Glen Tomasetti born 21 May 1929

Glen Tomasetti (May 21, 1929 - June 25, 2003) was a songwriter, singer, novelist and political activist.  

Born Glenys Ann Tomasetti, she inherited an adventurous spirit from her parents Jack and Muriel who, after travelling in Africa, China and Japan, settled in prosaic Balwyn, in Melbourne. She learned the pano at the age of five and attended various primary schools, completing her secondary education at the Methodist Ladies College. She excelled academically and studied music. At home she sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs accompanied by her mother at the piano. 

Aged 17, after receiving a commonwealth scholarship, she entered Janet Clark Hall at the University of Melbourne. She studied history, English, philosophy and French. She sang in madrigals and larger choirs and sang French folksongs on ABC programmes for schools. At 21, in 1950, she wed fellow student, later lawyer, Peter Balmford and for a time the couple lived at Leeper House in the grounds of Trinity College. Two children, Clare and Jonathon, were born to this marriage. The family moved back to Balwyn where Glen enlivened life in that suburb by forming the Making Balwyn Bearable Society. This group's website insists that in the early years members enjoyed jazz and wild dancing. Her marriage to Balmford was dissolved and she made a brief and unhappy marriage to journalist and guitarist Sebastian Jorgensen. 

                                   

As a further distraction to her unhappy marriages Tomasetti bought a guitar, and began to lecture and sing “wherever” she said “was an audience.” Her singing reached every section of the community through her work in schools, universities, restaurants, country towns, churches and at dances, recitals and concerts. She frequently performed on nation-wide television and radio. As a folk singer she toured China with the second Australian Cultural Delegation also in Europe, performing in Greece, Paris and Majorca. She could sing in seven languages and appeared on the BBC and commercial television in London. 

During the 1960s she cut 11 records, many derived from traditional Australian folklore. Channel 7 hired her for a program in which she was required to write a new song each week. How her radical approach survived commercial television of the time is a matter of historical conjecture, but she was well received by the viewers, who applied in droves for copies of her lyrics. Tomasetti invariably received a good press. In 1967 she made headlines when she was subpoenaed to court for withholding one-sixth of her income tax on the grounds that this was the exact proportion used by the Holt government to finance the war in Vietnam. 

During the 1960s-70s Glen sang in various folk music venues in Melbourne and taught guitar accompaniment classes in a room above Traynors coffee lounge. She became a hero of the feminist movement after writing, Don't Be Too Polite, Girls. In 1976, publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble launched their new enterprise with Tomasetti's Thoroughly Decent People, a novel set in suburban Australia. It was typical of her unorthodox style in that its fictional derivation came from an abandoned master's thesis on folklore. Her second novel was Man of Letters published by Penguin in 1981 which was made into a TV movie in 1984. 

Tomasetti had problems with drink. In 1983 she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and never drank again. At the same time she underwent a spiritual conversion from her professed atheism. In her later years she was stricken with a virulent form of arthritis. She died in Melbourne June 25, 2003 aged 74. 

(Edited from LP liner notes & Google Groups)