Can you tell us about the Sound FX program?
Gillian: Sound FX is about all the ways music and music-making can support community life and community goals in the Fitzroy Crossing community. It’s also about helping to create more opportunities for more music-making in community life, for more people. We sit down with our partners to talk about their goals and priorities, and where and with whom they would like to introduce or increase or enhance music opportunities. In Sound FX we have a broad concept of music - it’s not specific to any genre, we work with instruments, with digital technologies, with local sounds and voices, we write songs, and we work with stories and local languages. The approach is one of co-design, facilitation, and collaboration, rather than teaching. We are trying to create opportunities for people to explore, strengthen, and celebrate their culture and place through sound, in ways that are fun and open-ended, and also sometimes a bit adventurous or out of left-field!
How is your research with Melbourne University and the Sound FX program connected?
Gillian: As a researcher at the University of Melbourne, my work includes both traditional qualitative research and creative practice. I research the contributions of music to community strengthening. A lot of my research focuses on post-war places, and the ways that communities use music to help rebuild the social fabric in the aftermath of violent conflict, which often leaves communities traumatised and socially divided. Currently I’m investigating the ways that music and creative arts can be used to support dialogue and difficult conversations. I use a lot of arts-based participatory methodologies, such as collaborative songwriting, and narrative methods such as yarning.
The overlaps between the music work I do in war-impacted communities and my work with Sound FX are in the shared themes of community strengthening post-trauma or transition, and music-making as a personal and group wellbeing practice, and in the use of creative methods to bring new ideas and knowledge to the surface. In 2022, we started an action research project with the educators at Baya Gawiy to investigate the impacts on wellbeing and language that songwriting in heritage languages can generate.
Sound FX works partners with Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre and Fitzroy Valley District High School to achieve community goals- what are some of these?
Gillian: Our partners have asked us to support community goals around language revitalisation, wellbeing, and healing. We’ve been working with language educators and specialists in Marninwarntikura’s early childhood learning and care programs - collectively housed within the Baya Gawiy Child and Family Centre - to write songs for young children in their heritage languages, songs that they can use in their teaching, and that describe and celebrate local cultural knowledge.
The teachers at FVDHS were interested in how we could help their students create place-based music that would support them to explore and celebrate who they are and where they live. Each residency had a theme or focus, such as the cultural value of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River (2019), local history (Jandamarra, 2018), or healing Country (2021). I work with one or two classes and their teachers every day, developing original songs and instrumental music on the theme, and we then perform at community events in the final week of the residency. Many of these songs and instrumental works created through the first years of the Sound FX residencies can be heard on the Flow album, which was recorded in 2019 and released in 2021.
Sound FX is in its seventh year in 2024, how has the program evolved over this time?
Gillian: In the first years, 2017, 2018, and 2019, I was working with students at Fitzroy Valley District High School. The residencies focused on songwriting and instrumental music. I also visited the Early Childhood Learning Unit at Baya Gawiy each week, supporting music sessions led by a local musician and working with staff to develop different kinds of musical creative play and improvisations. The Baya Gawiy Camping Journey, which is one of the tracks on the 2019 Flow album, originates from those weekly visits.
I also worked with Marninwarntikura staff to create musical ‘nurture nights’ for local women, that were focused on musical sounds as part of self-care and self-compassion.
Initially, I was facilitating the project on my own, but in 2020, with me stuck in Melbourne thanks to Covid-19 border closures, Tura brought in some new musicians to lead the project, and this expansion has been maintained ever since, with two of us (me and Annika Moses, Project Coordinator and Facilitator) working on each Sound FX residency together.
Our key milestones have been the performances in the Kimberley Echoes tour (2017), the Flow album (recorded in 2019, launched in 2021), the action research project on songwriting in heritage languages (2022-2023). The Songbook project, Buga Yanu Junba, which we are working on now, will be published by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, probably in 2025, and this will be another big milestone and achievement for the project and the community.
What is the focus of the Sound FX residencies in 2024?
Gillian: We are compiling all the artwork and songs for the songbook project, finalising and mastering the recordings of all the new songs (for a digital album, hopefully released later in 2024), and building plans with our partners for the next big collaboration!
