You may have heard of Naarm (Melbourne) based, Gold Coast raised musician Birdgirl (Britt Franzmann), as she’s currently walking across Australia to raise money for Grow The Music and Slamtidote. I’ve been keeping her company via insta DM as she shares stories from the road, more about her trip and some insights into her music journey so far.
Walking across Australia pushing your stuff in a cart is no easy feat, and I was fascinated how this dream came about:
“I decided I wanted to walk across Australia many years ago, probably when I was 16 or 17. I had just recently read Robyn Davidson’s ‘Tracks’ and then started reading about other people’s similar adventures and became absolutely obsessed with the idea of crossing the country via foot. Originally this curiosity evolved from the need for escapism from my everyday life, but I suppose it transformed into a desire to see what it was actually like out in the most remote areas (that you can get to while pushing a cart) and what it would feel like to do something so completely out of my comfort zone.”
Birdgirl later decided to combine this with a desire to raise money to improve access to the arts. One of her first stories from her trip that she shares with me highlighted why this was so valuable:
“I have just stopped in the township of Eucla, population 37. Eucla sits on the border of Western Australia and South Australia, the first touchpoint along the Nullarbor to the ocean. A police car stopped me on the road, (which shocked me as I hadn’t seen any police stations for over 710km). We chatted about what I was doing, and one of them tried to convince me to play a gig while I was in Eucla. He explained how nothing new ever happened there and that some live music would do everybody good. I would have loved to have played a gig there and toyed with the idea, but ultimately there was no venue that could have housed me, other than the roadhouse restaurant, with no PA equipment and not really any areas to have me sit – even unplugged”
You can donate to her GoFundMe campaign here.
We end up digging into the barriers creating these issues. There is, of course, the obvious issue of the landscape, the distance and the isolation which makes logistics challenging. But deeper than that there’s the obvious systemic challenges, an overall lack of government funding and support for the arts, combined with a general lack of investment in regional areas. We agree that it’s likely to be grassroots organisations that will push any change in this for a while.
“I believe the key to making a difference for this specific issue is slowly working to change people’s preconceived ideas of the importance of the arts” shares Birdgirl. And it’s so telling that this community were so keen for her to perform. The arts exist everywhere in creating, music, storytelling and performing but it’s difficult to see how they truly thrive without an infrastructure to support them.
Back to Birdgirl’s own musical journey. She grew up on the Gold Coast, acknowledging that her school had a phenomenal arts program. But it was writing and literature she was drawn to at that age. It took a move to Adelaide for university (of which she ultimately dropped out), and a chance moment seeing a friend perform at an open mic night before she made the switch to music. Ultimately finding a true music community when she eventually settled in Melbourne.
You’d think someone willing to walk solo across Australia would be overflowing with confidence, and Birdgirl certainly possesses considerable grit and enough self-belief to take a leap when she needs to, but there’s threads of self-doubt that still creep through. Her inability to sing in an American accent saw her labelled as “bogan” in the early days, and even more recently as she walked to a recent gig in Adelaide she had moments of “what if no one shows up?” (Of course, they did). We touch on Tall Poppy Sydrome a few times during our chat, but there was something else which Birdgirl first spoke about on her insta feed that I actually wanted get more of a read on – misogyny. (Disclaimer: we’ve been chatting for weeks, I asked this question prior to the Sydney Swans story breaking and the outpouring of discourse around this. Take what you will from that, my take would be, this shit is alway happening even when we’re not talking about it).
Birdgirl has certainly met her fair share of wholesome characters during her journey. There is Piers, the cyclist she spotted bobbing along in the distance who is doing his journey even more old school than she is by being completely off the grid, with whom she shared an inspirational chat when they crossed paths. And there’s her friendly truckie who drives weekly from Adelaide to Perth and who drops her a new tent off on his next run after her original one got ruined, to name just a couple of friendly faces on her journey so far.
But there was also the less wholesome, the comments about her weight, the creepy propositions “I have an electric blanket in my caravan you’re always welcome to join me” 
and the downright bizarre. Birdgirl confesses that at first she just let the comments roll off her back, but then when she shared them with others she began to realise how unacceptable they really were. “You can see in real time the lack of recognition for you as a person, when this kind of misogynistic garbage is being spewed from a person’s mouth.”
She can easily draw parallels to this in her time in the music scene, while perhaps less outright creepy there’s still the lack of respect, an underestimation of what she can achieve as a girl and that underlying sinister feeling that something could happen. She expands on this:
“I want to touch on anticipation, specifically anticipating the worst case – because for many of us that is a safety measure we have to take. What I mean by this is the things that slip between the gaps. The things that you don’t always feel comfortable calling out, because we’re lead to believe that we’re ’ruining the fun’ or being ‘too dramatic’ in doing so. It’s the men at gigs who keep pressing even after you’ve said you have a boyfriend. It’s the ones that look down on what you’re doing and then when a man does the exact same thing – they get highly praised for it.
It’s the ones who keep asking for details on your route/where you’re camping after making comments about your legs and the ones with eyes that wander to everywhere but your face.”
“I may sound jaded as I write this” she continues “and I’m unashamed to say that I am. Because if things aren’t actively getting better, they’re getting worse.”
She’s mentioned the gruelling aspects of her trip multiple times, her tent and then her cart falling apart, the moments of loneliness and the day it was so hot she vomited in her mouth. But she never mentioned these negative interactions with men until I explicitly asked. I wish I’d asked which was worse, the vomit or the men, but I think I might know the answer.
I have no regrets about pulling her attention to these more negative aspects of her journey. Especially with recent news, these stories need to be told, I’m pleased she trusted me enough to share it, yet I also admire that for the most part she focused on the positive human interaction she’s had. The joys of meeting a fellow traveller, the overwhelm of all the people when she finally made it to her gig in Adelaide or the minute she perplexed a bunch of kids in Augusta when they asked how she knew where to go and she answered with the Ullah song lyrics “I just take a wild guess and hope for the best” (she later clarified she just follows the road. Something she also had to explain to me early on in our chat too).
There’s also been a restorative aspect to the walk for her too, a greater appreciation for things and a renewed curiosity.
I asked how her songwriting has changed as she’s progressed on her journey and it’s clear this sense of wonder has permeated this too “I’ll take a lot of things I see and phrases or odd things people say to use in songs” she shares. There’s also less care for what people think and she’s writing more honest, raw material. “I think I’ve definitely been leaning more towards our more emo roots which has been exciting” she adds. Writing has always been a solo endeavour for Birdgirl, and she has her guitar with her on the trip so she’s well equipped to create when she has the time and energy.
But she’s keen to return to the studio when she gets home, keen to experiment further with her songwriting and to bring the energy of this trip with her. “I’ve had a few mental breakthroughs on this trip concerning confidence with that kind of thing, since I am really new to recording still. So I’m excited to just slog through as many hours in the studio as I can!”
Roughly midway through the trip she stopped off to play a little gig in Adelaide. The idea begun as wanting to walk to her next gig, and then evolved into a fully formed stripped back set alongside her keys player Callum. “It was a little bit overwhelming at first, because I hadn’t interacted with so many people at once since leaving Perth – but I hit my stride after the first song!” She shared after the show.
She is now on the home straight, sort of, as she takes the final leg of her journey into Melbourne – arriving home around September 6th for a homecoming show at Northcote Social Club.
I ended our chat the way I end them all, asking about some artists she thinks deserve a bit more love. Her answers are below:
“Anna Jeavons!! I have been absolutely hammering her recently released album- it is genuinely so good and so honest.” (Fully agree with this I LOVE this album too)
Will Brien – an artist from the Western suburbs (I think) only has two songs out ‘if Jesus wore roller skates’ and ‘I couldn’t sit there all night’ and I swear those songs have crack in them or something.
And then I’d also say Harmony Romsloe– a phenomenal Perth based muso who I played with in Freo. If anyone ever was going to ‘make it’ I would say Harmony. I seriously have not seen many people who work as hard as her. Her music is phenomenal, as is her stage presence- and she’s just an absolute bloody legend.”
But honestly, it feels weird leaving her here, we’ve been chatting on and off over two months of her trip. I feel like I still have questions, like I’m leaving this unfinished but it also feels right to publish before too much time has passed. So there might be a follow up here. A Birdgirl’s big walk: The Aftermath, once she’s safely back in Melbourne (and maybe back in the studio) to see how it feels re-engaging with the world she left behind for a few months to follow a dream she had at 16!
Follow along with Birdgirl here.