DISCOVERY: Part 2 - The Team

After ‘the meeting’, I remember things moving pretty swiftly. Jack and I discussed ways we could go about making this album. It seemed imperative that if we were to present a culture as complex as Papua New Guinea’s to a contemporary world, it had to be through a visual lense as much as a sonic one. So we decided to go backwards from the visuals to the music. Seemed legit. This isn’t the standard workflow for traditional contemporary music making at all but I was down for a bit of spice in my life. How hard could it be? Assemble a small creative team, source funding, head to PNG with a million cameras and said team, come back inspired by the experience with hard drives full of visuals, write music, then present an art project to the world in, hmmm, say a year ? Maybe 2? Yeah boi. I got this. 

Wot an idiot. 

True. But I must clarify that I am an optimist first. I wouldn’t have gotten this far without a “lemonade” approach to this industry but in this instance, I feel like I really had no clue what I was signing up for and that it wouldn’t take me 1 or 2 - but 5 whole years to get to the other side of it. As I mentioned in my last blog, I was in funville (population me) so you could have suggested we streak across the harbor bridge naked and I would have deeply considered it. My heart has always been for my culture - and it has been the engine room that propels me forward but the mindframe I was in (amongst other things) may have distracted me from properly preparing myself for what was to be a mammoth task. 

But we can’t turn back time now. Onwards we dover head first into that canyon. Picture that pink elephant scene in the original ‘Dumbo’ movie where he and Timothy Q. Mouse accidentally get trolleyed on Champagne and the hallucination sees them ascend a staircase made out of elephant’s trunk and then swan dive into the abyss... That was me. 

Going to PNG for the first time is an experience. Not just going to the concrete jungle that is Port Moresby (the capital), which is a beast and beauty of its own. I mean getting out into the villages, going out bush, the settlements and up in the mountains and valleys. I knew that the group I was to take over with me needed to be small and a mixture of family and people I could trust to enter my country with care and respect.

Naturally I selected my mother, Dr. Miriam Murphy as our cultural advisor. Her standing within the villages we visited was highly respected and seen as a matriarchal figure with wealth of knowledge to offer everyone (including myself). Though PNG runs through my blood I had spent far too long in Australia to feel confident enough to properly guide the team through the cultural experiences we would have along the way.

I also asked my sister Ruth to come on as our team nurse and all round support. As a midwife she had a patience and knack for keeping the mood light which was invaluable during such a taxing journey.

The other 3 were people I had worked with but also had personal relationships with. Among them was my friend Ben who has now become my manager. At that point in my career Ben was working for me in some kind of assistant type role but we referred to him as more of a ‘get shit done’ kinda guy. I was also enjoying the growth of our friendship outside of my split with Tim, as they had been friends initially. The ticket for me was that he had won my trust and put in the work to support me and my family where he could. Not just a ‘get shit done’ kinda guy, but an ‘extra mile’ kinda guy too. He came under the banner of‘ ‘producer’ yet we quickly found that everyone ended up doing a bit of everything in the end. Emele Ugavule was my next superhero, a Tokelauan/Fijian creator and storyteller (amongst a long list of other things). Our friendship was quite new as we’d only just met working on the ‘Once’ film clip together. Like most people who come into her acquaintance, I was immediately struck by her intelligence and ease in which she carried herself. I thought it quite interesting that someone so young could carry so much knowledge with such lightness and such fire all at the same time. What really excited me though, was her deep love and advocacy for Oceanic people and the way in which she creatively presented that to the world. She was ever the student, learning, mining and excavating. She offered up her findings about our unique cultures in a way that I hadn’t been seeing much of and so I invited her on as a photographer as well as general creative assistant. It also helped that she was (at the time) dating one of my backing singers and our professional relationship grew into more significant hangs which I’m positive is Islander for ‘more significant eating’.

Next I had Dan Segal who came on as my video guy. Dan and I had started dating 2 years prior to the trip and as a creative director of his own branding company our careers had started to overlap. I know I know! I can already hear you scoffing! Don’t work with your boyfriends quack quack quack - didn’t you learn anything from ya last blog?! Look. 7 years, 1 baby, 2 restaurants, 2 albums and 7 countries later I can confirm that he’s been different - and no I don’t say that about all the boys lol. Plus I’ve successfully kept him out of my band this long despite his endless offers to play bass for me. He instead was the brains behind the ‘Once’ and ‘House On a Rock’ film clips directing both of those as well as multiple album and single cover shoots. Everything creative you’ve seen come out for this album comes out of the production house of Segal and Segal. Literally our house. 

Kavieng Airport N.I.P.n on the way to Rabaul.

But seriously speaking, I needed someone behind the camera who had prior experience in PNG but also someone that my family felt comfortable having in their space with a giant lense pointed in their direction. PNG is not for the faint hearted, especially if you’re wanting to get under its skin right to its core and I felt Dan had some first hand (though preliminary) experience with the nuances that lie under the surface of the smiling Islanders, the palm trees, the magical rainforests and the sparkling beaches. There was one more person who would have made this a tight little 6 person team and that was Jack. As I was setting the trip up, Jack was juggling a long distance relationship with his girlfriend Soraya and it transpired that he needed to be in Paris. I was super bummed (as we’d embarked on this project together) but I could see the stress he was under with having to deal with VISAs on top of keeping his relationship afloat between two different countries. In hindsight I’m almost certain that Jack would not have been in the right headspace to ingest PNG at that point and the team I went away with ended up being exactly the people I needed to guerilla it with. 

Team locked in, we got prepped. Between us we must have had about 13 cameras which included a bunch of vintage ones from Emele’s collection, some from mine and some I’d purchased from ebay specifically for the trip, a drone, a few digital SLRs, an 8mm camera, multiple batteries, a bag full of film and our iphones.

We packed medical kits, muesli bars, hiking boots (well some of us did - others thought they could summit a mountain in Chuck Taylors which they did but lol), mozzie repellents, sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses and a swag of Gucci pieces that would have cost more than all our cameras combined.

After a few briefing sessions, brainstorming, document checks and  phone calls we were on our way excited for what lay ahead of us. 

But alas, the thrill of adventure was short lived as at 5am at the Virgin Check In counter, one of us would be booted from the flight, us waving anxiously goodbye to them as we disappeared towards the departures gate. It can only get better from here right?