Country Style - May 2008

my country childhood | DAVID HOBSON

DAVID HOBSON SINGER AND COMPOSER

THE OPERA AND TELEVISION STAR RECALLS A BOYHOOD IN BALLARAT, WHEN ALL THE FAMILY SANG, BUT FOOTBALL WAS WHAT MADE MEN FAMOUS.

CLOCK WISE FROM TOP LEF T Smartly attired at age 3; David with his parents, Philip and Kathleen, and sisters (from left) Anne, Ruth and Jane; David (middle row, far right) with the AFL team at the University of Melbourne’s Ormond College in 1980.

ON SUNDAY, after a roast lamb-with-all-the-trimmings lunch, the Hobsons would gather around the piano in the sitting room and sing. “It was a musical family,” says David of the weekly ritual.

David, who was born in Victoria’s Ballarat in 1960, has steadily become a household name to Australia’s opera lovers since 1983 when he was discovered by Opera Victoria. He achieved outstanding success nine years later when he sang the part of Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s production of La Bohème. In recent years he has reached an even wider audience as one of the star voices on the Seven Network’s top-rating It Takes Two, in which well-known singers like David coach a celebrity partner.

A season of Seven’s Dancing with the Stars in 2007 further endeared him to the viewing public. The show offered him a chance to raise money for a favourite charity that works with young people battling cancer. David himself had lymphoma as a teenager and its return during his first year at university saw him abandon his studies for the more precarious path of music — “Being sick accelerated the way I felt about things...”

It was through his father’s involvement in musical theatre that David took to the stage, playing the Artful Dodger to his father’s Fagan in a production of Oliver when he was 10. By the time he was 17, David had already worked on radio and television, in the theatre and in a recording studio. “It’s extraordinary to think that a town of only 60,000 people had those facilities,” he muses.

David remembers his childhood as idyllic: “The country experience is a type of naïve abandon.” And even though his own family now lives in a city, he and his wife Amber believe they’ve managed to create something of the same experience for their children, Madeleine and Sam. “We’ve ended up in a really nice pocket of Melbourne where we know every neighbour and there’s a park down the end of the street.”