“I put an EOI out and said, ‘Come and work with me’,” he said. “We’ll create some music together, send it out and let the universe work its magic.

“I got a beautiful Greek-Lebanese young Australian who plays classical harp and sings soprano, a Persian oud player and a Moroccan guy who plays a camel skin bass and sings.

“We had four four-hour sessions and in the first five hours wrote five songs and recorded them, and then we created this amazing video. Imagine what we could do in four weeks. It’s a unique new sound for contemporary Australian music.”

Petkovic is now seeking funding to set up his Multicultural Motown as a permanent facility.

“Artists of different cultural backgrounds would come in, we support them, we produce them, give them what they need, and then ship them out to go tour the world with their western Sydney sound or their Fitzroy sound.”

And while bringing together disparate musical traditions, especially with players who don’t use traditional Western notation, may sound like a huge challenge, Petkovic says that with enough goodwill and generosity it’s relatively simple.

“It’s getting in the room and saying, ‘We’ve got this idea. What happens from your culture?’ Then the African guy might say, ‘In my culture we do this call-and-response’, and the Vietnamese guy might say, ‘We do it this way’. We just start jamming, really.

“Rather than sounding like everybody else, this is Australia finally standing up and saying, ‘This is what a successful multicultural society sounds like’.”

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