Ningali Lawford-wolf
Actress in Rabbit-proof Fence and Edinburgh Festival regular
NINGALI LAWFORDWOLF, who has died aged 52, was an Australian actress who made her name in 2002 in the film Rabbit-proof Fence, Philip Noyce’s drama about three mixed-race Aboriginal girls who escape from a native settlement and undertake a 1,500-mile trek along the eponymous fence in order to rejoin their families.
The film was controversial in Australia with its depiction of the government’s historical policy of removing the children of what became known as the “Stolen Generations” and putting them in state institutions.
Ningali Lawford, as she was credited, played the mother of the girls’ leader. She had a deep empathy with the themes of the film, as her own father had been forcibly removed from his family when he was four years old and taken to the same settlement as the girls in the film.
Ningali Josie Lawford was born in 1967, under a tree in the Wangkatjungka community at Christmas Creek Station, a cattle station in the far-northern Kimberley region of Western Australia. She was a member of the Walmadjari people; her father was a stockman, her mother a domestic worker. She grew up speaking three indigenous languages, but did not master English until her teens.
She attended Kewdale Senior High School in Perth, then spent a homesick year in Anchorage, Alaska, on an American Field Scholarship. She trained as a dancer in Sydney with the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre and the Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Her first acting job was in 1990 in the indigenous stage musical Bran Nue Dae, whose director, Andrew Ross, recalled: “She could sing, dance, she could do everything. She was brilliant, even though it was the first real thing on stage she’d ever done. She set the energy level for the show.”
She became a regular at the Edinburgh Festival, and in 1995 she went there with her one-woman show Ningali, which explored her childhood experiences, and won a Scotsman First Fringe Award.
She made her first screen appearance in the 1998 television miniseries Kings
following it up two years later in the “mockumentary” series The Games, a satire on the organisation of the 2000
Sydney Olympics.
Another of her acclaimed one-woman shows was Windmill Baby, written with David Milroy, about an elderly Aboriginal woman who returns to the cattle station where she was born. “The pastoral industry was built on the Aboriginal people’s back,” Ningali Lawford said at the time. “It was a time of bloody hardship and racism.”
The pair won the 2003 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award – worth A$20,000, making it the most lucrative prize in Australian theatre – and toured Britain, Canada, Ireland and India.
Credited as Ningali Lawford-wolf, she appeared in the 2009 film adaptation of Bran Nue Dae, then in 2015 she was in the film Last Cab to Darwin, playing the close friend of a terminally ill taxi driver who decides to travel to a euthanasia clinic.
In 2018 she appeared in the award-winning television drama series Mystery Road, and this year she was in the police comedy KGB.
As well as acting, Ningali Lawford-wolf also worked as an Aboriginal and Islander education officer at Broome Senior High School in the Kimberley region, and was involved with the cattle industry, as a director of the indigenous-owned Kimberley Agriculture and Pastoral Company.
For the last four years she had been playing the narrator in the show The Secret River, an adaptation of the Kate Grenville novel in which a convict from London arrives in New South Wales and clashes with the local indigenous people. She was with the show at the Edinburgh Festival when she suffered an asthma attack and died.
Ningali Lawford-wolf is survived by her partner, Joe, and by two daughters and three sons.
Ningali Lawford-wolf, born 1967, died August 11 2019