The currawong is a native Australian bird, thought of as the rakish compatriot to the magpie. It was under her fierce yellow gaze, on the back deck of my childhood home, where this album began to take form.
No longer a child, I returned to inhabit my parents nest with staggering clarity of our vices and faults. Melancholic nostalgia lingered on every familiar texture, surface and screen, countered by a new awareness and contextualisation of our family. Addiction, isolation, estrangement, internal and external, raged in a time of great global instability.
I began to re-contextualise myself in the wake of this understanding, seeing myself as the product of not just the love and care of my family, but also their generational trauma. As the youngest, I bear my mother’s grief, my father’s anxiety, my sister’s anger.
“Currawong” has been born of a reckoning with these complex forces - the internal family systems waring with their real life iterations, and the systems at large that perpetuate their struggles.
I hope to bottle this moment in my life to share with others, who find themselves bearing heavy burdens in their familiar life, or who’ve been forced into prolonged adolescence by an indifferent economy.