The Mackay-born international performer and Griffith Conservatorium graduate – who is also the original voice of telephone app Siri – said she was immediately inspired when she heard Julia Gillard’s now infamous speech on the ABC show Ms Represented, prompting her to run to her piano to write music to accompany it.

“Truly it was like a bolt from the blue and I ran to my computer … I took that printed transcript, went to my piano, and I remember that feeling, it was just like I was overtaken,” Jacobsen said.

“I started to set it to music, word for word, and I put my hands on the piano and it was like all the music was right there. It just came through me.

“So that was the beginning. And I knew very quickly that this project was a lot bigger than me.”

The Misogyny Opus will debut in full in February 2023 at a regional venue yet to be confirmed, before touring around the country.

She hopes Misogyny Opus will spread the impact of Gillard’s words even further internationally, with the orchestral accompaniment highlighting aspects of the speech many may not have noticed previously.

“I have spent more than a year composing, setting that text to music. It’s a 15 minute speech, which is going to be an almost one hour pop orchestral work. And I’ve been writing it, I’ve been recording it, I have almost finished recording the concept album of the entire Misogyny Opus,” she said.

“For me it represents a call to action for all of us, and that even 10 years on, the needle’s moved and it’s better than it was, but I don’t know about you I still deal with misogyny and sexism in small ways every single day of my personal and professional life. Every day.

“And we all do because it is insidious, it’s in our language, it’s in our systems, it’s just in our lived experience. It’s almost inescapable.

“We cannot call ourselves a healthy society when that is tolerated.”

A decade after her October 9, 2012 anti-misogyny speech, Julia Gillard believes sexist and misogynist behaviour is not tolerated as much as it was during her prime ministership. (AAP image).

Jacobsen’s single Better Standard Than This – features one of the 17 musical sections from her opus. The video for it was locally produced and released to coincide with this month’s 10th anniversary of the speech, featuring 70 freedom activists from around the world mouthing the words to Jacobsen’s composition.

“It was deeply important to me that the music video was inclusive and had excellent representation across gender, across cultures, across levels of ability, age, it just felt really, really important. I wanted to have it be noticeably inclusive and I’m really proud of achieving that,” she said.

“What we’re dealing with is thousands of years of persecution when it comes to the treatment of women. We are rewriting our social constructs from a structure where women were and still are in many countries possessions of men. So this is no small feat.

“From that perspective, we’ve come a long way in the last 10 years. But from the perspective of an atmosphere of equality, we have hardly come any way at all.”

Jacobsen is proud that her Misogyny Opus has highlighted the talent in Mackay and the Whitsundays for an international audience.

“I’m here to increase the arts and culture presence in the regions and from the regions, and that’s something that’s really important to me,” she said.

“I recently co-founded the Whitsunday Songwriter Festival for the same reason. It’s to bring these really world class events and projects to the area.”