TO THE AUSTRALIAN DREAMERS…
THERE ARE STILL NOT ENOUGH INDIGENOUS STORIES BEING TOLD IN AUSTRALIA. IN AN EXTRACT FROM HER MEMOIR, MIRANDA TAPSELL EXPL AINS WHY – AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Miranda Tapsell talks about the importance of seeing more Indigenous stories on screen.
On Sunday, May 3, 2015,
I was fortunate enough to win two awards at the Logie Awards. I had been nominated for my role as Martha in Love Child. I knew that if I won and was given the opportunity to say something I had to take it, because it might not happen again.
It was an exciting time to be an Aboriginal actor, because more and more Aboriginal producers and writers were creating stories for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to lead in. Redfern
Now, Black Comedy and The Gods Of Wheat Street had gone to air and 8MMM and Cleverman were about to go into production.
Earlier that year, April Reign’s #Oscarssowhite hashtag had begun a massive conversation on social media about the kinds of artists and stories that are valued in Hollywood. It was from that that I was able to find my own language to paint a picture of the lack of imagination in our local industry: from which stories in Australia gain recognition to the writing and casting of people of colour in Australian stories.
That night was very special for me. I was a young Black actor finding my way, and to hear my name called was incredible. I had a microphone and I owed it to every other person of colour to make the most of it. In my speech I spoke from my heart about putting “more beautiful people of colour on TV and connect viewers in ways which transcend race and unite us”. My words were met with resounding applause. Actors, producers, writers and directors seemed excited by the conversation my speech had ignited. Even though many actors before me – Justine Saunders, Bob Maza, Deborah Mailman, Aaron Pedersen, Shari Sebbens, to name a few – had said similar things long before I was in the industry. In my naivety I honestly believed that the people in the room, particularly the ones who had to make conscious decisions about who was in front of and behind the camera, might truly listen and take on board what I said.
I’m not as naive now. Five years have gone by and we are still discussing how casting can be more conscious and inclusive. Nearly every journalist asks me, “Do you believe things have changed?” The statistics tell us they haven’t. In the most recent industry drama report, 83 per cent of the leading roles and recurring characters are played by actors of Anglo-saxon and Celtic backgrounds. But you just have to look at mainstream television to know that it’s actually going backwards. Until performers who represent the majority on screen go into bat for better representation, things will not change. I think it’s fair to say that Geraldine Viswanathan, Remy Hii, Chris Pang and Aisha Dee had to chase success in Hollywood because no-one back in Australia had the ingenuity to reflect what the public really looks like. Quite frankly, it’s gutless of the industry to not have more people of colour behind the camera as well, so that the collaboration of a project is richer, more honest and more authentic.
I have never understood why some non-indigenous people see diversity as a block to their creativity. I believe it’s a weak excuse to be told that it’s a token gesture to write a person of colour into your script. You lack originality and enterprise if you erase the people who live in the world – regardless of whether they live in your street. Also, if we can believe in a game called Quidditch or a throne that a fire-breathing dragon melted, you can believe two people of different backgrounds can find common ground in your story.
I’m not asking for every character I play to bring up the Northern Territory intervention, or the fact that Indigenous people in this country make up 29 per cent of the prison population, or that the life-expectancy gap between a non-aboriginal and First Nations person is 20 years. What I’m asking is to celebrate modern Aboriginal culture, to subvert the stereotypes that have been pitted against Aboriginal people – that we don’t believe in hard work, that we’re negligent with our children, that we’re all criminals or that we all have alcohol problems. To instead show the complexity and commonplaces that we all share while also acknowledging the uniqueness of our story.
I’m very inspired by exciting stories that people of colour are making around the world. The Big Sick, Crazy Rich Asians, The
Incredible Jessica James and Ali’s Wedding are all examples of great storytelling that breaks down stereotypes. These films speak to people who have been sidelined in Western storytelling for so long, despite existing and thriving in the Western world for much longer.
Films like Crazy Rich Asians prove that stories involving a cast that isn’t Anglo-saxon can speak to a broad audience. And to have people of colour making rom-coms makes my heart want to burst. In Time magazine, Kumail Nanjiani talks about how co-writing The
Big Sick with his wife, Emily V Gordon, helped make his experience as a Pakistani-american man more relevant to wider America. The couple wanted the film to show that his family, the way he lived and fell in love were more universal than people once believed. Performers such as Nanjiani, Jessica Williams and Constance Wu make someone like me believe that I too deserve the fairytale.
When Josh [Tyler, Tapsell’s co-writer on Top End Wedding] planted the idea of writing a film together, these films were my inspiration. As much as I wish I didn’t have to justify or validate my lived experience on a daily basis, the Australian media’s all-toocommon degrading rhetoric about Aboriginal people leaves me no choice. Humanity is brought back to Aboriginal people when they see themselves reflected on screens in all their complexity. And that humanity is translated to everyone watching. Not only do their lives seem less alien to the wider audience, it also strengthens the love they have for themselves and their community. It makes them feel like their perspectives on Australian society and history matter. The only way the majority of Australians will feel empathetic enough to change the system that favours them is if they regularly put themselves in the shoes of marginalised people. Many won’t
have the capacity to do that if marginalised creatives and stories sit on the fringes of modern Australian storytelling. The stories I create might not improve the awful things that continue to oppress Aboriginal people, but if even a small number of non-indigenous people in an audience can believe that the general wellbeing and safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders should be prioritised to the same degree as non-indigenous lives, then I’ve done my job.
As a Black woman with a profile, I feel I have to speak up, I have to push for some form of substantive change. Making one speech was not enough; I had to follow through. I wanted to take my anguish over how stagnant the conversation had become about diversity and begin writing the things I wanted to see at the cinema. I realised very quickly that the mind-blowing experience I had with The Sapphires was a magical one-off thing – that I couldn’t simply wait for someone to give me that experience again.
For me, it’s more than just giving Aboriginal people and other minorities opportunities to further their craft, which of course is incredibly important. It’s about stories dismantling the narrative that Australia has curated about Aboriginal people for so long. Particularly about Aboriginal women. Sometimes, I can kid myself that we have come a long way and that it is better. But then I see a cartoon of Serena Williams or a video clip of a famous stand-up comedian denigrating a woman of colour to an audience raucously laughing and I know it is not. You only have to look at Mark Knight’s cartoon of Williams that appeared in the Herald Sun. This was about putting a woman of colour in her place and scolding her for speaking up. How were young girls of colour supposed to interpret this?
There are too many instances where the appearance of an Australian Indigenous woman has been brought to international attention in a negative way. On February 17, 2015, the US sitcom 2 Broke Girls, starring Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs, featured an episode in which their boss Han, whose sole premise is to make people laugh at his thick Asian accent, enters distressed that he can’t find his ipad. “I’ve been having a casual flirtation with a woman from Australia. She is part Aboriginal, but she has a great personality.” A couple of days after that aired, and after a fierce backlash, Dennings tweeted: “That line was a moment of ignorance from whoever wrote it. It does NOT reflect how I or the cast feels. Hope this helps anyone rightfully upset.”
It didn’t, but hers was a much better response than that of the show’s creator Michael King, who has previously clapped back at allegations on the show making racist stereotypes by saying, “I’m gay. I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive… I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.” Listen Michael, the world has never been an even playing field, so you’re not being helpful to anyone kicking down other minorities. Maybe King was riffing off comedian and host of
Trevor Noah’s 2013 stand-up show. I will never know how Noah, a South African man of colour, could think it was funny to say: “All women of every race can be beautiful. I bet some of you sitting there now are saying, ‘Oh but Trevor, I haven’t met a beautiful Aborigine.’ But you know what you say? You say yet. You haven’t met a beautiful Aborigine yet. Coz you haven’t seen all of them, right? And also, it’s not always about looks. Maybe Aborigin[al] women do special things. Maybe they just jump on top of you and be like [pretends to perform fellatio like playing a didgeridoo].” The video went viral around Australia in 2018, and many Aboriginal people were hurt by what they heard.
Friends begged me not to watch the clip, but I had to know what was being said about me and the women I love so much. My eyes stung from tears of anger, my face burned, I sweated, my heart raced. As much as I don’t want to let these stupid things get to me, I work so hard to change all of these perceptions people make about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, and I feel as if I go two steps back whenever this happens. It leaves me infuriated and exhausted. I have written this book so that if people want to know why I take this stuff so personally, I can say, “Read my book” and walk away.
Noah possibly felt that taking the video down was enough to make amends with my community. Most Aboriginal women would have forgiven him if he had made a meaningful apology, but he mentioned on multiple media platforms in Australia that he didn’t feel he had to apologise for what he said in a routine he performed five years before. But the majority of viewers, particularly Anglosaxons, aren’t going to look at how long ago it was and think, “Gee, that’s an old take. Aboriginal women must be gorgeous now.”
Ugliness like this needs to be called out and, at the very least, you hope the instigator learns and goes on to help counter what they put out there. Not Noah. “I do understand how outrage works… people generally don’t want to listen or understand from their side. They go, ‘No, we’re angry.’ So all you can do is fall back and say, ‘Hey, I’ve addressed this,’” he said. So, in the end, his feelings mattered more than any of the women he had trodden on. Saying sorry doesn’t take away your responsibility. It means you need to work harder to make amends.
I noticed while watching the clip most of the audience in the front row were Caucasian. There were no Australian Aboriginal women present that I could see, which made me wonder who his jokes were for. They definitely weren’t for someone like me, since I’m part of the group he was punching down on. Being a Black South African man, he would have to understand how colonisation affects other Black and Indigenous groups. He chose us because he knew his audience didn’t know enough about us to challenge it.
While Noah sits comfortably in his apartment in New York, Aboriginal women have to live with the reverberations of his words. The audience look to comedians for “truthful” observations about the world around them. They laugh when they acknowledge a gag they believe to be true. This “joke” waters a seed already planted in racist minds, further cementing for them that we’ll always be less.
The reason these comments cut so close to the bone for me is because I live with their consequences every day. But I am lucky: because of where I am in my life I can push them aside most of the time. Many of my sisters can’t. Women like Samantha Cooper – a case manager working in Moreton Bay who was sacked from her job two days after she filed an official complaint about micro-aggressive comments relating to her Aboriginality to the workplace watchdog. Cooper was running a program called Breaking Down The Barriers, designed to assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families through the government-funded domestic violence organisation she worked for. She had been described as going “walkabout”, told she was “quite pretty for an Aboriginal” and asked if she’d ever met a “real” Aboriginal person. After several attempts to address these comments more informally, she was left with no choice but to make the complaint.
Cooper’s story is one of many, and it’s comments like Noah’s that tell non-indigenous people that it’s okay to talk to and about Aboriginal women like that. It’s crazy that Noah thinks that his words don’t have power, that they don’t influence the people who listen to him. It’s insane that comedians like him claim that when people pull them up for being irresponsible, they are being censored. We’re simply asking comedians to take responsibility for what they say.
The truth is, Aboriginal women don’t need to be kicked down more than we already have been. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 37 times more likely to be hospitalised than nonaboriginal women for non-fatal domestic violencerelated assaults. If people like Michael King, Trevor Noah, Mark Knight et al didn’t help rob us of our humanity, then would this happen to us?
How do we change that? How do we rewrite the story? It starts with telling the whole story. It starts with equal representation. It starts with having tough conversations. It starts with respect. Believe me, if non-indigenous people are tired of hearing about diversity and representation, imagine how exhausting it is for people like me to speak about it. I’ve trawled through websites and libraries to ground my beliefs, so people who hold power don’t try to dismiss them. So, I am using my power and my voice to talk about the things that matter, to point out disrespect and to tell everyone with a platform to be wary of what that platform communicates.
This is my shout-out to fellow creatives to do better. Acting schools – do better at considering who you give opportunity to. Do the next Margot Robbie and Hemsworth boys take up 90 per cent of your selection? There’s plenty of them in Australia and Hollywood. I’m sure these students will work just as hard as I do, but honestly most can thrive in LA without the leg-up. If students of European descent are the only ones rocking up to auditions, that perhaps means they’re the only students who can afford your training. Create programs to make your courses more accessible to passionate students who don’t have financial or emotional support behind them. It’s your job to facilitate that. If you already have them, make them more widely known.
Australian writers, creators and producers – what is it that you want to say about your country? How do you want it to be seen? It’s all well and good to be upset at the way Hollywood actors attempt the Australian accent, but what have you given them to reference? As good as Vegemite and Tim Tams are, is that all we eat? Do we only murder, rape and contend with animals that can kill us? How many Ned Kelly films do we need to make? How many times must I watch films following White people feeling guilty? I can say all this because I was named after Miranda in Picnic At Hanging Rock.
And finally, to the young Black dreamers who want to become actors – don’t let anyone tell you drama school is not for you. When I was studying I might have struggled at first and only learned about European art that I would never be cast in, yet it is because of these learnings that I found my place and can now deconstruct at length why these stories aren’t relevant to me. My acting was very wooden when I first graduated; it took time to develop my skills. But I have tools to navigate this demanding industry. The raw “gut instinct” that people believed I would lose comes back to me the more confident I am in a role. So, research the training institutions across the country and decide from there what you want. But remember, knowledge is power.
Despite knowing all this, or maybe because of it, I realised that no-one was going to make the kind of stories that I wanted to see on screen, so I decided I was going to make them my damn self.