In Ntaria, 130km west of Alice Springs in Australia’s red centre, Que Kenny stands in country made famous by artist Albert Namatjira, her shock of red hair glowing against the clear blue sky. An Aboriginal transgender activist, studying law at Deakin University but living in and working for her central desert community, Kenny has fought against more kinds of discrimination than most.
“I’ve been through a hell of a lot in the community, but that never killed my spirit, people’s negativity. I’ve been spat at, sworn at, had dirt thrown at me.”
She laughs, dismissing the clearly still painful memories.
“I’m still standing tall and proud. And now I’m helping the people that disrespected me. That’s their big barrier, thinking whether or not they should allow me to help them in anything.”
Kenny is being interviewed by Aboriginal photographer Wayne Quilliam, as part of a photographic exhibition soon to open at the United Nations in Geneva, exploring the race and gender discrimination experienced by Australian Indigenous women.
She is deeply religious, but blames European-imported Christianity for much of the discrimination she and other Indigenous transgender people face in their own communities. “We have brother-boys, and sister-girls, and we are being accepted now. I believe that this was accepted many years ago but colonisation took away a lot of things through the bible,” she says.
She draws parallels between the fights for the rights of women, LGBTQI people, and Indigenous Australians, which all inform her activism both on behalf of and within her own community.
“I want to see changes here with us Aboriginal women, to have that voice to speak not only for ourselves but men and women and the younger generations,” she says.
With some pushing from Kenny, women are gaining more of that voice in her family’s community, navigating the traditions in Indigenous culture that jar with modern feminism. “Going back to remote communities out west, women still have to ask permission from old men to speak up and talk,” she says. “For us it’s rude [for women] to just get up and talk without permission from the elders.”
Kenny notes the difference between her activism and her place to speak up in her community where “most days the elders will tell you to shut up.” She laughs again. “Never mind, I can get up in public and talk – when I get back home you don’t have much say anymore ... [but] I can see it’s gradually working, because I’ll get a lot of elders asking me to get up and talk for us. So it’s happening.”
Leaving Ntaria, Quilliam describes Kenny as “pure unadulterated strength”.
“I suppose that’s one thing I’ve learned from these women. A lot of them are friends or acquaintances I’ve known for quite some time, but to now feel their resilience and know their strength is inspiring.”
In An Undeniable Right, an exhibition of striking individual portraits and filmed interviews, Quilliam hopes to shares the experiences of strong and proactive Indigenous women with an international audience.
“The idea, visually, is to be light skin and dark skin, urban, rural and remote from all different parts of Australia, so there is a balanced visualisation of what Aboriginal women look like,” Quilliam tells Guardian Australia on the road from Ntaria to Alice Springs.
“Whenever I’m creating a show for Australia, I tend to find – and this is just a general rule – that Australians have a preconceived idea of what Aboriginal Australia is meant to look like, meant to act, meant to sound,” he says. “I find when I go to international exhibitions, they come very much with an open mind. They still do have have minor preconceived ideas, but they’re quite open to interpretations about who we are.”
The interviews are deeply personal, covering empowerment and inspiration, racism and discrimination. The project has been done “on the fly”, says Quilliam, who tentatively arranged meetings with women suggested to him along the way, hoping for the best.
Quilliam and Guardian Australia meet Trisha Morton-Thomas on the day the first episode of her comedy, 8MMM, is to air on ABC TV. The writers says she has “sweated blood” for four years and almost lost her mind over the project.
“For me, tonight is not the big deal,” she says, standing on the edge of an Alice Springs suburb with the town’s famous ranges behind her, as Quilliam adjusts his camera. “A couple of days ago we had a screening for the community on our town council lawn and that was the night for me … For me I needed to know the reaction of the community to the series more than I need to know the reaction of Australia. Because it is about my community.”
The comedy is darkly funny and brutally skewers the relationship between white and black Australia. It’s written to shock, but shouldn’t surprise, and is borne from Morton-Thomas’s own experiences. She describes the outwardly racist and jaded white manager Dave Cross (played by Geoff Morrell), as “probably the most important character” in the show.
“Some people have had a go at me about including that kind of a character and those kinds of words in the series, but I can’t write about Alice Springs if I don’t include that character,” she says.
An Anmatyerr woman who raised her children mainly on her own while her late former partner battled schizophrenia, Morton-Thomas speaks highly of her family and community, but despairs at the disempowerment and tragedy she has seen. In 2012, her nephew died in police custody. The coroner found “completely inadequate and unsatisfactory” care by police led to his death, and Morton-Thomas acted as spokeswoman for a family angry there would be no consequences.
Quilliam asks her view of the experience of women in Indigenous communities today, where such tragedy is not uncommon. “I think taking over the reins has been forced on Indigenous women here – that or they’ve had to just pick it up and run with it, because so many of our men have been disempowered,” she says.
“Our men are under attack in a huge way. So they drink or take drugs to sort of hold their soul together I guess. And a lot of times it’s destroying it. Then they come home and who’s the most vulnerable person at home? Your wife and your children.”
Morton-Thomas points to the role of men in her life, particularly in the older generation, who have grounded and shaped her. “You can’t have a full woman without a positive male influence there, a nurturing male influence,” she says. “Otherwise you’re only half a person. You have to have the yin and the yang.
It’s been a personal journey for Quilliam as well as a physically exhausting one across the continent, with his own outlook challenged in the interviews, including those Guardian Australia witnesses.
He says he has been criticised over the project – another man trying to tell women’s stories for them – and has struggled not to react. As a man brought up to respect women but who does not witness the everyday sexism many rail against, he doesn’t understand the backlash.
But after meeting so many strong women who have experienced discrimination based on gender as well as race, has the photographer learned much? It’s a leading question. Quilliam has been noticeably challenged by some ideas put forth by his interviewees, while latching on to others that confirm his own views.
“Oh yeah. It never ceases to amaze me, what I thought I knew compared to what I really know,” he says. “I suppose what I’ve learned [is] I thought we were all one people, and I thought we were on the same journey, but doing these interviews has actually opened my mind up to how different we are.”
He stops short of saying there have been any great feminist epiphanies, but there were certainly many surprising answers to his questions.
“What I thought would be the answer is not. It’s made me take a step back and say OK, I need to re-evaluate this,” he says. “Because the women have come back and gone ‘well you may be thinking that way, but it’s not the way we think’.”
- An Undeniable Right opens at the United Nations in Geneva on 17 June
