Janet Millett: A Life in Balladong - The York Festival

See history come alive as actor Sarah McNeill embodies this remarkable woman, Janet Millett bringing her experiences in Balladong to vivid life. This performance has been created using extracts from Janet Millett's best-selling book, An Australian Parsonage, written in 1872. Sarah McNeill is joined by cellist Anna Sarcich in a show that captures the life and the town of York in its days as an early settlement.  The show is co-written by Sarah and Rob-Garton-Smith. 

After five years in the new settlement of York, which she called Balladong, Janet Millett returned home to England and wrote about her time there in An Australian Parsonage, a memoir full of her thoughts, observations and experiences as a pioneering settler.  Actor Sarah McNeill brings York to life in the 1860s, through Janet’s own words, in Life in Balladong, accompanied by Anna Sarcich on cello on Saturday 13 April at 2pm and 6pm and Sunday 14 April at 2pm and 5pm. 

Anna is a very creative cellist who will be improvising on original 1860s classics. The beautiful sounds of the cello weave in and out of the story and act as a break between the spoken “chapters” of Janet’s accounts of York. The performance takes place in the very church where her husband was chaplain.   

Sarah McNeill says, “I am so full of admiration for this woman who arrived in a tiny colonial town so far from anything she was familiar with but made the place her own. She refused to call it York instead adopting the local name Balladong, attempted to learn the local indigenous language and made friends with them. She fostered a young Aboriginal child whose mother had died. She loved the countryside and rode out daily and she worked hard to help ex-convict workers who she felt were being treated unfairly.”