North Queensland: fuelling the art mix

Abstract

[Extract] "See here now!" was my indignant cry as an ardent tertiary music student when I failed to understand how my colleagues could be so blithely ignorant of the exciting things happening in contemporary art music on their very doorstep. Back then it felt like a cry in the wilderness. I just wanted to immerse myself in the riches offered by living Australian artists—composers, musicians, dancers. To become part of the vanguard of new thought, new aesthetics, was a thrilling thing for an ignorant country girl new to the city's bright lights.

So it was with a sense of irony that I viewed the title of this festival being held at the other end of the country and over 20 years later. See Hear Now, held over a weekend recently in Townsville-Thuringowa, North Queensland was not exactly 'a cry in the wilderness', but it was avant-garde enough to attract an interesting mix of original thinkers and presented a somewhat different approach to art from that normally offered in the provinces.