Australian Idol alum Ngaiire (pronounced “ny-ree”) never slows down for long. She headlined Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall in early May, just days after releasing a live album from her forecourt concert there in 2022. Both featured backing from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, following the future-soul star’s collaborations with the Queensland and Melbourne symphony orchestras. The singer-songwriter is currently balancing work on her new album with a move back to her home country of Papua New Guinea. And, if that wasn’t enough, she’s also readying a multidisciplinary show for The Makers Series, presented by Maker’s Mark in collaboration with Sydney Fringe.
A one-off event, Just Desserts pairs Ngaiire’s music with the arts of flower-arranging and dessert-making. Punky chef and creative director Anna Polyviou and Sydney fine-art floral studio Acid Flwrs are on board for the night, with Polyviou bringing her adventurous desserts and colourful styling, while Acid Flwrs turns real blooms into canvases for psychedelic graffiti. And you can match your dessert with a Gold Rush cocktail from Maker’s Mark – a riff on the Whisky Sour with a honey-syrup twist.
“Fringe had this idea for a beautiful collaboration with desserts and flowers and music,” Ngaiire tells Broadsheet. “And they just thought I’d be the best outfit to fit into that trio. The idea seemed pretty exciting and I love dessert, so I said yes!”
The four-hour Just Desserts joins a slate of Makers Series events – including a showcase of local hip-hop’s next gen and a meeting of cocktails and independent creatives – all set in Machine Hall, a century-old substation that reopened in June as a 400-person venue. Ngaiire’s set list will focus on her breakthrough 2021 album, 3, which earned multiple Aria nominations. The arrangements will be a mix of those developed by Alex Turley for her performances with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and those of Novak Manojlovic, who arranged the material for her current quartet configuration.
In contrast to her epic Opera House shows, Ngaiire is returning to that intimate four-piece mode for this unique Fringe show. “We’re going back to where we started,” she says. “There’s a different magic to playing with a smaller outfit. There’s a lot more freedom. You don’t feel like you have 50 people [playing] behind you. And if you stuff up, the whole ship isn’t going to run into an iceberg.”
A full 20 years after her experience on Australian Idol, Ngaiire doesn’t plot predictable touring circuits or release schedules. She favours big, bold swings that push her into new territory, including her recent recording of the Leiber and Stoller blues classic I’m a Woman for the ABC series Ladies in Black. She credits her upbringing and schooling in PNG for her ability to balance such disparate projects.
“My parents were the first in their families to get an education and go to university and get doctorates,” she says. “So they ushered their kids into this growing middle class where we had access to international schools there. [And] we had different layers of identity that we grew up with – not just being Papua New Guinean but having the influence of colonial history, from the Germans to the British to the Portuguese.”
Before the age of 12, moreover, she had survived major volcanic eruptions, a battle with cancer and her parents’ separation. “I had to reach into different corners of what I had access to, just to process it all. And those corners weren’t very conventional, whether it was listening to my grandmother early in the morning singing gospel and praying, or going to an American mission-run school that would fly college big bands and choirs over to perform and run workshops. I had exposure that not a lot of kids would have had.”
For her next challenge, Ngaiire is relocating to PNG with her Sydney-born husband and their six-year-old son. “We’re going to be completely off-grid, bar our phones,” she says. “Just real basic living. It’s all rainwater, so we need a tank and solar panels and all that stuff.”
It’s a back-to-basics move that reminds the artist of her early gigs at the Opera Bar. “Every time I drive over the bridge and see the Opera House, I get emotional because that bit of land has become so much more to me,” she says. “And moving back to PNG after being here for more than 20 years, it holds even more memory and nostalgia for me.”
For Ngaiire, whether it’s relocating to a new country or pulling off the ambitious Makers Series event, each new hurdle is a fresh chance to prove herself. “Those opportunities make you work harder in a way that you never have before,” she says. “You rise to the occasion.”
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Maker’s Mark.
