APRA mentor Ella Hooper: “We need a Hans Zimmer who’s a woman!”

With her band Killing Heidi becoming one of the biggest things in Australian music when she was still in high school, APRA mentorElla Hooper has spent her entire adult life as a working musician, and while she says she personally had “an easy run” when it came to being a young frontwoman in a male-dominated industry, when it comes to whether young women are being encouraged to pursue and maintain careers in music, “the statistics don’t lie”.

“There’s a problem, and it needs to be addressed.”

APRA’s latest initiativeis a bold move towards exactlythat goal, with a raft of measures being introduced to boost their proportion of female members from the current 21%. One of the most important parts of the scheme is the mentoring program with a firm focus on outreach to women.

Killing Heidi are celebrating their 20^th anniversary this year with a reformation and a run of shows, and during those two decades Hooper has been a mentor and role model to a generation of young female musicians in both official and unofficial capacities. She points out incredulously that when she and her bandmate/brother Jesse shared the APRA Songwriter of the Year award in 2001, she was the first woman to take out the title, in the prize’s tenth year. (Only four – Sia, Courtney Barnett, Kasey Chambers and Julia Stone – have done so in the 16 years since.)

And while she looked up to artists like Adalita and Deadstar’s Caroline Kennedy, she had relatively few opportunities to be properly mentored herself.

“I actually would have loved to have had a mentor or a bit more contact with other women in the industry,” she says. “I would have loved to have had an actual person that I could go to – preferably a woman – for advice.”

She says that her goal as an artist was to promote confidence in girls, to be an “anti-hero” who brought a brash attitude where girls are expected to be sweet and innocent – and she still hears from young women “almost daily” for advice on those “first hurdles”, like building communities, and overcoming shyness.

“It’s incredible how many [women] told me they started a band because of Killing Heidi – because they just thought, ‘Hang on, you can do it’.”

Reflecting the findings of the latest RMIT/APRA AMCOS studythat revealed just 13% of registered screen composers are women, Hooper says a close friend found herself the only woman in her composition class of around 20 at VCA. Hooper theorises that the cycle of non-participation in male-dominated fields becomes self-perpetuating as women are “spooked” to find themselves, in a sense, alone.

“It’s amazing how much the ‘see it, be it’ thing is true,” she says. “I know who I was influenced by, and I hear that time and time again: ‘You’re the reason, you’re the reason’ – and I didn’t do anything to make that true. Just by virtue of being so visible in that period… And now we need that in composition! Just an arse-kicking… a Hans Zimmer that’s a woman.”

Despite the grim numbers on paper, Hooper’s incredibly hopeful about the future, citing acts from Tired Lion and Camp Cope to Tkay Maidza, Miss Destiny and fellow APRA mentor Montaigne as some of the most inspirational women in the current crop.

“And that’s why I think it’s a such a hot topic – because it’s undeniable that the representation is there creatively. Now, can we see it on the boards? Can we see it on the discussion panels? Can we see it on the festival headline bills? Can we see it permeate properly throughout the industry? I think that’s what we all want.”