Bush Gothic in town

Australian trio Bush Gothic are performing at the Tauranga Arts Festival on 23 October. Photo/supplied

Music from the earliest days of white settlement in Australia has been reimagined by Australian trio Bush Gothic, who bring their unique style to New Zealand for the first time this month.

Regularly playing in Australian gaols, historic buildings and old goldfields towns, Bush Gothic comes to the Tauranga Arts Festival fresh from a tour of Britain and Ireland, performing a mid-afternoon show on Labour Day in Tauranga.

It is the voice and virtuoso violin playing of Jenny M Thomas that holds centre stage and she's confident in the spotlight, having had many musical adventures including rollerskating backwards while playing violin for Circus Oz, playing a Norwegian Hardanger solo with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for The Lord of The Rings premiere and a solo concert series in Europe performing Indian classical violin.

Her affinity with the folk music of Australia took on a new direction in 2009 when she held a series of urban bush band sessions changing the line-up weekly and improvising through a playlist of settler songs. From this she picked Dan Witton and Chris Lewis to form The System, named for "the system" that saw transported convicts work in indentured servitude.

Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were sent from Britain to Australia. Many were transported for petty crimes (more serious crimes being punishable by death) or were political prisoners.

The trio, which changed its name to match that of its critically acclaimed 2016 album, looks to the music of convicts and the goldrush with one Australian reviewer writing, "It is not original work, yet it is sparkling in its originality ... [they] have reworked traditional songs about Australia - its convict, transportation and early settler years - into a chain that holds you captive. It's a work bold, inspired and beautiful in its intensity."

"My focus is to tell the stories of women because they didn't have people writing down their histories," Thomas says. "All we have are their letters. Settler women, convict women would describe being able to write letters as their only solace in life. It's the untold stories - the loneliness of women, the hardship of their lives in Australia and their separation from their homelands - that resonate with me."

Is the music still relevant? "Women are still lamenting their boys going away to prison so to me The Wild Colonial Boy is absolutely a song for now.

"We can romanticise things and that's okay so long as we have a very broad idea of what art is and what it is to be a human. And that encompasses beauty and it also encompasses heartbreak and loneliness."

the fine print
What: Bush Gothic
Where: Carrus Crystal Palace, Tauranga waterfront
When: Monday, October 23, 3pm
Tickets: Baycourt or Ticketek. TECT cardholder discounts available until tomorrow. taurangafestival.co.nz