Rabbit-Proof Fence actress defied stereotypes but still suffered racism
Ningali Lawford-Wolf actress b 1967 d August 11, 2019
Ningali Lawford-Wolf finished her performance in Sydney and stepped outside the theatre to the cab rank. ‘‘Four times, cab drivers pulled up,’’ she later told The Advertiser in Adelaide, shaking her head. Each time the driver looked at her, the only person waiting at the rank, and drove off. ‘‘It took other people to hail a cab for me – non-indigenous people. I was not intoxicated, it was late at night, all I wanted to do was go home.’’
This was not some long-ago incident, but 2016, when she was starring in The Secret River, a play about the conflicts between Australia’s colonial settlers and its indigenous people. This month she was appearing in the same show at the
Edinburgh
International
Festival when she died, after suffering an asthma attack. Ann Treneman, reviewing the play in The Times, described how as narrator Lawford-Wolf guided the audience ‘‘with monumental grace’’.
On screen she came to public attention as the mother in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), the story of Daisy Kadibil, who was forcibly removed from her family and sent thousands of miles away, but found her way home across the outback.
Her goal was to challenge generalisations about her people. ‘‘People tend to think that Aboriginal people like me in positions like this are hotheads, activists,’’ she said in 1995. ‘‘I want people to realise when they see a drunken Aborigine down the street that he was not like that all the time. God knows what kind of life he had. I am sick and tired of people categorising us.’’
Ningali Josie Lawford was born on an unknown date in 1967 under a bauhinia tree at Christmas Creek, a remote cattle station east of Fitzroy Crossing in the north of Western Australia; Ningali was her clan name and she was a member of the Walmajarri people. ‘‘That open space became part of my dreaming,’’ she said.
Her father, who had been born to an Aboriginal mother and a white father, had been sent to the infamous Moore settlement near Perth ‘‘to have the blackness beaten out of him’’. He was head stockman on the station, while her mother worked in the white station owner’s homestead. ‘‘She was a servant,’’ Lawford-Wolf said.
Speaking hardly any English until she was 11, Lawford-Wolf would attend the local primary school for no more than four hours a day. ‘‘My childhood was spent in the rivers and creeks, and out in the bush,’’ she recalled. Her earliest exposure to Western culture was through the films projected on to the outside wall of the station shop. Many were about cowboys or soldiers, but one, The Sound of Music, struck a chord.
Her father was determined that she should
have an education. At 13 she was sent to Kewdale Senior High School in Perth, where she was ‘‘freaked out by the buildings and the cold’’. She was scared to see white people en masse for the first time.
At 16 she applied for an American Field Service scholarship, requesting to spend a year in Hollywood. She was instead sent to Alaska, where she discovered snow. ‘‘I only had myself to fall back on for a whole year there,’’ she told The Age. She attended a local high school, where the other pupils assumed she was Puerto Rican.
On her return to Christmas Creek, the entire community came out to welcome her home. She got a job in the community store and, with her experience overseas, taught English to children and adults. However, a visit by the Aboriginal Islander Dance Company, which was learning traditional dances, inspired her to study with them in Sydney for two years.
There she claimed to have had a brief affair with the visiting David Bowie. ‘‘That was a crazy fling,’’ she said. ‘‘Luckily he was a gentleman.’’
Her acting debut was in Perth in the 1990 musical Bran Nue Dae, about an Aboriginal teenager on a road trip in the 1960s; later she would appear in the film version. This was followed by work on stage and television.
However, a meeting with the directors Robyn Archer and Angela Chaplin led to an idea for a one-woman show based on her own country and people. She performed Ningali, an extraordinary work in three indigenous languages with a mix of dance and song, campfire-style storytelling and satire, in Perth in 1994.
The next year it was staged at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it won an award for best new production. ‘‘Angela made me realise the importance of it because the majority of white Australians don’t know what a black fella looks like, let alone their lives, particularly the Aborigines like me from the desert area,’’ Lawford-Wolf said.
She had five children, including Jaidan, who grew up with his white father in the old pearl-fishing town of Broome, as well as Rosie, Alexander, William and Florence from her marriage to an Aboriginal man known as Wolf. ‘‘I encourage them to do what their hearts desire, but I do want them to make lots of money so they can look after me in my old age,’’ she joked.
Latterly she lived in Broome with her partner, Joe Edgar, an indigenous community liaison officer, who survives her.
In 2004 she and the writer David Milroy created the award-winning Windmill Baby ,a one-woman show about an elderly Aboriginal woman returning to the deserted cattle station where she was born. ‘‘The pastoral industry was built on the Aboriginal people’s back,’’ she said at the time. ‘‘It was a time of bloody hardship and racism.’’
Despite receiving her share of that racism, Lawford-Wolf remained upbeat. ‘‘We’ve got too many problems to be angry,’’ she said. ‘‘We have a common history here and we need to make what was wrong become right for our future generations, to be able to not see colour or not have a debate about racism.’’
– The Times
‘‘I want people to realise when they see a drunken Aborigine down the street that he was not like that all the time. God knows what kind of life he had.’’