In a new book ‘for every artist who felt pushed away, or talked over’, the Camp Cope bassist has interviewed the likes of Amy Taylor, Marcia Hines and Courtney Barnett about motherhood, abuse and respect
When she was 17, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich flew to Alice Springs to stay with her mother. Hellmrich had been living independently for a year, but a boy she was seeing had screamed at her and shoved her into a door. So her mother bought her a flight.
In Alice, she meandered the town by day and sat with her mother outside the duplex at night, sipping Cruisers. Already the veteran of a few bands, Hellmrich was confronted by the idea that her mother’s ambitions had been thwarted. “I was so scared at the time of ever being a mum and having to lose myself that way,” she writes in her first book, It’s Not For You – part memoir, part missive to the music industry. “Scared of what motherhood would take from me.”