Inmates are being encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings through songs, with some unexpected results.
While on a road trip across Australia, Oli Firth found himself somewhere he never expected to end up: In prison.
Mr Firth's drive was cut short in the dusty NSW outback after he was caught with drugs and sent to Broken Hill Correctional Centre.But while behind bars, Mr Firth got involved in a program called Songbirds that teaches songwriting to inmates. It changed him.And Mr Firth is not alone in finding solace through music in prison.Murray Cook is a musician who's played with Midnight Oil, Mental as Anything and Mixed Relations.
But for more than 20 years, Mr Cook has also run music classes in different NSW prisons, including a stint as a music teacher in the psych ward of Sydney's Long Bay Correctional Centre., which brings music and other artforms into prisons, with a focus on songwriting.Songbirds is modelled on the Jail Guitar Doors program that was set up by musician Billy Bragg and MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer in the UK and US.
But he says "somehow within the context of a song, it's okay to say stuff like that, to say something like, 'I love my partner'." So Mr Cook has assembled a team of musicians to run Songbirds workshops across the state, including Abby Dobson from Leonardo's Bride and Bow Campbell from Front End Loader and Dead Marines.Mr Cook tries to get inmates to write about their feelings and experiences, as a way of dealing with them. But getting to this point isn't always straightforward.
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