Jessica MauboyIt was a sold-out show at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) on Saturday night, with Jessica Mauboy’s The Story of Me bringing fans from every era of her twenty-year career.
The Story of Me debuted at the 2025 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, and was then performed in Sydney in May before Saturday night’s show in Brisbane. It was one of the first events of Clancestry, QPAC's annual First Nations festival, which has been a fixture on Brisbane's cultural calendar since 2013.
Curated and led entirely by First Nations artists, the 2026 edition (30 July – 8 August) shows the festival's range, with artists like Troy Cassar-Daley, the Djinama Yilaga choir, Yothu Yindi and more taking the stage later in the week.
From the moment Mauboy took the stage in her black suit with blush fringe detailing and rhinestone mic, the audience was hooked and travelling with her back in time to the beginning of her life as a Darwin child getting noticed for her musical chops.
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Mauboy’s fans would have loved the covers of Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing and ABBA’s Thank You For the Music, as well as her own Never Be the Same, We Got Love (her Eurovision entry), Little Things, Pop A Bottle, Been Waiting and more.
Each anecdote marked a pivotal point in her life: getting in trouble for singing in class, meeting her primary school choir teacher, and even $10 steak nights at the local pub where her mum and aunty would collude to put her name down to sing a karaoke song.
Reimagined classics were interspersed through these stories, with the songs and artists powerfully connected to Mauboy and the time of her life.
It was the Telstra Road to Tamworth competition at the 2004 Tamworth Country Music Festival that put Mauboy on the map and on course for a quick rise to fame, bolstered by her time on Australian Idol where a 16-year-old Mauboy auditioned and was an instant crowd and judge favourite, but ultimately finished in runner-up to Damien Leith.
A Sony Music contract followed, along with starring roles in The Sapphires and Bran Nue Dae, and even representing Australia at Eurovision.
Each milestone was delivered humbly, with Mauboy reliving those moments of shock, anticipation and pride as if we were all huddled around her dining table in Darwin hearing the news with her for the first time.
Her love for her immediate and extended family shone through every memory, and we came to know her father as a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operator, and her mother as the planner who kept everything in control. Ultimately, she told us that it was this grounded upbringing that allowed her to always know who she was and where she came from - as she learned to trust her gut in an industry where there are many voices in the room trying to dictate what direction to take your career.
A memorable moment was when Mauboy recounted a meeting in which she and her mother were in attendance, and the management at the time were talking about things that made Mauboy feel uncomfortable. Mauboy’s mum, Therese, began to vocalise these concerns and someone said, “Shut the f*ck up, Therese.”
This elicited a collective gasp from the Concert Hall that even made Mauboy take a step back and ask if we were all alright. The story ended with Mauboy's mum taking her shoe off and throwing it at the person who swore at her. Needless to say, the Concert Hall was on Therese's side.
Throughout the show, there were several candid reflections that you could only glean from 2 hours and 20 minutes with an artist. She told us that her country upbringing felt incongruent with her young teenage self, who was listening to different music.
She also said that learning to sing in The Sapphires in that 1960s soul style felt completely different to anything she had ever experienced and woke something in her. She told the audience with pride that her last album, Hilda, under her previous record label, was something she had to fight for to ensure what she wanted was on it and how she wanted it.
Her instincts were rewarded when it debuted at number one on the ARIA Australian Albums Chart, and ultimately proved that she was on a different path to her label and wanted to continue to make decisions on her own.
There were so many faces in attendance that Mauboy seemed to know and recognise, with the fans so engaged with her story and life that it felt like they could have finished her sentences at times. An example of this was when she was telling a story about her family at the $10 steak night, and someone called out, “Where was Freya?”, and Mauboy had to tell them she was not born yet. Whenever a story came up about her mother, we would also hear, “We love Therese!” There were also pairs of women with signs that said “We love you Jessica!” that they held up throughout the night.
Mauboy was thrilled to be in Brisbane performing and sharing with the room, with a cough here and there that she apologised for. It was only at the end of the show that she told us she had a chest infection, which shocked the room given the vocal performance that we had witnessed for more than two hours. The evening ended with a standing ovation as she concluded with Inescapable.
