Georgia Maq

A Redgum household, and a nursing qualification

Georgia McDonald grew up in Melbourne as the daughter of Hugh McDonald, the fiddle player and singer of the Australian folk-rock band Redgum. Her mother is of Greek heritage and McDonald was baptised Greek Orthodox — a set of inheritances that has surfaced repeatedly in her writing, most recently in songs that turn over religion without settling on a verdict.

She took the name Georgia Maq for her own music, and the first releases under it were small: a 2014 solo effort called With A Q, then a 2015 split record with the Newcastle songwriter Spencer Scott. The same year she qualified as an enrolled nurse, a second career she has never fully put down; during the COVID-19 pandemic she deferred and then took up a graduate nursing position, working on testing and vaccination while touring was impossible.

Also in 2015 she formed Camp Cope with the bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and the drummer Sarah Thompson. The trio became one of the more argumentative and widely heard Australian guitar bands of the late 2010s, built on Maq's unguarded, heavily accented delivery and a rhythm section that left a great deal of space around it.

Camp Cope, and the ending at the Opera House

Camp Cope made three studio albums before stopping. The last, Running with the Hurricane, arrived in 2022 and softened the band's earlier abrasion into something closer to country-rock; the same year they issued a live EP recorded at the Sydney Opera House. The band disbanded in October 2023, and the final show was at the Opera House itself — a tidy piece of symmetry that also, at the time, looked final.

Maq had already been working outside the trio. Her debut solo album Pleaser appeared in 2019, produced by Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis, and swapped guitars for bright, unembarrassed synth-pop. It was a deliberate break from the band's register rather than an extension of it, and the reception was mixed enough that later writing about her treats the record as a detour rather than an arrival. A standalone 2021 single, 'Joe Rogan', drew more argument than airplay.

Los Angeles, an acoustic guitar, and 1000 Rats

After Camp Cope ended, Maq moved from Melbourne to Los Angeles. The first evidence of what that did to her writing came on 8 November 2024 with the single 'tropical lush ice', written with Daniel Fox, mixed by Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with violin from PJ Cartwright and a video directed by Seannie Bryan. The synths were gone. In its place: acoustic guitar, a string line, and a lyric Maq described as encapsulating how she felt when she moved to Los Angeles from Melbourne after the band ended — a song, on her own account, about vaping and about being unbothered by how that sounds.

That single set the terms for God's Favourite, the five-track, seventeen-minute EP released in September 2025 on 1000 Rats, an imprint Maq set up herself. Daniel Fox produced. The tracks — 'Mercy and Grace', 'The LA River', 'Slightly Below The Middle', 'Citronella' and 'Pay Per View' — run into one another as a continuous piece rather than a sequence of singles, and the arrangements are wider than anything she has released before: piano, strings and horns arranged for scale.

The critical reading was that the record repaired her solo standing. Northern Transmissions scored it 8.1, calling it a rebound after quiet years and hearing chamber pop in the mould of Weyes Blood, with religion, love and death as the recurring subjects and the Los Angeles River as its central image of longing. Spill Magazine gave it three and a half stars, described it as Americana folk from an outsider's lips, singled out 'Citronella', and noted something specific about the delivery: Maq had dropped the broad Australian accent that defined her Camp Cope vocals.

May 2026: the Alive & Well tour, and five minutes of Camp Cope

Maq had not played a show in Australia since Camp Cope stopped. That ended with the Alive & Well tour in May 2026, routed for rooms rather than theatres: Lion Arts Factory in Adelaide on 20 May, Crowbar in Sydney on 21 May, Crowbar in Brisbane on 22 May, Altar in Hobart on 27 May, and The Tote in Melbourne to finish. Announcing it, Maq said that being able to make music and art with the people she loves makes her feel like she has already won.

Demand for the Melbourne date ran past a single night and the run at The Tote was extended. The final show, on 29 May 2026, had doors at 8pm and Maq on stage at 9.30pm. At 10.30pm, Camp Cope played a surprise set — the first time Maq, Hellmrich and Thompson had performed together since the Opera House show in October 2023. It was not announced, it was not billed as a reunion tour, and nothing since suggests it was meant as one.

Between the Australian run and now, Maq worked the American club circuit as a headliner: Baby's All Right in Brooklyn on 29 July 2026 and Songbyrd in Washington, DC on 30 July.

Where she stands, September 2026

The current Australian shows are a double bill with Ben Lee, packaged as The Two Most Annoying People You Love. It opened at the Princess Theatre in Brisbane on 23 September 2026 and reaches Sydney's City Recital Hall on 25 September, The Rechabite in Perth on 29 September, Freo.Social in Fremantle on 30 September and Adelaide on 1 October. The rooms are deliberately modest — The Rechabite holds around 500, Freo.Social around 800 — and the seated Sydney date is a long way from a Crowbar stage.

Immediately afterwards she crosses to the United States as support for the Oklahoma songwriter John Moreland, a pairing that makes sense of everything God's Favourite did to her sound. That run takes in The Armory in Fort Collins on 9 October, The Lariat in Buena Vista on 10 October, the Empire Theater in Livingston on 13 October, Missoula on 14 October, Spokane on 16 October, Neurolux in Boise on 17 October, Trout Lake on 18 October, Harlow's in Sacramento on 20 October, Healdsburg on 21 October, the Ojai Playhouse on 23 October, Deep End Live in Redondo Beach on 24 October and Santa Fe on 28 October. A headline date at the Sid The Cat Auditorium in South Pasadena follows on 19 November with Brennan Wedl opening, and The Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts is booked for 4 February 2027.

What that schedule describes is an artist rebuilding an audience from the bottom rather than trading on the old band's name. Twelve support slots in nineteen days across the American west is the work of someone who wants the songs played to people who have never heard of Camp Cope.