The roller derby skater Maddy “BB Gun” Wilkinson has speed and scale on her side. The 24-year-old jammer (primary point-scorer) for the Adelaide team the Wild Hearses is 156cm tall (“I push just 5’ 1”, maybe”) and easily weaves between small gaps left by the opposing team, shielded by taller teammates from the scanning eyes of their rivals.
Wilkinson is fast too, and fearless, darting out to knock an opponent off balance – although she has never forgotten the time she broke her collarbone competing in junior league. “Definitely no punching or kicking people’s feet out,” she insists. “I use my shoulders a lot: shoulders, hips, the side of the body are all legal zones.”
Competitive roller derby began in Australia in 2007, with leagues springing up in Adelaide and Melbourne. These days there are more than 80 men’s, women’s, mixed and junior leagues across Australia. Players take theatrical names such as Bionic Mayhem, Frill Seeker and Judge Juicy, painting their faces in individual masks.
The bodies, sexualities and identities are diverse: one team, the Salty Dolls, renamed themselves the Good Ship Salty to acknowledge their non-binary identifying players. Roller derby was “promoted to be a women’s community so women had something they could do together”, Wilkinson says. “But through that, we have a massive community of queer skaters, and it’s important they feel comfortable, confident and safe to be themselves.”
This summer Wilkinson can be seen skating in Sydney town hall and the Adelaide Entertainment Centre theatre for the high-energy play Mama Does Derby, co-created by its director, Clare Watson, and writer, Virginia Gay, at Sydney and Adelaide festivals. Inspired by Watson’s story, the play is about a single mother whose chaotic energy leads her to join a roller derby team while trying to connect with her 16-year-old daughter, the responsible one of the pair.
Each performance will feature 10 players (two teams of five) in choreographed sequences, moving the set and prop pieces around the actors – in the case of Sydney, skating and acting in the round in a takeover of the city’s 137-year-old town hall, where a full-scale, custom-built oval track and a central stage with scenery will have been wheeled in.
The theatre-makers are mindful of the hall’s precious Tasmanian blackwood and tallowwood floor beneath the track, as well as the famed 25-metre-wide grand organ at one end. “Yeah, don’t touch the pipe organ,” Watson says, laughing. “And we must take care of the stunning parquetry floor.”
Wilkinson has been skating since the age of six, when her dad bought her a beat-up pair of roller-skates at a garage sale. After father and daughter went to their first roller derby “bout” together in 2008, Wilkinson was hooked.
She’s been part of the Wild Hearses since 2023, taking the name BB Gun in honour of her mentor: the late Sarah Strong-Law AKA Barrelhouse Bessy, the Texas-born founder of the sport in Adelaide, who was killed in a road accident in 2022.
Like the character loosely based on her in Mama Does Derby, Watson came to roller derby later in life and saw the “legendary” Strong-Law compete in the first bout she attended: at Puckhandlers rink in north-east Melbourne in 2008. “We wouldn’t be doing this show without Sarah, she’s in the fabric of everything we’re doing,” she says.
Recalling that first encounter with roller derby, Watson says: “The stakes were so high. The athleticism, the strength, the power, the agility, also the theatre of the thing, their sense of character as performers.”
She signed up for beginners training with the Victorian Roller Derby League, bringing along her six-year-old daughter, Ivy. They watched bouts together too, and Watson was surprised – never having been a sports barracker – to find herself “holding a can of VB over my head and yelling encouragement and obscenities”.
But one day the mother and daughter witnessed an accident that frightened Watson. “Somebody wearing all their safety gear went down,” she recalls. “They were unconscious for a long time, and the ambulance took them away. It turns out that they had broken their cheekbone; their eye socket was basically broken.”
The episode scared Watson off advancing to competition; she decided to transfer her love of roller derby to the stage instead. She pitched the story to the playwright and actor Gay, her longtime collaborator.
Initially Gay said no: she had never been on roller-skates, and still hasn’t. “[I’d] never seen a game of roller derby and I don’t have kids,” she tells me. But Watson won her over: Gay loves innovative theatre, after all, and she’s known Ivy since she was little.
As research, Gay went to roller derby bouts and training, and interviewed athletes. She created the characters of Maxine, played by Amber McMahon, and her 16-year-old daughter, Billie (Elvy-Lee Quici). Maxine falls in love with the sport (she competes as “Mad Max”) but Billie is uninterested – she’s more invested in car wheels than skates, eyeing a driver’s licence.
Watson’s daughter Ivy is a script consultant and, although the play isn’t directly biographical, Gay says the pair “energetically defended their avatars on stage and fought for what is important for them”. While the show explores body and sexuality and gender diversity, “It doesn’t point at them too hard,” Gay says. Does Billie identify as queer? “Well, I don’t think she uses that phrase but that is certainly something that happens.”
The musical director, Joe Lui, has put together a live three-piece band of bass, drums and guitar. “Mum’s sound is punk rock, riot grrrl, Bikini Kill – the sound of fight,” says Gay. “Billie’s sound world is like Billie Eilish, light, floating … she longs for ease.”
For Watson, the experience of collaborating with her daughter on the play has been “wonderful”; Ivy has graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with the ambition of becoming a theatre-maker in her own right.
“She’s so independent and creative and marvellous,” the proud mum says. “And we’re meeting in a different place as great friends.”
Mama Does Derby is at Sydney town hall from 15 to 22 January as part of Sydney festival; then the Adelaide Entertainment Centre from 27 February to 8 March as part of Adelaide festival
