Nervous Wreck

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIX, Issue 83, 13 August 1923, Page 8

Nervous Wreck

SYDNEY CONTRALTO RETURNS. HOPES OF CAREER DASHED. Melbourne, August 3. A popular young Australian contralto left for Europe a year age. happy and confident, to make her name in Europe. To-day she returned to Melbourne by the Largs Bay. a complete nervous wreck and suffering fF-om acute melancholia. When the liner was about to sail from Tilbury two uniformed nurses arrived on the gangway bearing between them a frail, pale, dark-eyed girl. They thrust her passport and other documents into her lap, and left her. A motherly woman, noticing the pathetic look in the girl's ej'es, approached her. "I'm a singer, but my heart is dying," were the only words the girl could utter. The ship's doctor diagnosed her condition as acute nervous trouble. Examination of her papers showed that she had been a patient at a nursing home for nervius diseases up to the time of the Largs Bay's departure. She was placed on board practically penniless. On the voyage she had to be carefully tended. Her mother met her'! at the pier to-day. She is well-known in Sydney, where the money for her trip to Europe was raised by an influential committee. She was instrumental in raising a large sum for the South Sydney Hospital.