When Jaguar Jonze was a child, she and her mother made many visits to a pro bono lawyer in Sydney. Her mum – a Taiwanese national – spent seven years fighting for permanent residency in Australia. When the pair drove down from Brisbane for legal appointments they would visit the Chinese Garden of Friendship, a green oasis in the city’s centre. Jonze would play amid the koi fish-filled ponds, mock Ming-dynasty pavilions and weeping willows. Back then, the garden felt endless.

“It seems so much smaller to me now,” Jonze says, looking around the garden today.

Jonze – real name Deena Lynch – is here to talk about how things often look different with a bit of distance. She has arrived looking every bit the avant garde pop star she is today in a matching two-piece suit; a musician not afraid to swing big with moves, such as performing in a dress that slowly catches fire while auditioning for Eurovision.

Seven years ago, Jonze had just started building a music career with her bright, bold brand of art-pop when she found herself at the centre of the #MeToo fight in the Australian music industry, after publicly alleging she had been assaulted. While her criminal case worked its way through the courts she became an advocate for women and sexual assault survivors in the music industry, helping shape the federal government’s landmark National Cultural Policy, contributing to an independent review.

How does Jonze feel now about the post-#MeToo world – one where women still often face personal and professional consequences for reporting sexual assault?

“I mean, sometimes I’m just like, why did I do that?” Jonze responds, throwing her hands up and letting out the sort of nervous laughter you make when the only alternative is crying. “Why did I do all that stuff when things just go backwards? You take 10 steps forward, but 70 steps back.”

Exasperation and wry humour are both running themes in our conversation. The 34-year-old is bright and bubbly when we meet, happily taking on the role of tour guide to her old haunt (“Welcome to the Chinese Garden of Friendship!” she says, gesturing widely when we first step inside). Her demeanour swithces to more thoughtful and quiet when discussing the toll the years in the spotlight took on her. When a monitor lizard runs across our path and causes me to scream and then apologise for interrupting the very serious conversation we’ve been having, she laughs. “That’s life!”

On multiple fronts, it has been a difficult couple of years for Jonze.

Her court case ended in a mistrial in 2023 and a re-trial was not pursued.

The next year, Jonze began suffering seizures, paralysis, chronic pain and difficulty walking, becoming so unwell that she was forced to pause her music career. She was eventually diagnosed with functional neurological disorder and the autoimmune disease lupus, and feels that “the chronic stress and trauma that I endured over seven years, publicly, led to deep frying my system” – sparking her health problems.

“I think a lot of the advocacy process dehumanised me … I don’t think I fully understood the consequences I was going to pay for that, either” she says, pausing briefly as we weave around teenagers staging photoshoots and waiting until we’re alone again to continue speaking. “I felt like I had to operate as a machine and drive myself into the ground, and if it came at a cost of me, it was worth it because it was going to blow things up.”

There is a matter-of-fact resignation to the way Jonze discusses this now. She feels like her body “knew that I wasn’t looking after it” and reacted in protest. The inflection point was a five-hour seizure she suffered while on tour in Melbourne in 2024, after which she was forced to step away from work and spend four months focusing on rehabilitation. Water therapy helped her, but otherwise she was largely bedridden unable to walk without mobility aids.

“I took a really long time to stop travelling with the walking stick. I just recently felt OK without it,” Jonze nods. “I’ve had a bit of flare up recently, but for the most part, I’m in remission – I’m in a whole different place compared to 18 months ago.”

What moved the needle for her was a change of scenery: a friend booked Jonze flights to Bali and a place to stay that met her accessibility needs, urging her to swap hospitals and her bedroom for proximity to the ocean. She was only meant to go for a couple of weeks, but kept pushing out the date of her return flight – until realising she wanted to make her relocation permanent. Based in Bali in 2024, she slowly began to regain her strength, and kept writing music despite having no immediate plans to play live. She also became “obsessed” with the sport of freediving – in which she can plunge over 30 metres into the ocean without any safety gear or breathing equipment – a pursuit she feels helped her reconnect with her body.

But she found that in the rubble of her health collapse and away from the weight of her advocacy work, the songs she penned were very different to those on her debut record, Bunny Mode, which roared about injustice and howled with trauma. On that album, she “felt the pressure of writing for a thousand voices”. This time around, she shrugs, “I wanted to write for fun”.

Jonze wrote tracks like the high-energy, middle finger flip of Kawasaki Ninja (named for the motorcycles she rode, pre-illness), eventually realising she had written an entire dance-pop album – despite being incapable of dancing. “I was like, “What have I done?” she laughs as we take a seat under a Chinese Elm tree in a private corner of the garden. “How am I going to tour these songs?”

The album, which she titled Beatmaster, will be released in January. With the first three singles out, Jonze has begun making her tentative steps back to the music industry. She knows that this time around she has to give far less off herself – less of the physically demanding live shows that might push her body over the edge, and less access to her personal life that has been so mentally draining. She recently handed the keys to her once-buzzing Instagram account to her management team.

The silver lining of all she’s been through is that her advocacy work led her to connect with like-minded people. She is proud of the changes she has helped encourage the government to push through. And she knows change comes by degrees. “If [my work] makes it easier for the next person to make another dent in the glass ceiling, and if we keep chipping away at it, one day it will shatter – that’s my part in it.”

So after everything she’s been through, from that difficult childhood to her #MeToo fight and health battles, how is Jonze now?

‘“It’s a bit of a dance,” she says. “Because of the advocacy and the trauma, I am more fragile and more vulnerable. But at the same time, I am so much stronger and have a lot of character for it.”

Ultimately, though, Jonze is content with the slower, calmer and more private life she has built in Bali, complete with a chicken and a “very sassy” pet dog. She smiles when she talks about how her priorities have shifted.

“I have a very different mindset now, which is that my health comes first. And if I can release music and it connects with someone, that will make me really happy. But I won’t sacrifice my wellbeing in order to make that happen any more, or to be seen,” she reflects, as we stroll back towards the front gates of the garden she first loved so much as a little girl.

“I think it’s nice that I’ve come back to the art, actually,” she says. “And whatever happens out of that is just a bonus.”

Beatmaster by Jaguar Jonze will be released on 29 January 2027.