- Zoe “Sparrow” Hulme-Peake was 22 years old when her life was tragically and unexpectedly cut short last year. Raised in Toowoomba, she moved to Brisbane after high school and hit the road as a travelling activist.

Zoe was intelligent and articulate, a philosophy student and playwright. As an activist she was courageous and committed. She also, as the album It Takes All Of Us displays, was a talented poet and songwriter – taken before most of the world was able to discover her talents in this field.

Her closest friends knew though. And as a memorial, they collated this album – a few rough recordings of Zoe performing, and a handful of her poems read and set to lovely backing music by her friends.

There’s something beautiful in the way these poems and songs were originally shared – not published for a mass audience to consume, instead performed in front of her friends or sent as voice messages. Many of them are about her friendship group or contain specific references to the activist subculture to which she belonged. It’s touching listening to them being lovingly carried by those friends now.

Like Zoe’s life, the process of refining these works was cut short before it could reach full fruition. The reading of Lemonade Sunset ends with her quipping “I don’t know, it’s a bit random”, while Freedom is a sea a Sunset and Nothing at All ends with the line “work in progress”.

The album carries the unmistakable mark of youthful passions – a bit of melodrama, sure, but also chock full of romance, adventure, yearning, and radical convictions – the things that inspire each generation to create poetry and try to change the world. The mix of righteous resentment against the system that “takes it all from us”, balanced with the joyful and thrilling rebellion of “Blockading a Container Port in the Rain”.

It is a loss to all of us that these works will remain frozen in that youthful stage – that we will never get to see what Zoe would have created with her abundant talents as she experienced growing older with all its complications. But as they are, these words burn with the brightness of a life captured when every moment means so much – whether it be on the barricades of political action, in the arms of a lover, or trying to get outeverything you are bursting to communicate with the world.

These words, like the recordings, are rough and raw but carry their own kind of beauty. There’s humour too – Solidarity Forever is an adept satire of those who criticise her chosen methods of social change, while the little grab of Zoe livestreaming her blockading a port begins with the greeting “Sup punks?”

Hearing Zoe’s words from the grave, read and accompanied by her friends, is a powerful picture of mortality. None of us know when our fragile stay on this earth could be cut short, but for all of us there remains the possibility of living on – in words and deeds, our legacy carried on by those we were able to impact. Those close to us, or those whose paths we never crossed but who we were able to gift something of a better world to. May this album inspire all of us to use our lives as well as Zoe Sparrow spent her short time amongst us.

- Andy Paine.