Born with music in her blood, third-year online Bachelor of Music student, Bonny Wythes, is passionate about having a good creative sector in country towns.
In January, the singer-songwriter brought a sense of connection and community back into her hometown, Canowindra, after devastating floods by performing on the veranda of the local Royal Hotel as a part of her MUSI340 capstone music project, titled Homegrown.
With music on both sides of the family, as her parents were in a local band together, Bonny was surrounded by music from a very young age, making it an integral element of her life.
After having a break from wedding singing and gigs at pubs while starting a family, Bonny, decided to make music her full-time career, enrolling at UNE with aspirations of becoming a secondary music teacher. She’s now pregnant and in her final year of study, and Bonny says this degree has offered her a personalised learning journey to accommodate her work, passion and stage of life.
“The flexibility has been amazing”, she says. “I've been able to keep working; I can watch [tutorials and lectures] at any point. That has been particularly good for where I am in life now, and having a baby, the flexibility is everything, and it's really the only university to offer it.”
Through her Homegrown music project, Bonny explored the important role that the arts and, in particular, music, plays in human society as an aid for developing social cohesion and community well-being.
"That feeling of belonging is really important for rural communities that are often quite isolated and very prone to environmental impacts like drought,” Bonny says.
“We had just had recent flooding in Canowindra, and in that area of the Central West that ended up being quite devastating. So, there's things like that that always hit local communities, and I think the arts and music, are so important in bringing people together and having them have that social outlet.”
“We had just had recent flooding in Canowindra, and in that area of the Central West that ended up being quite devastating. So, there's things like that that always hit local communities, and I think the arts and music, are so important in bringing people together and having them have that social outlet.”
"The other really positive benefit to this performance was the venue that I performed at. It was just the local pub, the local Royal Hotel, up on the verandah that overlooks the main street, which is beautiful. They didn't have anybody else in the pub except for the people that attended my performance, and the manager actually, made the comment afterwards that, ‘Oh, we would have been shut hours ago if it wasn't for you guys.’ Even from an economic standpoint, bringing in customers to a small business was extremely rewarding."
Homegrown featured one of Bonny’s original songs, Deep Breath, which won the UNE Cath Ellis Memorial Fund in 2020; this recognises a student undertaking a project in the area of Australian Indigenous music.
“While studying Indigenous arts, I was taken with Aboriginal connection to land. I felt many parallels with how rural communities relate to their environment, often as their livelihood, and wanted to highlight this while acknowledging the original custodians of the land we work, play and live on,” Bonny says.
This project sparked inspiration for Bonny, who says that this relatively small event opened her eyes to how a show can be thrown together so quickly and bring so many people together. The country creative is already looking forward to the future, determined to support local musicians and performances like this.
“Well, if that was such a successful project, what's next?”
