Antony Hegarty will soon be touching down in Australia for an eagerly anticipated performance at Dark Mofo in Hobart. However, Hegarty and her band, The Johnsons, are not currently in the middle of a touring or promotional cycle.
“I wouldn’t normally fly out to Tasmania to do a concert, off season, not on a tour,” she recently told the Sydney Morning Herald. Instead, she’ll be appearing at two Australian performances for a very special reason.
While she acknowledges Dark Mofo is a “great festival”, Hegarty will be appearing in support of the Martu Aboriginal community from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. A community she says is a “very precious resource” for Australia.
“They’re a very, very precious resource, for not just Indigenous Australians but for all Australians, they have tremendous spiritual clarity about their relationship with the land,” Hegarty told Fairfax. “In the middle of this impending climate crisis, they’re among [the] most precious people in Australia.”
In late 2013, the New York-based transgender singer and visual artist spent a week with Martu artists and Sydney media artist Lynette Wallworth in the Pilbara. The resulting artwork and footage was used in an installation exhibited at the Adelaide Biennial early last year.
For Hegarty, her time with the Martu was one of the most amazing experiences of her life. It made such an impact that some of the proceeds from her Dark Mofo shows, which will headline the annual Hobart event, will go towards the Martu.
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On 22nd June, Hegarty is set to fly to Sydney for a presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where she will sing and members of the community will speak out against the proposed Kintyre uranium mine on Martu native title-determined country.
“The Martu believe they are responsible for that land, and responsible for everything in it and that where that uranium goes they’ll always be responsible for it,” says Hegarty. “It’s a spiritual burden and a responsibility that they’ve taken care of for millennia and it’s part of their spiritual vision.”
Hegarty has long been passionate about the environment and nature has been a constant theme in her music. The environment was the subject of Antony & The Johnsons’ acclaimed 2009 album The Crying Light and she proposed a feminist approach to environmentalism during a monologue on the live album Cut the World.
