Wallis Bird’s tragedy has fairytale ending

Wallis Bird's story starts like a fairytale. It ends like one, too. Eventually.

Once upon a time a girl was born in a small Irish town. Her father gave her a toy guitar when she was six months old. She loved that guitar. She would hold it and strum it and sleep with it and hide her dummy and spoons inside the sound hole.

Wallis Bird’s work ethic is legendary.Credit:Mia Knight

Then, when she was 18 months old, tragedy struck. Her father was mowing the lawn. He left the mower for a moment. His daughter reached under and lost all the fingers on her left hand.

"Can you imagine my father having to pick up my little fingers from the grass?" says Bird, who is now 37. "They were like matchsticks. My dad still gets really upset about it but I tell him, 'look, I'm so happy it happened because it's all part of my personality'. I'm really stubborn and I refuse to let anyone think I have some kind of handicap. I find it's elevated my abilities because I tried harder. I've reassured my Dad so many times. I've turned out all right."

Somehow, despite all this happening in small-town Ireland more than three decades ago, the doctors managed to successfully reattach all but her pinky.

Bird was determined to prove herself, growing up to learn guitar and playing in covers bands to put herself through college. She slowly introduced her own visceral, intensely personal songs into her sets until they took over.

Her work ethic is legendary. At one point she was playing almost a hundred gigs a year. And in 2016 she decided to play a marathon 12-hour show in Berlin, where she has lived for seven years.

"I wanted to push myself as far as I could and get an out-of-body experience," she says. "I felt that I'd become stagnant and isolated, so I wanted to challenge that. I played about four hours from my repertoire and the rest was just f—ing wild. There was a slump at about the eight-hour mark when I was losing the will to live and had my head on the piano playing notes with my elbows.

"Then a friend got up to join me and then more people got up and then we jammed. Some of it was noise and some of it was beautiful."

In the end she got a second wind and played an encore, so the concert went 30 minutes over time. She did it again in Melbourne last year with one difference.

"I took no toilet breaks in Berlin. For some reason I just didn't need to go. But I took breaks in Melbourne and I actually felt like I was cheating. I want to try to do this every year and next time I'm not taking breaks."

One song she will no doubt perform is The Ocean, which was released in December with a stunning video by Sydney-based Irish film-maker Sinead McDevitt.

Two Australian dancers – So You Think You Can Dance finalist Yukino McHugh and Sydney Dance Company-trained Olivia Kingston – enact a same-sex love story, from tentative beginnings to a joyful, passionate entwining of limbs and lips. Bird and McDevitt wrote in tandem, each influencing the other with visuals and music.

"When I watched it for the first time with my partner Tracey in our sitting room we were both completely overwhelmed. It was like watching our story. It was unbelievably poignant. It looked exactly how we felt. It was like that moment in the movies where the girl gets the guy or the team wins the Super Bowl. It was a life-affirming moment.

"Sinead and I both said we wished we had something like this when we were kids. A lot of people like us grew up thinking we had to hide our love and our sex from the world. The Ocean is like our gift to our younger selves."

Bird came out as gay to her mother when she was 25 and to her father just five years ago. The girl who grew up with nine fingers now wishes she had done so earlier.

"You feel like you have to hide that shit for dear life growing up in Ireland. And I lived in a very small village. But I did a disservice to my parents by coming out so late. I expected less from my parents, which I shouldn't have. I didn't expect them to understand. And they did. They said they just wanted me to be happy."

Wallis Bird plays Blue Mountains Folk Festival this weekend; Northcote Social Club on March 14; and The Factory Theatre on March 21.

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