Questions from the Audience
Question: How long did it take you from the first moment from when you were selected to be the Artistic Director to all the productions? What was the time span for that?

RR: Eighteen months exactly. I started in December of '95. I was approached six times for the job, didn't take it initially because I didn't want the pressure or the stress or whatever. And then when I realised that it could become a very folkloric festival I decided that yes, it was an opportunity to take on. There certainly wasn't enough time and as you probably know, people working within the industry, that often it's two to three years out that other artistic directors are appointed, so it was a much shorter process.

Question: Are there any plans for future Aboriginal arts festivals?

RR: I think there is a need, because you only have to look at all the festivals that come out and the level of indigenous works. There's very, very rarely collaborative work and you could really count on your hand - perhaps you might get one visual arts exhibition, or you might get one Aboriginal production as such. So I think that there is a need for a biennial festival, a community or indigenous festival, particularly if it has the collaborative nature of the works, because I think it's more than just an indigenous festival, that it does sort of turn around and go, well it's an Australian festival, and it is pure and simply Australian works.

Question: I'll ask two questions. I'll ask the easy one first. You've kind of answered it partly when you talked about the couple from Mosman, but I was wondering if you had any other examples of how individuals you've met during the course of the Festival have actually expressed how it had changed their attitudes, particularly obviously people of a white Australian background, and was there a kind of wider resonance, did you any get a sense of political effects spreading out, so to speak?

RR: Yeah, I mean, it's really hard... We did some audience surveys and I'll be really interested to see the result of them. They were done by Lisa Meekison sitting right in the front here, came along and did all our research for us for nothing as a volunteer. Thank you Lisa. I think one of the things that really had an impact was the 'Wimmin's Business' series, because all those women were talking about either children being taken or displacement and it wasn't just from Australia, so I think for a lot of people it occurred to them that this policy actually existed in Canada as it did in Australia - perhaps it didn't make us feel so bad, that there were other countries that were doing it. I went on opening night to one of the shows and the Minister for the Olympics, Mr Michael Knight's wife was in front of me and she's in tears for the whole time and that amazed me and there were people who were really affected. I used to work as a nurse out at Canterbury and I had a little old woman ring me up - I nursed her, when I nursed in my very first year of nursing, and hadn't seen her but back when I was nursing [I had] cups of tea with her and she rang me out of the blue and invited twenty of her friends from her local bowling club - I think it was Greenacre - and they came, and when they came to one production, they came to five. And I said, 'Look I'll get you the tickets', she went, 'No, we're paying for this'. And that was pretty amazing, because this was a group of women who - I mean, if they go to the theatre, they're going to go and see Showboat, they're not going to go and see Aboriginal theatre. And the letters. I think the letters were... particularly from a generation, the 25 and under group were quite responsive, which was just great because that's the sort we need to be introducing these people more into theatre - and the visual arts and dance and all the rest of it. So there were some good stories, but there was also people who weren't happy. You can't imagine the people who rang and abused me and some letters that weren't good because they felt that we had no right to be working with the SSO or up in Government House and who did we think we were, and how dare we, and there was 'Dear Mary, Gin, Darky, Boong', no, 'Mary' was the last one... 'Dear Gin, Mary...', like every sort of derogatory name, how dare you and how dare you refer to me as a non-Aboriginal. And that was interesting - the power of words, the power of terminology. He's really offended that I'm not referring to him as an Australian. That's really interesting.

Question: That leads on to my second question, the difficult one, about some of the themes. You kind of alluded to this at the beginning with Black Mary, how some relatives identified with the white side and the black side. It's an issue I think that has this politically correct barrier around it, and that's people who are of part white background and part Aboriginal background, maybe falling between the two, and somewhere in the middle identifying. I think it's an issue that has to be developed and discussed, particularly in theatre and probably books to a lesser extent, particularly in theatre. Now, is that something that you can see developing in the future? Do you know of any projects that are looking at the audience point of view?

RR: Yeah, I certainly hope there is, and I think that that's exactly what I'm talking about when we have to look at issues that affect us as well. I mean, in the Aboriginal community, if someone's Aboriginal and you know their family and the particular community they come from, full stop, end of the road, they're black. Doesn't matter if they've got blonde hair and blue eyes. Now that's really hard for other Australians to accept, that's just the way we are because we've always been like that. But again, for people were taken and have been raised as white people and then discovered that they have this heritage - that's a very hard thing for them referring to them as being black, and they've got red hair. So there are many issues as we go through that process as a community, but also as a broader community as well. One of the most disappointing things about the Festival was the level of the writing. You know, early on I got a number of scripts and they were kitchen sink drama, very mediocre, and I know why that's happening is that there hasn't been continuous playwrights' conferences and there hasn't been the opportunity for discussion and for writers perhaps to - I don't even know now with the Australian Centre for Playwrights. They invite Aboriginal writers now, but still there's only one or two and we really need to take that on board and make an effort - that's why I say sometimes our generation's become a bit complacent. And that was frightening because there was no one writing being brave or going on the edge a little bit and so we have to start moving there. Apart from the productions that were in the Festival, a lot of new, good works had been workshopped before the Festival, like a new commission or something. And that's why we commissioned works like Deborah Cheetham's and Leah Purcell's, because their story did have an edge.

RR: That's Aboriginal people, I mean, nobody hears our level of humour. That's the whole point, because we can laugh about ourselves. It's a bit like we need, I suppose - I still hate saying the term 'wogs', I have a real problem with that - but Wogs Out Of Work was a period of time in theatre that really made us look, and that whole terminology and look at Greek Australians and so forth, has changed and we've seen, right down to Frontline now these sorts of different approaches. Perhaps we need to be brave enough, doing that kind of work and we need something like that so that people actually see that we have this level and the ability to laugh at yourself and show that you're not afraid to laugh and that's something we have to be a little bit more brave about.

Audience: ????

RR: Yeah, I'm still counting all those pennies, but we did very, very well. We've actually been able to put quite a lot of money into next year's 'A Sea Change' from this particular festival... Yes! Thank God for that! And Belvoir Street - you know, I love this place and Black Mary, I put so much money into that production and I fought so hard because that to me was very dear to my heart, because I've seen that production earlier on at PACT theatre - that was just a story and here was this women who was intelligent and used to hold press conferences and they couldn't handle it because she actually was articulate and was teaching convicts how to read and write, you know, that was totally against what the nation thought of Aboriginal people in that day and time, and through the theatre, to tell a story like that... and she's a woman, telling this guy how to rob [and she] can change history. And, you know, to have something so tragic happen, not only to that production, but to the cast and the crew was just⁹... I cried that night, I was in tears, to the point of getting really upset and you can't stop and it was just - I didn't know what to do. But, afterwards I thought, well, we had 10 shows, we had 10 shows that sold out, and that was amazing. Mimi started having 600 people a night but because there were so many people lining up each night we extended it to 1000, so we had this opportunity where the productions we didn't think a lot of people would come to, that they did, and laughed and kept coming back and so we were able to increase seating and so forth and I [said] let's just put it at 60% and if we sell 60%, great, so given my figures at the very beginning, being very careful, but of course we sold capacity for most things, so that was fantastic and it really says something about Sydney and Australian audiences and we did have people coming from interstate to see some of the shows as well, and I think that's something now we could look at and even in the theatre, it's a really [important] thing, how commercial do you go? The opportunity through marketing and tourism and working with those sorts of [people], even for a small productions, there's so much out there that we can... and we should, we should be claiming that and taking over as arts precincts and so forth.

Question: You said that you'd set a precedent by organising the Festival. Do you think that the festivals that follow your Festival will go back to a more commercial one?

RR: Well, it's up to the artistic director of those particular festivals, but I really think that having seen what's happened in the [Festival] it was political, but I don't think that really... [everything] as far as I can see these days is political, even theatre. But what it's given us; we had 700 indigenous artists employed in this festival and probably about 550 of those are still working. It's not bad. We've never, ever had that, that level of employment at the one time in a particular period. But what it did was, for us, it opened new doors for the people working in other theatre companies now, simply because people saw them and 'Oh gee they're good'. So it's opened a lot of doors for people. The doors were there, but it's kind of like I suppose... and I'm just hoping that next year, because... Oh God, you know, the amount of work that we have from non-English speaking backgrounds and companies, particularly out in our Western suburbs is phenomenal. It has so much energy, they are the people who are doing the new work. Now if we can sort of continue that sort of the establishment of relationships, say with the STC or Cabramatta or some group out there, the opportunities we had that I think clearly - with those other sectors - it could very well highlight this new Australian work as well. And I'm sure it probably will, because next year is 'Sea Change' which looks at our relationship with the waters and so forth and it is the International Year of the Ocean next year, and there'll be those tall ships... But also 'A Sea Change' as in the change that's occurred in Australia since immigration.

[Pause]

You can be nasty too, I don't care!

Question: I sometimes wonder whether some black writers get into a development process with white well-meaning dramaturgs who sort of hijack the work and take the rights to it. I've seen one example where a really amazing story was being told in a way that I thought was [like that] and it sort of hijacked it in a sort of a, again pejoratively, in a sort of an STC white style of playwriting. I wonder if you have seen it happen, a process where you actually start to fight back and actually tell a community's story the community's way, rather than kowtow.

RR: It's hard. Two schools of thought. The writer wants to pay his rent and he wants to extend his skills and if he's been working with the STC, then that's great on his CV. On the other hand, that was why I was so insistent that the whole thing of having a policy of authorship and control passed, because of the control of the product. Even if it's being directed by a non-indigenous director, the control of that product is indigenous hands, whether it's through producing, directing, or writing or so forth, curating an Aboriginal arts exhibition, or choreographing a dance piece. And I think that's really important. I think people have to step back, because we're tired of the stories being told, not from our perspective, but narrated almost. It always happens. David Unaipon was - he's the one on the fifty bucks; if you've got one there - and he's from South Australia, and he in the '30s in fact... Oodgeroo Noonuccal was really our first published writer, but David Unaipon wrote this manuscript for that Angus & Robertson - is it George Angus, I think? He was a good mate of David's. David invented the shears for the sheep and when he died they found all these drawings of helicopters based on the aerodynamics of the boomerang and they labelled him the Leonardo of Australia. That was the background. He wrote this manuscript based on all the stories of his language group, gave them over, which were then given to a guy and his last name was Brown who published a book in 1938, word for word, of David Unaipon's manuscript. It's in the library, actually, his manuscript, along with the published book. No mention, no acknowledgment of David Unaipon. You can pick up that book and go 'Oh great, creation stories from days gone by. I'll read that, oh that's gospel'. Well it is, but [...]. So constantly you're fighting that level of control of the product. On the other hand there's been opportunities where writers... OK, I'll be totally honest here. Up the Road: there's a lot of work that needed to be done on that script by Johnny Harding - I love Johnny and it's fantastic, but without Neil Armfield that final production that we saw on the stage wouldn't have been the level... But then, Neil's worked with a lot of Aboriginal actors and so forth, so he has a certain awareness. I don't think you can ever understand. I'll never understand what it's like to be gay, but I hope I'm aware of the issues, but I can never understand it. But Neil does have that awareness and he's prepared to listen, just listen to the language and people and so forth, and that obviously is captured on that production, but I think his level of direction showed as to the script I read initially. I mean it's still a fine script but it needs to be worked. That's really funny, because every Aboriginal woman who read it went 'Oh God, how clichéd' and then we realised no one else has even heard of these clichés. It's really interesting as well... But, yeah, it's like 'be prepared' and that's why I say sometimes the pre-production's going to take longer, the development's going to take longer, but let it go into indigenous hands and work together, because everyone brings something; you don't have to be precious about it; well, I think that showed. One thing, Mimi for example, I mean, here was, it amazes me: they put over half a million bucks, the funding bodies who put over half a million dollars into it, and what was going to happen to it, if we had not reinvested in it, to get it to go to the Netherlands festival. What would have happened? And yet, it was one of the most amazing productions. Yes, we reworked it, we got a choreographer to work with them, but it was still an okay production when we saw it, it just needed to be tuned a little bit more. But that's what happens all the time in Australia; you get a production up that doesn't have a long time to work with new commissions or whatever, we put it into one festival, everyone goes 'Oh yeah' and it's gone. We need to be working with these works for three or four years to develop them. After all, that's what Europeans do.

Anything else? Let's go have a drink.

Notes
1. This version of the lecture is a combination of Rhoda Roberts' notes and a transcription of the lecture on the day. Square brackets indicate where a section of text was inaudible/incomprehensible and several words have been added to complete the sentence.
2. Pauline Hanson
3. Sydney Theatre Company
4. When a person in a community dies and other members of the community must return home for the ceremonies associated with this.
5. National Institute of Dramatic Art
6. Victorian College of the Arts
7. Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts
8. Production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Noel Tovey.
9. The season of Black Mary was cancelled after some scaffolding (on which the audience was seated) collapsed and several people were injured.