MELBA’S GRAVE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21647, 18 May 1932, Page 20

MELBA’S GRAVE

WILL NOT COMPLIED WITH LEADS TO COMPLICATIONS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, May 12. The will of the late Dame Nellie Melba has been before the courts this week for a direction as to what action the trustees should take in connection with a bequest of £BOOO to the Albert Street Conservatorium of Music, Melbourne. It was explained that a condition had become impossible of performance owing to the decision of the diva, during her last illness, not to be buried at the place mentioned in her will. It was explained that the Victorian section of the estate had been valued for probate purposes at £17,000, but her property in other parts of the world has not yet been fully valued. It is believed, however, that the total amount will be well over £IOO,OOO. Only one clause of the will is involved in the proceedings that have been commenced. This directed the trustees to “ set aside a fund of £BOOO, and to apply the income thereof, in perpetuity, towards a scholarship for music, to be known as the Melba Scholarship, at the Albert Street Conservatorium of Music; or, if ' that institution ceased to exist, then at the University of Melbourne Conservatorium, in the hope that another Melba may arise, provided always that the conservatorium shall, out of the income, maintain the memorial erected on ray grave at Mount Mary to the satisfaction of my trustees,”

In her will Melba expressed a wish that she should be buried on her land known as Mount Mary, near Coombe Cottage, and she wished her trustees to erect a suitable memorial, the cost to be left entirely to her trustees. The-complication has been caused by the fact that Melba was not buried at Mount Mary, but in the Lilydale Cemetery. When she was ill at Coombe Cottage she told her trustees, when the wall was made, that, as her American investments had fallen so in value, she desired lo.be buried, not at Mount Mary, but alongside her father at Lilydale. At the time she was too ill to be worried, and for that reason .she delayed making a codicil to the,will to give effect to her wishes.' She proposed to do that when she went to Sydney, but in Sydney she became worse, and died without making the change. The problem for the courts to decide is wdiether the gift to either of the conservator! urns can stand in view of the fact that the condition attached to it is impossible af- fulfilment.