They are fashionably late to their own show, leaving no time for a final run through.
A dozen models painted up and dressed in couture race to the stage, file into line, and finally, as the dust settles on Gurindji Country, they nervously step onto stage to a crowd of applause.
Strutting across a makeshift runway was never a dream for Sheronica Snowy – she didn't know it could be until the opportunity was right in front of her – plucked from the crowd in her home community of Yarralin.
"I feel really proud of myself, really excited, but also very nervous," she said.
Their clothes tell the stories of their culture, sharing yarns thousands of years old – but on this night, in the tiny community of Kalkarindji, heaving with the footsteps of thousands of people – the show's tenor runs deeper than sharing First Nations culture.
At the 56th anniversary of the Wave Hill walk-off — a seminal event that galvanised national change and paved the way for equal wages for Aboriginal workers, as well as a new land rights act – history was made again.
For the first time, women dominated the entertainment line-up at Freedom Day Festival on Saturday night, in a bid to put women back into the history of the Wave Hill story.
It is well known that in 1966 Vincent Lingiari led some 200 stockmen and their families off the Vestey Brothers' Wave Hill pastoral station in protest of decades of exploitation, violence and unfair working conditions.
It led to one of the longest strikes in Australian history, and inspired one of the country's most iconic songs From Little Things Big Things Grow.
From the trailblazing activist Dexter Daniels, who travelled the country to spread the message of the strike to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the history is dominated by men.
Yet there is another part of the story that has been blotted out by time – the account of the women who were also paid rations to cook and clean, and made up a significant portion of the strikers.
"While it's always important to acknowledge and honour Vincent Lingiari and all of the legendary men of the Wave Hill walk-off, we also wanted to use the festival's Saturday program to show deep respect for the women of this powerful movement whose stories often go untold," festival producer Susannah Tosh said.
Saturday night's headliner, Pakana singer from Tasmania, Denni, said it was a "massive honour" to be playing on Gurindji country on a night that had a powerful message that struck a chord with her own history.
"My great-grandmother and my uncle were very heavily involved in land rights and land parcels being returned to our community," she said.
Yet decades later the "struggle" to win back land continued.
"What we are doing here today, what the mob, the TOs, and locals are putting in to share [the untold story of women] is super important," she said.
"The women in the walk-off were essentially the back bone … [it's important to] commemorate and honour them and the hard-yards that they put in," adding that parallels run in the music industry today.
"Women are very highly undervalued, so we will be singing up tonight, swishing the flies away and being very proud to be here."
The all-women line-up also included Jem Cassar Daley, Toni Childs, Ripple Effect — an all-female rock band hailing from a remote Arnhem Land community.
Emmy winner and three-time Grammy-nominated singer Toni Childs, who performed an electric set, getting amongst the crowd, told the ABC earlier that even though she knew the legendary Wave Hill walk-off story well, being on the ground was inimitable – especially as a cast of women performers.
"I think we are going to rock tonight, I can feel it in my bones," she said.
