Louise Hanson-Dyer 1884-1962

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Louise Dyer swiftly claimed a place in Melbourne’s artistic circles. At ‘Kinnoull’, her grand mansion in Toorak, she played munificent host to the city’s elite. She engaged the best available musical talent to entertain her guests, and commissioned leading artists to design the souvenir programs. She was always centre-stage, always gorgeously and flamboyantly dressed, and always sparkling with wit and charm.

Dyer fostered Melbourne’s Alliance Française and the formation of the British Music Society of Victoria. She subsidised most of its presentations, including in 1926 a single performance of Gustav Holst’s short English opera Savitri, proceeds of which provided a considerable boost to the British Music Society’s Endowment Fund.

Dyer also espoused the work of the bush poet John Shaw Neilson. She underwrote the publication of his Ballad and Lyrical Poems in 1923 and led a deputation to the prime minister to seek an increase in the pensions that the Commonwealth made available to writers.

Her husband, meanwhile, served on the executive of the Royal Victorian Liedertafel, with which he had sung as a tenor, and expanded his art collection.

In 1927, after they donated £10,000 to assist the formation of a permanent orchestra, the Dyers left Melbourne and spent two years exploring Europe. They settled permanently in Paris, which Louise called ‘the Mecca of musicians’. Their luxury apartment, with its view of the Eiffel Tower, became a magnet for the era’s leading composers and writers, and for friends visiting from Australia. There were frequent trips back to Melbourne, most notably in 1932: her brother, Harold Gengoult Smith, had become the city’s lord mayor. He was then a bachelor, and Louise enthusiastically assumed the role of lady mayoress.

Back in Paris, Louise devoted herself to collecting historic musical manuscripts and to establishing her own publishing house, ‘Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre’, the name and associated logo reflecting the iconic lyrebird of her homeland.