I’ve rewritten this speech about a dozen times. I’ve gotten angry and I’ve cried. I believe the invitation to speak was also an invitation to heal. But we need to start with the truth, so that’s why I’m telling mine. To quote my dear friend Jen Cloher from their song Shoegazers: “Indie rock is full of privileged white kids – I know because I’m one of them.” I was raised with privilege and the belief that I could be a musician and that I could do anything a boy could do, because I could afford to.
When I was 18, I would busk on the streets of the city and play shows wherever anyone would have me. Until one day, when I was asked to pay to play: a small fee to play a gig just to “cover the costs”. I was so confused by this and to be honest, I still am. We were the talent, we were the ones who would bring people to the pub. It’s like being asked to pay to work for someone; it just didn’t make sense. So I refused. I took a small but very scary step into being the woman I am now: strong, fearless and really, really annoying to anyone trying to exploit musicians.
That didn’t deter me from the industry, but I started to see a problem. Every show I went to featured bands with four white men, sometimes opened by a person of colour or a female. Never both though, not in Australia in 2013. I desperately wanted to be a part of this world, so I tried not rock the boat. Whenever I put on shows, though, I would try to have as many women playing with me as possible. A stage is a very visual metaphor – it’s a platform we give to someone so that we can hear their voice – and I didn’t want to lose my spot on it. I went up there with my acoustic guitar and the hope that others in the scene would follow.
Around that time I was sitting at my local pub and I saw a text message pop up on my friend’s phone, from the male guitarist of a local band that I loved. The message said something jokey and derogatory about my music and my moustache – “but I’d still fuck her”. I was 18; he was in his 30s, in a band I’d cheered from the front row for years at all-ages shows. I’d spent my money buying merch from him, I had asked him to sign records for me and he had reduced me down to a sexual object. “She was just 17, you know what I mean,” sang the Beatles. I don’t think 17-year-old girls were any older in the 1960s. I think they were just children.
I knew then that my purpose was to take care of young girls who loved music, because this industry wouldn’t. Teenage girls made everyone, from Elvis Presley to Taylor Swift to One Direction; we were the tastemakers and what did we get in return? Assaulted by men in mosh pits, harassed by men on the street outside and made to feel as if the space wasn’t ours to be in. We were taught that men’s violence was acceptable; we were taught to accept comments like that of Michael Crafter from I Killed The Prom Queen who, in a 2016 Facebook post he has since apologised for,– defended the lack of women on Unify festival’s lineup because “there’s enough girls [getting] finger banged in the tents to be happy enough about the festival”.
Then along came Camp Cope: three friends who wanted to play shows and make a record together. We were forced into a political position because in 2016 being three women in a band was a political statement in itself. We were asked who wrote our songs for us; on our first tour, we were asked if we were the groupies or the girlfriends; our male tech was asked multiple times over the years if he was our manager; and in the first review of our live show, as the only women on the bill, we were the only band whose appearance was noted. In 2016, Triple J’s end-of-year issue referred to us as “this year’s girl band”. We weren’t ever just a band; we were a “girl band”.
Despite this, over our eight years Camp Cope had a massive impact. I see it in the tattoos people get of our lyrics and even of me; I see it in the eyes of young people who tell us they started a band because of Camp Cope; in the trans woman who told me she realised she was trans because of our lyrics; in the father with stage 4 cancer who recently emailed me saying our music helped repair his relationship with his teenage daughter. We strived to show young girls and queer people that they have a place on the stage, that their voices matter and their music can have an impact. We are still one of the only internationally renowned and critically acclaimed bands of all women to come out of Australia and we did it all ourselves – with no external management, no showcases and no major labels.
Camp Cope started the It Takes One campaign before we played our first festival, to help end sexual assault and violence at shows. For our tours, we set up hotlines for people to call if they felt unsafe. In the first few years of live shows, I took inspiration from Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and would ask that all the girls, gays and theys make their way to the front of the crowd because that space belonged to them and I knew this would be safer. If the music industry wasn’t going to do anything about our safety, we would.
When we played our first major touring festival in 2017, Laneway festival worked with us to create a helpline for anyone who felt unsafe or uncomfortable at the festival. 1800-Laneway is still being used to this day and I would like to thank the organisers for that: it was one of the best and most important experiences of my life.
We played another festival though. I’m sure everyone knows the one. When the lineup was announced, Camp Cope made up one-third of all the women – nine women, out of more than 100 musicians. We tried to work with this festival to add more women: they had bookers on salaries but we were the ones who had to pitch to them more acts who weren’t men. At the first concert in Tasmania a woman was sexually assaulted. On stage I spoke about her and about the festival’s lineup and I changed some lyrics of our song The Opener to highlight what was happening.
This put a target on our back for years to come. The main talking point wasn’t the issue, it was Camp Cope. Through the media we were told we should just start our own festival; that acts are booked on merit not gender; that we shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds; that there were plenty of women behind the scenes, so it’s all OK. Women silently doing a majority of the work and men getting all the fame and glory on stage? That’s not really OK to me. Once at Big Sound, in fact, I was told “the diversity bandwagon is full”. I still feel extremely proud of Camp Cope’s impact. That festival didn’t book a lineup with just nine women ever again.
The music industry didn’t teach me how to fight; it taught me that I needed to fight. I’ve been told that I wasn’t good enough to play because I was a girl and I’ve been told that I only got to play because I was a girl. I was told I was only given opportunities because I was pretty and then told I was only given opportunities because I wasn’t. I’ve been told that my success in music is only because of my proximity to men in the industry. Men told jokes, publicly by the way, about sexually assaulting me – and then said I was too loud and too angry because I was speaking about being sexually assaulted by men. But I’m tough, I have to be. I will never regret fighting back and making enemies – and I am damn proud that dangerous men in this industry still warn each other about me.
This industry won’t blink an eye when women, queer folks and people of colour are being hurt and humiliated. Amy Winehouse was mocked for her drug abuse despite being one of the greatest artists of our generation. Shuhada Sadaqat (formerly Sinéad O’Connor) was booed for tearing up a picture of the pope on TV and only now, after her death, being praised for her bravery. Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit, a song about black people being lynched in the south, and she was targeted by the US government and later buried in an unmarked grave. Natalie Maines of the Chicks said that they were ashamed that the president of the United States was from Texas and local radio stations held CD-burning ceremonies and stopped playing their music; they were told to “shut up and sing”. Why does this only happen to women and people of colour? Were Kurt Cobain or Pete Doherty treated the same way as Amy Winehouse? Do people ever think about John Lennon beating women or can we separate that art from that artist because he wrote Imagine? Is it more important that Steven Tyler was a rock star than that he brought an underage “girlfriend” on tour? Were country music star Morgan Wallen’s CDs get burned after he was caught on video using a racial slur in 2021? No – in fact, his album sales went up 1,220%.
I have some suggestions. We need more women in leadership roles and in roles like production and engineering. We need people to listen to women when we come out about abusive men in the industry and we need to hold those men accountable. We need streaming platforms to pay artists fairly for our music because they would be nothing without us. We need more women on festival lineups and we need them on the main stage, not just playing the side stage at midday. We need venues to stop taking merch cuts, because what the hell did they do to earn that? We need Australian radio stations to support and play Australian artists. We need a minimum wage for musicians, mental health care and a union that will fight for us. We need sexual assault and harassment at gigs to stop, and this starts and ends with men: women have done everything we can, now it’s your turn. And oh my God, we need musicians who are women to stop being disregarded after they turn 30; this never happens to men.
There are two issues, though, that are unique to the Australian music industry. The first is festival lineups. Recently Good Things festival and Byron Bay Bluesfest revealed lineups that just aren’t unacceptable in 2023. I’ve toured the world over the last eight years and currently live in Los Angeles, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen lineups as male or white anywhere else in the world but Australia.
The second is the treatment of our own musicians. Amyl and the Sniffers were made fun of by Australia and now they’re one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Mallrat didn’t receive any Aria recognition for Butterfly Blue, which featured Azealia Banks and was remixed by the Chainsmokers. The Kid Laroi was given scraps from the Australian music industry and look at him now. Even Kylie left us. I’ve learned the best thing you can do as a musician in Australia, at this point, is to leave. Hell, I left – I had to. This will keep happening until it’s possible for us to live off our art in Australia.
Even though I don’t live in Australia any more, my heart will always be here. You will never get rid of me. And to all the young women and non-binary people in the audience: start a band, start managing a band, start booking shows, start writing about shows, start a record label and show them what it means to be loud.
This is an edited version of the keynote speech Georgia Maq delivered at Bigsound in Brisbane on Thursday 7 September. Camp Cope’s final show takes place at the Sydney Opera House on 13 October
