ACCLAIMED VIOLIST, CONDUCTOR and composer Aaron Wyatt is pragmatic about his Noongar heritage. "To totally paraphrase [former prime minister] Julia Gillard, it's not everything about me but it's not nothing about me. It's just one of many parts of who I am."
He had a typical lower-middle-class suburban upbringing; his father was a teacher, mum a librarian. "My Indigenous culture wasn't a huge part of my life," he says. "For instance, if I was filling out a form and there was a box to tick if you were Aboriginal, I didn't, because I didn't think those details should matter.
It's one of those weird things, I suppose; it's only recently that I've had a chance to re-embrace my cultural heritage, particularly as a composer." The son of Ken Wyatt AM, Australia's first Indigenous federal minister (appointed to the health portfolio in 2015), Aaron also has several firsts attached to his name. Notably, he's the first Indigenous person to conduct an orchestra in Australia. Like his father (one of 10 children, and one of the Stolen Generations), he too started from humble beginnings and has worked his way up the octaves. "Music has always had a special place in my life," Aaron recalls.
"Fooling around with the piano at a family friend's house and listening to my parents' eclectic record collection - my mum didn't care about the Beatles; it was all classical music to her - gave way to more formal studies at age five when I picked up the violin." Aaron admits he was "no child prodigy", but he was headstrong and opinionated about how best to navigate the instrument. "It's a huge credit to my teacher that I didn't end up with more selfimposed technical issues to fix in my teenage years," he says.
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