Last week, a band from Lismore played a gig at the largest performance venue outside capital cities in the southern hemisphere. Liz Mackney - band facilitator and founder of Lismore Music Therapy - has combined years of passion and training in music, nursing and research to make such events happen. Liz shared her journey with Sara Browne.

I’m from Goondiwindi. I came here in 2002 after Brendan Mackney and I got married and I became part of the Mackney clan. We met years ago when we were at uni. He was studying Environmental Science at Griffith University in Brisbane and I was studying nursing. We lived on the same campus and we reconnected years later. When we were both about 25 we ran into each other again. We’re coming up to 20 years married this year.

I grew up in Goondiwindi and went away to boarding school in Toowoomba and then nursing in Brisbane. Music therapy was always where I was directed, but I ended up getting into nursing out of school. I thought when I started it I’d probably change, but I liked it. I liked the idea of being able to go anywhere with your job, which I was able to do with nursing. I lived and worked overseas. It was when I came back that I reconnected with Brendan. Once we were here in Lismore and settled and both working in our areas I realised there was an area in nursing where I thought music therapy could fit.

Liz far right at Gundy State Primary with best friend, Rebecca and grade seven teacher, Mr Isle

I’m a Cardiac Rehabilitation nurse so my specialty is cardiology. I thought that Cardiac Rehabilitation would be a great place to integrate music therapy. Cardiac Rehabilitation is a secondary prevention model. Current chronic disease management models have grown from the original Cardiac Rehabilitation models over the past 20 years. When I applied for a Master of Music Therapy program at UQ, that was the angle that I took. You had to have an interview and an audition to get in.

Cardiac Rehabilitation at that time wasn’t bringing in stroke patients or a broader population living with the consequences of cardio-vascular disease beyond those admitted to Cardiology wards, Coronary Care Units, and Cardiac Surgery Units. It was a bit exclusive, it was just for people who were mobile. Whereas I thought music therapy could offer innovative and meaningful rehabilitative strategies and techniques for people, such as stroke victims, by working on and activating many areas of their upper body and the speech and language areas of the brain. Cardiac Rehabilitation programs weren’t addressing these areas or needs at the time.

I studied classical piano from when I was seven. I studied cello as well and I was always in choirs and ensembles and orchestras. My Mum is a music teacher, a private piano teacher. She is also a qualified school teacher. It was something that my Dad really wanted - for us all to learn an instrument.

I worked really hard and it kind of drove a bit of love out of it for me growing up - the practice, but I’m really grateful for it now because it means I can do things like I did last night – the big concert. The kind of work that I do now requires all of those elements and an understanding of systems, really large systems like hospital systems, disability sectors, and the music industry. You really need to have a comprehensive understanding of how to navigate those systems to be able to make a large-scale performance with musicians living with a disability at one of Australia’s newest performing arts venues happen. It’s a pinnacle for the band, but it’s a pinnacle in my career as well. I feel immensely proud and privileged to have been a part of it.

We performed at the Gold Coast’s Home of the Arts – HOTA. It’s the largest performing arts centre outside of a capital city in Australia. It is absolutely stunning. My husband has played in a band for a long time, he’s also a teacher, but after the event, he said that there’d be professional musicians that would never get a gig in a place like that. It’s big stuff. To have stepped into the corporate arena in terms of performance gives the band a lot of potential.

The band is called The Little Tucki Creek Band. There are six members in the band. Three of them have been in the band since I started doing group work as a music therapist in 2014. They were the first group that I put together.

People ring me up and ask me if I run groups, expecting that they can drop someone into a group at any point, but that’s not how I run therapy groups. The reason that a group is a success is because of the therapeutic relationship we build over time individually, and me seeing that there is potential for these people to come together - that their skills are going to fit. It needs to be advantageous to everyone. It’s not just about ticking a box because that’s what an organisation says is the goal. The participants want to be there for a long time and they want long term success in their social relationships.

The Little Tucki Creek Band is an adult group, and essentially a closed group. At the end of last year, I asked the rest of the group about welcoming a new member, who they knew from a previous performance. It was the 2019 International Day of People with a Disability, we did a performance in the Quad. I put to the band that Dylan might be a good fit and he’s just joined.

Glen, Jesse and Tara are three original members, they’ve been in the group since 2014. Brianna, guitarist, I had worked with when she was at school and I knew she’d be a good fit for the group. She’s been in the group about four years. Sue joined last year, we eased her into it, every step she’s been frightened of, even though she can be a real extravert. The gig this week was our third performance, and Sue’s family reported in the led up to the event that she was very excited and not anxious at all about it.

The audience at HOTA was the TAL workforce, which is a life insurance company. They were part of the Australian Superannuation Fund Conference, which was the event happening at HOTA. They had about 1000 people at the conference itself in the daytime and about a hundred people in the evening at the performance. We did a 15-minute medley. Everyone was absolutely buzzing afterwards – performers and the audience alike.

HOTA stage

Band member Tara is part of SPRUNG!! Integrated Dance Theatre, which was founded by her mother, Robyn Brady, a paediatrician.

SPRUNG!! is a real success story. I highly recommend going to one of their performances. Liz Terracini runs SPRUNG!! now and TAL got in touch with Liz and asked her about a choir or a band that could play at the conference. Liz referred them to us – Lismore Music Therapy. We’ve been connected for quite a long time with SPRUNG!!.

Last year I supervised a Masters of Creative Arts student from Melbourne Uni, the tutors of SPRUNG!! and I shared the supervision of that student. That’s all been really hard because of COVID - for universities and people being able to do their clinical placements onsite. We’re working together with organisations like SPRUNG!!, which is the way we need to approach things in the disability sector.

Essentially, we’re creating pathways that don’t exist. The intent of the NDIS is to make social change for people with disability, but actually, you need everybody on board to do that.

Dinesh Palipana was one of the people on the panel at the conference, he was the 2021 Queensland Australian of the Year. He was studying his medical degree when he had a car accident and became paraplegic. He was told he wouldn’t be able to practice medicine like that.

He has since become an Emergency Department consultant. He’s also a lawyer, a disability advocate and a researcher. He says it very clearly. Social change can’t happen just from one side, it has to be a universal thing. The only way we can do it is by going out and meeting and reaching out to people who are doing the same thing and making these pathways strong. Then people will see it more, it will become more visible and present. People just don’t know how to do it. How does a business employ someone with a disability? How do they do that? If somebody with a disability wants to become a musician, if that’s what they want as a career, how do they do that? It’s a difficult path for everyone, but you have to have people believe that it’s something that should be available to everyone. If you don’t have that, you can’t even start.

onstage at HOTA

I did my Masters many years later, after nursing. It was a coursework Masters but if you achieved a certain level in your study, you could do the minor thesis component, which is what I did. It was my intention all along to blend the two careers. It was pioneering, it was the first research of its kind. I was awarded a nursing scholarship to do it. It was too pioneering for some people.

I have three teenagers. I had to drive to UQ to study, it was an internal course. I started in 2010 and finished 2013.

Madeline, my eldest, started school the year I started the course. She’s 17 now, doing her HSC. The day I finished the course she said it was the happiest day of her life, but later on, when I told her that they wanted me to do a PhD she said, you should do that Mum, that sounds like a good idea. My kids are musical, but they don’t play. They don’t do formal lessons. Whatever they need to know, I can teach them.

Madeline has studied a little bit of piano. She studied violin for a bit too. Joe, our middle son, he very much admires the fact that I have my own business. I think they’re pretty proud of it. Jacob, the youngest would come home to me and say I think such and such should come to music therapy. It’s quite a unique profession. It probably creates a bit of interest for the kids, I don’t know, but I think they think it’s pretty cool.

I can’t have more than 50 clients. The only way to do more would be to employ other people. I have been a bit averse to that. What I would rather do really is share the load - if we can.

Lismore Music Therapy is essentially just me, but we are a collaborative team. Meghan Thamm is another music therapist, she’s accessible via my website. There’s a speech therapist and also someone who’s about to get into equine therapy who did Camp Caba with us. It was an opportunity for people to feel supported - I don’t like the term therapy camp – and go away with their person up at Cabarita Pony Club. The first one we ran in December 2021. We were supposed to be running another one now but because of the flood we changed plans. There’s also Jo Young who is a community musician and teacher, she supports the big group work.

When I started doing the band group, I had an arrangement with the university where they let us record in the big studio there and I would employ a student who knew about audio engineering, but students tend to leave and because they’re early in their career, they want something really secure and it takes time to build this. It takes time to develop that trust with people.

I work mostly now in the area of disability. The NDIS has made that a really good career path for a music therapist but also, it’s given music therapy an opportunity to showcase what it can do for people, what it can make possible.

The Little Tucki Band busking in Lismore's CBD

Music therapy absolutely has a place in trauma recovery. We were directly affected here, we had water in our living area downstairs. It has been very important, where we can and as much as we can, to bring the routine back as soon as people are ready for it and we can make it available to them.

Music therapy can work on all areas – physical, psychological, social – depending on the need, irrespective of age or chronic disease or disability or whether you’re experiencing some kind of trauma. The thing with music therapy is that it can work in a very integrated way. It doesn’t necessarily have to isolate one thing. We might target one thing that you want addressed but you will find that it will work on a whole lot of areas.

Glen – who has been in the band group for ages – had a terrible accident when he was 23, which left him with an acquired brain injury. I met with him in 2014 and when the meeting was set up his mum was going to ring me and tell me not to bother coming because she thought it would just be another thing that he couldn’t do. He has use of his pincer grip in his left hand, clenches his right, but he plays electric guitar and keyboard and he sings. He’s a major fan of hard rock like ACDC. He’s got all the gravel in his voice. He could hardly sing at all when I first started seeing him. It was hard for him to finish just one vocalisation without running out of breath because he is in a wheelchair all the time so his lung capacity is reduced. He sang – at the HOTA concert – for the entire 15 minutes – and I have never, ever seen him do that before. It was really amazing. So that’s what long term therapy does.

The Little Tucki Band appearing at the Quad

In Australia, we have a bit of a concept about therapy needing to be a 10-week cycle. Glen has been doing it since 2014 and that’s an outcome that we saw this week. Not only that, he got paid. So, it’s physical, psychological, social, and it’s economic. It’s everything. And, it’s not just what it is to him, it’s what his story is to everybody else as well. Brianna, on guitar, was singing more than we’d ever seen her sing at the concert.

With trauma specifically, I work with people who are removed from their homes, they’re in foster care, and on top of that, they have some kind of diagnosed disability. It’s about the relationship. It’s about giving them the experience of consistency and trust, something that they can rely on and a space that gives them an opportunity to actually have some choice and control in their world.

Thinking specifically about the flood, everybody’s lost. Everybody’s lost everything about the way they function that’s normal. All of those things that they didn’t ever have to think about – that’s the larger, mass experience.

Liz and husband Brendan

Being a therapeutic support in this context is about being as consistent as you can be, to be constantly there and to allow people to have a voice and for them to discover – potentially for the first time ever – that what they’ve got to say or share is actually valued.

Whenever people ask me if it’s taxing, I always come back to my nursing. It teaches you a resilience or a way to create a professional and personal distinction in what you take on. It’s essential, you simply could not nurse if you couldn’t do that. It’s something that I don’t find difficult. I do see others that I work with impacted in that way.

I think I’m exactly where I am supposed to be. I think I am supposed to work with people with a disability and I think I’m very, very lucky to be in this position.