Sara Flower

Sara Elizabeth Flower (c. 1820 – 1865) was a British-born contralto singer who became Australia's first opera star. She began a musical career in London in the 1840s but decamped to Australia late in 1849, when her professional future seemed secure. Soon after her arrival in Melbourne early in 1850 she began a career as the Australian vocal phenomenon of the era. In 1852 she appeares in Sydney in the first production in Australia of Bellini's opera Norma. Flower was Australia's first diva.

Sara Flower was born in Grays, Essex, an English market town on the River Thames and situated on the edge of the Tilbury marshes. In 1821 it had a population of 742, supporting six public houses. Flower's maternal grandfather, Daniel Granger, had the Rising Sun public house. However, close by, overlooking the Thames, the 18th century Belmont Castle exerted considerable influence upon the social and cultural life of the wider region, more specifically, it was the focus of an influential musical circle of metropolitan status.

Sara's father, William Lewis Flower (c.1800-1847), was recorded in the Essex Directory in 1823 as a draper, grocer, and agent for Phoenix Fire & Life. In 1841, upon the entry of his daughter Sara to the Royal Academy of Music, he could declare that he had 'no occupation', hence, the status of gentleman. His elder brother, Robert Flower (1779?-1832), was by 1824 foreman of the local brickworks but had been described in the parish records in 1817 as a yeoman, which suggests an earlier lineage of tenant farmers or small proprietors, and also a drop in social status. With the enclosure movement after the Napoleonic Wars, conditions for this socio-economic group were particularly difficult, which probably explains Robert's change of occupation.

Her mother, Ruth Flower, was the daughter of Grays publican, Daniel Granger. Nothing more is known of her, except for the possibility that she may have been the prototype in Alice Diehl's first published novel Garden of Eden for the mother of a fictional opera singer whose sad fate she prophetically foretells.

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