Jeanette is on her way to work on music projects in the APY lands and Western Desert communities of Yalata and Oak Valley for the next month. It will be her first visit to the APY Lands. She has been contracted by the Department of Education and Children’s Services to teach music and literacy to children in the pre-school and lower primary years. After that, she’ll head west to spend a week at the Yalata Anangu school before heading inland to Oak Valley for her first visit back to that community for a year. While there, she will deliver a keyboard donated to the Desert Oaks/Maralinga Desert band by sports personality, Pat Mickan.

Jeanette is looking forward to the healing and perspective offered by the desert wilderness. The drive to Oak Valley and the wide horizons have always given her a sense of peace and restoration that shows through in her music. Jeanette will have her laptop and will be uploading photos regularly to her facebook pages whenever she can get internet coverage.

Eric Bogle and John Munro will be on tour in Canada in the fall of 2009.

For over 30 years PENNY DAVIES & ROGER ILOTT’s performances of songs such as Hey Rain!, Where the Cane Fires Burn, Beside a Railway Line, Ridin’ on the Fruit Train, The Monkeys Sing Soprano and When the Cooper’s Coming Down have been taken to Australia’s heart and are part of the Australian psyche.

MOON CALLER is their latest release and features son Jordy on drums along with old bandmate Jed Hudson on bass – creating a strong rhythmic feel on every track. The album features songs about people, climate, greed, the price of war, human achievement and human frailty, the lessons of history, bushrangers, growing up and growing older.

The moon is a strong symbol throughout this new album – with its focus on the mysteries and the tides of human life on this planet. MOON CALLER is their 17th album. Tracks: She’s Like A Tree, Aurelia, Four Horsemen, The Circle Game, Crazy Weather, O’Mara’s Front Verandah, The Goldfield, Wet Season Blues, Song Of The Artesian Water, Pte. Herbert Thomas Scard, Must Have Been The Moon, Armstrong, Goodbye To Your Schooldays, Peaceful, Storm King Jam.

You can order MOON CALLER directly from
Penny Davies and Roger Ilott at RESTLESS MUSIC.

Multiple Golden Guitar finalist Graham Rodger has teamed up with Jeanette Wormald to record a duet which features on his new album The Fire Within Me. Jeanette travelled to Brisbane in January to record the duet in producer, Michael Fix’s studio. The song is an Australian classic about a little lake in South Australia’s outback Carra Barra Wirra Canna. Jeanette tells that Graham rang her up and asked whether she would consider doing a duet with him. “I was honoured,” Jeanette says. “But our initial choices for a duet didn’t work out. I was in the studio listening to Graham’s new songs and was really excited by the direction he was heading. I did the vocal arrangements for him on Diamantina, and then realised that Carra Barra Wirra Canna would work really well for us. We learned it that night and recorded it the next day. I was so excited by the harmonies I got teary and Graham got goose bumps. Even Michael was excited and called Susan Jarvis in to have a listen.” The duet features on Graham’s seventh album which was launched in Queensland the first weekend in April.

We acknowledge the beautiful & sensitive photography of Italo Vardaro for this image

The day he turned the taps off, dairy farmer JR Williams of Torrumbarry near Echuaca, got an idea. He had been unable to irrigate his pastures for his dairy herd and so he decided to raise awareness of the struggles of his region through music. And so this gifted songwriter-farmer put his passion for music into words with a song called “WHO GIVES A STUFF ABOUT THE FARMER”. JR believes the song which was released nationally in Australia in December 2007 when the water crisis hit hardest will help spread the message about what is really going on in Australia’s bush lands. His song expresses the region’s frustration of seeing water run to waste in the south of Australia as the government decided to pipe water out of the struggling northern irrigation system to supply the cities int he south. JR is also concerned about the social implications of young people on the land being forced to leave rural areas and move to the cities in order to feed their families.

“We need to work together to find positive long term answers for our irrigators along the Murray Darling River System.”