‘If you yell at everything, no one’s gonna listen’: Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich on the Australian musicians rewriting the rules

Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, the bassist and former Camp Cope member who has written a book titled It’s Not For You, which saw her interview 18 Australian women and gender-diverse artists about their experiences. Photograph: The Guardian

When she was 17, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich flew to Alice Springs to stay with her mother. Hellmrich had been living independently for a year, but a boy she was seeing had screamed at her and shoved her into a door. So her mother bought her a flight.

In Alice, she meandered the town by day and sat with her mother outside the duplex at night, sipping Cruisers. Already the veteran of a few bands, Hellmrich was confronted by the idea that her mother’s ambitions had been thwarted. “I was so scared at the time of ever being a mum and having to lose myself that way,” she writes in her first book, It’s Not For You – part memoir, part missive to the music industry. “Scared of what motherhood would take from me.”