By Olivia Condous
The regional music scene across Moorabool is flourishing, with new opportunities and support for local creatives. Reporter Olivia Condous spoke to musicians who live in the shire to find out their hopes for the future of music in the towns they call home.
You may not know it, but among the bush and quiet towns of Moorabool are countless talented musicians who call the shire’s countryside home.
Award-winning performers who have toured internationally and received widespread acclaim are locals, but they may not have graced local stages with their talents very often in the past.
Council’s latest cultural initiative aims to remedy this, through the Hide and Seek music festival providing opportunities for local musicians and singer-songwriters that had never existed before.
Born as a council project, in partnership with the state government’s Live Music Office, the festival has provided performance opportunities to more than 60 established and emerging musicians from the regions.
The festival was designed to boost tourism, as well as working towards cultivating a sustainable regional music industry with a local focus.
The free event ran over four weekends across June and July, with the towns of Blackwood, Gordon, Bacchus Marsh and Ballan each hosting a leg of the festival.
Live acts performing folk, bluegrass, pop, blues and rockabilly music played across 20 venues throughout the shire, including unique settings like an antique shop, a chapel and a caravan-stage.
The council also partnered with local artists to curate the festival, to work with venue owners who didn’t know the practical requirements of holding a live music events.
Cat Moser, a musician who lives in Blackwood, was one of the curators as well as performing in the duo Cat and Clint.
Moser said one of the main goals of the festival was to connect local artists and venues, to increase the chances of local musicians performing within the shire rather than travelling further afield.
“A lot of places could have gigs, but they’re not confident to know how to sound a space for example, with PA systems and things like that,” Moser said.
She’s travelled the country and overseas, touring with her partner Clint, but said she’d rarely played shows within the shire.
“That’s because there haven’t been many venues, but it’s been great with the festival having that opportunity,” Moser said.
Bacchus Marsh resident Riley Beech, who performs folk music as The Suburban, was the other curator of the festival and said the preparation for the event involved talking to each venue and working to pair them with performers that suited the space.
“I tried to place appropriate acts in appropriate spaces, to try to kind of appeal to both the audiences and the venues, to make that marriage work,” Beech said.
He runs the Bacchus Marsh Music Bowl (part of the local bowls club), his own venture to try to bring more original live music to the area.
Beech said he hoped the musical exposure the Hide and Seek festival provided would broaden the variety of artists performing within the region on a regular basis.
“We’re really looking to broaden that scope, both for the audience’s tastes as well as the venues… to make the area a viable option for touring acts as well,” he said.
Marcus Frangos moved to Gordon two years ago, after growing up in Melbourne and playing the city live music scene with his partner Gabrielle as country folk duo The Darlings Family Trust.
Frangos bought local pub The Gordon Hotel at the start of this year, and hopes to expand from the usual cover band gigs to providing a space for local artists to blossom.
“The idea is to have to create just an environment where people can come and just try out their stuff,” he said.
“What I noticed out here is that there’s not many places that kind of put on a low key, weekday Open Mic, like you see in Melbourne all the time.
“The idea is to have things pretty chill and organic, rather than always this big hoo-ha, and then every now and then I’ll put on a bigger show,” Frangos said.
If four weekends jam-packed with music wasn’t enough, Moorabool council also facilitated the Young and Local program, a mentorship initiative for emerging artists aged between 12 and 25.
The program consisted of workshops throughout the months leading up to the festival, culminating in a performance event.
Jen Hawley is a performer and music teacher who moved to Bacchus Marsh six months ago and was the coordinator of the mentorship program.
She said the initiative created a community of burgeoning performers, who were given significant creative autonomy and mentored each other throughout the process.
“There was a really strong sense of community early on,” Hawley said.
This is the first time, that we’re aware of, that a program like this has taken place in the Moorabool Shire which allowed young people to come together, be creative, learn about running events and perform together.”
The program attracted musicians with a wide range of experience, with the only prerequisite for participation being the ability to play a song from start to finish.
“We had young performers who had never played with other people before, we had teenagers who were jamming in their bedrooms together but not doing gigs yet and we had professional musicians in their early 20s who are starting their careers,” Hawley said.
Jayden Vermeend, a 19-year-old Ballan resident and guitarist, said participating in the program enabled him to form a network with other up and coming musicians.
“A big part of it would have been networking and meeting other people, that was good to have a few connections,” Vermeend said.
He said the experience has inspired him to start up his own band so he can partake in more performance opportunities.
“That’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years now, and I feel like I can now that I know how to network a bit better,” Vermeend said.
The Moorabool Shire proved to be the perfect setting for a folk music festival, with the inaugural event a glowing success.
It seems only logical, as the natural beauty and innate peace of regional Victoria is a setting that has attracted many artists away from the city life.
Ballan local and award-winning musician Heather Marsh, who performs under the alias of Breckin, said living in Moorabool provided artists with the “literal and figurative” space to let their creativity flourish.
“Out here, there can be more of a sense of space and freedom to carve out your own path… I felt after moving to the country that I had more headspace to be able to be creative.”
Even though Marsh is an established artist who has lived in the shire for many years, the Hide and Seek festival furthered her connections with other creatives in the area, since collaborating with a local sound engineer and other musicians.
“None of these things would have happened if I hadn’t been involved, both as an audience member and as an artist, in the festival.”
Marsh teamed up with Cat Moser when she opened the festival in Blackwood, asking her to play fiddle on her track named after the town.
Moser said while the festival was wrapped up, the music community hoped it was the beginning of bigger and better things for live music in Moorabool.
“It’s very much the beginning… Hopefully, it’ll build from here.”
