Something changes when a harp begins to sing inside a museum built to honour journeys. Not the kind with maps and GPS, but the quiet kind—the ones we take through memory, music, longing. That’s what audiences will encounter when Whelk, the ambient project from Genevieve Fry and Manisha Anjali, takes the stage this Sunday at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum.
The event is part of a packed weekend celebrating Cultural Diversity Week, but Whelk’s 3pm slot stands out for its stillness. Among food stalls and folk dancers, Fry and Anjali offer something softer—an invitation to sit, close your eyes, and listen. Really listen. Fry plays harp and builds rhythmic textures that feel like waves lapping at the edges of your thoughts. Anjali, a poet with roots in Fiji and New Zealand, speaks in slow, deliberate tones—her words drifting in and out like dreams. It’s the kind of collaboration that doesn’t shout to be noticed. It lingers.
Their project is named after the sea creature that coils in spirals, and it suits them. Whelk’s performances are tidal: slow to swell, impossible to predict, and hard to forget. Fry has long found inspiration in the natural world, and you can hear it in her compositions—notes that rise like mist from a lake or the creak of a tall tree. Anjali’s poetry touches on exile, dream states, and what she calls the “more-than-human” world. She’s the author of Naag Mountain, published earlier this year by Giramondo, a book that bends time and place with quiet confidence. Together, their work carries the kind of weight that doesn’t need amplification.
The museum, already a keeper of stories, becomes an amplifier of emotion during Cultural Diversity Week. This year’s theme—Embrace the Journey, Shape Our Future—might be written on a poster near the entrance, but it’s Whelk that gives it sound. The performance is one of many across the weekend. Music from every continent will spill into the courtyard. Dancers will twist and turn in traditional garb. Food from Ghana to Gujarat will be plated up. Grazeland in Spotswood will host its own festival of flavours and sound, but it’s the museum’s quieter offerings that carry the real staying power.
Victoria’s annual Cultural Diversity Week has grown over time, drawing crowds from all walks. Last year, more than 160,000 people took part in activities across the state. This year’s numbers are expected to surpass that. But metrics don’t always capture meaning. You can count plates of biryani and measure dance performances in applause, but some things—like what Whelk offers—need different tools. A pulse. A breath. A shiver on the back of your neck.
There’s something old-fashioned about live harp music. Maybe it’s the way it harks back to ancient storytelling, or how it resists the urgency of the digital world. Paired with Anjali’s quiet confidence, it becomes something otherworldly. At times, the duo’s set feels like it belongs in a forest rather than a city building. And yet, there’s nowhere else it would make as much sense as Melbourne—arguably the country’s most restless mix of tongues, flavours, and personal geographies.
For many migrants, the Immigration Museum is a place of pause. People walk its halls to see photos of ships, read letters from loved ones, or find their surname etched in a registry. But the building has never been just about the past. Events like this weekend’s show how stories keep growing, how culture keeps composing itself anew. The festival may include Bollywood moves and steaming satay, but it’s also where poets whisper of the wind, and harps summon the ghosts of home.
Whelk’s Sunday set lasts an hour. Enough time for the mind to wander, maybe even to heal a little. Enough time for visitors to taste something in the air that wasn’t there before. At 4pm, the museum will return to its usual rhythm. Visitors will go back to chatting over coffee, children will tug at their parents’ sleeves, and volunteers will collect folding chairs. But something will remain. A line of poetry still humming in someone’s chest. A harp string still vibrating in the bones. A sense, however faint, that art has just bent time for a moment.
And maybe that’s what Cultural Diversity Week does best. It doesn’t preach unity. It just sets a long communal table, pulls out a few spare chairs, and lets everyone bring a story, a song, or a steaming bowl of something warm. Some will dance. Some will debate. Some, like Whelk, will whisper. All of it matters.
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