I could find very little information until I discovered that she had changed her name, travelled to Sydney and Italy to train as an opera singer and had quite a long career as a radio star in Australia and New Zealand in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
As Madame Daisy Zelanda she seems to have had an illustrious career.
As a young student at St Philomenas in Dunedin she was a musical star, as a singer, violinist etc and I could find lots of reports about her during her school years.
What we have discovered that she was divorced , left her husband and child in Dunedin, and travelled first to study in Sydney at the Conservatory with a Professor Slapoffski, and then to an opera school in Palermo Italy where she graduated as Prima Donna.
She died in Wellington in 1975, living in the Harry Squires Hostel - and the mystery is where was she for all those years between being a Prima Donna in the 1930’s , and her death in 1975.
I can find no musical record of her in Dunedin, she sang for many years on Australian and New Zealand radio, and was acknowledged as a Dunedin star.
- Margaret Lee
