Rhoda Roberts (Continue)

They wanted to see a performance, dancers, writers, actors, musicians, etcetera, so in the early and mid-eighties, many of us had the opportunity to be involved in international festivals. Hello; at home you pick up a brochure for an international state festival and you tell me, can you count the indigenous works on one hand that exist in those festivals? Yes; because we're always slotted into the basket. There's never the thought of collaborative work on the main stage. But I guess when a young man who used to work on a bridge went overseas with a stuffed crocodile and started drinking at the Walkabout pub, he really probably didn't think we'd accept him at home either, but when he did really well in America, then we all went, "Paul, we love you." So it's not just for Aboriginal artists. I think we still have that old thing where you have to do well overseas before you're accepted at home.

However, what we face in the nineties for our visual artists can be quite devastating for some of our young artists, particularly those from urban and rural communities because they continually have to fight, and educate the masses, as to what Aboriginal art is. It's not just one genre such as the central desert dots.

As recently as the weekend we pick up our paper and we see issues of appropriation. They keep arising. How do remote communities work? Those are issues that need to be addressed. It is quite appropriate, for instance, for people from remote communities when they're doing large canvases to involve groups from that particular community as long as they are supervising.

For me the nineties is really a turning point for us in the arts. The work that has been nurtured, created and set up by our elders for 209 years has now had the opportunity to appear on the main stage and in venues which in the past often had a poor track record about opening their doors. When would we have had a festival and the opportunity to showcase what we're about from our voice, authorship and control of our product? Just who would have financed over $4,000,000 for an Aboriginal festival had we not had the Olympics? It's a big ask on a very small budget and a huge risk.

Pushing for venues such as the Opera House and the Sydney Theatre Company was questioned by many and not only in the Aboriginal community, but my question was - do we always preach to the converted? Should we work on the fringe, on the edge and remain alienated from what is termed or labelled the mainstream? Well, hell, no. Don't get me wrong because I think there is still an enormous need for us to have those venues in our communities, in the streets, in the malls. We need to continue to use them because we started educating out there and entertaining.

But what happens - and I can only talk from a personal level, but what happens, in my own community is more than getting a product or an exhibition up. The hope that I can see in young faces and the knowledge of our elders that is being used, and they're made to feel useful, there's self-empowerment that comes from projects developed at grass roots level and it fills me with enormous pride. I recently went home. During the festival we had a project called Waiting for Godot which is a Samuel Beckett, Irish playwright, and we translated it into the Bundjalung language.

I went home to see this in rehearsal. Now, this place was full and there were all these people from the community. None of them are arts people, you know, they were just doing their shopping, and they heard people were speaking the language. For a lot of our old people, they hadn't heard this language spoken for 20, 30 years. Just to see them coming into the rehearsal period and just sitting back, just listening, just to hear their tongue, was amazing. So I stood there and I thought now do I sit back and say, "Great, we've really achieved something here." They feel good, we feel good. Do I become complacent? Do I marginalise us or should their voices be taken to the deaf ears, to the subscription holders of those major venues, because they are the ones who really need to hear our dreaming cycles.

We were very fortunate during the festival, I'm sure some of you might have noticed, but with the Sydney Morning Herald as one of our sponsors, we managed to capture an audience and get marketing like I don't think Aboriginal arts has ever had before. I only wished I could have shared some of that with Carnivale because they need - it was marketing that got it out there. The Herald with articles every day got it to those people who clutched their pearls and we thought they would never change their minds, and they actually came back for more, which was quite amazing.

The bar we had - we had to have a bar, as you do. We had a bar called Bar Bidoo, which was our festival club, Wharf Theatre, on the harbour, really flash, fantastic. Everyone came, there was such a buzz. But this one particular night we had Aim For More playing, just deadly. Absolutely flash gorgeous guys in their suits and singing the Platters and a bit of rap and everything. Every night I would go around to all the tables, introduce myself and say, "Welcome to Bar Bidoo," as you do, good manners.

This one particular night I went up to this old couple and I hate to label or stereotype people but they were from Mosman, they were. They were really sweet and I went up and I said, "Hi, I'm Rhoda Roberts, I'm the artistic director of the festival. Have you been to see the festival?" They said, "Yes, we just saw the Shakespeare." We did a production of Shakespeare with an all Aboriginal cast. They actually said that was the first time they actually understood Shakespeare. It's about a couple of brawls over two lovers, a bit of a marriage, you know. What we're used to in the community.

I said, "Look, here's two drink vouchers. Get yourself a free drink and I hope you can stay for the evening's entertainment." They said, "No, our friend is coming." These people were about 72, they were fairly old - not old but - they said, "Our friend is coming and wešve got to go soon." I said, "Well, anyway, glad you could make it," blah, blah, blah. Two hours later I look over. Here they are swinging their hips, listening to the Platters, and for more, their friend had arrived. Not only did they have a drink in their hand, they had a bottle, and they remained there. I looked at them and they were smiling. Then I started to look around the room, black and white faces, Asian faces - God, Australian faces. Everyone was smiling, having a drink and having a good time. There was not one brawl, nothing, at this club. I just thought, "That's what it's about." Would these people have experienced this buzz if they'd come to Shakespeare, then gone home. They sat there talking to blackfellas all night. That's the way to do it, so I think we need to fall on those deaf ears sometimes.

I'm really aware of the time and I know many of you will probably want to go the jillawaa in a minute so I'm sort of hurrying up. So I began to question during the festival at what I was looking at. I've talked about collaborative work and I really believe in it because for me it's what the arts is about What is Australian arts? We're heading towards 2000. How are we going to represent ourselves as Australians? Is it about Mary-Anne Ward and her lover Captain Thunderbolt? This is a production in the festival called Black Mary.

Mary-Anne Ward was a woman of her time that, when they were trying to say we were child-like, unintelligent savages, she was holding press conferences in gaol, okay, and teaching prisoners, convict women, how to read and write, so she went totally against the policy in how they were trying to portray Aboriginal people. So they actually legislated that she wasn't to be arrested. So she continued being the brains behind Captain Thunderbolt, robbing stage coaches, and stand and deliver stuff.

This woman went on to have nine kids with this man. During the festival when we started getting out all the spiel about Black Mary, we got contacted from families around the Maitland area. One was white, one was black. Thunderbolt is white, Mary is black, they've had nine kids, right. Here we are two generations later, this family says they're white and this family says they're black, really interesting. We talked to them. The white family actually turned around at the last day, they all came to see the play, because after all this was about their aunt and their great grandmother, and said, "You know what reconciliation is about? It's about discovering your relatives." I thought, "Is this Australian art?" because colonial history and Aboriginal history were forged and linked. That is our history. Is it about the Shakespeare or is it about Aim For More? What is Australian culture?

You see, the majority of people hear their information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from their television, and I'm not talking ABC and SBS, I'm talking commercial crap, and that's what they get. They get fed a diet of misinterpreted, misinformed myths. How do we address that? When do they ever see us laughing? When do they see the humour of what we're about as people. Yes, as we know with this current government so many issues need to be heard and very, very broadly.

The Lord Mayor said, "Don't be afraid." I think we should be afraid, we should be very afraid, because we're discussing issues of stolen children. Trevor Graham's documentary, Mabo, the Life of a Man was a collaborative work with the Mabo family. They chose him, a non-indigenous man, to shoot their lives and that of Koiki. To me that is true reconciliation.

The response from the arts industry at the AFI awards on Friday night - God, I had a really heavy night on Friday night - actually brought tears to my eyes. The humility of Bonita Mabo accepting an award from the film industry and them as such giving her a standing ovation. It seems the only platform is the arts to address many of the issues we face on a daily basis but we still have such a long way to go and while legacies and relationships have been established with productions such as Mimi.

I'm only talking about products from the festival, I know there are so many other products out there and forgive me that I haven't recognised them, but this is where my head has been for the last two years so it's going to take me a while to get out of it. But Mimi was a production based on stiltwalking creation story from the Kunwunku people of Arnhem Land. Stalkers Theatre Company is a non-indigenous white theatre company, very famous. Many of you might have seen - most of you guys may even know them - anyway, they began working in Perth very early on with Michael Leslie on a production called Mimi.

There was a lot of money invested into this production from the Australia Council, the New South Wales Ministry and so forth, a lot of money, and then all of a sudden it stopped. No-one wanted it so we commissioned a choreographer, Raymond Blanco, to work with Kunwunku people and with Stalkers and we gave them money to go up there and do a two week workshop. The reason I mention this is that it was amazing because the Kunwunku people, the dancers that we had, four of them had never been out of Arnhem Land, hadn't even been to Darwin and we were about to send them to The Netherlands. It was pretty amazing. Then we brought them to Sydney.

But the relationship and watching Stalkers, having met them, then watching that company go and work in Arnhem Land and tour Arnhem Land, Yirrkala, Yirrganydji, Maningrida and so forth, the respect and the awareness they now have for the practice of that community culturally and spiritually is a relationship that will continue until the day they die. Because when you go into an Aboriginal community you have to have a place of identity, you have to belong in some purpose, have some recognition in that community. You can't just walk in. You've got to have a place. So when you go to remote community youšre given a place and that place is for life and that is a pretty amazing development and relationship and what those people will continue to work with and develop for years to come is going to be a new genre of Australian art. I think it's absolutely brilliant.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra, who's worked with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra? They're conservative, they always wear their blacks, so to speak, and here were a group of people who were prepared - I'm not very good with the jokes - who were prepared to don costumes to reflect what we wanted to show. They were prepared to allow dancers to dance in amongst their instruments. Their whole approach was like, "Okay, we're open and we're ready." If someone had said, "Yeah, the SSO will be open and ready for you," I thought, "No, we're going to have to have a few discussions here and they were just like, "No, what do you want to do?" That's pretty amazing. Working with the Aboriginal Island Dance Theatre, is that Australian art?

One of the issues, and I'm about to wrap up, but one of the issues that I think that we now really have to look at, at a very community level is, there was an example we had in the festival. Janinkingara is the Wiradjeri Company based around Dubbo, a young dance company performed for local community events or so forth but they hadn't performed outside their town. But when I saw them, God it makes me proud, you know, to see these fellows this morning, I mean, this is the next generation. Jesus Christ, we're going to knock their socks off, but anyway, there was this young company and what they'd done was, they'd talked to their elders and some of the older women had remembered some of the dances that they used to sort of do in the fifties, but of course, it's 99 years of ethnographics this year and so they went to the archives and they found all this footage. It was approved by the elders, you know, whether it was secret, sacred and so forth, and they looked back at the historic references and researched what their dances were during colonisation and so they reproduced a number of those dances. That was really exciting because I thought, "That's what we have to start doing. We have to start reclaiming history that we're losing or that has been lost."

Where I come from, for example our painting styles are very different to what people would assume was Aboriginal art. We paint with parallel lines and geometric designs, yet a number of our young artists are painting either in very classic European terms or they're painting in western desert. I really would like to see grants and money going to the fact that people should start researching what was from their original areas. Once you have that identity of security of who you are, then nobody can question you.

The festival was also committed to a wider understanding of Aboriginal culture and access for Aboriginal arts and it quite frightened me actually when we looked at the number of venues that we were using, how many actually had wheelchair access, or access for elders with frames; not good. We really have to do something about that before we hit 2000, otherwise we're going to be in big trouble.

We set up a program called the Camarada Program which is based on a Sydney language term, camarada for friend, comrade, and we called it Camarada Dignitaries. We didn't call it elders because these people were representative of five Sydney language groups as well as other community groups around New South Wales but the idea of the program was that so it will continue each year and by the year 2000 it will be a national program.

The reason I wanted it was because if I go to New Zealand and I go to a major function and the governor-general or their prime minister, or whoever is there, may also be a Maori queen or the equivalent. But we never get that cultural representation on our main stage, if we have a major function in this country we don't have the Aboriginal representatives and our communities our elders and our dignitaries are statespeople. They are the equivalent of the governor-generals, the prime ministers, they are our dignitaries and they should be represented as such. So we saw the Camarada program as a way of piloting this through the festival, then continuing and hopefully by 2000, Aboriginal people will be representing us as a nation, and I mean white and black, when I say as a nation.

We also looked a protocol and I wrote a protocol manual looking at a number of issues, particularly those of working with remote urban, rural communities and cultural issues that you have to be sensitive to but also issues such as sorry business and terminology that's used and what's acceptable and what's not. Margaret, before when you were talking about mission - and I thought, "I know what you mean, mission statement, you know, charters and all the rest," but every time I hear the mission all I think of is my grandmother and the mission and kerosene and, you know, open fires and cauliflower and - yeah. So it's really interesting the terminology that we have that often people don't hear or what we use and what's acceptable and what's not.

We also did a lot of research into the venues around Sydney. I really wanted it to be a process that those five language groups of Sydney are recognised because most people just assume, you know, the minute Cook got there everyone else disappeared and we came up with a lot of research, a lot of history and we were able to use a lot of this. Anecdotally, almost trivia, but people actually remembered things. In the program we put a, Did you Know, section and people actually remembered and some of it was quite important, you know, naming the guerilla fighters, for example, because they've always been termed in our history books as the enemy or the baddies but they were our resistance fighters, little things like that.

Now many of our many companies and exhibitions are touring nationally, regionally and internationally. As a result indigenous artists - and there were 700 employed in this festival - have ongoing work for two or three years. All I can say is, let's hope next year when we have A Sea Change we will see the same effect occur for organisations based in non-English speaking background communities because there is such amazing work that we've seen in Carnivale and we see, some of the stories are just incredible, if they can have the effect that we had and the positiveness from the community that we had, then truly we are going to start to change when we hear some of those personal stories. So I'm really looking forward to A Sea Change.

One of the major battles is television and that of colour-blind casting. Again the ABC has a new program, I think it's coming out this week, called Wild Side; wonderful. It's got about five Aboriginal actors cast as detectives - I mean, the best boy in the production, you know, the clean, nice, conservative, daggy, the one we'd never take home to meet mum, is Aboriginal, the baddies are white and so forth. So that should be really interesting to see. Let's hope everyone tunes into Pommies on Thursday night because it will be very interesting to see when you're alienated and you're despised, how it feels, and I would be very interested to see how Australians react to getting a bit of a taste of negativity from other white people.

But as I said television is the diet of this nation and we still don't have Aboriginal faces and, God bless Ernie, but it ain't enough. We don't have enough people on Neighbours or Home and Away or Heartbreak High. I mention these because this is what the youth is watching and this is the reflection of society they think they live in. Well, they don't live in it. So that's going to be my next big bunfight.

This is a time when Australians are bewildered by the changes around them and we need to embrace each other and truly work together as we head towards the new millennium. Aboriginal people and our elders in particular had such generosity of spirit and they still do and they want to share what they've got because what we've got, it's too good just to keep just to ourselves, but if we were any other nation of people in the world you would be very afraid because I can tell you, if we were Ireland or in Iraq or in Canada, the troopers would be having problems with us now because we'd be talking about terrorism. Aboriginals don't think that way. We're a very different race of people.

I read this in the Herald this morning and it's a poem that was sent in and it says: Mr. Howard, heed the words of the black American poet, Langston Hughes who wrote:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun
or fester like a sore and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat
or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load
Or does it explode?

Thank you very much.

Back: Dr Margaret Seares