Summary

Newspaper clipping titled 'They Want to Join Eoan Group', dated 1958. It discusses auditions held for the Eoan Group at City Hall for the Opera Company. It describes four people who auditioned, three men and a woman named Sylvia Booysen (Boyes). The article states she was 21, grew up in Leliebloem Orphanage, and now works on the kitchen staff of a hospital in the Gardens. Sylvia joined the Eoan Group in 1966 and performed in a variety of operas in the chorus. She met her future husband, Lindsay Motherwell, through the Eoan Group's production of 'South Pacific'. Sylvia left South Africa in 1969 and migrated to Australia in 1970.

Sylvia Boyes (a South African-born orphan) and Lindsay Motherwell (a Melbourne-born drummer) met in Cape Town, South Africa in 1967 through their theatre connections. They fell in love but due to apartheid laws were forced to leave South Africa to marry in London. They subsequently relocated permanently to Melbourne in 1970.

Physical Description

Newspaper clipping describes four people who auditioned; Simon Swiggelaar, 25, Otto Domeyer, 37, Cyril Julie, 20, and Sylvia Booysen, 21. There is no date but Sylvia turned 21 in July 1958.

Significance

Statement of Historical Significance:
This collection provides a significant opportunity to represent political and personal freedom as a motivation for migrating to Australia within the international context of both apartheid in South Africa and the end of the White Australia policy in Australia. The personal narrative is well documented and the objects provide a material way to follow the lives of both Lindsay and Sylvia, both separately and where they coincide in South Africa and onwards together to Melbourne. While this is ultimately a love story, it plays out through the collection against the backdrop of apartheid South Africa, sixties London and an increasingly multicultural Australia.

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