We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Moana Mayatrix. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Moana below.

Moana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

Two stories come to mind – being about 15 years old and busking in my small country town after school with friends – we made heaps of cash! (Or maybe it was just because I was a teenager who had made very little money!

When I was 17 I played at an open mic night at my local country town pub, after my performance the manager approached me and asked if I’d want to come back and do a paid gig in a couple of weeks for their dinner night. I remember feeling so elated by that experience.

Moana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Māori-Australian multi-disciplinary, multi-genre artist best known for my work as a singer, musician, performer and all-round creative. I’m a constantly evolving artist, but generally speaking my work is an exploration of a darkly powerful feminine beauty riding the landscapes of life, death, love, loss, myth, magic, sensuality, surrealism, sass, playfulness, the wild, the weird, the ancient and the now, primarily through the lens of music – though story-telling, dance and aesthetics are worthy of mentioning as secondary modalities. My vision draws inspiration from stories of life on the outskirts as a bohemian artist, deep connection to nature, the psychedelic, the cycles and our subconscious human nature. The soul of my vision is to express a bold and provocative celebration of our aliveness, to create work that makes you feel and empowers your own pathway to self expression.

I’ve always been a creative and a dreamer. Ever since I can remember I was singing, writing fantasy stories, performing roles in school plays and lost in my imaginary worlds. A life-changing moment for me was when I was 14 years old, my dad was learning some songs on the guitar and I thought “I can do that” so I sat down to join him and basically have never stopped.

Once I had the power to play an instrument (just a few chords at first) and sing at the same time, I felt I could do anything and there was nothing else that gave me the same feeling of belonging and excitement as I spent hours upon hours in my bedroom practising and exploring. Around 16 years old I started writing my own songs, at first performing acoustically with my wonderful mum, Jen, in my hometown of the quiet surfy, Gracetown in regional Western Australia.

Meanwhile, I was a very keen student and learner and in my final year of high school I had been intending to study veterinary medicine – something I considered having come from a family of doctors, growing up around farms and being an animal lover. However, nothing made me feel as alive as creativity and I chose to move to Perth city to study Contemporary Performance and Literature at University. This was one of the first big choices I made in my life where my internal compass consistently pointed me in the direction of Passion over the Plain. Straight out of my degree I was picked up by a contemporary theatre company to go to New York for an artist’s residency, developing a show in a prestigious avant-garde art gallery graced by the likes of Tom Waits, Roger Waters and Winona Ryder.

Returning from New York, inspired by the performing arts, the bohemian artist’s lifestyle and rock n roll icons emerging from New York in the ‘60s and ‘70s, another life changing moment was picking up the electric guitar and an amp with built in effects, which is where I started to access a part of myself I didn’t know existed – the rock star. Something about the loudness, the rawness and intensity made me feel 60ft tall and able to access a deeply, hidden part of my tribal warrior spirit – having been displaced from my own indigenous roots growing up in Australia, it felt like something ancestral moved through me. Additionally, the endless possibilities of expressing myself through a deepening creative outlet of clothes, fashion and styling, I started to collaborate with my mum who was a seamstresses on developing costumes. From there in 2013 I started my art-rock band Mayatrix & The Psychics (fka MOANA), which has been the hub for all my creative expressions across music, performance and story-telling. Our unique brand of heavy-psych-rock with an art-rock twist has earnt us acknowledgement world-wide including most recently winning Best Australian Music Video at the Prague Music Video Awards, being nominated for West Australian Music Song Of The Year Award and supporting the mighty Australian prog-metal band, Karnivool.

Simultaneously, my work as a performer and multi-genre musician has flourished working on a number of independent theatre and film projects, including hip h’Opera ‘Iceland’ with Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company and Australian hip hop legends Downsyde on the full length production, which was a finalist for Best Composition/ Arrangement at the 2020 Performing Arts WA Awards.

I think my unique and diverse blend of creative interests and talents in my project is what differentiates me from others in the scene, my work ethic, fearlessness and passion for this path as a creative, as well as being a woman of colour in a male dominated heavy music scene. I am most proud of my resilience in the face of adversity, my determination to keep growing, learning and expanding on my discipline and creative direction, and the way I have stayed true to myself and my vision along the way.

More recently I have started up my own solo work as Moana Mayatrix, recently screening a short animated rock-opera I wrote and directed, ‘The Colour Red’, at film festivals across the US and Europe, differentiating myself from the amazing band that has been created over the last 10 years, and I’m really excited about an upcoming solo album I am working on, as well as various collaborations across hip hop, electronic and house music, as well as a clothing label expanding upon the unique art-rock aesthetic of my world with The Psychics.

Furthermore, I have found so much satisfaction in my career by finding more ways to be of service to my community through my creative practice in the realms of teaching and facilitating others in expressing themselves and encouraging young people to pursue the gift of music. I’ve worked as an early childhood music teacher and now I facilitate songwriting workshops with youth in regional and remote areas of WA – this isn’t just a hobby for me, living the life of a creative is my purpose and I am deeply passionate about it from so many different angles.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Wow, there are so many! One that springs to mind is a fairly recent one where I got booed off stage in a country town. The vibe was very rough and backward and the locals can be real savage. I’d been booked to support a blues rock band as a solo artist and when I was setting up all I could hear was old ladies yelling “Boo! We don’t want a woman on stage! Where’s the band? We came here to see the band! Who do you think you are girl?!” And with no change over music, it was incredibly awkward and I felt deeply uncomfortable. I decided I wasn’t going to deal with that level of disrespect, and left the stage not playing my set.

You best believe I went off under a tree after that and cried my eyes out, as I found it deeply hurtful and shocking to experienced that. But I allowed myself to feel all the hurt and rejection, wiped my tears and later went on stage with the band and sung my heart out doing some Tina Turner. But the reason I bring up this story isn’t because of the resilience I found on the night to get back on stage and show that crowd what I was made of, even though that was a courageous thing. It’s a reminder that resilience doesn’t mean you have to become hardened, I think the courageous thing is to keep your heart open and feel it all, whilst becoming wiser and stronger in spirit. I find solace in knowing that in the 70s when David Bowie came to Australia he played in a small country town outside of Victoria and he was booed off stage by the same kind of crowd calling him all kinds of derogatory homophobic names for the way he dressed. Be bold and brave and the haters will come, but that’s ok because you get to be you and they have to be them! I also bring it up to illustrate that resilience is about simply continuing to keep going.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The simple purity of the process is my greatest reward of creativity. The absolute pure presence I feel when I’m in the zone of making something. The energy that fills my entire being, I feel like I dance more through life when I’m in the process of creating something. The determination and focus while I piece it together. Moment to moment, the purpose it breathes into my life.

I have come to realise how valuable these feelings are as a key element of the way I want to experience this human life, especially in this modern world full of distractions from the truth of existence.

That’s why no matter what I do on a day to day basis, as a self-managed artist wearing a few hats, I make sure I am spending time actually *creating*. When striving to make your creative passion your business, the to-do list is literally endless, and it can be so easy to spend all day in front of a computer having not picked up your guitar, or written some words in your journal, or worked on that song. When I do that, I eventually feel drained and existential about my life choices, but when I have the thread of the excitement and inspiration of creativity running through me, I feel triumphant no matter what. So, I make sure I dedicate significant time each day not only to the business side of my projects, but to the freeform act of practice/creating. It seems fundamental, but it’s funny how easy we can forget in this kind of “do more! do more” world.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/moanamayatrix
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/moanamayatrix
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mayatrix.and.thepsychics
• Other: My band: https://linktr.ee/mayatrix.and.thepsychics

Image Credits
Main photo: Glen Baker @westcoastwanderer_ Photo 1 + 2: Caris Bingemann Photo 3: Amy Hastlehurst Photo 4: Matthew Gedling Photo 5 + 8: Jazmin Nixey Photo 6: Deric Martin Photo 7: Honey Bomb Arts