Cam Ward
Making Room for Other Voices

BEFORE CAM & SHAZ

If you only know Cam from the radio, you are arriving fairly late.

Camilla Ward is a teacher, performer and theatre person whose work has run through Dubbo’s creative life for decades.

Through The Creative Voice Studio she has coached people in public speaking, singing and performance. She has taught drama and music in Australia and overseas, worked with young performers, led community choirs and built theatre opportunities rather than waiting for someone else to create them.

Her archive includes Black Box Creatives, Macquarie Conservatorium’s Youth Music Theatre program, Dubbo theatre and performance work, community stages, the dementia-friendly Sing Out! Choir and the kind of volunteer jobs that rarely make it into the glamorous version of an arts biography.

In 2019 she was named the Dubbo Electorate Local Woman of the Year for her service to the arts community.

The list is useful because it tells you she has experience.

The pattern is more interesting. Cam keeps creating places where people can have a go.

A choir. A stage. A rehearsal. A microphone. A class. A conversation.

The voice matters, but so does the invitation.

THE RADIO YEARS

For 18 months, our friendship had a radio program.

Cam & Shaz began on DCFM 88.9 in August 2022. Our theme was Community, Kindness and Connection, which sounds suspiciously like almost everything I have gone on to build since.

We had Dubbo Dooo for what was happening around the region. We had the Gooden of the Week for people doing something decent, useful or quietly generous. We talked to locals. We played music. We finished with gratitude.

Mostly, we had a weekly reason to notice people.

Community radio does something useful to your brain. You begin listening differently. You need to know what is on, who is doing it, who has a story, who deserves a microphone and who knows somebody else you should call.

Cam already had an extraordinary creative network. I was still relatively new to Dubbo. Between us, the show became a kind of weekly map of people, events, causes, ideas and local characters.

And because it was Cam and me, it was allowed to be serious one minute and completely stupid the next.

That mattered more than I realised at the time.

There are subjects people will enter through laughter, music or curiosity that they would never approach through a formal invitation.

RIDICULOUS AND MEANINGFUL

Then there were the red dresses.

Our creative partnership also became Dubbo’s Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever.

Red dresses. Kate Bush choreography. A crowd of adults agreeing to look gloriously ridiculous together. Thousands of dollars raised for local cancer trials.

There was a serious reason underneath it. Cancer had touched people we loved and people throughout our community.

But we did not want grief or fundraising to mean the event itself had to be sombre.

Cam understood that immediately.

That is one of the things I love about making things with her. She knows that joy is not disrespectful to a serious purpose. Participation can be playful and still mean something.

In fact, sometimes the ridiculous thing is the doorway.

Someone who would never call themselves a performer will learn a dance. Someone who hates fundraising dinners will put on a red dress. People practise together, laugh together, bring friends and end up part of something before they have had time to decide whether they are ‘the sort of person’ who joins community arts projects.

That is Creative Courage in a red frock.

FROM RADIO TO TOWN TELLY

What if local people could tell local stories themselves?

When Cam & Shaz ended, one idea kept hanging around: what if the local-media part could keep going in another form?

Town Telly grew from that instinct.

The pilot asked a simple question: could a region tell more of its own stories, in its own voices, without waiting for those stories to fit the usual media format?

The answer, at least in pilot form, was wonderfully messy and very local.

There was music. Arts. Eisteddfod. Local authors. Community stories. A tourism centre. Microscopic video art. A One Photo story with Dr Emma Webster. Sing Out! Choir. Cam interviewing artist Jack Randell. Me interviewing Vicky Aland. Michael Davis performing. Different ages, different artforms, different reasons for being in the room.

Cam was on screen, yes.

But the project was not about making Cam more visible.

It was about using Cam’s skill, warmth and curiosity to make other people visible.

Making room for other voices is not passive. Somebody has to build the format, hold the microphone, ask the question and make the person in front of them feel that what they are about to say is worth hearing.

THE FESTIVAL

Singing under the trees, then helping build the room.

Cam has been part of the women’s Festival story from the beginning too.

At the first Dubbo Women’s Festival, her contribution included a sing-along and lunch session under the trees.

It made complete sense in a day that deliberately put health professionals, conversation, food, music, creativity and connection beside one another.

By the 2026 Festival, her work sat deeper inside the creative production: performance and facilitation, preparation, rehearsal collaboration, coordination of participating artists and vocal leadership.

Again, that list sounds technical until you think about what it means in a room.

Somebody needs to help a performer feel ready. Somebody needs to know where a voice fits. Somebody needs to rehearse the thing, hold the timing, support the people and still keep enough looseness that the event feels alive rather than manufactured.

Cam is very good at that bit.

MAKING ROOM

Voice is relational.

There is an obvious interpretation of a story about a creative voice coach: confidence. Finding your voice. Speaking up.

All true.

But I think Cam’s work shows something slightly different as well.

Voice changes depending on who is listening, who invited you, whether you feel safe enough to try, whether somebody else is taking up all the room and whether the person holding the microphone actually wants to hear the answer.

Cam’s career has included plenty of moments where she is the performer, director, teacher or person at the front.

But across the work I know best, her real gift is often what happens around her.

Other people sing.

Other people perform.

Other people tell the story.

Other people take the stage.

Other people become braver because the room has been made easier to enter.

That is why Cam belongs in The Orana Woman as more than somebody who appeared at the Festival.

She is part of the creative infrastructure of this place.

And she is part of my own Dubbo story too.

Radio gave us 18 months of weekly practice in noticing the region. Wuthering showed us that ridiculous and meaningful can live very happily in the same room. Town Telly asked what happens when local people get to tell local stories themselves. The Festival keeps giving us new rooms to fill with voices.

The projects are different.

The thread is not.

Make the invitation human. Give people something real to join. Then make enough room for them to bring their own voice.

— Sharon