Spurned by a careers counsellor who advised her that finishing high school would be a waste of time, the Aboriginal storyteller, festival director, curator, actor and writer Rhoda Roberts went on to become one of Australia’s greatest cultural ambassadors.
Roberts, a Bundjalung Widjabul Wiyebal elder who has died aged 66, dedicated her life to sharing the stories of her people, preserving and promoting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture through language, dance and ceremony, and securing pathways for First Nations talent to flourish.
Against a backdrop of racial discrimination, intergenerational trauma and the historical oppression of Aboriginal people, Roberts resolutely determined to change the overarching narrative, declaring Indigenous culture to be an advantage for all Australians.
“To share and celebrate First Nations culture together can be a path to a shared future and I’ve continued to turn that belief into action for many years,” she wrote.
Roberts began her career as a registered nurse, a volunteer with Radio Redfern and a drama student, but by 2000 her work as a creative director for the Sydney Olympics Awakening Ceremony – highlighting Indigenous culture during the opening ceremony – had been viewed by millions of people around the world.
She co-founded the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust in 1988 and in 1995, launched the Dreaming festival/Garrabadu, to “sing the water alive”. Its success led to that pivotal invitation from the Sydney Olympics organising committee to direct their various associated arts festivals.
In 1990 Roberts became the first Aboriginal person to host a prime-time current affairs program, SBS’s Vox Populi, and in 1992, while working in radio, she co-founded Deadly Sounds, which ran for 21 years, giving Indigenous people a voice across Australia and the Pacific.
In 2012, Roberts became the inaugural head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, a role she held for nine years. While there, she initiated Dance Rites, a First Nations dance competition, and advocated for the inclusion of Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Deadly Awards.
She became creative director of the Parrtjima festival of light in Alice Springs/Mparntwe in 2017, with the goal of encouraging Australians to engage with Aboriginal storytelling through light installations.
“Come and understand the fragility of the land that we have looked after and continue its stewardship with us … because when you do know the story of that tree or that rock, you look at it in a totally different way,” she said.
Most recently, Roberts wrote a one-woman play, My Cousin Frank, about her relative and Australia’s first Aboriginal Olympian, the boxer Frank Roberts, who represented Australia at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
She also “modestly yet proudly” credited herself with introducing the term welcome to country while establishing protocol manuals for the arts industry during the 1980s.
Rhoda Roberts was born at Camperdown, Sydney, on 8 July 1959, a twin daughter of Frank Roberts and his wife, Muriel (nee Fleming). Her Aboriginal father, a pastor and civil rights activist, and her white mother met at church and fell in love but could not marry without permission from the Aboriginal Protection Board.
Roberts and her sister, Lois, and two brothers, Phillip and Mark, grew up in Lismore in northern NSW, on Bundjalung land where the Roberts family has deep family connections.
“I think we are into 3,000-plus generations,” Roberts said of her family. “Everywhere we went, there were cousins, but we were a population that wasn’t seen.”
Her mother was ostracised by the town’s white women, while the children were forcibly checked for scabies and lice before they could swim in the local pool. Roberts’s early life was spent in fear of being taken from her family by welfare authorities.
Her father, who had once prayed with Martin Luther King Jr, was heavily involved in the 1967 Referendum and later spoke at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972. He was instrumental in establishing the Koori Mail newspaper, encouraged his children to speak language at home despite it being outlawed, and instilled in them the foundational lesson of service to their community.
At Richmond River high school, Roberts was among the first Indigenous students in the area to finish Year 10 but with little encouragement for her dream of attending university or becoming a journalist, she set her sights on a nursing career.
In a similar story to that of one of her role models, Lowitja O’Donoghue, Roberts was refused the opportunity to study nursing locally by a matron who believed Aboriginal girls would get pregnant and not complete their training. Instead, her mother took her to Sydney where she was immediately accepted. She became a registered nurse in 1979 and worked in London for five years, gaining further qualifications in emergency nursing.
When she was 21, Roberts’s twin, Lois, was involved in a serious car accident and sustained head injuries requiring a long rehabilitation. In 1994, Lois, believing herself unable to manage motherhood, asked her sister to take guardianship of her daughter Emily, transforming Roberts and her then-husband, the actor Bill Hunter, into parents of a newborn.
In 1998, Hunter abruptly left the marriage, later telling Roberts that he had not wanted her to nurse him through illness. He died of cancer in 2011.
The same year, Lois disappeared while hitchhiking near Nimbin. The Roberts family struggled to convince local police that she was missing. Six months later, her remains were found in local rainforest but her death remains unexplained.
“It crushes me on some days,” Roberts said. “I am a twin and it just feels like I am missing a limb. I will never be whole again.”
Roberts was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016 for her services to the arts. In 2012, she produced Yarrabah the Musical in collaboration with Opera Australia and was director of the Indigenous multi-arts Boomerang festival. She has held positions on numerous boards.
She is survived by Emily and by her partner, Stephen Field, and their children, Jack and Sarah.
“The world-wide dialogue of fear is rising. We need to push an alternate rhythm, movement and positive change with grace and respect,” Roberts wrote.
“Start to listen and your body will catch the rhythm.”
• Rhoda Roberts, broadcaster and cultural creator, born 8 July 1959; died 21 March 2026
