her three younger brothers died at age two. The family had moved to Western Australia by 1911. They lived firstly in Kununoppin and later in Boulder. Despite their poverty, her parents encouraged her musical development and she began music lessons at age 10. She attended St Joseph's Convent School in Boulder where she was taught music by Sister Mary Monica Butler. When she was aged 13, her family's financial circumstances meant that Eileen had to leave school. However, they managed to find enough money to pay for piano lessons with a private teacher, Rosetta Spriggs (a great-grandpupil of Antonín Dvořák). She made Eileen known to a visiting Trinity College examiner, Charles Schilsky, a former violinist with the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris. Schilsky was extremely impressed with Joyce: he later wrote "There is no word to explain Miss Joyce's playing other than genius. She is the biggest genius I have ever met throughout my travels". He approached the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Perth and arranged for Eileen to be sent to Loreto Convent in Claremont, Perth, to continue her schooling. Her music teacher there was Sister John More. Joyce entered the 1925 and 1926 Perth Eisteddfods, winning the Grand Championship in 1926. Schilsky continued to make her name known, and wrote a letter to Perth newspapers urging her to be sent to Paris to study. In May 1926, the Premier of Western Australia, Philip Collier, set up an "Eileen Joyce Fund" with the aim of collecting £1,000 to help Joyce's future career. In August 1926, Percy Grainger, on a concert tour, was introduced to Joyce by Sister John More. He heard her play, and then wrote an open letter to the people of Perth: "I have heard Eileen Joyce play and have no hesitation in saying that she is in every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last twenty-five years. Her playing has that melt of tone, that elasticity of expression that is, I find, typical of young Australian talents, and is so rare elsewhere". He suggested she would have the same celebrity as Teresa Carreño and Guiomar Novaes. Grainger recommended she study with an Australian master so that her playing would not become "Europeanised" or "Continentalised", and in his view Ernest Hutcheson, then teaching in New York, was the best choice. A short time after Grainger left, Wilhelm Backhaus arrived for a tour