‘People can’t imagine something on that scale dying’: Anohni on mourning the Great Barrier Reef
Anohni Hegarty is about to go to the Great Barrier Reef for the first time. “I feel like I’m going to Auschwitz,” she says nervously. “On the one hand, I’m so excited to go because the landscape is so beautiful, and I know there’s going to be so much that’s gorgeous. And yet, I’m also scared.”In a week, the British-born, New York-based avant garde singer of Anohni and the Johnsons is flying to Lizard Island, a paradise of powdery sands on the reef, 1,600km north-west of Brisbane. Its luxury villas and bluest of blue waters are a stark contrast to the grim nature of Anohni’s assignment: documenting the current state of the world’s biggest coral reef.Reefs are hubs of biodiversity, supporting about a third of all marine species and 1 billion people, and crucial to the Earth as both a carbon sink and a home to algae, which produce at least half of the planet’s oxygen. The Amazon rainforest, which produces about 20% of our oxygen, is often described as the Earth’s lungs; being the size of Italy or Texas, you could call the Great Barrier Reef the left lung and the Amazon the right. But the gigantic reef is not well: it has been hit by six mass coral bleaching events in the past nine years, an alarming trend driven by record marine heatwaves. If coral reefs disappear, scientists warn there will be a domino effect as other ecosystems follow – a step down the path towards mass extinction.Tracing the worst coral bleaching event in recorded history – videoAnohni has been thinking about what she calls “ceremonies fit for purpose”, for a loss of this magnitude. When a sudden catastrophe happens, like a terror attack or natural disaster, humanity has worked out ways to process grief and anger en masse: funerals, memorials, protest, activism. But what do we do in the face of a slower death – like the worst global bleaching event on record, which is happening right now and has hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs?“Where are the ceremonies fit for the purpose of naming and commemorating the times that we’re living through?” she asks. “To see the Great Barrier Reef fall, that’s 10,000 9/11s.”“People can’t really imagine something on that scale dying,” she says.For this year’s Vivid festival, Anohni is performing two shows at the Sydney Opera House, titled Mourning the Great Barrier Reef, featuring songs from across her career and footage of the reef captured at Lizard Island. With the help of Grumpy Turtle, a production company that specialises in underwater and conservation films, Anohni will be directing the scuba team from the surface in her snorkel. The image of such a poised performer, bobbing along in the ocean, seems wonderfully incongruous even to her. “I can’t believe I’m doing it,” she laughs. “I feel so privileged just to go. I’m scared and I’m very excited. But I’m with a great team, and they’re all very knowledgeable, so they’ll help me through it.”Just as a dying star glows more brightly before it goes dark, coral look even more beautiful in distress. Fluorescing – a phenomenon when corals release a garish pigment into their flesh as a sign of heat stress – is deceptively spectacular; and bleaching – when corals expel the photosynthetic algae that give them colour in response to warmer ocean temperatures – turns them a dazzling white.Bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef in April last year. Photograph: David Gray/AFP/Getty Images“It is like when someone’s dying, sometimes they show the gold of the soul,” Anohni says. “They throw their life force into a final expression. That’s what coral bleaching is … she’s saying goodbye.” She describes a conversation she had with a scientist who went out to visit a dead reef with a group of Danish students, “and they were all saying it was the most beautiful thing in the world, because they didn’t even know what they were looking at was a bunch of skeletons”.Anohni has long been singing about the climate crisis, sneaking this bitter pill into her beautiful, otherworldly songs. “I need another world,” she sang sorrowfully on 2009’s Another World. “This one’s nearly gone.” On 4 Degrees, released as world leaders met for the 2015 Paris climate conference, she sang her grim vision of the future: “I wanna hear the dogs crying for water / I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea / And all those lemurs and all those tiny creatures / I wanna see them burn, it is only four degrees.”She has grown used to being seen “as a kind of a Cassandra on the sidelines”; the prophet doomed to be ignored. Still, she is “so grateful” for being alienated in a way – as a trans artist, as a climate activist – “because when you have an outsider status, you have an opportunity to see the forest for the trees”.Her songs are often about how everything is connected: patriarchy, white supremacy, late stage capitalism, climate change denial, public surveillance, centuries of extraction and environmental degradation, and societies built on religions that preach that paradise is elsewhere, not here – “all this unwellness that we have woven together”, she says. Naomi Klein recently described Anohni as “one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world”.It Must Change by Anohni and the JohnsonsAnohni has a special connection to Australia: in 2013 she was invited to visit the Martu people of Parnngurr, in the West Australian desert, “an experience that changed me forever”. When she asked one Martu woman where they believed people went after death: “She just looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘Back to country’.”This “deeply shocked” Anohni, from a British and Irish Catholic background. “She had a profound, peaceful acceptance of this animist reality,” she says. “I was raised in a society where they believed that only humans had souls and that this place was basically just a suffering ground where we had to mind our Ps and Qs. I no longer believe that.”In 2015, she played two concerts at Dark Mofo to raise proceeds for the Martu’s fight against a proposed uranium mine on their ancestral lands; the following year she joined them on a 110km protest march in the outback. She even willingly entered Australia’s most hostile environment – Q&A – where she memorably blasted a panellist for opposing wind turbines, telling him: “You’re doomed and I’m doomed and your children are doomed.”“I screamed at those fucking wankers, and made a fucking fool of myself,” she says, smiling, “and I was torn a new arsehole in the Murdoch press.” But at the same time, she was inundated with messages of support from all over the country. “I was proud of the chance to be of service to Australians,” she says.Great Barrier Reef suffering ‘most severe’ coral bleaching on record – videoStill, she agonises over her own impact on the environment, even the decision to go to Lizard Island. She is not assigning blame to anyone else – if anything, her finger is directed firmly at herself. “Just coming to Australia is an intolerable equation – the amount of oil that I burn to get there,” she says. Now if she performs in Australia, she does it for a cause and leaves the proceeds behind “because there’s no way morally to justify it any more”.For the Vivid project, Anohni is also interviewing eight “incredible” scientists about what they have observed on the Great Barrier Reef, including Dr Anya Salih, an expert on reef fluorescence, and the “Godfather of Coral”, Prof Charlie Veron. “They’re the ones who have stewarded the reef, who’ve watched her and cried with her as she’s declined,” she says. She admires that they don’t hide their grief; as Veron told the Guardian back in 2009: “The future is horrific. There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise.”“Australia is pioneering in this oeuvre of environmental feeling,” Anohni says. “It’s could be something to do with the Australian temperament. It’s more expressive. It’s stoic too, but there’s room for feeling. The English scientific community is very, very cruel in that regard – any expression of emotion is grounds for exclusion from any conversation of reason.”It is her hope that her Vivid shows will be fit for purpose – to show people the reality of the reef and give them a space to both marvel and grieve. “But to grieve doesn’t mean that a thing is done – to grieve just means that you’re recognising where we are,” she says.“For an hour and a half you can come to the Great Barrier Reef with me, and we’ll look at it and we’ll feel it. Without understanding what we’re looking at, there’s no hope of finding a direction forward. It’s actually a profound gesture of hope.”
The Anohni and the Johnsons singer is collaborating with marine scientists for two special shows at Sydney’s Vivid festival that will show the reef’s plight Anohni Hegarty is about to go to the Great Barrier Reef for the first time. “I feel like I’m going to Auschwitz,” she says nervously. “On the one hand, I’m so excited to go because the landscape is so beautiful, and I know there’s going to be so much that’s gorgeous. And yet, I’m also scared.”In a week, the British-born, New York-based avant garde singer of Anohni and the Johnsons is flying to Lizard Island, a paradise of powdery sands on the reef, 1,600km north-west of Brisbane. Its luxury villas and bluest of blue waters are a stark contrast to the grim nature of Anohni’s assignment: documenting the current state of the world’s biggest coral reef. Continue reading...
Anohni Hegarty is about to go to the Great Barrier Reef for the first time. “I feel like I’m going to Auschwitz,” she says nervously. “On the one hand, I’m so excited to go because the landscape is so beautiful, and I know there’s going to be so much that’s gorgeous. And yet, I’m also scared.”
In a week, the British-born, New York-based avant garde singer of Anohni and the Johnsons is flying to Lizard Island, a paradise of powdery sands on the reef, 1,600km north-west of Brisbane. Its luxury villas and bluest of blue waters are a stark contrast to the grim nature of Anohni’s assignment: documenting the current state of the world’s biggest coral reef.
Reefs are hubs of biodiversity, supporting about a third of all marine species and 1 billion people, and crucial to the Earth as both a carbon sink and a home to algae, which produce at least half of the planet’s oxygen. The Amazon rainforest, which produces about 20% of our oxygen, is often described as the Earth’s lungs; being the size of Italy or Texas, you could call the Great Barrier Reef the left lung and the Amazon the right. But the gigantic reef is not well: it has been hit by six mass coral bleaching events in the past nine years, an alarming trend driven by record marine heatwaves. If coral reefs disappear, scientists warn there will be a domino effect as other ecosystems follow – a step down the path towards mass extinction.
Anohni has been thinking about what she calls “ceremonies fit for purpose”, for a loss of this magnitude. When a sudden catastrophe happens, like a terror attack or natural disaster, humanity has worked out ways to process grief and anger en masse: funerals, memorials, protest, activism. But what do we do in the face of a slower death – like the worst global bleaching event on record, which is happening right now and has hit more than 80% of the planet’s reefs?
“Where are the ceremonies fit for the purpose of naming and commemorating the times that we’re living through?” she asks. “To see the Great Barrier Reef fall, that’s 10,000 9/11s.”
“People can’t really imagine something on that scale dying,” she says.
For this year’s Vivid festival, Anohni is performing two shows at the Sydney Opera House, titled Mourning the Great Barrier Reef, featuring songs from across her career and footage of the reef captured at Lizard Island. With the help of Grumpy Turtle, a production company that specialises in underwater and conservation films, Anohni will be directing the scuba team from the surface in her snorkel. The image of such a poised performer, bobbing along in the ocean, seems wonderfully incongruous even to her. “I can’t believe I’m doing it,” she laughs. “I feel so privileged just to go. I’m scared and I’m very excited. But I’m with a great team, and they’re all very knowledgeable, so they’ll help me through it.”
Just as a dying star glows more brightly before it goes dark, coral look even more beautiful in distress. Fluorescing – a phenomenon when corals release a garish pigment into their flesh as a sign of heat stress – is deceptively spectacular; and bleaching – when corals expel the photosynthetic algae that give them colour in response to warmer ocean temperatures – turns them a dazzling white.
“It is like when someone’s dying, sometimes they show the gold of the soul,” Anohni says. “They throw their life force into a final expression. That’s what coral bleaching is … she’s saying goodbye.” She describes a conversation she had with a scientist who went out to visit a dead reef with a group of Danish students, “and they were all saying it was the most beautiful thing in the world, because they didn’t even know what they were looking at was a bunch of skeletons”.
Anohni has long been singing about the climate crisis, sneaking this bitter pill into her beautiful, otherworldly songs. “I need another world,” she sang sorrowfully on 2009’s Another World. “This one’s nearly gone.” On 4 Degrees, released as world leaders met for the 2015 Paris climate conference, she sang her grim vision of the future: “I wanna hear the dogs crying for water / I wanna see the fish go belly-up in the sea / And all those lemurs and all those tiny creatures / I wanna see them burn, it is only four degrees.”
She has grown used to being seen “as a kind of a Cassandra on the sidelines”; the prophet doomed to be ignored. Still, she is “so grateful” for being alienated in a way – as a trans artist, as a climate activist – “because when you have an outsider status, you have an opportunity to see the forest for the trees”.
Her songs are often about how everything is connected: patriarchy, white supremacy, late stage capitalism, climate change denial, public surveillance, centuries of extraction and environmental degradation, and societies built on religions that preach that paradise is elsewhere, not here – “all this unwellness that we have woven together”, she says. Naomi Klein recently described Anohni as “one of the few musicians who have attempted to make art that wraps its arms around the death drive that has gripped our world”.
Anohni has a special connection to Australia: in 2013 she was invited to visit the Martu people of Parnngurr, in the West Australian desert, “an experience that changed me forever”. When she asked one Martu woman where they believed people went after death: “She just looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘Back to country’.”
This “deeply shocked” Anohni, from a British and Irish Catholic background. “She had a profound, peaceful acceptance of this animist reality,” she says. “I was raised in a society where they believed that only humans had souls and that this place was basically just a suffering ground where we had to mind our Ps and Qs. I no longer believe that.”
In 2015, she played two concerts at Dark Mofo to raise proceeds for the Martu’s fight against a proposed uranium mine on their ancestral lands; the following year she joined them on a 110km protest march in the outback. She even willingly entered Australia’s most hostile environment – Q&A – where she memorably blasted a panellist for opposing wind turbines, telling him: “You’re doomed and I’m doomed and your children are doomed.”
“I screamed at those fucking wankers, and made a fucking fool of myself,” she says, smiling, “and I was torn a new arsehole in the Murdoch press.” But at the same time, she was inundated with messages of support from all over the country. “I was proud of the chance to be of service to Australians,” she says.
Still, she agonises over her own impact on the environment, even the decision to go to Lizard Island. She is not assigning blame to anyone else – if anything, her finger is directed firmly at herself. “Just coming to Australia is an intolerable equation – the amount of oil that I burn to get there,” she says. Now if she performs in Australia, she does it for a cause and leaves the proceeds behind “because there’s no way morally to justify it any more”.
For the Vivid project, Anohni is also interviewing eight “incredible” scientists about what they have observed on the Great Barrier Reef, including Dr Anya Salih, an expert on reef fluorescence, and the “Godfather of Coral”, Prof Charlie Veron. “They’re the ones who have stewarded the reef, who’ve watched her and cried with her as she’s declined,” she says. She admires that they don’t hide their grief; as Veron told the Guardian back in 2009: “The future is horrific. There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise.”
“Australia is pioneering in this oeuvre of environmental feeling,” Anohni says. “It’s could be something to do with the Australian temperament. It’s more expressive. It’s stoic too, but there’s room for feeling. The English scientific community is very, very cruel in that regard – any expression of emotion is grounds for exclusion from any conversation of reason.”
It is her hope that her Vivid shows will be fit for purpose – to show people the reality of the reef and give them a space to both marvel and grieve. “But to grieve doesn’t mean that a thing is done – to grieve just means that you’re recognising where we are,” she says.
“For an hour and a half you can come to the Great Barrier Reef with me, and we’ll look at it and we’ll feel it. Without understanding what we’re looking at, there’s no hope of finding a direction forward. It’s actually a profound gesture of hope.”