Last December, Missy Higgins appeared on Q&A and reflected on a turbulent political year. During a discussion about the rising number of Australian women speaking up against institutional abuses of power, the musician spoke. “Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins have shown us we’re now in this kind of generation where these young women are feeling like they can stand up and call out abuse,” she said. “And they’re not going to be shut down.”
Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer who sparked a #MeToo movement with allegations she was raped by a colleague at Parliament House, and Tame, the childhood sexual assault survivor and 2021 Australian of the Year, had both inspired the singer while she was writing music for the ABC drama Total Control. Premiering in late 2019, the show explores power, corruption and racism in Australian politics through the character of Indigenous senator Alex Irving, played by Deborah Mailman.
“It was mirroring the stuff I was writing about … it seemed serendipitous,” Higgins says now. “I’m so disappointed in these white men that are running our country, and I feel like all the women in our country are endlessly disappointed by them.
“It felt like they captured something in this show that was so relevant to what was going on in Australia and so, almost by accident, I started writing about those girls … It made me feel really inspired about the future generation of females.”
There’s an urgent fire in the songs on Total Control, some of which have now been expanded into a mini-album of the same name. “Hell hath no fury like a woman’s rage,” Higgins sings in Edge of Something. Later in the same song, she sings, “I’m my mother’s daughter/I’ve got plenty of fight left.”
This generational strength is a great motivator for Higgins. “I’m a mum of a three-year-old girl and a daughter of a very independent business owner. She’s always been able to stand on her own two feet and show me how to be a strong, independent woman, and I really want to show my daughter how to do that,” she says.
Higgins acknowledges her privileges as a white woman, and the bigger fight faced by women of colour – Indigenous women especially – in Australia. “It blows my mind that we are still denial about that,” she says. “Everything that [Alex Irving] goes through shows me how much more an Indigenous woman has to battle every day than most of the white women I know.”
Over an almost 20-year career, the musician has gone from writing about personal relationships, which characterised her 2004 debut album, The Sound of White, to responding to politics. Her last record, 2018’s Solastalgia, tackled climate anxiety. Oh Canada, a song released in the same year, was about the drowned Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi. Total Control continues this trajectory, blending personal and political.
“When I see things happening around the world, like refugee boats turning over in the in the middle of the ocean because their family was forced to flee their country, and we still live in a country that turns away boats of those poor people who are just looking for a safe place to live, as though they’re criminals, it’s so incredibly heartbreaking,” Higgins says.
“The only thing that I know how to do is write songs – it’s the only way that I know to make even the slightest amount of difference. So that’s what I tend to do to try and contribute to the world in some sort of meaningful way.”
Working on Total Control was a blessing for Higgins during lockdown. While she savoured the time at home with her two young children – “God, I’ve learned a lot about crafting,” she laughs – the project gave her a different kind of outlet.
“I was so inspired by the story and by Alex that it just felt like it came along at exactly the right moment,” she says. “It came along at a time when I didn’t think that I had any time to write or work with both kids at home, [but] because I was on deadlines and I was writing for somebody else … that was a really good motivation for me. Otherwise, I think I would have just been like, ‘this is too hard, I’m not going to be able to write something until all these lockdowns are finished’.”
Higgins’s career took off when she was just 20; now she’s approaching 40, the singer has developed the same independent streak she sings about on Total Control, always going her own way.
“As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that nobody really knows what’s right for me but myself,” she says. “At the beginning of my career, I had the record company breathing down my neck saying, ‘You can’t wait too long to release your follow-up album or you’ll lose the fans.’ I feel like I’ve established myself enough now that it’s OK to take a few years off between releases. I don’t feel so much like I have to prove myself, which is a good feeling.”
Total Control is released on Friday (EMI Australia)
