Creative Careers: Vendulka Wichta

Posted on 20 January, 2020

A writer. An actor. A dancer. A singer.

They’re the professions that many of us spend our childhoods aspiring to—but what is the reality of life in the spotlight?

Sarina Talip finds out for HerCanberra’s Summer Magazine: Shine.

Vendulka Wichta is a singer-songwriter performing under the stage name, who, despite being on The X Factor when she was just 14-years-old, and on The Voice in 2019, has, for the most part, always needed a day job.

“Music has always been the goal and I guess what the goal looks like has changed,” she admits.

With her golden hair, tattoos, and fingers covered in turquoise, quartz and opal rings, it’s not surprising to discover the 22-year-old Cooma native grew up in the folk festival scene.

It also meant she had some inkling that music could be a viable career. “I knew that people get booked on the program and they get up on stage and make music and sell CDs and T-shirts, so I already had the idea of it being a business,” she says.

In 2016, she got booked to be the resident musician in Perisher for the four-month 2016 snow season. With some of the proceeds, she bought a one-way ticket to Whistler, Canada, where she snowboarded and worked a “stupid amount of jobs” in hospitality and retail.

But music found a way of “creeping back in” when she entered the Whistler Live Music Search. Prize money: $1000.

“I needed to buy a season pass so I could go snowboarding,” she explains. After she won the competition she did some radio interviews. “And then all the local pubs wanted to book me for gigs, and it snowballed. I was like, ‘here we are again’.”

Eventually returning to Australia, she made a good wage out of busking—up to $100 an hour. But a few months later when her friend Danielle White asked her if she would make cosmetics for her new natural makeup venture Dirty Hippie Cosmetics, Vendulka was in.

“It was kind of nice to take the pressure off and not have to worry about making money from something creative, because every artist has the struggle of trying to monetise the thing that they love, and then it’s no longer the thing that they love,” she says.

In April she wrote a song that felt different to anything she had ever done before. She got a Great Ydeas grant from the YWCA for $2000 to pay for Sydney producer Xavier Dunn to record and produce the song.

Then, in October 2019, Vendulka found out she’d got an artsACT grant for $19,301 to record and produce an EP with Xavier. She quit her full-time job and her music has gained momentum—she gets regularly booked for shows and plays the festival circuit.

In November she was the headline act for the New Zealand “music & fireworks festival” Soundz and Booms in Hawkes Bay, and other producers have shown interest in working with her. She’s recently announced a “fresh new project”, AYA YVES.

Even so, there have been some low points.

In July she was driving to Melbourne to perform. She was exhausted and decided it was better to pull over at a rest stop in Albury to try to get some sleep. She’d also just received “some pretty crappy” family news.

“So I was pretty sad, and trying to sleep in my car, which is pretty tiny, and I was just telling myself: ‘Soak it in, remember every detail,’” she says.

“‘You’re going to be looking back at this point, where you’re sleeping in some dodgy rest stop, crying yourself to sleep, and be grateful for it, because then you’ll appreciate where you end up.’

Feature image: Koh Bouckaert.

This article originally appeared in Magazine: Shine for Summer 2019/20, available for free while stocks last. Find out more about Magazine here.

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