OUR PLACE, OUR TIME
Radio broadcaster Brooke Boney leads a discussion with fellow Indigenous women, actress Miranda Tapsell and playwright Nakkiah Lui, about race and empowerment.
Radio broadcaster Brooke Boney discusses race and empowerment with fellow Indigenous women, actress Miranda Tapsell and playwright Nakkiah Lui.
Our experiences have been defined by the struggles of modern Australia. We’ve spent our entire lives negotiating the space between our difficult past and a bearable future for our people. We are three fair-skinned Aboriginal women, and as well as being your average nuanced, ambitious, bubbly, creative, flawed human beings, we are also the physical representation of this country’s difficult past.
And despite the limitless density of this cultural fact, its full scope can sometimes be entirely captured in a single moment. A moment all three of us have experienced: the very moment where it clicks in a person’s mind that you’re Indigenous.
The surprise on people’s face gives it away. The surprise that, up until now, they haven’t felt uncomfortable. And it’s this surprise that on occasions can manifest itself into a very revealing phrase. A phrase that’s as well-meaning as it is devastating. A phrase that Nakkiah Lui and Miranda Tapsell have harnessed as the thought-provoking title of their incredible podcast: “You’re pretty, for an Aboriginal.”
With this, regardless of intentions, people are saying that our appearance is more palatable because we look more like their grandparents than our grandparents.
With that one statement, suddenly (white people) as a group are pretty, and you (Aboriginal people) are not. It isn’t deliberate, and it’s not helpful to be rebuked for sins we’ve all committed, but for such an innocuous statement it is certainly revealing of a much wider cultural phenomenon.
And that is that for so long in Australia, on the news, in the media, the only representation of Indigenous people we’d see would border on parody – reinforcing a stereotype of Aboriginals that belies the diversity of First Nations people in 21st-century Australia.
Lui is one half of the podcast Pretty for an Aboriginal, and she told me it’s part of the reason she became involved in the arts: “One of the reasons I went into media was because I remember watching TV as a kid and reading magazines and not seeing anyone who looked like me. And that really affected my self-worth and my value. And that beauty is beyond the superficial as well. It’s inspirational to be strong, smart, forthright and staunch. And to have beliefs and values and I think those things are a part of what makes people beautiful.”
Miranda Tapsell is the other half. She’s a Larrakia/Tiwi woman from Darwin who will appear in the Sydney Theatre Company production
Black is the New White (written by Lui, who will also star in the show), and is about to star in Top End Wedding, a romantic comedy set in the Northern Territory, which also marks Tapsell’s screenwriting debut. Tapsell says for a while after her breakthrough in The Sapphires she struggled to find her place in a world where people on TV and magazines didn’t look like her. “I thought: ‘Well, I’m not six foot,
“When we realise that diversity and cultural inclusion isn’t a threat to the Australia we know and love but an integral part of it, the tension will dissipate”
I don’t have long legs, I’m not blonde-haired or blue-eyed, so what is it that I can celebrate about myself?’ I think when people found I was funny and that I could sing and that I could get up on stage without any shame and do it with conviction … I thought: ‘Okay, this is how I’m going to empower myself, this is how I’m going to feel good about myself, ’cause I’m going to show people I’m more than what people see in magazines. They’re not going to compare me to women that they see in magazines.’”
Brooke Boney: “One of the things I’ve been thinking about is what someone means when they say: ‘You’re too pretty to be an Aboriginal person.’ That’s something that we’ve struggled with and carried with us our whole lives, and I think there’s a shift and I don’t think it is just about inner strength I think it’s about recognising that there are different kinds of beauty.”
Nakkiah Lui: “I think it’s also because so often our Aboriginality is talked about as if it’s a detriment. It’s like anything that makes you different is a detriment. And I think the fact is in Australia, regardless of the politics, I think it’s a more diverse community, I think the values of people individually is about embracing things that are different. And so ultimately there is going to be recognition of that.”
Miranda Tapsell: “I agree. The Brisbane Times had a story recently: Samantha Cooper, a Queensland Indigenous woman, was sacked two days after filing an official complaint. And one of the things that was said to her was that she was quite pretty for an Aboriginal. Of course, it’s a backhanded compliment, which is why we wanted to make it the title of the show, because we wanted to unpack some of that.”
nl: “And it’s a really multi-faceted thing, but your difference is your strength. I think with the podcast, well, if you can see it then you can be it and that’s why having diverse representations is incredibly important, but also you aren’t necessarily going to change people’s minds by spewing your ideology at them. It’s people empathising if someone is like them and they have similar feelings but for maybe different reasons. The specificity of someone’s personal experience and their perspective is what makes it so universal. I think the great thing about Pretty for an Aboriginal, and what Miranda does, and what I do, and what you [Brooke] do, is that you just talk about it. In a really intimate and honest way and I think that does more than some type of government action plan.”
BB: “To tap into what you were saying before about how deeply it affected your sense of self to not see any Aboriginal women, or men really besides someone like Ernie Dingo on TV or in the media, for me, to now be a part of this next generation where there’s a sort of renaissance of Indigenous culture in the mainstream is an incredible time. Little girls can now open up a magazine and see pictures of us, or they can turn on a TV and see you or they can turn on the radio and hear me, and that’s an incredible thing.”
mt: “If anything, I wanna see more of it! (Laughs.) I’m always of the opinion that we can do more. The space can be opened up more. I think at the moment it is an exciting time, because there is possibility, so what I hope to see in the future is that it is normalised. That it’s just normal to open up a magazine and flip the pages and see it. There’s all different girls from different cultures, from different backgrounds, of different shapes to normalise that, so that it reflects the wider culture, so that it’s the same as when you walk down the street. That’s what I would like to see. Because I think it’s nice to explore that there isn’t just one standard of beauty that is the epitome of beauty.”
“I think it’s also that stereotypes are built on simplifications. The more personal and complex stories and voices we hear, the more that we break down stereotypes. I was very much brought up in a family that was ‘you respect your elders’ and I grew up knowing my history. I grew up knowing my culture and my family and so my Aboriginality wasn’t a huge deal in my life, it was just a thing that I was and it wasn’t what my world centred around, ’cause I doubt many people’s lives centre around their race, it’s just how their race effects them. What’s been amazing for me is the fact that people want to hear different voices. That people want to hear from us.” BB: “One of the things I’ve been struggling with with the #MeToo movement and intersectional feminism is that we know Indigenous women are raped more often, are beaten more often. There’s the horrible example of Lynette Daley on the north coast of New South Wales, who was brutally murdered and it took years for the men involved to be charged. It’s difficult for me to feel like we’re equal to other women when our stories are left out.”
nl: “I think in Australia, we’ve seen over the last couple of decades, that it’s a country capable of great change and thinking about other people and having empathy and we’ve made some brilliant decisions in regards to immigration and things like same-sex marriage over the last couple of decades that have really given people the opportunity to have a good life – it’s always for some, my addition is ‘for some’. Even though as a modern country in so many ways, we can be quite progressive and quite compassionate, I think there’s still a very institutionalised idea that Aboriginal people just aren’t worth as much.”
BB: “When we have a moment in this country when we realise that diversity and cultural inclusion isn’t a threat to the Australia we know and love but an integral part of it, the tension will dissipate. It’s a difficult ask, because it means asking our fellow Australians to acknowledge that their good fortune has been built on the back of our misfortune, that regardless of whether or not they have caused it, they are the direct beneficiaries of the most abhorrent of atrocities committed by their ancestors against ours.”
nl: “I think when a country doesn’t acknowledge the violence and trauma that a lot of its hope is founded on, then that just lives on in a community. There’s a lot of unpacking to do. So much with intersectional feminism at the moment is very much about staying in your lane because you want to be considerate of people, you want to see them have equality and feel like they’re treated fairly. So sometimes it does feel like as an Aboriginal person you kind of have to put your Aboriginality to the side to support other women.”
mt: “We’re not here to say who’s got the worst thing ’cause that doesn’t help anyone. I think there’s interesting discussions to be had around that and I think those kind of conversations will hopefully make things more inclusive for everyone, if everyone can understand more of what’s outside of their own experience.” ■