“There was a lot of pioneering work.” This is how Rhoda Roberts, producer, arts executive and Widjabul Wiyebal woman from the Bundjalung nation, describes being the first person to take on the role of head of First Nations programming at the Sydney Opera House back in 2012.
It’s a description freighted with historical irony. The internationally famous arts centre’s sails perch on Gadigal land at a traditional meeting place that looks nothing like it did prior to the arrival of the English. The “pioneering work” Roberts has done there is, at least partly, about undoing that other kind of pioneering work: invasion and colonisation.
“The job was actually created for me,” she says, tipping her hat to then-CEO Richard Evans and programming director Jonathan Bielski, for creating a role that was the first of its kind at a major performing arts organisation in Australia. And it meant, she says, that Indigenous people finally “actually had authorship and control of our content and projects” at the Opera House.
At the time of her appointment, she described the executive position as “a visionary national leadership project” that showed the Opera House was “committed to on-the-ground reconciliation, rather than just having the paperwork and ticking the box”.
Nearly a decade later, she is moving on. Speaking to Guardian Australia from her home in Northern New South Wales before the announcement of her final curated program, Roberts reflects on whether her comments from nine years ago still hold up.
“I think in any institution across Australia today, First Nations people still face systemic behaviours,” she says. “Sometimes the institutions aren’t aware that those behaviours occur on a day-to-day basis. I think that it just exists as part of the Australian norm. We have quite a bit of work to do to switch that thinking. Slowly, slowly, things have changed, but not perhaps as quickly as we had assumed they would.”
The renewed Black Lives Matter movement, she says, has been the catalyst for a new wave of conversation about how to provoke change – in cultural spaces, as well as in the justice system.
“Certain sectors of the creative industry are in fear of their jobs, because they’re dinosaurs, you know – old white men,” she says. “I think the change we’re seeing with this groundswell of new creatives is how courageous they are. Back in the day, you’d be diplomatic – things tended to get diluted, but you’d work towards a compromise. Whereas now, they just say it as it is.”
Shortly before Roberts arrived, the Sydney Opera House developed a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) – a bureaucratic tool that sets out the company’s commitments to First Nations people. The Opera House claims it was the first performing arts organisation in Australia to have one.
“RAPs can be very tokenistic,” Roberts says. “Companies want to be good global citizens, so they do their RAP, put all their KPIs – which often are unattainable – tick the box, and done. But we have to use this as a working tool. So there was a lot of thought from across [the Sydney Opera House] going into what the RAP would be.”
Part of that work was recognising “disparities across the creative sector” and creating programs to help alleviate those, such as sending staff out on exchange and skill-development programs with Indigenous arts organisations on-country, and finding meaningful ways to bring Indigenous diversity and perspectives back into the country’s most high profile arts centre.
It also meant creative commissioning. Roberts highlights Natives Go Wild, the circus show that depicted the shadowy, uncomfortable aspects of the career of the “Greatest Showman” PT Barnum. “In the film [The Greatest Showman] and in the musical, neither reflected on the truth telling of how he engaged with Indigenous peoples, and created a human zoo,” she says. “We wanted to have that visibility, that we also played a role in that history of circus.”
She’s also involved in the establishment of the World Indigenous Art Orchestra, a project that is still in development. “It’s about reviving those first instruments, and looking at our original music scores,” Roberts says.
“There’s this cultural amnesia that [Indigenous people] had any classics to bring to the fabric of Australian culture,” she says. “While they weren’t written down, we do indeed have classics.”
Roberts becomes visibly emotional when she speaks about Dance Rites, the Indigenous dance competition she founded seven years ago. She recounts the story of the Kulgoodah dancers who hail from Woorabinda, a small community in North Queensland that has frequently battled high rates of crime.
“Woorabinda’s always had a fairly distraught reputation,” Roberts says. “And, of course, the services that are supposed to be provided for every Australian aren’t quite provided for that community.”
When Kulgoodah entered Dance Rites in 2017, they won. “And those men leapt up and leapt to the ground in tears. The joy, that pride that we recognised them, that they simply were good enough. I could cry. It was so moving to see these men, and just how much it meant them,” she says.
Dance, she says, has helped to turn the community around. “Fifteen-year-old to 25-year-old young men get forgotten in our society. They’re totally invisible. Most people are afraid of them. They’ve got black skin, so ‘don’t think just shoot’, you know? That gives them a fear of authority as well. We have to empower those young men, we have to give them visibility and a sense of purpose.”
Their Dance Rites performance also helped propel the music career of a young vocalist from the town: last year, Miiesha, who accompanied them in 2017, won the best new talent prize at the National Indigenous Music Awards.
Roberts finished up at the Opera House just over a week ago. No replacement has yet been appointed; at the time of writing, the role is still being advertised. Her final program is due to roll out in April: Barrabuwari, one of four free outdoor concerts representing “the future voices of Australia”, will be headlined by Ziggy Ramo performing his 2020 album Black Thoughts.
“What I was able to achieve at the Opera House was in service to my people. So there was the fear of leaving. And freelancing is terrifying – of all the times to leave a position! Am I stupid? Not a good businesswoman,” she says with a laugh. But her prospects are far from bleak. She’s in the throes of directing the Parrtjima light festival, the Boomerang series at Bluesfest (both in April), and working on three films.
And if the work dries up? “I live off the grid, grow veggies, got the chooks. So I’ll survive.”
