‘Even with segregation, they dressed up and danced’: the radical joy of 1960s Indigenous deb balls

‘People don’t understand how special Redfern is to the Aboriginal community’ … actor and playwright Dalara Williams with her grandmother, Norma Ingram, who inspired Williams’ new play Big Girls Don’t Cry. Photograph: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian

On a Friday night in April 1966, 16-year-old Norma Ingram was one of seven young Aboriginal women formally “presented” as part of the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball at Paddington Town Hall. “It was a lot of that old English stuff, ‘coming out into society’,” the Wiradjuri woman says of the event, which was attended by some 200 Aboriginal people.

Revellers passed under a boomerang arch to enter the hall, which was festooned with Indigenous motifs in ochre colours. Ingram wore a white ballgown. “We were all just teenagers,” she says of her debutante cohort. “It was fun for us, and we made a whole lot of new friends.”