Zara the Good

Being mixed English and Papua New Guinean, I had a colourful childhood growing up in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, before my family settled in Cairns, Queensland.

I’ve been singing since I could talk, and it was my Mum and Bubu Meri (grandmother) who instilled in me a love of music – from the Tok Pisin lullabies they sang me to sleep with, to the gospel worship songs I was surrounded by at the church I grew up in. I wrote my first song at the age of 9 in a little blue book that I still have.

I started going by Zara the Good in mid 2023, after changing my Instagram handle, and eventually all my social media handles. “Zara the Good” is a little play on words with my name, and a nod to medieval epithets. What do you have to do in life to be remembered as good?

My songwriting encompasses my life experiences, touching on themes of identity, mixed heritage, faith, materialism, existentialism, womanhood, sisterhood, love and loss, and trauma. My recent songs hold a magnifying glass up to the tender and raw reality of being a ‘young adult.’ They chronicle some of my revelations from the ages of 18 to 22, an uncomfortable period of growth where I grasped to add meaning to my life and grappled with the harsh truth that my expectations of adulthood were entirely false.

These songs come from a painful place, but it’s my prayer that when you listen to them, you find light in the darkness, calm in the storm, and know that someone else has experienced the same thing – you are not alone.