Deborah Conway on music, missed opportunities and #MeToo

Some expected Deborah Conway to become world-famous back in the 1990s. But the feisty Melburnian was never going to sell out. And other than her politics, things haven’t changed.

(Her) last two albums, full of beautiful songs, traversed the unquenchable longings of the human condition, the Exodus and the Holocaust. The piano-based Serpent’s Tooth, on Everybody’s Begging, is about raising teenagers through their hormonal rages. It’s an exquisitely tender plea for peace. “Leave your tempest in the hallway,” Conway sings. “I surrender.”

These two albums were also heavily influenced by Conway and Zygier’s Jewishness. The song Through Your Blood Shall You Live is about Zygier’s parents. (“It made me cry when I heard it,” says Shellie Conway, “It’s profound.”). Holocaust survivors Ted and Lucia Zygier met at the Polish consul’s office in Budapest in 1944. They had lost both sets of parents, three brothers and a sister. Ted never stopped talking about the Holocaust. Then he lost his memory to Alzheimer’s disease, and he became happy. “He escaped the trauma because he no longer remembered it,” Conway tells me later on the phone, suddenly crying. “It was quite an extraordinary transformation.”

In what Zygier calls a “really weird bookend to the Holocaust”, his nephew Ben Zygier reportedly took his own life in a “suicide-proof” cell in Israel in 2010. The young Australian had been an Israeli spy, but wound up being secretly jailed by the Israelis for reasons that remain disputed. “It felt like some novel,” says Zygier. “It was just bizarre and something we’ll never get over.”

Carl Conway’s family fled Russia to England after the pogroms around 1900. Deborah Conway’s upbringing was not particularly religious – she doesn’t believe in God – but the family had Shabbat dinner on Friday night and synagogue visits a few times a year. Over time, though, she has become increasingly passionate about her heritage. Conway and Zygier ran the Shir Madness Melbourne Jewish Musical Festival in 2015 and 2017 and both are avowed Zionists, believing in the development and protection of Israel as a Jewish state. Asked why her passion for Zionism has increased, she says: “I hate bullies and I feel like the world is bullying Israel.” The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement – which aims to end international support for Israel – is, says Conway, “nothing short of horrendous anti-Semitism”. “Look, there’s no question there are contentious aspects of the Jewish state, but it’s the only place in the world where Jews have a state.”

Apart from her support for Israel, Conway – who was once asked to stand for the Greens – won’t talk about politics. “I think it’s problematic when celebrities, or minor celebrities, I should say, discuss their politics.” But this wasn’t always so. In a 2004 Age article, Conway said: “I’m outspoken, feminist, political and I lean to the left on many things.” But a shift was beginning, even then. “I’ve had to face terrible questions lately and seriously question every value I’ve ever held,” she went on to say. “Suddenly some of these people from the left want to put me up against the wall and shoot me because I’m Jewish.” Her friend Paul Grabowsky says he often has good-natured political discussions with Conway, even though she’s on the “neoconservative but not loony right” and he’s a “classic bleeding-heart leftie”.

Read the article by Melissa Fyfe in The Age.