It is where the river bends at its widest point that Rhoda Roberts comes to sit. She looks out at the water and thinks about all the generations of her family who have sat here. Once they were shaded by great cedar trees. “The river was our lifeline, our bloodline. It gave us everything. I come here and look at the river all the time.”
Above us the traffic rattles and clanks over the Ballina Street bridge, a crossing that was once made by canoe.
When I meet Roberts the Wilson river is benign, brown, sluggish, innocent as it weaves through the broken town of Lismore.
This is the same river that raged, heaved and rose up in February 2022, causing the biggest flood on record. “I think about how often we’ve copped floods here. Mother nature speaks you know, she’s had enough. We’ve desecrated this river.”
Standing in the winter sun by the river, Roberts, 65, wrapped in a puffer jacket, is small, wiry, racked by flu and coughing. Her usual warmth has been engulfed by illness. She should be in bed. Initially we abandoned plans for a walk, but after coughing her way through the interview she rallies and comes down to the river that is so significant to her.
She has overcome so much more than flu to become one of the pre-eminent arts figures of her generation. A journalist, a celebrated actor, the first Aboriginal presenter on prime-time television, festival creator and director, former head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House. A recipient of the Order of Australia. A story teller.
And there are so many stories to tell.
Roberts has been shaped by this town, this country, these people, the house she grew up in over in Lismore Heights. These streets that she walked all her life, so recently put back together and gleaming in the sun, are a part of her.
She is a Widjabul woman of the Bundjalung nation. And she is a Roberts of Lismore. One of the large, unruly, irrepressible Roberts clan.
“I think we are into 3,000-plus generations. Everywhere we went there were cousins. But we were a population that wasn’t seen.”
Her cousin Frank, from a long line of boxers, was Australia’s first Aboriginal Olympian at Tokyo in 1964. Yet there is not so much as a plaque here for “Honest” Frank Roberts. “If Lismore knew the truth of what they bred here they would be a proud city.”
We meet in the Northern Rivers Performing Arts building, where she will present a new play, My Cousin Frank, next month about the man. She picks at a plate of biscuits as we talk. Boxing was a way out of the poverty and government control on Cubawee Aboriginal Reserve. Roberts remembers visiting her uncle’s home and finding trophies instead of plates in the kitchen cupboards. All his boys were title holders.
But Frank “had a skill that was just innate, he had it in his blood”.
Her play, she says, “is just the story of who we are as people.” Her family history has been on her mind.
Her great-grandfather Lyle Roberts was the last fully initiated Aboriginal man in this region before initiation was outlawed. He sang the songlines, he passed on culture and wisdom. Her father, Frank Jnr, would read country.
“We’d go to a swimming hole and he’d stop and be crawling and doing the whole traditional way of announcing yourself as you enter that waterway. And then he’d stop us and you’d see him reading it, and he’d say ‘we’ll go down here because you don’t want to swim in your kitchen.’” Not understanding, the kids would go “Daaad”.
When she was growing up in the 70s there was an unspoken colour bar. “You didn’t go into the Ryan hotel. You couldn’t be served inside the Mecca cafe, you had to get a takeaway. When you went to the cinema you had to line up outside Grangers to go through a different entrance point. At the swimming pool they would get us all in a separate line to check us for lice and scabies. That was life in a northern town.”
On Molesworth Street we pass a building with a giant yellow heart on it. It is the Koori Mail newspaper that was founded by her father. “He had vision, after he ran a radio show for many years, that people wanted to hear more stories.” Twenty-seven years after it first hit the newstands his daughter says this casually, in passing.
Her father, Frank, had grown up on Cabbage Tree Island under the Aboriginal Protection Board.
Like his father he became a pastor with the Church of Christ and a civil rights activist. When he was studying at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma he had prayed with Martin Luther King Jr and seen the civil rights movement take flight. He would become increasingly politicised, a leader both locally and nationally.
Frank was studying at Woolwich Bible College in Sydney when he met Rhoda’s mother, Muriel, at church. She was a worldly, educated woman of deep faith who found herself in Lismore.
“She was ostracised by white women because she was married to a black man. It must have been extraordinarily difficult for her.”
Muriel would tell her children “you’re going to have to work three times harder, but once they get to know you and if you’re a decent human being then they’ll tell their friends they met a half-caste girl who had manners and was educated and intelligent”.
“Dad believed if you changed one person’s mind it would have a ricochet effect,” Rhoda says.
“My parents combined love and the belief that the world was a good place and there were good human beings in that world, no matter what their colour, I guess that really did shape us.”
As a child frightened of being taken away by welfare, Rhoda kept her head down, “I’d just make myself invisible.” But her twin sister, Lois, was a rebel who would retaliate. If anyone picked on the bespectacled, plait-wearing, introverted Rhoda, Lois or one of the cousins would punch them out.
Then, at the age of 21, Lois was left brain-damaged after a car accident.
In 1994, at the height of Rhoda’s career and married to the late actor Bill Hunter, Lois asked her to raise her baby, Emily. Lois knew she couldn’t cope, feared welfare were about to take the baby; it was natural to keep her in the family. It was difficult at times, Rhoda says, but “today I realise it is one of the greatest gifts she bestowed.” Emily grew up in a stable family with her children, Jack and Sarah, and her partner, Stephen Field. “Emily was never alone but the trauma seeps into our lives at times.”
In 1998 Lois was hitching a ride home from Nimbin when she vanished. Six months later her body would be found in the Whian Whian state forest. She had been tortured and sexually abused for at least 10 days before being killed. The murder has never been solved.
Still, every second day when Roberts is driving past the Whian Whian to Lismore, “I just cry.”
In a later email she elaborates: “It crushes me on some days, I am a twin and it just feels like I am missing a limb, I will never be whole again and so I have a ritual – before I go to sleep at night I think of moments of my sister, where I could have been kinder, or the funny and ridiculous things we did. When I wake up she is my first thought and I talk to her often, I cry and then I have to remind myself how lucky I am to be her twin and have that time with her.”
Lois’s body was found deep in the forest, an almost untouched place, but a significant cultural place. “I really believe my father was guiding because there was no way you would have ever found that body otherwise.”
When Roberts was performing in Akwanso Fly South in the late 80s, her father would come to every opening night as it traveled across the country. “But he’d never tell me. And I’d hear this laugh and know he was in the audience. And then I’d shit myself because there were a lot of swear words in that play. But he said ‘Oh now I see what you are doing. This is your pulpit’.”
By this stage Roberts can barely speak without coughing. She is slugging back water to try to get through the interview. In her later email she says, “Dad was so right. If they hear stories and truth, as uncomfortable as it may be, they will slowly change their assumptions and learn some solutions without the fear.”
But still. After the voice referendum failed, all of that early casual rejection was reignited in her mind. “You’re walking through the supermarket and you are just looking at people going ‘They voted no. They don’t want me. They don’t want to see me, they don’t want to hear me.’” There is sorrow and bewilderment as she recounts this. She thought she knew these people.
But she rallies. Giving voice to stories, maintaining language, dance and ceremony – this is her resistance, and hope. “Our old peoples know we are as persistent as they were,” she writes. “We will not be the generation who forgets the ancient philosophy of our relationship with our lands, waterways and sky country.”
My Cousin Frank, presented by Northern Rivers Performing Arts (Norpa), is playing in theatres in Lismore and Byron Bay from 24 August
