Stella Axarlis has always been a commanding presence, first on the opera stage, then on the factory floor and then in community service.
By Phyllis Papps
ON January 1, 2001, Stella Axarlis stood on centre stage once more, one of six Australians from diverse backgrounds chosen to tell their story to celebrate the centenary of Australia’s federation. The ceremony at Sydney’s Centennial Park was broadcast live and viewed by millions of Australians.
Resplendent in a flowing black and gold silk gown, Axarlis started her story with the words, “I love this country and I’m passionately Australian, though I think as an Anglo-Celtic my heart still beats in Greek tempo.” She spoke of her family and of her four professional lives: high school teacher, opera singer, business woman and community advocate. Arms outstretched, she ended with the proclamation, “Australia – I love you!”
Phillip Islanders watched this stellar performance with special pride. Stella Axarlis is one of our own. For many years she has owned a luxurious townhouse in Cowes. As her work commitments lessened, she became increasingly involved with local causes, including Phillip Island Nature Parks and the Friends of Churchill Island. The island was her haven: she swam and took long walks on the beach with her beloved German shepherd Zoë. Her friends and large extended family visited her there.
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ABOUT five years after the centennial celebrations, feeling rather daunted, I visited Axarlis to interview her. My anxiety disappeared when I was nearly knocked over at the security door by Zoë. Axarlis greeted me warmly and we started chatting as if we had known each other all our lives. We discovered we had similar backgrounds. We were both born in Egypt and had Greek parents and we both came to Australia in 1950. Apparently my parents knew her parents and we had obviously met each other as young children at some stage, although she is a few years older so wouldn’t have taken much notice of me.
There were reminders of the opera star she had once been in the large framed photographs in the main room, which also contained a grand piano. More framed photos lined the hallway and stairway. And there were occasional flashes of the diva she once was, the grande dame. She related a life story with many twists and turns. She had been in the public eye for so long that it took four interviews and various long lunches – she is a cordon bleu cook who loves to cook for guests – before I got the real story, not just the one she had rehearsed over many years of being interviewed.
I asked her how she felt being chosen to tell Australia’s multicultural story. “I was stunned, but I quickly realised this was the first time I had the opportunity to tell Australia how I felt about it and my gratitude for Australia. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to honour my parents. I had four minutes to say who my family was, to acknowledge that this country has given someone who was not born here many opportunities to develop in so many ways.”
Stella Axarlis’s Centenary of Federation speech
Axarlis was born in Egypt and came to Australia with her parents and four brothers when she was 10. Her mother was a dutiful Greek wife and her father, who was 60 when she was born, was very patriarchal. But she said he also gave her the strength to break away from the mould.
“He was my greatest mentor in my earlier years and had a profound effect on me. Everything he said I seem to have stored away and used at different stages in my life. In our home there was encouragement to read, to think, to articulate opinions, to learn to listen as well as contribute. I think they were the things that formed me.”
At school, Stella was teased for being Greek and it made her want to excel. She was a performer from a very early age. “I used to love to recite and I would get up on a table at five years of age and recite these incredibly long poems.”
In 1956 she joined the Latvian Mixed Choir and started singing solo, which led to her momentous meeting with Madame Erica Burkewitch, a renowned international soprano who was to become her mentor, her teacher and her adoptive mother after the early death of her own mother in 1960.
In 1964 Axarlis graduated from Melbourne University with a BA in mathematics and history and for the next three years taught mathematics at secondary school. But she was already beginning her next career. At night she studied singing under Madame Burkewitch’s demanding tuition and was soon invited to live with Madame Burkewitch and her husband Bill Connochy in their Caulfield home.
A publicity photo of Stella Axarlis, 1970s.
Her big break came in 1967, when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, the top competition in Australia. With Madame Burkewitch at her side, she headed for Europe. Bypassing the traditional apprenticeship of an opera singer, she stepped straight into some of the most demanding dramatic soprano roles in opera – Aida and Tosca among them – in many of Europe’s top opera houses. On her frequent returns to Australia, she performed as a special guest of the Australian Opera Company. By 1990 she was at the peak of her opera career, booked out five years ahead.
And suddenly it was all over. Madame Burkewitch – “my tower of strength”, as Axarlis calls her – had become ill and Bilcon Engineering, the family business founded by her husband Bill in 1942, was on the verge of collapse. Axarlis abandoned her opera life and returned to Melbourne to care for Madame Burkewitch and to run the ailing Dandenong firm.
“I was catapulted into a new situation that I was totally unprepared for. It was my duty, but the decision was heart-breaking,” she recalled many years later in Cowes. “However, I had a new challenge and I had to perform that challenge to the best of my ability.”
The appearance of an opera singer on the automotive engineering scene was bound to raise a few eyebrows. “I made my first mistake when I went to see General Motors dressed in a wonderfully long mink coat. Politically quite incorrect, but that’s the way I was dressing in those days and it was winter.”
Of course, she knew nothing about engineering, or running a firm, but she set about learning. Australia was in recession and Bilcon had its own problems. “It had no computer systems, no quality systems and no administrative processes,” she recalled in an interview in 2009.
Axarlis also discovered that although Bilcon had many highly skilled employees, they were shut out of the management process. “I began to communicate with each employee, asking them what they liked and what they didn’t like. Slowly there evolved a picture of our strengths and weaknesses. We broke down those barriers so we were able to continue this process that empowers people.
“Quality has to be part of the culture of an organisation. You can’t simply impose it. But the rewards are immense, not only to the bottom line but to the people who work there in their satisfaction at being part of an organisation that values them.”
As Bilcon returned from the brink, Axarlis herself began to be noticed in management circles. She was appointed chairwoman of the National Training Quality Council, the modern Australian Apprenticeships and Traineeships Scheme and the Industry Skills Council. In 2011 she received the inaugural lifetime achievement award from the Australian Training Awards for her contribution to vocational education and training.
She set up her own management consultancy and is still an inspiring public speaker. She gives credit to her years on the stage. “A lot of the speeches and presentations I do now use the same ability to make contact with an audience.”
She also chaired Liberti Learning, a non-profit company that aims to help children and young people with special needs with individual learning programs, training and research. Liberti Learning founder Ann Penaluna, a colleague and friend of Axarlis for many years, said she had “an enormous heart”. “Stella’s leadership and drive and sense of social justice is infinite. If you need something, Stella’s network is quite remarkable and she will use it for the kids, never for herself – never.”
In 1998 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to training, business and children with special needs. She received a Hellenic Excellence Award in 2000, an Award for Excellence in Multicultural Affairs in 2002 and a Centenary Medal in 2003.
I saw both the public and the private sides of Axarlis during my many hours with her. Somehow she has created a delicate balance between the rational Anglo-Celtic side of her nature and the emotional Greek side. We discussed this dichotomy over espresso coffee and Greek shortbread. “I’m sort of fairly emotional, yet very rational,” she said.
In her opera career she was as renowned for her dramatic abilities as her singing and she brings that same quality to public life: her persona is commanding. She is extroverted, disciplined, logical and decisive. She is also a perfectionist and a workaholic. “I could not possibly be without work. I embrace it,” she said. The public person was very obvious when she received a very difficult work-related phone call while I was there.
But I also saw the private, vulnerable woman – the shy young girl who was teased at school for being Greek, the beautiful young woman who was adopted by Madame Burkewitch as her protégé, the family woman who is very close to her brothers, their wives and her nieces and nephews.
The private Axarlis is quietly spoken, self-effacing and emotional. There were tears in her eyes when we viewed a video of her eulogy to Madame Burkewitch, who died in 1997. She also showed me a video of her trip to Chios, her mother’s birthplace, in 2000 to commemorate her mother’s death 40 years earlier. Stella visited her relatives, her mother’s home and the church that her mother prayed in. She was amazed at how emotional the experience was for her.
Axarlis visits Phillip Island less than she once did. Her townhouse went on the market about a year ago. I saw her last year standing in a queue at the Cowes Newsagency, dressed in black, wearing black sunglasses and a black hat and avoiding eye contact with everyone. Clearly, she did not want to be recognised and I let her be.
But I would never rule out another comeback. The last time I interviewed her, I asked her about her future. She laughed heartily. “I haven’t a clue! I never seek out challenges. They seem to seek me. I’m sure there will be other challenges.”
ON January 1, 2001, Stella Axarlis stood on centre stage once more, one of six Australians from diverse backgrounds chosen to tell their story to celebrate the centenary of Australia’s federation. The ceremony at Sydney’s Centennial Park was broadcast live and viewed by millions of Australians.
Resplendent in a flowing black and gold silk gown, Axarlis started her story with the words, “I love this country and I’m passionately Australian, though I think as an Anglo-Celtic my heart still beats in Greek tempo.” She spoke of her family and of her four professional lives: high school teacher, opera singer, business woman and community advocate. Arms outstretched, she ended with the proclamation, “Australia – I love you!”
Phillip Islanders watched this stellar performance with special pride. Stella Axarlis is one of our own. For many years she has owned a luxurious townhouse in Cowes. As her work commitments lessened, she became increasingly involved with local causes, including Phillip Island Nature Parks and the Friends of Churchill Island. The island was her haven: she swam and took long walks on the beach with her beloved German shepherd Zoë. Her friends and large extended family visited her there.
**** **** ****
ABOUT five years after the centennial celebrations, feeling rather daunted, I visited Axarlis to interview her. My anxiety disappeared when I was nearly knocked over at the security door by Zoë. Axarlis greeted me warmly and we started chatting as if we had known each other all our lives. We discovered we had similar backgrounds. We were both born in Egypt and had Greek parents and we both came to Australia in 1950. Apparently my parents knew her parents and we had obviously met each other as young children at some stage, although she is a few years older so wouldn’t have taken much notice of me.
There were reminders of the opera star she had once been in the large framed photographs in the main room, which also contained a grand piano. More framed photos lined the hallway and stairway. And there were occasional flashes of the diva she once was, the grande dame. She related a life story with many twists and turns. She had been in the public eye for so long that it took four interviews and various long lunches – she is a cordon bleu cook who loves to cook for guests – before I got the real story, not just the one she had rehearsed over many years of being interviewed.
I asked her how she felt being chosen to tell Australia’s multicultural story. “I was stunned, but I quickly realised this was the first time I had the opportunity to tell Australia how I felt about it and my gratitude for Australia. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to honour my parents. I had four minutes to say who my family was, to acknowledge that this country has given someone who was not born here many opportunities to develop in so many ways.”
Stella Axarlis’s Centenary of Federation speech
Axarlis was born in Egypt and came to Australia with her parents and four brothers when she was 10. Her mother was a dutiful Greek wife and her father, who was 60 when she was born, was very patriarchal. But she said he also gave her the strength to break away from the mould.
“He was my greatest mentor in my earlier years and had a profound effect on me. Everything he said I seem to have stored away and used at different stages in my life. In our home there was encouragement to read, to think, to articulate opinions, to learn to listen as well as contribute. I think they were the things that formed me.”
At school, Stella was teased for being Greek and it made her want to excel. She was a performer from a very early age. “I used to love to recite and I would get up on a table at five years of age and recite these incredibly long poems.”
In 1956 she joined the Latvian Mixed Choir and started singing solo, which led to her momentous meeting with Madame Erica Burkewitch, a renowned international soprano who was to become her mentor, her teacher and her adoptive mother after the early death of her own mother in 1960.
In 1964 Axarlis graduated from Melbourne University with a BA in mathematics and history and for the next three years taught mathematics at secondary school. But she was already beginning her next career. At night she studied singing under Madame Burkewitch’s demanding tuition and was soon invited to live with Madame Burkewitch and her husband Bill Connochy in their Caulfield home.
A publicity photo of Stella Axarlis, 1970s.
Her big break came in 1967, when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, the top competition in Australia. With Madame Burkewitch at her side, she headed for Europe. Bypassing the traditional apprenticeship of an opera singer, she stepped straight into some of the most demanding dramatic soprano roles in opera – Aida and Tosca among them – in many of Europe’s top opera houses. On her frequent returns to Australia, she performed as a special guest of the Australian Opera Company. By 1990 she was at the peak of her opera career, booked out five years ahead.
And suddenly it was all over. Madame Burkewitch – “my tower of strength”, as Axarlis calls her – had become ill and Bilcon Engineering, the family business founded by her husband Bill in 1942, was on the verge of collapse. Axarlis abandoned her opera life and returned to Melbourne to care for Madame Burkewitch and to run the ailing Dandenong firm.
“I was catapulted into a new situation that I was totally unprepared for. It was my duty, but the decision was heart-breaking,” she recalled many years later in Cowes. “However, I had a new challenge and I had to perform that challenge to the best of my ability.”
The appearance of an opera singer on the automotive engineering scene was bound to raise a few eyebrows. “I made my first mistake when I went to see General Motors dressed in a wonderfully long mink coat. Politically quite incorrect, but that’s the way I was dressing in those days and it was winter.”
Of course, she knew nothing about engineering, or running a firm, but she set about learning. Australia was in recession and Bilcon had its own problems. “It had no computer systems, no quality systems and no administrative processes,” she recalled in an interview in 2009.
Axarlis also discovered that although Bilcon had many highly skilled employees, they were shut out of the management process. “I began to communicate with each employee, asking them what they liked and what they didn’t like. Slowly there evolved a picture of our strengths and weaknesses. We broke down those barriers so we were able to continue this process that empowers people.
“Quality has to be part of the culture of an organisation. You can’t simply impose it. But the rewards are immense, not only to the bottom line but to the people who work there in their satisfaction at being part of an organisation that values them.”
As Bilcon returned from the brink, Axarlis herself began to be noticed in management circles. She was appointed chairwoman of the National Training Quality Council, the modern Australian Apprenticeships and Traineeships Scheme and the Industry Skills Council. In 2011 she received the inaugural lifetime achievement award from the Australian Training Awards for her contribution to vocational education and training.
She set up her own management consultancy and is still an inspiring public speaker. She gives credit to her years on the stage. “A lot of the speeches and presentations I do now use the same ability to make contact with an audience.”
She also chaired Liberti Learning, a non-profit company that aims to help children and young people with special needs with individual learning programs, training and research. Liberti Learning founder Ann Penaluna, a colleague and friend of Axarlis for many years, said she had “an enormous heart”. “Stella’s leadership and drive and sense of social justice is infinite. If you need something, Stella’s network is quite remarkable and she will use it for the kids, never for herself – never.”
In 1998 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to training, business and children with special needs. She received a Hellenic Excellence Award in 2000, an Award for Excellence in Multicultural Affairs in 2002 and a Centenary Medal in 2003.
I saw both the public and the private sides of Axarlis during my many hours with her. Somehow she has created a delicate balance between the rational Anglo-Celtic side of her nature and the emotional Greek side. We discussed this dichotomy over espresso coffee and Greek shortbread. “I’m sort of fairly emotional, yet very rational,” she said.
In her opera career she was as renowned for her dramatic abilities as her singing and she brings that same quality to public life: her persona is commanding. She is extroverted, disciplined, logical and decisive. She is also a perfectionist and a workaholic. “I could not possibly be without work. I embrace it,” she said. The public person was very obvious when she received a very difficult work-related phone call while I was there.
But I also saw the private, vulnerable woman – the shy young girl who was teased at school for being Greek, the beautiful young woman who was adopted by Madame Burkewitch as her protégé, the family woman who is very close to her brothers, their wives and her nieces and nephews.
The private Axarlis is quietly spoken, self-effacing and emotional. There were tears in her eyes when we viewed a video of her eulogy to Madame Burkewitch, who died in 1997. She also showed me a video of her trip to Chios, her mother’s birthplace, in 2000 to commemorate her mother’s death 40 years earlier. Stella visited her relatives, her mother’s home and the church that her mother prayed in. She was amazed at how emotional the experience was for her.
Axarlis visits Phillip Island less than she once did. Her townhouse went on the market about a year ago. I saw her last year standing in a queue at the Cowes Newsagency, dressed in black, wearing black sunglasses and a black hat and avoiding eye contact with everyone. Clearly, she did not want to be recognised and I let her be.
But I would never rule out another comeback. The last time I interviewed her, I asked her about her future. She laughed heartily. “I haven’t a clue! I never seek out challenges. They seem to seek me. I’m sure there will be other challenges.”