Rhoda Roberts

Thanks, Judy. I'll just get myself centred here. Good morning and welcome to our elders, aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues. I'm Rhoda Roberts. I'm from the Waibal clan of the Bundjalung nation. I'd like to acknowledge the fact that I'm on Jagera land and that I've been welcomed into this community and the opportunity to speak here in Brisbane, and in particular I'd like to thank DARE for asking me to do this keynote speech. It sounds really scary actually, when you think about terminology and keynote speeches.

I don't do speeches. I just get up here and have a bit of a yarn, but I am truly honoured because I had no idea actually that this was the only second national conference. That appals me. Why isn't it happening every year? People need to communicate and discuss things. In particular I'd like to thank Peter Wood because I've been so busy and this poor man has been sending me faxes and writing to me and probably thought I wasnšt going to turn up today, so thank you very much, Peter, for all your hard work.

For me community and culture go hand in hand. I was taught the language at an early age but sadly, under the act it was against the law and the fear from my parents of the protection board removing us from practising our culture was too great. However, my father with his knowledge worked with other elders in our community and members of that community and linguists to document the language and cultural practices in the 1970s. Bundjalung language is now taught at Monash University although it's from northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland. We still haven't got it up this end yet. We're working on it.

Today, as artistic director of the Festival of the Dreaming, the first of four Olympic arts festivals, I see my involvement in the arts and my community as an extension of my family's political activism. My father, Pastor Frank Roberts Jr, and my grandfather, Pastor Frank Roberts Sr - we're big on names in the Roberts clan - were involved with Ficatsi, as many of our aunts were here in the 1967 referendum. For them, they were pastors and the platform was the church. They used the church to get their issues across. Today Aboriginal people tend to use the arts to get that message across.

Who would have thought that 30 years ago, that in 1997, we would be holding an international indigenous festival as part of the Sydney Olympic games cultural program. This festival is in tandem with the biggest event in the world that takes place every 4 years. It's milestone putting our artists up front where they belong. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists today - and when I refer to Aboriginal I also mean Torres Strait Islanders, okay, because I know I've only got 40 minutes to talk - they express the tenacity and the strength of the people who bore the brunt of colonisation. This festival gave us the opportunity to invite nonindigenous people from around the country into a rare insight of indigenous culture through music, theatre, dance, literature, film and the visual arts in a way they had never seen before.

The festival reinforced our cultural and community ties and our languages. Yes, indeedy, folks, we have languages spoken Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and Western Australia. You just don't have to go to the Northern Territory to actually hear language spoken. We manage to address a lot of the myths and mistruths about us as a people. I'll talk further about the effect and some of the approaches to some of the projects that were in the festival shortly, however, I need to address a bit of the history that has occurred through the arts within the black community and the contemporary nature of what we're seeing within those arts today.

When the first settlers witnessed a corroboree, they labelled it a bush opera. Opera, as we know, is dance, music, story, mime and song. It encompasses many of the arts. Aboriginal arts has always been holistic and it's often difficult to label and box it into little pigeonholes, just as I find it personally very difficult and hard to box and label what is often termed as fringe, community or mainstream arts. It all had a beginning and comes from somewhere and someone's culture. Even the old bard himself began very community.

There are a number of people, all community based, who paved the way for many generations developing Aboriginal arts and culture. Like all peoples our culture has developed, changed and adapted through colonisation over the last 209 years. However, the intrinsic link across the country is in the nineties. As artists, we paint, dance, perform and write about the country, the nation and the language group and the land we come from. Our resources and infrastructures have always been limited and with further funding cuts - and not just to the arts, because if we have funding cuts in our community that are to health, education and housing, it affects what we're doing at a community level with arts, so do we have to look and change our mind-sets.

This is one of the biggest questions that Aboriginals are facing in the nineties when they look at their arts. Do we go to BHP? Do we take the money they're offering to make them feel good because of the destruction they have done to many of our communities? Is it blood money? Does it matter? Is it going to get our work up there where we want it? It's a really big ask and it's a big struggle and a big question for many artists and their colleagues in the community because most community-based organisations are struggling and many of their future looks bleak.

If you compare our major companies with their Australian counterparts, there are a number of areas and issues which are hugely different. Bangarra Dance Company, for example, represents a product of over 20 years of nurturing. In a small tin shed in Redfern in the 1970s an African American woman called Carol Johnson started recruiting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dancers from around the country, all young people. She wanted to teach them classic and contemporary forms of dance, both western and Aboriginal. It was then known as the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre, it's now known as the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association or for short NAISDA.

Bangarra is a company which is made up of many graduates of NAISDA. They represent Australia as one of the premier dance companies, not just as an Aboriginal company, and they are continuing to develop links nationally, rurally and internationally, but most importantly, they are making changes for the next generation. The bridge between remote and urban has been developed by the work of Stephen Page, who's been working closely with the Yirrkala community, and I believe has made history by employing as his principal dancer for the Bangarra Dance Theatre Company, Djakapurra Munyarryun. I was actually amazed that during the festival none of the critics picked up on this. It is ground-breaking work what he's doing.

It's also pretty amazing what he's doing as collaborative work with the Australia ballet. Who knows, perhaps the next Swan Lake production could have a black principal dancer because I actually thought that the story was, there was this ugly black duckling who grows up to be a beautiful swan. But here is a company - maybe I got it wrong - here is a company who are about to go under and unable to finance a 1997 production when we first spoke to them. They did. There recent work was Fish. Would they have performed - it was commissioned by the Olympic Arts Festivals and I do put the question - would they have performed at the Edinburgh Festival or toured Asia this year, would this have happened to the Sydney Dance Company, who are 21 years old this year?

The point I'm making is Aboriginal works are often not judged as equal with their counterparts but it has only been a very short time of finance, development and resources for a small number of organisations and companies around the country. There are also so many cultural issues that need to be addressed and taken into account when working with classic Aboriginal work. You'll notice I don't use the term "traditional" a lot because I think a lot of our terminology has been mixed up and people often refer to the real Aboriginal as being traditional, so I like to refer to it as work that comes from our ancestors thousands and thousands and thousands of years old, as classic work.

Aboriginal work in remote communities and urban-based artists. The pre-production and approval process, for example, is perhaps three months longer than most productions. A thing that cropped up during the festival, when the Festival of the Dreaming was organised for September, of course they didn't do their homework because in a lot of remote communities September and October is not a good time for a festival because many specific ceremonies and religious practices are in place and need to be respected and observed.

We in fact had a lot of support from some of the communities and they did a lot of juggling with their dates so their artists could perform in the festival. But as I said there are so many cultural issues that come into play and perhaps we need to be looking at some sort of paper or development on education of what those practices are. We had a couple of groups from the territory where we actually put more money into a project to make sure that we had artists who were allowed to learn some of the dances so that if any sorry business occurred, for example, those performers who were in that particular production could go home and we had the permission to keep performing with other dancers from Sydney.

If you take perhaps a comparison and you look at the women's' film unit that was set up in the 1970s, it was about women making film. They didn't get much of a voice before then. Many of the films that came out in those early days were based on women's' issues. Today we see Jan Chapman, who's just won an AFI award, Jane Campion, Gillian Armstrong, as some very strong women in the industry. They're making great films nationally and internationally. They're not specifically making films about women, they're making films about human issues, but what gives that edge to those films, is the mere fact that they are women.

When I first entered the arts, there were often discussions - and it wasn't just in the arts - I'm sure it was right across a number of industries, but everyone was talking about the glass ceiling. I said, "Uh'huh, glass ceiling", my response to that is, "Well, honey, you're talking about the glass ceiling. We're talking about the floorboards. We're still trying to get through them. That's why we lift them up and burn them as firewood, because it makes the process so much easier."

There are so many people who've gone before me and I actually feel really privileged for someone of my generation to be given the position that I have been placed in the last 18 months, and it has given me the opportunity to perhaps highlight the fact that what we learn isn't an individual thing, it's always group oriented. David Unaipon went unnoticed for years. Now, I know many of you won't have it, because wešre really underpaid and under resourced, but if you've got a $50 note on you, David Unaipon is the bloke on the $50 note. He actually invented the shears to shear the sheep.

He was a Ngarrindjeri man and in the 1930s he wrote a manuscript based on creation stories from his area. This was appropriated by a white writer, published by Angus and Robinson, word for word with no acknowledgment of Unaipon. So he really was one of the first Aboriginal men during our time, to document into English, stories of his community. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, a writer, a mentor and great friend, was one of our greatest writers, but so many people don't realise that she wrote a number of very innovative plays about the environment and many of the issues that wešre looking at today.

Uncle Jack Davis from WA, we used to get really jealous of people in WA because all of a sudden they had all these plays to work with and Uncle Jack created so many roles for Aboriginal people that we all wanted to go and work with him. But what happened from that process was people like Lynette Narkle who now works with YirraYaakin Theatre Company directing. Ernie Dingo, you see on your screens, he's probably the only black fellow you actually see on your screens who's smiling, because the rest of us, you know, are depicted as angry blacks waving flags.

Kelton Pell is now writing his own solo show. There are so many artists to come out from just one man. Justine Saunders, who often says she made her career out of being raped and prostituted and playing drunk. Yes, when Lydia Miller, Kylie Belling and myself came along in the early eighties, we were actually given the opportunity to play characters that actually had lines, good lines. Mind you, we had to fight for three dimensional characters, rather than the one cardboard cut-out and I think that what was often attached to our bios, was difficult.

But we're seeing a new generation now, the Leah Purcells, the Debra Mailmans. She's toured the world doing Shakespeare. Seven Stages of Greiving is a play that's gone internationally. Leah Purcell actually did make history again. I don't think anyone picked up on it but she was the first Aboriginal, I would say, that was cast as a regular on a television series, it was the ABC, that was cast in a regular television series as a woman to play a police officer. She wasn't there because she was Aboriginal, she was there because she was talented. She happened to have this amazing heritage as well which was an added bonus. She's just been recently nominated for an AFI award with her role in Fallen Angels.

The black theatre established in the seventies led to the involvement of Chicka Dixon, who's a Yuin man from south New South Wales. He was involved very heavily with the La Perouse community. He was a very strong unionist. He established the Aboriginal Arts Board. Gary Foley followed through and pushed for further funding and the establishment of black playwrights conferences and the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust. Out of those playwrights conferences we started to see younger playwrights coming out - the Johnny Hardings, who's just had a recent production last year at Belvoir Street Theatre; Ray Kelly. There's so many I can't name everyone.

But what happened was, when is the next black playwrights conference? The last one was 1989 specifically for playwrights. Because there are only so many people working in this area of administration and bureaucracy and they simply get burnt out. However, what we do have now is statebased dance companies and theatre companies and our music is really big right across our communities.

There are far too many to name but I want to mention one that actually comes from Queensland. Kooemba Jdarra was recently under the artistic direction of Wesley Enoch. This is a young man with an enormous scope and vision and is a very talented young man. There are individuals and groups out there of young people who really need to be nurtured now, not just from Aboriginal communities, but from the arts community. They need financial, emotional and in particular physical support for their work because we're entering a stage which is really difficult because there are so many issues in our community that we face a challenge as artists.

Do we talk - because it's not all bright and rosy. Yes, we have a culture that spans over a hundred thousand years. Wešre the oldest race in the world. That's just fantastic to belong to something like that. But we also have domestic violence, petrol sniffing, alcoholism. How do we highlight these and how do we work with our communities in projects where we can actually say as Aboriginal people, "Yes, we admit, we have this problem and now we need to work with the community." So anyone who's brave enough to take on those issues in our community it's a really long hard role and they really need support from the broader arts community for their work to continue.

We're at a stage where many of our leading artists and talents want to extend their craft and their skills and they're really tired of being marginalised. Visual artists, for example, are often more than not community-based people. Since the 1970s with the adaptation of classic sand art at Yuendumu, where originally before the seventies at Yuendumu, they'd pulp up the flowers, paint them with ochre, and then place them for ceremony on the sand and paint their pictures. One of the school teachers that was working there in the seventies took some of the elders paintbrushes and canvas. Now, they'd never used paintbrushes so the only thing that they did was take what they saw in the sand, which was the pulped flower of ochre, and place it onto a canvas, hence we say the birth of dot paintings.

The same with Oenpelli, when it enabled communities like that in the last few decades to boost not only the continuance of their culture but also the economics, money to put into the community. We owe many of those early artists a lot because while placing barks and dots on the international market, what they did for us was those people over the seas wanted to know about us. We know they didn't want to know about us up here, down home. They were just trying to get rid of us, but overseas they really wanted to know about us and not just about the arts, they wanted to hear people talk on a number of issues.