When she was 17, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich flew to Alice Springs to stay with her mother. Hellmrich had been living independently for a year, but a boy she was seeing had screamed at her and shoved her into a door. So her mother bought her a flight.
In Alice, she meandered the town by day and sat with her mother outside the duplex at night, sipping Cruisers. Already the veteran of a few bands, Hellmrich was confronted by the idea that her mother’s ambitions had been thwarted. “I was so scared at the time of ever being a mum and having to lose myself that way,” she writes in her first book, It’s Not For You – part memoir, part missive to the music industry. “Scared of what motherhood would take from me”.
When she speaks to Guardian Australia, Hellmrich – who spent eight years as the bassist of Melbourne band Camp Cope – is wearing a necklace that says “Mother” and is pregnant with her second child. “I had this conversation with my partner: ‘Oh my gosh, is this the end of my creative career?’” she says. “He was like, ‘I’ve got this feeling that it’s just the beginning.’”
It’s Not For You contains 18 interviews with women and gender-diverse artists who have changed the Australian music industry on their own terms, including Courtney Barnett, Vika and Linda Bull, Julia Jacklin, Barkaa and Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor. It’s named after a line in a Camp Cope song, and as Hellmrich writes, is “for every artist who felt pushed away, or talked over, or told that their place was somewhere else”.
Camp Cope were both lauded and critiqued for their fierce activism, which included calling out festivals for booking too few women and spearheading the It Takes One campaign to encourage people to call out abusive behaviour and make festivals safer. Years of inflammatory headlines made Hellmrich apprehensive about sharing so much of her life, she says, but on the flipside she’s the perfect person for her peers to open up to.
One theme is parenting as a musician. “I couldn’t escape it,” she says. “I thought, I can’t just talk about motherhood to these women because they’ve got so much else going on, but I really wanted to because we all approach it in such different ways.”
As a child, Hellmrich vividly remembers seeing Yumi Stynes interviewing bands for Channel V with a pregnant belly, and thinking how cool that was. In the book, DJ Anna Lunoe reveals that even though she performed at festivals while visibly, gloriously pregnant, she kept her nausea hidden and was worried she’d lose relevance. Similarly, producer Anna Laverty hid her family status on social media at first, having Googled “female music producers with children” and only finding one. Laverty, who founded the Music Producers and Engineers’ Guild of Australia, also describes being hired by male bands, but being able to sense if one member might not respect her authority.
The idea that men have more trustworthy musical knowledge can be deeply ingrained. When Sarah Blasko split up with her romantic and creative partner before making her third album, she realised she had to let go of the feeling that she needed a second opinion – and upon its release won an Aria award. Journalist Sosefina Fuamoli describes older male critics congratulating her for getting spots on panels: “Oh, it’s great you’re booked. I wasn’t available, but good for you.”
After Camp Cope split in 2023, Hellmrich moved to Penrith with her partner, Lekii, to raise their kids. Western Sydney looms large over her beautifully observed memoir sections, and as it seems to sit on the outskirts of power and influence, despite the wealth of talent there, is a good metaphor for the book.
The perfume of her nan Dawn – who always wore her hair sprayed high and could throw a solid punch, she writes – still seems to linger at the Penrith Leagues Club where Hellmrich interviews Marcia Hines. And dirt bikes become a motif. As a youngster, Hellmrich hooned around on the back of her brother’s Yamaha PeeWee 50, then decades later finds herself on a video shoot for Barkaa, who – being a western Sydney woman herself – requested PeeWees for the occasion.
“For a long time I felt lesser because I was from here, and then as I grew up, I understood that it really shaped my art and it shaped my personality,” Hellmrich says.
I tell Hellmrich that reading It’s Not For You has been a personal reckoning. In the mid-2010s, when Camp Cope released their self-titled debut album, there was an upswell of activism. Among the initiatives, the Melbourne-based grassroots group Listen was formed to promote equality in the Australian music scene; and #MeToo went global. I reported on sexual harassment at live events, spoke on panels about inclusion and safe spaces. I had experienced many of the issues first-hand, but my participation was also fuelled by fear – of not being seen to do enough, of getting it wrong. The call-out culture could be furiously unforgiving. But reading the more nuanced thoughts of Hellmrich and her peers has been a salve.
“It was a really unforgiving period,” Hellmrich agrees. “As women, we get criticised on so many different aspects, and so much of that is beyond the art. It’s really scary, having everything you say be scrutinised, and it absolutely demolished my mental health. A lot of us went through that.”
She gives the example of Sampa the Great, another voice in the book. “She didn’t get the joyous career that she should have had in Australia because she had to take on being a teacher and representation for her community,” Hellmrich says. “She loves to celebrate her community, but if you’re constantly having to be the spokesperson for Botswana or black women in that genre, it’s exhausting.”
In an ideal world, Hellmrich would have been “making music about aliens and being a loser”, but instead Camp Cope felt obliged to speak up on behalf of any damage they were seeing to the community that supported them.
“It can be a lot,” she reflects of the trio’s time together. “You can’t be the Ghostbusters of every bad man in the industry. If you fight everything, you only beat yourself. If you yell at everything, no one’s gonna listen any more.”
Then again, in the chapter in which she interviews her former bandmates, drummer Sarah “Thomo” Thompson gets the last word. “Nah,” Thomo says. “I actually wish I’d been more of a cunt.”
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It’s Not For You by Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich is out 11 August via Penguin
