Bios

Dean Pearce, age 12

Dysart QLD

Dean was introduced to the arts from a very young age. At the age of 4 he took out 1st place and also received a highly commended award for his photography entries in the popular Dysart Through My Eyes Photography competition. Since then he’s won many awards for photography, art, sculpture and crafts from a variety of competitions.

Dean was chosen by Queensland Music Festival (QMF) for an important dance part in the community performance – The Power Within which was a massive community event held in Moranbah in 2018. He also assisted with coordinating the Dysart Kids Dance Mob for the event.

The Down Under Brothers is a brilliant YouTube channel that Dean hosts with his brother – Heath. The channel has been going strong for the past 3.5 years, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you better not get left behind and go check it out. There’s oodles of episodes for you to check out – over 300 of them! Some of them are about the great community events they have been in his hometown, visiting other towns around the Isaac Region and going further afield within Queensland, and if they’re not visiting somewhere, or there isn’t a community event to attend then they make videos about all sorts of interesting things like hand raising baby sun conures (birds), playing with duckling, harvesting honey or creating games. The channel is all about promoting the Isaac Region. We love that they’re like minded like us!
As a show of appreciation for all of Dean’s contributions to the arts he was chosen to be a Batonbearer for the Commonwealth Games in 2019. His leg of the walk was in Moranbah with most of the other champion batonbearers from Dysart.

At the 2020 Australia Day Awards Dean was nominated for 5 awards as part of the Down Under Brothers (on YouTube) x 2, Dysart Arts Inc, Dysart Arts Drama Club Halloween performance in The Halloween Experience, and his family received an incredible honour of being chosen for a special and new award – Spirit of the Isaac.

He’s achieved all of this and he’s only just made it to high school, this kid is going places!

Jasmine Pearce

Jasmine is the producer, director, film crew and editor of the family friendly YouTube channel the Down Under Brothers. The channel is well loved not just by the locals, but also worldwide. It was from this successful project that Jasmine received the trending nickname of Down Under Brother Mother which was a name created by famous Australian musician Katie Noonan.

Jasmine has become a valued member of the community for her contributions as liaison and coordinator for the Queensland Music Festival (QMF) massive community project – The Power Within (2017). Jasmine coordinated the adult choir, children’s choir and kids dance crew.

Working with QMF led a coordinators role with Isaac Performing Art – Back to the 80’s (2018) as liaison for Dysart members within the show along with the roles of photographer and committee member.

Both The Power Within and Back to the 80’s received Australia Days awards for the contributions to the community.

Jasmine is Founder and President of Dysart Arts Inc established in 2018. Jasmine has also written articles about the arts for local publication the Dysart Diary. Her efforts have not stopped there… Jasmine and her family have been hosting great Halloween displays each year for the public to experience. In 2019 the Halloween event was shared with and relocated to Dysart Arts Inc where they teamed up with the kids and parents of the Dysart Arts Drama Club. Together they created The Halloween Experience, which won an them an award at the Australia Day Awards.

For her efforts in the arts and finding ways to include the Isaac community Jasmine was selected to be a batonbearer for most recent the Commonwealth Games.

With her commitment to the arts we sure are glad to have her on the Kids Voice team!

Kwan Chan

Born in Hong Kong in 1965, Kwan migrated to Australia in 1979 and finished his high school and dentistry degree here in Australia. He moved to our town of Clermont in 1998 and started his family here with his partner Janis, his son Michael and daughter Angela, both very much locally grown country kids.

Music has been his lifelong passion but with his career and family commitment it has been an on and off affair. He also did most of his musical projects on his own at home alone, the “Closet Muso” as he would call himself. This changed however in 2015 when his family joint the Clermont Community Choir(now part of Artslink). This opened up opportunities for him to connect with many other like-minded artists of various fields, and participated in many local and statewide musical events. The more notable ones are the QMF’s The Power Within and IPA’s Back to the 80s where he performed in their housebands on his EWI(Electronic Wind Instrument, think electric saxophone). In Back to the 80s Kwan also acted as the show’s technical advisor and recordist, as well as being the voice actor for the role of Mr Miyagi. He has also performed in and helped organise numerous other local musical community, school and festival events, as well as acting as the instrumental tutor in various educational programs.

Kwan loves music in all its forms and plays a number of instruments but he has gravitated towards sound engineering and the latest music technology and what they can do for music creation. He has been the creator/arranger for most of the choir’s demo and backing tracks as well as taking care of the technical side of the activities, ie. he is the choir nerd.

Frustrated to see nearly all the local community projects grinding to a halt due to the Coronavirus Lockdown, Kwan initiated the “ISO-Choir” recording projects. Each choir member would learn and record their singing parts in their own home with just their phones, and everybody would send in their recordings for Kwan to process and mix into the final song to be released on Facebook and Soundcloud as our tribute to ANZAC.

Long wanting to give the young ones their own musical space and start a musical community project for our local kids(classes, musical, junior band), he thought this ISO Choir format would be the perfect platform as everything will be done online so no physical contact is necessary at all. Shortly before he was going to start the project on his own, while having a chat with Jasmine he thought: this is a project for Kids and wouldn’t it be great to have Jasmine’s very talented and energetic son Dean to be our Voice and Front Man? Dean would be someone the young ones can relate to, and Jasmine has tons of experience with liaison and publicity. This would also be a great experience for Dean! He made an offer to Jasmine and Dean and they both enthusiastically agreed, and thus our beautiful collaboration started!

Kwan’s proudest achievements in his life:

• Having his children and watching them growing up into great people,
• Being involved in so many community cultural and musical events in Isaac,
• Being told by our Mr Ivan Bettridge that he is now a local in Clermont!