Tara Tucker found the "language" of drumming inspiring and healing.

Every now and again we meet someone who challenges our expectations, someone who steps outside the confines of the everyday and lives life that little bit closer to the edge. Tara Tucker is one of those people.

Undeniable beauty and brains aside, Tara is a woman of tremendous fortune. Not only has she discovered what truly makes her “heart sing” but she has devised a way to transform that passion into her life’s work.

The Tasmanian-born percussionist and founder of music resource Drum Up Big says it took her more than 30 years to officially realise her talent and call herself an artist.

“I was coming back from Africa about five years ago. I’d been playing drums for 10 years by that time and it was my passion. I thought if I won lotto it would be what I did,” Tara laughs. “I was filling out an immigration card and it asked for my occupation and I wrote musician. I just remember thinking that this is how I’ll define myself from now on.”

For Tara, who speaks Japanese and French, holds numerous degrees and has spent a lifetime switching between mainly government and university jobs, it was a brave move but one that was long overdue.

Tara says her connection with drumming emerged at a young age. “I went to Japan on home stay when I was 13 and fell in love with the place. I went back when I was 17 on a Rotary scholarship. That was where I first saw taiko drumming live and I just felt it. It really planted a seed.”

These initial trips also sparked an interest the country and culture. It was an infatuation that would see her return repeatedly, in between studying language and economics, modelling and even working as a master diver and tour guide in Cairns.

It was on a working trip to Japan that she finally got her chance to study percussion, she says. Interestingly, it was a West African who presented the opportunity. He was a Senegalese master drummer who had moved to Fukuoka and was offering classes. Tara embraced the challenge, forming a strong bond with her new teacher and eventually joining him on stage as a performer. She returned to Australia and continued her lessons in drumming, but it wasn’t until Tara, then 28, was confronted with a potentially life-threatening health issue that she truly realised its significance and the role it would play in her future.

“I was wiped out, I couldn’t do anything for about six months. The one thing I could do and did do for hours and hours was drum and that was really when I discovered its healing aspect,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of research now into the actual science of it and it does boost your immune system, it lifts your spirits, it helps calm you down. I spent many hours drumming alone. It saved me a little.”

Gradually, Tara got her strength back along with her adventurous spirit. “It took me a while to get the courage up to go out into the world again,” she says. “But I got more and more interested in drumming and realised it was a language I was learning. It wasn’t just a case of hitting the drum randomly. There’s an art to it, a whole rich cultural background that I wanted to learn about and so I decided to go to Africa.”

This next adventure launched a new chapter in Tara’s life and introduced her to a world that, like Japan, captured her. Through a friend, Tara made contact with a national drum and dance ballet in The Gambia and organised to spend a month living in the city of Banjul, learning traditional West African drumming. But she learnt more than she expected.

“They picked me up at the airport and took me to the house I’d arranged to rent. When I got there I realised all these drummers who were going to be teaching me had moved in. A lot of them didn’t have permanent places to stay, they were artists and they were very poor,” she says.

“The car had a broken windscreen, it was practically on the rims of the tyres, we were driving on sand roads. We had to stop on the way and buy a mattress from the night markets. There were no roof racks so they were holding it on top of the car, then we stopped to change money at the black markets and I was just thinking: ‘What am I doing?’ I was paying them by the hour for lessons but there was an assumption that I was kind of looking after everyone as well. It was a little confronting.”

Tara says her experience in West Africa highlighted the poverty facing its people but also exposed her to a world rich with culture, tradition and passion for life and for music.

“I remember for the first three weeks going around with them (the drumming group) to every concert and they always carried my drum. My last week they said: ‘Tara, you carry your drum tonight, now you’re a drummer’ and I thought: ‘Oh my God I wasn’t allowed to carry my drum’ I actually had to earn the right. I just thought they were being polite.

While travelling through countries such as The Gambia, Ghana and Guinea in the ensuing years, studying various forms of drumming as she went, Tara says she learnt, among other things, of the drastic need for educational supplies in many communities.

“I did some volunteer work at a primary school (in Guinea) and they literally had no pens or paper. That really struck me and I thought: ‘What can I do’,” she says. “I decided the best way for me to give back was to use what I’d learnt, which was the music.”

When Tara returned to Australia she headed to Alice Springs and produced a CD, bringing together all the musical friends she had made around the world. Profits from the album funded the postage of educational supplies to West Africa. It wasn’t the first or the last time she would call upon her musical connections to draw cultures together.

In the years following, Tara gained one of only 16 placements worldwide in a prestigious human rights university course in Tokyo, went on to complete an internship with the United Nations and eventually started work as a UN research consultant. This work led her to combine her greatest passions – Japan, Africa and drumming – to launch a project called AfriJapan Beat, an exchange between Japanese and African artists to raise awareness about HIV Aids while promoting music and dance. 

Her skills earnt her a position at a university in Philadelphia where she stayed for three years before coming home.

“I needed to come back to Australia. I’d been out there in the world for so long,” Tara says. “It becomes much more meaningful to be creating something in a community where you feel at home and that’s really why I came back.”

Since settling in Cairns several years ago, Tara has established Drum Up Big and launched a collection of community-based programs. She directs all-girl drumming troupe Hit Like a Girl, which performs locally, and hosts drumming workshops. She runs development programs including Foreshore Friday, a free drumming event held on the Esplanade on the first Friday of every month,  Drumbeat, an early intervention music program for youth at risk. yoga and drumming morning retreats and Junk Percussion sessions for people with disabilities.

“There’s a saying in Ghana that a village where there is no drumming and no dancing is not a place where a man can stay,” Tara laughs. “For me imagining no drumming would be like taking my breath away. It sustains me.”

For more information on the range of drumming workshops and programs available visit: www.drumupbig.com

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