances on Saturday afternoons while the Met is in season, typically beginning the first Saturday in December, and totaling just over 20 weekly performances through early May. The Met broadcasts are the longest-running continuous classical music program in radio history, and the series has won several Peabody Awards for excellence in broadcasting.
The earliest western musical influences in Australia can be traced to two distinct sources: in the first settlements, the large body of convicts, soldiers and sailors who brought the traditional folk music of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; and the first free settlers, some of whom had been exposed to the European classical music tradition in their upbringing. An example of original music by a convict would be an 1861 tune dedicated to settler James Gordon by fiddler constable Alexander Laing. Very little music has survived from this early period, although there are samples of music originating from Sydney and Hobart that date back to the early 19th century. Musical publications from this period preserved in Australian libraries include works by Charles Edward Horsley, William Stanley, Isaac Nathan, Charles Sandys Packer, Frederick Augustus Packer, Carl Linger, Francis Hartwell Henslowe, Frederick Ellard, Raimund Pechotsch and Julius Siede.
Clarke's Classics is a comedy studio album by Australian satirist John Clarke. The album was released in August 2017.