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Valley sings praise for ambassadors
Grafton’s singing sisters, Brooke, Sam and Mollie McClymont (The McClymonts) are the joint recipients of this year’s Clarence Valley Ambassador Award.
The award, now in its sixth year, forms a significant part of Local Government Week and seeks to recognise outstanding achievements by former Clarence Valley residents.
The McClymonts are winners of a number of prestigious awards highlighted by two ARIA award wins for Country Album of the year, an APRA Award in 2013, 10 Golden Guitar awards and celebrating 52 weeks in the ARIA charts for their recent album “Here’s to you & I”. The girls are Clarence Valley products through and through having grown up in Grafton and attended Grafton public and high schools.
Sam said the girls started writing music from an early age in their house on Villiers Street, usually singing into a cassette recorder with favourite topics covering school, boys and family.
“We looked up to fellow Graftonian Troy Casser-Daley and his wife Laurel Edwards,” she said.
“When we saw that he was travelling, recording music and hearing his songs on the radio, we thought hey, maybe we can do that too.
“We were lucky to have such a wonderful childhood in Grafton. We were always jumping on the trampoline or swimming in the pool. Our street was full of kids our age so we would be outside til the sun went down playing with everyone.”
Mayor, Richie Williamson, said he was proud the Clarence Valley Ambassador Awards were going from strength to strength with so many leaders in their field developing their talent right here in the Valley.
Previous winners of the award include: Troy Cassar-Daley (musician), Cameron Pilley (squash player, currently ranked 13 in the world), Wal King (Leighton’s CEO), Brent Livermore (former Australian Hockey player and Olympic gold medallist) and author Gillian Mears.
Fans packed into Grafton’s Saraton Theatre on Friday night for the McClymonts home town performance, which was part of their “10 years of Hits” tour.
During their performance, the girls spoke of what they had been up to in recent times.
Mollie has a beautiful six-month-old baby boy, Sam has been involved as host for the TV series ‘Farmer wants a Wife’ and Brooke has branched out into acting with her first movie, which is to be released on September 15.
A quirky Brooke informed the home-town crowd, “I’m no Nicole Kidman”.
The girls welcomed a family from Perth, who had travelled to Grafton to see the girls perform in front of their home town, believing that it would be the group’s best performance.
A highlight of the evening was a preview of a song which the girls had written for their husbands titled ‘My love is Endless’.
The song is yet to be recorded.