A few years ago I wrote about going to Wilcannia for the first time. It was a quick visit but I managed make a sweet little song/video and made several efforts to return.
I’ve been to Wilcannia with Heaps Decent twice so far this year. We received a grant to fund six more visits over the next 18 months which is fantastic. We work with the public school, the drop in centre and, for the first time, a primary school. You can read more about our first Wilcannia trip this year here.
We usually work with young people between 15 and 20 at Heaps Decent so working with primary school kids was quite a change. After two visits we have eight songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on Sesame St. In our workshops get the kids to come up with a subject then we help them write quick, simple verses. We sampled them playing percussive instruments they had in their classroom and made a beat out of it. The finished songs are cute, fun and educational!
After our first trip we got back to Sydney and one song, Dinnertime, stood out as the strongest. I asked my friend Georgia Perry to animate a clip for the song which you can watch at the top of this post. When we returned to Wilcannia last month we played the kids at St Therese’s the animated video and they watched attentively, singing the lyrics in unison as they flashed on the screen in time to the music. I filmed their reaction to the video, it was priceless. Made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. We’ll be making a lot of songs like this in the future, please share this video around. If you’ve got kids show it to them.
