Arnold has been writing, recording and touring for more than two decades and for the past 10 years, his production company Small Town Culture has been creating original music and film projects in collaboration with schools, community groups and organisations.

Arnold’s partnership with Friends of the Alliance – the NRHA’s grassroots network of people and organisations from across rural Australia – follows the success of Better Together, a collaboration between the Golden Guitar-winning musician, Tasmanian primary school students and conference delegates, which was performed at the 15th National Rural Health Conference in Hobart last year.

“Over the past 10 years [Friends of the Alliance] have always popped up on Facebook and said well done and have shared my different events and finally, last year they got me along to their conference and I wrote a song called Better Together with some of their delegates,” Arnold told InQueensland.

“It was about people in the bush uniting to help each other and getting that community spirit going and so I visited the conference last year and wrote that song and this year The Friends of the Alliance got in touch and said, ‘look, can we do something again?’”

Together, Arnold and the organisation came up with the idea of encouraging people in rural and remote Australia to contribute ideas for a song title and lyrics, which will be collated into an optimistic piece of original music. Contributors will also have the opportunity to workshop ideas with Arnold via Zoom.

National Rural Health Alliance chief executive Dr Gabrielle O’Kane said Friends of the Alliance provided a valuable grassroots connection with rural Australia and helped the Alliance better understand the health issues affecting the lives of people in rural areas.

“During COVID-19 and times of isolation, connectedness is more important than ever,” O’Kane told InQueensland. “We thought about different ways of bringing together rural communities in a way that was innovative and fun, and settled on the idea of a virtual musical collaboration. Not only is this a way for people to get involved with an exciting project, but it aligns our ongoing advocacy of arts and health.

“We know that during COVID-19 many people in rural Australia are feeling isolated or that their voices aren’t being heard. This project will allow people in these communities to not only be involved with the creation of a piece of music but to have a say in what the final product looks like.”

Arnold said he hoped giving people in rural communities the opportunity to collaborate on the song would help them focus their minds on something positive and “maybe inspire people and make them feel good by creating a song about hope, resilience and the fighting Aussie spirit”.

“People in the bush have gone through drought and then the bushfires and we thought, well, that’s the sucker punch, they’re knocked on their arse completely but now there’s this [COVID-19], which affects everybody, but with this on top of it, you know, there’s a real worry about mental health in the bush, as simple as that.

“My job in this is to collaborate with regional people and try to understand what they’re going through and it’s funny, because people have been very vocal about the drought and bushfires in what they’ve responded to me with so far but it’s like they don’t know how to even grasp the ‘the C word’ – it’s like it’s shock, or people just say ‘and now there’s this thing’.

“It’s like, what is this thing? It’s really just a shock to the system because no matter what goes on in Australia, we always go ‘oh well, at least we’ve got other at least, we can go have a barbie with a friend or we can go to the pub but now we can’t do that.”

O’Kane said Arnold’s existing relationship with the Alliance, as well as his affinity with rural communities, made him an ideal choice for the project.

“We don’t know what the final product will look like yet – but I’m sure it will be a great piece of music that truly reflects life in rural Australia, because not only does Josh understand rural Australia but he will have had the chance to have input from real people in these communities.”

Arnold said since announcing the project on social media last week, he had already received plenty of submissions from across the country.

“A girl sent in this idea about watching her mum suffer as a single mum on the land, and she called it ‘Sidelines’, and it’s about how she’s on the sidelines watching and can’t help, and it was really nice.

“But this one lady just poured her heart and there was no poem, no lyrics.  It just said ‘I own a corner shop, I’m surrounded by properties, and grown men are coming in and bursting into tears because they’re losing fourth-generation properties.’ She makes it her mission every single day to make people feel good that walk in the door and try and make them feel better as they walk out.

“That little story, that’s so inspiring to me. It’s those little things I think. She said while I’m open, you know, I can’t shut until I’m told – made – to shut, because this is my mission, to make people feel good, and that’s inspiring for me and I think music can do that, too.”

Arnold recalled his time working as a jackaroo on a remote cattle station years ago, when he made the decision to pursue music as a full-time concern.

“When I left there, I said [to the station owner], ‘I’m gonna do music because that’s what I’m meant to do’, and the guy said ‘righto, piss off then, leave the property, you pussy.’  He said, ‘just remember that the world can survive without music but the world can’t survive without beef’.  I’ve never forgotten that he said that, because I think the world could survive without beef, as much as I like a steak, but music … music is everything.”

“You take music of a movie and loses so much, it becomes such a barren unemotional thing. Music shapes, everything, it’s our memories, you know we hear that song and you remember your first kiss or remember where we were at a beautiful moment. Music’s just intertwined in every single part of our lives and I don’t think – until we were to have it taken off us – that we’d understand that.”

For more information, visit NRHA’s Friends of the Alliance website or Josh Arnold’s Small Town Culture.