When Holly Rankin was 13, she wrote a list of things she wanted to achieve. Write an album. Write a book. Change a law that affects the environment. Work in communications. Two decades later, she has done every single one of them.
Holly, known to many as musician Jack River, is also the co-founder of Sentiment, a strategic advisory firm working at the intersection of culture, politics and communication.
She co-directed David Pocock’s first Senate campaign, was involved in early conversations with Professor Megan Davis and Pat Anderson around the Uluru Statement from the Heart, played a significant role in the Climate 200 movement and was the architect behind bringing content creators into the federal budget lockup for the first time.
Over two decades of music, campaigns and policy work, she has landed on a single idea: if you change the story a society tells itself, you can change the system.
As she reflects in a recent episode of There Will Be Dancing, a podcast produced by Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (WELA) in partnership with Women’s Agenda, her conviction didn’t arrive cleanly. When Holly was 14, her sister Shannon drowned in a spa in Foster. Shannon was 11. What followed was a three year coronial inquest and then an eight year compensation case. The entirety of Holly’s adolescence and early twenties was spent in a holding pattern of grief.
“Music became this well to escape to,” she says.
Her favourite musicians became sources of strength. She began writing. And what started as an outlet became a career, then a platform, then a vehicle for everything the 13-year-old list had imagined.
Her work at the intersection of culture, communications and democracy feels increasingly urgent.
As Holly puts it, the landscape of Australia’s public conversation is being shaped by a small group of foreign tech bros whose algorithms were never designed with democracy in mind. The fragmentation of shared truth is at the core of the problem; without a common starting point, collective action fractures before it can form. Her response is ambitious: rather than 100 small campaigns running in parallel, she is focused on how progressive movements can come together around shared strategic goals and communicate at a scale that can make a genuine dent. The federal budget lockup, in which content creators were included alongside traditional media for the first time, is her most visible example of what meeting audiences where they actually are can look like in practice.
This episode also features a contribution from Yuggera and Jabba Jabba singer-songwriter Nidala Barker, whose song Boldly Ahead and reflection on why boldness in hope is what gets us back on track sits in perfect conversation with everything Holly has to say.
For someone who has spent two decades thinking about how culture moves people, Holly’s dancing story is disarmingly simple. She doesn’t talk about a festival or a stage or a crowd. She talks about watching her three-year-old daughter Maggie dance — the intrinsic, uninhibited, fully embodied joy. “My greatest joy is just watching her do that.”
Listen to the full conversation with Holly Rankin on There Will Be Dancing, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major platforms.