“If you witness something terrible and then go back to work the next day and everyone pretends the world didn’t just split open inside you? That silence is the trauma. I make things for the people who live in that silence.”

I recognised her first. Elizabeth Ryker. Her name had appeared now and then over the years in minor news pieces and trade journals. She spent her early career in Sydney as an industrial chemist and built her own private laboratory before relocating that work to the Northern Territory in the mid 2000s.

Isla doesn’t sing for catharsis; she sings through it. She’s proof that some artists don’t survive to tell the story — they tell the story to survive.