One of Australia’s greatest singer-songwriters Jack River will be performing at this year’s Women’s Agenda Leadership Awards on Friday October 13 in Melbourne.
Jack River, known as Holly Rankin off stage, has featured on Australian radios, playlists and festival headlines for a decade.
A performer, song-writer, mother, activist and more, Jack River has made waves in the Australian creative industry and shows no signs of slowing down.
Born and raised in Forster, NSW, Holly Rankin has been writing her whole life. She moved to Sydney and launched her first extended play (EP) in 2013 under the stage name Jack River, titled On Nature Part One.
In 2016, Rankin released her first single ‘Talk Like That’ and her next EP Highway Songs No. 2.
But it was her single ‘Fool’s Gold’ in 2017 that really set her career off. The same year, she opened for Aussie rock band Midnight Oil and set off on her own solo national Fool’s Gold Tour.
The song was described as “dreamy as hell” in The AU Review, “lit up through a beautifully-crafted haze of a narrative”. ‘Fool’s Gold’ has been played more than 26 million times on Spotify.
The following year, Rankin dropped her debut album Sugar Mountain. The album peaked at number 11 on the ARIA Albums Chart and received nominations at the 2018 ARIA Awards for Breakthrough Artist, Best Pop Release and Engineer of the Year.
Rankin’s latest album, Endless Summer, was released in June 2023. Ellie Robinson from NME described the ten-track record as “a psychedelic cruise through streams of pop influenced by surf-rock and shoegaze, carried by lyrics that paint an oddly alluring picture of an apocalyptic hellscape.”
Jack River has more than 350,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and more than 51,000 followers on her Instagram account. This year, she performed at Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay and she is set to perform at Summer Salt in Victoria the Cry Baby Fest in South Australia later this year.
At the end of 2022, Rankin announced she was taking some time off to welcome her baby girl, Maggie, into the world. She finished the final leg of her national tour 35 weeks pregnant.
In an interview on The Project, Rankin said it was a much needed break.
“I was quite a workaholic beforehand and it’s been nice after COVID and a few insane years in our industry to just have a complete break and go back to basics,” she said.
A lot of Rankin’s writing and approach to motherhood comes from a place of grief and trauma. She has openly spoken and written about the impact of her sister’s tragic accident that led to her death. Rankin was 14 years old when she lost her sister, who died at the age of 11.
“For anyone that has been through a traumatic life event, you will know that the brilliant highs in life gallavant so closely to death, in that everything that is beautiful is often measured alongside everything that is missing, or lost,” she wrote in an Instagram post, reflecting on “matresence”, the physical, emotional, hormonal and social transition to becoming a mother.
“It is a curious thing, and despite how tragic that last sentence sounds, knowing loss and grief supercharges the experience of life, and makes me so grateful for life’s beautiful things every single day.
“That feeling, combined with the experience of seeing everything for the first time again, through Maggie’s eyes, is magical af.”
In between performing, writing and being a mother, Rankin is also actively engaged in politics.
Recently, she joined fellow Australian singer-songwriter Josh Pyke, Senator David Pocock and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to advocate for the Fair Pay for Radio Play Bill.
The proposed legislation would overturn a cap on royalties commercial broadcasters pay singers, enshrined in the 54-year-old Copyright Act. No other country in the world has a similar cap on royalties.
Rankin explained the impact of this proposed legislation and what it would mean for the future of Australian radio in an Instagram post.
“Right now, the Copyright Act (our piece of federal legislation that determines rights and protections for works of any kind) states that Artists and their rights holders (labels) can’t be paid above 1% of gross annual commercial radio revenue for use of sound recordings,” she wrote.
“BASICALLY our own Copyright Act places a cap on what Artists can be paid for use of their sound recordings. No other creator or piece of work has this cap. It was introduced in 1968 when the price of bread was 20c! Things have changed.”
Rankin said all artists are asking for in this Bill is for the cap on royalties to be removed so they can negotiate their value when their song is played on commercial radio stations.
“It’s honestly pretty damn simple, it’s not a ‘big change’ it’s just a spring clean of a 55year old relic in the Copyright Act,” she wrote.
“Without changing this – more use of Aus music on radio won’t make financial sense down the line.”
This is not the first time Rankin has been a political advocate. She has previously been involved in championing causes for climate change, Indigenous rights and more.
Jack River will join Women’s Agenda in Melbourne on October 13, performing live at the Leadership Awards. You can purchase your tickets to the event here.