NAME: JESSICA HILDA MAUBOY
Scale of Notoriety:
4/5
Jessica Mauboy is one of Australia’s best known artists and well known for her proud Indonesian-First Nation heritage.
Scale of Influence:
4/5
Jessica Mauboy is a good example of a successful music artist, especially considering she’s Australia-based. She’s also just a good role model overall - doing a lot of charity work and giving a lot back to her community as well.
Target Status:
Alive and dancing in Sydney, Australia.
Background:
Born in Darwin the second youngest of five girls and into a family of music lovers. Her talents became first known at fourteen when she won a singing competition in Tamworth and scored a record deal with Sony Music Australia. While the record deal eventually fell through, her big break came after becoming the runner-up of the fourth season of Australian Idol, signing another contract with Sony just two weeks after the competition ended.
Since her debut in 2006, Jessica Mauboy has seen a flourishing music career, boasting several music awards, including the 2014 ARIA Award for Best Female and the 2012 ARIA Award for Best Pop Release. She has likewise performed internationally, standing on the same stage as artists such as Beyoncé, Flo Rida and Chris Brown, and represented Australia for Eurovision 2018 with the song “We Got Love”.
Genetic Make-Up: Jessica Mauboy is half Indonesian and half Aboriginal Australian. Her father is from West Timor, while her mother is from the indigenous Kuku Yalanji peoples of far north Queensland. Growing up in Darwin, a city which hosts both a large Indigenous Australian community and a large Indonesian community, she was able to experience the best of both her cultures.
Strengths:
Singing Prowess – She’s an exceedingly good singer, and is lauded as Australia’s equivalent to Beyonce.
Determination – She dropped everything to follow her dreams and never gave up even after her first debut flopped.
Compassion – Jessica Mauboy is seen as role model to the Indigenous community in Australia for her involvement in charity work, and mentoring, performing and education programs.
Weakness:
Volume Limits – Her family is very musically inclined. Unfortunately, they have trouble keeping the volume down because of their passion and talents.
NRL – Specifically, she’s a huge fan of the North Queensland Cowboys.
Hidden Talents:
Along with her music career, Jessica Mauboy is also an actor! She appeared as major supporting characters in the movies Bran Nue Dae and the Sapphires, and played the main protagonist of TV series The Secret Daughter.
Nadya Labiba is an Indonesian-Australian currently in her fourth year of Journalism and Languages and Cultures at University of Technology Sydney. Aside from interning at Captain Bagrat, Nadya is an avid community volunteer and a published contributor at Central News.
Instagram @nadrlabiba
Bevin Liu is an ABC (Australian-born Chinese) in every sense of the word. Thinking that her life was set on a law degree, she is now going into the third year of her undergraduate degree in Journalism and International Studies (Majoring in China). On top of occasionally dropping into Captain Bagrats, she is working as a journalist for a regional newspaper, as the planning editor for Central News and trying to balance it with her new responsibilities as a member of UTS’s Academic Board. She would dabble in her love for animals and strange things through the university’s Cat Society and StartUp Link in her spare time.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bevin-liu/