AIMEE Volkofsky has a goal to re-enliven Broken Hill’s music and entertainment scene.
Her production company, Boneyard Sessions, was created for this very reason – to share music with, from and for the Far West.
“There’s a lot of really creative and musical people coming here, but there’s not a network for audiences,” she said.
Ms Volkofsky said she wanted to help her friends who were visiting to play gigs while here, but also wanted to play gigs locally herself.
“So Boneyard Sessions was initially field recordings and videos of musicians from other regional and remote places, playing in the bush,” she said.
“It’s been a really fun way to meet and connect with other musicians.”
Ms Volkofsky said her inspiration for Boneyard Sessions came from listening to friends play songs by the campfire at Menindee Lakes.
“It was something so beautiful that I wanted to share,” she said.
Boneyard Sessions’s inaugural real-life gig was part of a series called the Boneyard Live Showcase that she hosted a few years back that saw musicians she’d previously worked with for field recordings and films perform, usually five or six each night.
More recently, Boneyard Sessions hosted a series called Smells Like Rain at Petrichor, a now closed bar on Argent Street.
Ms Volkofsky has plans for a series of live music events next year.
“I’ve done it for the love for a long time, but with this relaunch that I’m working on I’m looking at ways of making it more sustainable,” she said.
“The project I’m working on will be a Boneyard Sessions Variety Show.”
She hopes to host four of these events each year, one in each season, though she’s aiming to start by hosting two in 2025.
“It’ll be a showcase of all different kinds of artists, like an old school variety show,” she said.
“There’ll be a headline act which could be a visiting artist or local band, and then five or six performers and artists of different kinds – it could be poetry, songs, magic, it’s a full mixed bag!”
Ms Volkofsky said she hoped the series would help to create opportunities locally for musicians who were starting out and hadn’t had much experience performing.
She said the hardest part of hosting these events was finding funding, though understood the grants on offer at the moment in the Far West had potential to reinvigorate the art scene locally.
“When a big chunk of resources comes into the town, there’s sort of this explosion of arts and culture,” she said.
“It’s an exciting time, it’s like the natural environment has seasons and some of them are a really hard slog and sometimes we get rain, and suddenly we can do a lot and it feels like that at the moment. It feels like there’s more happening musically than there has been for a really long time.”
