Thelma Plum is a Gamilaraay woman, musician and creator. She grew up in Brisbane and spent many of her childhood years on her Grandparents’ farm in Delungra, a small country town in rural New South Wales. Thelma Plum’s debut album Better In Blak is a story about culture, heritage, love, and pain.
With incredible strength, courage and heartbreaking tenderness, her debut album captures so deftly what it’s like to be a young Aboriginal woman in Australia. Singles like ‘Not Angry Anymore’ and the album’s opener ‘Clumsy Love’ (#79 in triple j’s Hottest 100) are certified pop hits, while ‘Love and War’ (featuring Gang of Youths’ Dave Le’Aupepe) was written the about the events at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. There are intimate moments, ferociously honest break up songs, and the album’s wonderous closer ‘Made For You’ – a love song she wrote with Paul Kelly – that impressed Paul McCartney so much that he offered to write guitar parts for it.
For Thelma, one of the most vulnerable moments on the record arrives in the form of ‘Thulumaay Gii’, a song about healing. ‘Thulumaay Gii’ is Thelma’s middle name and translates to ‘Thunder and Heart’ in Kamilaroi, the language of her Gamilaraay people. It feels fitting for one of the country’s brightest songwriters, whose essence is indeed, thunder and heart.