Tallegalla Road

About the Artist

Queensland singer-songwriter Brooke Seabrook has traced four generations of family history down one country road in her new single, 'Tallegalla Road', out October 30. Brooke wrote the song as she was driving to work one Tuesday morning, fresh from performing at the Tamworth Country Music Festival. The South-East Queensland singer-songwriter had played the main stage in Toyota Park at the festival as a featured artist on the Back to the Bush Festival and attended the Golden Guitars. Heading back to her day job as an accountant, she drove out along the Warrego Highway past the turn off to Tallegalla Road at Minden, where her ancestors had settled in the area. "I had been sorting through my Grandma's life story, which she'd written down in her beautiful but very difficult-to-read script, and on one of those pages she mentioned how her mother used to walk to school along Tallegalla Road in the late 1800s," Brooke said. "This song wrote itself in the 20 kilometres it took me to get to work." Brooke's grandmother, Albertina “Teen” Fredericke Boughen, was born in 1902 on the family farm at nearby Coolana. She loved to write, sing and tell stories, and passed that love down through the family before passing away in 1998, at the age of 96. "Whether it was that she was the only grandparent I knew, or that her stories and poetry inspired me to want to write, I always felt very connected to Grandma," Brooke said. 'Tallegalla Road' is a song about nostalgia and wanting those simpler times, but Brooke recognises that it wasn’t all rose-coloured. "No matter the time or place, struggles may look different, but they will always transcend time," she said. "Writing songs like this is therapy that cannot be bought."