About Ginny…

I am a multi-dimensional wordsmith and musician with eclectic skills, tastes and interests, including a penchant for floral dresses and Art Deco floral china. I live in Perth, Western Australia, with much of my adulthood spent on in or near the vibrant historic port city of Fremantle. Like many women who are also mothers, I strive for a balance between social connection, relationship, family life, and the essential alone time that re-energises me and infuses my writing.

My current creativity is a confluence of a variety of life experiences, trainings and healings I’ve undertaken. As well as a degree and study in multiple disciplines, which engages my critical brain, I’ve trained and worked as a group facilitator, musical director and performer. I have both explored and trained in massage and bodywork, aromatherapy and the practice of Nei Gung, a deeply introspective but physical fusion of chi gong and yoga involving both the chakra system and the Chinese energy and meridian system. I’ve undergone personal grief and bereavement work, experiential astrology, sound and light healing. I love tarot and oracle reading as a playful way to “talk to” archetypes and all the facets of being human, both light and shadow, as well as a means to gain insight and answers to pressing questions. I’ve enjoyed yoga, meditation, freeform dance, and a good night’s sleep filled with instructive dreams, among the many fully-embodied practices that contribute to peace, creativity, wisdom and wellness, over the years.

I have over 25 years as a music educator and musical director, event organiser and MC. I’ve also facilitated various discussion groups— “secret women’s business” and “talking stick” style circles. I hold facilitation and training accreditations in adult learning—a Cert IV in Assessment and Workplace Training, various Community Skills Training Centre (CSTC) groupwork trainings. I’m an accredited Simply Music piano teacher and have completed both practical and theory towards the graduate diploma in Eduction.

 

Writing Background…

I have an interest in writing for writing’s sake—the writing process as a valuable means to gain personal insight, whether this is ever shared or published or not. I draw variously on mythology, biography, nature, politics, and history, and such authors on the topic as Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones), and Tristine Rainer (The New Diary). Also Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral Explode. Having sat with other women in much deep disclosure and catharsis, I recognises the gifts that personal lived experience—birth, motherhood, daughterhood, sisterhood, relationship, menopause, ageing, loss and bereavement, personal triumphs and challenges—bring to women’s creative writing.

My own writing has taken many forms throughout my sixty years of life— songwriting, poetry, musical comedy, health choice advocacy research, freelance journalism, humorous travel blogging and reviews and, more recently, novel-writing. As an Anthropologist by training, ​with a spiritual bent, I have a particular interest in myth and archetype, through story-telling and song. Known for humour as well as soulfulness, I have at times been invited to participate in such ribald events as the World Series Comedy Poetry Debate at Fairbridge Festival, where I argued vehemently in rhyme that “poetry is NOT better than sex”!

In 2017, I was chosen to participate in a mentoring programme for promising authors at Margaret River Writers Festival. I was paired with Novelist Sara Foster, who described my then “seedling” novel, The Saltwater Goddess, as “lovely writing” and encouraged me to keep going! I have since completed two mentored, peer-evaluated novel writing courses with the Australian Writers Centre in 2020-2021, under the guidance of course tutors, published author Bronwyn Parry, and editor/publisher Bernadette Foley.

Despite many major disruptions, I can proudly say I have finally completed my novel, writing under the pen name Virginia May (see previous column).

Musical Background…

(NB you can click on a word or band name to link to music recordings and external web pages!)

Since re-discovering music in my early twenties, I dusted off the piano, picked up a guitar, joined a large community choir, and began arranging songs. One thing led to another and I started directing various acappella ensembles from the mid-1990s, including Fremantle-based Ocean Choir, and Heart and Soul Choir in Mandurah. My choral arrangement of an early original song, “Ocean,” was chosen for the Fremantle Festival 1998, the International Year of the Ocean.

I trained in Simply Music piano in 2001, and ukulele, which I’ve offered privately and in the community (see Arts Narrogin). I more recently started experimenting with the piano accordion because of the freedom it gives her to be an “unplugged” Wandering Minstrel with a band! See also my Music Teachers Online profile.

As well as organising, directing and MCing a variety of community music events, I have over the years, performed original material and covers, both as a solo guitarist with a tendency to write quirky story songs, and in bands and duos, both comedic and straight. More light-hearted collaborations include a French ukulele band (and here) translating well-known jazz and pop songs into French, all-female comedy duo Bad Hair Day with Joanna Ayckbourn, and children’s ukulele band Spiderfish Stew (also here performing in the Fairbridge Festival Kids Tent). Ukulele was a means to have a bit of musical fun, after the intensity of raising small children.

Many of my “serious” early songs were inspired by growing up by the ocean in Western Australia. I recorded Soulskin in 2001 with the help of guitarist Dave Hyams, harmonist Brigitte House and percussionist Eugene McGrath. Performances and workshops include a variety of local and interstate festivals (notably Fairbridge Festival, Nanga Music Festival, Melbourne and Cairns Ukulele Festivals, Rottnest Island Festival, Triple J Comedy, and Fremantle Festival), Rhythmsong Music Camp, house concerts, and other community events.

In 2017, I co-ordinated the creation of two albums of original songs by local musicians, as part of the successful campaign to halt the Roe 8 road project and to protect the Beeliar Wetlands.

Most recently, I directed The Tuart Place Singers from 2013 to 2022, a diverse band of Child Migrants, Stolen Generations and other Care Leavers, who are finding solace and joy through the telling of their stories and the singing of songs.

Tuart Place Singers participating in Bernard Carney’s Pass the Song Along challenge

Hear the Tuart Place Singers  Child Migrant’s “anthem” here.

See also ABC’s Lateline segment about the Child Migrants (Tuart Place Singers are around 7 minutes in) 

Academic Background…

I originally (double) majored in Anthropology and Sociology at UWA, from the mid-1980s to 1991, undertaking firstly a Science (Anthropology, Botany and Human Biological Science) degree with a view to pursuing Ethnobotany and/or Medicine (Anthropology could be undertaken as both a Science and Arts degree). This was followed rather more enthusiastically by a Social Sciences/Arts degree as an Honours candidate, once I discovered the wonders of History and Post-colonial Literature. Luckily, I was able to readily access a supply of such reading material, while working as a Library Assistant in the Reid Library while at UWA! I am of Anglo-Burmese-Indian and South African parentage, so matters of culture, colonialism and post-colonialism, mass migration and refugees, are personally meaningful and fascinating. Anthropology also took me on a journey into the impact of colonialism, multinational corporations, the global banking interests (IMF and World Bank), and the globalisation of agriculture via the so-called “Green revolution” in so-called developing countries.

Always motivated more by curiosity than career, I passed up the opportunity to study Medicine, and instead my primary area of interest became Medical Anthropology (more formally known as the Anthropology and Sociology of Health and Illness). This involved delving into the History of Public Health and Medicine; the politics of “mental health” and Psychiatry; the rise and role of pharmacological Medicine vis-a-vis “Complementary” Medicine; the structure and History of doctor, nursing and health practitioner training; cross-cultural approaches to health and illness; and the globalisation of health.

I also studied indigenous Australian issues, past and present (this was at the peak of the Land Rights campaign era, and the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission), and qualitative and quantitative research methods and statistical analysis. After graduating, I gained work experience at both the W.A. Museum cataloguing indigenous and Islander material artefacts, and at the Aboriginal Medical Service, learning a great deal about the Politics of topical cultural issues, in the process.

I have since taken an active interest in and collaborated on in-depth research in the areas of Australian government health policy, and its impacts on families and in Aged Care. I have a dedicated interest in closely examining all the factors contributing to policy, and personal and societal wellbeing, including iatrogenic illness and its recovery through access to an integrated, holistic approach to health, in an increasingly Corporate, bureaucratised world.

I’ve been fortunate to have taken a meandering path through a few other subject areas on the way, too, including Communication Studies (Murdoch) and Linguistics (UWA). I’m an avid lover of foreign languages, who excelled in French and Japanese at high school (first place winner of the Alliance Française Perth exam, year 11 and graduated with honours in year 12 school French, Japanese and English Literature prizes). I furthered my love of foreign Languages including French and German (UWA/Murdoch), Asian Studies and Malay-Indonesian (Murdoch), consolidated through travel to the places they are spoken.

I also delved into visual arts (Claremont School of Art/Fremantle TAFE) in the early 1990s, for creative balance, after leaving university and academia, dabbling in drawing, pottery, illustration, Art History and sculpture. This dimension of my creativity has been mainly channeled into photography and website design in recent years.

External Links…

You can listen to some of my spoken word poetry on Soundcloud.

See also  Nanga Music Festival 2019

Monday Night Supper Club 

Ginny’s Various musical performances and workshops over the years, on YouTube