22-05-2025
Anohni mourns the Great Barrier Reef in her Sydney Opera House shows
Anohni Hegarty first sang on Australian stages almost 20 years ago, when her band — then called Antony and the Johnsons — played theatre shows that left audiences enraptured.
This month, the band — now Anohni and the Johnsons — will play their final Australian shows, as their leader reckons with the environmental impact that comes with her profession.
"The reason I don't intend to travel anymore to Australia with large groups of musicians is because it's just not environmentally tenable," Anohni says.
"The footprint is too abhorrent. The amount of carbon that I burned to get here … it's football fields full of forests for me to come here with a group."
Australian audiences are lucky to even see them here for this last tour, which takes in two nights at the Sydney Opera House at the end of the month.
"I was going to cancel this show, honestly. But my intention in the past has been to try turning the opportunity into something that can be of service to Australian people."
Previously, this has seen the singer spend time with the Martu people in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, returning years later to march in opposition to a now-scrapped proposal to build a uranium mine close to Indigenous communities in the area.
This time, Anohni is focused on the Great Barrier Reef, where she has spent time investigating and documenting its destruction.
"I put all the money or the proceeds from the concert into this project, Mourning the Great Barrier Reef, which has been my focus for the last month," she says.
"I've been in Queensland filming at Lizard Island with a group of marine biologists and filmmakers, documenting the state of bleaching and acidification that's currently playing out on those group of reefs."
This footage will form part of Anohni's Sydney Opera House shows, as will interviews with experts like marine biologist Charlie Varon and filmmaker David Hannan.
"Between the songs, there'll be moments of testimony with the different scientists speaking about their experience as stewards of the reef from what they've seen over the last 30 years.
"It's really leaning on elder scientists in how they feel now about what they're seeing and where they feel this is headed."
This month's trip was Anohni's first opportunity to see firsthand both the beauty and devastation of the natural icon.
"It's very emotional. It looks like a war zone. It looks like a city that's been destroyed. It looks like a cemetery. Like, bones everywhere.
"There are fish swimming around and they are confused. They make their homes in the architecture of the reef, and because the architecture is still standing, they're still colonising those spots, reproducing and taking shelter there. But those kinds of reefs, once they die, they disintegrate very quickly."
Anohni's art is not just beautiful, it's imbued with rich meaning and unflinching commentary on matters of conflict and devastation. She insists she doesn't sing out of protest, she just sings her truth.
"I honestly never thought of myself as making protest music," she says. "I just compulsively take advantage of any opportunity I have to say the thing I care the most about.
"It's such a rare opportunity that a person like me would have a platform. I wasn't raised in a society or culture where I would ever have an expectation of having a chance to speak.
"I grew up in a household where feelings were considered a second-class pursuit. Only women had feelings and that was grounds for their exclusion from conversations — you know, the hysteric woman.
"Men supposedly didn't have feelings, but in fact they were just constantly expressing sublimated rage. Meanwhile, [women are] supposed to button our lips. So, I always sought refuge in art and creativity and self-expression and singing as a way of voicing things that we weren't allowed to voice in pedestrian culture."
She's an acclaimed artist and an unflinching advocate for many groups, but Anohni doesn't claim any superiority.
"I don't really believe in exceptionalism. I'm not any smarter than anyone else. I'm just a very normal person of my disposition, moving through the space trying to do the best I can in this situation."
She moves while possessing a seriously impressive tool: her rich, tender, powerful, otherworldly voice. But Anohni downplays this matchless instrument too, claiming she is but a product of those who've come before her.
"It's just an amalgamation of great voices," she contends. "I'm of British heritage. One of the great skills of a colonial nation is that they're really good at absorbing other people's cultures.
"When black American music came to England in the 50s and 60s, all the kids went crazy for it because it set them free. It was giving them permission to have ecstatic experiences [in] a very, very depressed, miserable post-colonial hellhole that was most of working Britain.
"The children were grabbing for dear life at joyful, ecstatic music that black Americans were bringing to their shores. Then, generations of young people copied those voices, and I'm like a third-generation iteration of that.
"So, the knowledge that I carry in my voice comes from black singers.
On the cover of Anohni and the Johnsons' latest album, 2023's My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, is a portrait of Marsha P. Johnson, a legendary gender-non-conforming gay-rights activist for whom Anohni — a trans woman — named her band.
"Marsha P. Johnson was a very exceptional person because she was living a very like 'Jesus as a girl' kind of life. She was giving everything, the shirt off her back. She wasn't going to leave anyone behind. Same with [American gay-liberation and trans-rights activist] Sylvia Rivera.
"I am not that person. Like, I have a shirt on my back."
One thing she doesn't have, and isn't interested in, is hope.
"If we need hope that we're not going to die in order to find reason to live, then that's a catch 22 I don't need," she says.
That doesn't mean she's not interested in a better future. She believes she knows what that looks like as well, and it's a long way from the androcentric ways of our past.
"I believe that, if there is to be leadership that can lead us forward, it will be feminine leadership," she says. "Only circles of mothers, only circles of sisters can lead us out of this.
"There's tonnes of beautiful men in the world but, collectively, men are constitutionally incapable of solving this problem.
"I heard that Australia has like 57 per cent women in your new parliament, which is a really beautiful start. I would recommend to go to 80 or 85 per cent and then let's make it global, and then we can maybe have the beginning of a conversation about how to help and save ourselves. I don't think we'll be able to do it without that."
Anohni and the Johnsons play Vivid LIVE at the Sydney Opera House on Monday, May 26 and Tuesday, May 27.
