‘I just quit’: Megan Washington on ABC’s ‘Australian Story’

Singer-songwriter Megan Washington will appear on ABC TV’s Australian Story on Monday, November 2, in an episode titled ‘Finding Her Voice’.

It details how her career took a major turn since her 2014 appearance on the show.

At that time when she’d released her breakthrough There There album, took the female lead in the musical-thriller film The Boy Castaways, and was coming off a TED talk about her ‘shameful’ secret stutter.

The second Australian Story profile recounts how she stumbled afterwards, unsuccessfully recording and discarding a series of albums.

“I was like, well, maybe I just shouldn’t make records anymore, so I stopped trying,” she said. “Actually, I just quit.”

Washington became a voiceover artist, including for children’s show Bluey and SBS series The Recording Studio – a move she would have once considered impossible because of her stutter.

“Getting into the booth was pretty intimidating at first,” she recalled. “I had to do a lot of takes because they all had stutters in them.

“By the end of it, I was just reading the lines on the page and it was amazing.”

An unexpected request from director Warwick Thornton to score his documentary series The Beach brought her back to composing. She taught herself the latest music engineering software and learned how to record herself.

Stuck in isolation during the pandemic lock-in, she made the deeply personal Batflowers album, premiered one of its singes on Q&A, got involved in the Brisbane Festival and starred in the Christian rock/rap six-part mockumentary CrossBread about a sister-brother duo who gig unsuccessfully until they’re embraced by the Christian music scene.

“I have this sort of life approach now,” Washington said. “It’s largely to do with that TED talk, actually, which is that if I’m not terrified, I’m probably not trying hard enough.

“If I keep doing stuff that I’m scared of, I stop being scared of it.”