In my next life, I have decided that I will not be coming back as an opera singer. It’s just too hard. I’ve just finished another round of auditions for The Opera Foundation for Young Australians, an organisation that gives money to young opera singers to travel to other parts of the world and get extra experience in opera.

There’s the Lady Fairfax New York Scholarship to send them to the Met and Juilliard for a few months, the Vienna State Opera award, which sees them plugged into the Austrian opera house for a number of months doing smaller roles, and in a similar vein the Deutsche Oper Award where they get to work in Berlin. These opportunities can start careers. Look at Siobhan Stagg, a past winner in 2011 and doing great things now in Europe and the UK.

With my fellow adjudicators Cheryl Barker and Roger Lemke we listened to some 60 young opera singers in Brisbane Sydney and Melbourne. (Auditioning can be tiring so we would always start the day with coffee – what became known as a Keira Knightley – a skinny flat white.) The standard was very high and the...