Michael Leslie’s Politics

He may never have heard of Winston Churchill before, but Kamilaroi/Mandandanji man, Michael Leslie’s award of a Churchill Fellowship taking him to New York and training with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company “taught him to be serious”. And that’s one of the key take-aways from the new one-man autobiographical show that appeared briefly at Carriageworks in Sydney. Beyond the Tracks ran for only three performances, which may be partly because many like me associate Leslie with his lauded career in dance and arts leadership in WA. In fact, he identifies primarily with good ol’ racist Moree – though the short and sharp 45 minute show seemed to reveal that his first few years were spent in a tent beside the Asquith to Cowan railway line just out of Sydney.

No wonder he’s still lithe and tough-minded today as he approaches 70, illustrating dance moves vigorously and instructing an imaginary dance class to shape up or get out. He also takes on various contentious aspects of Aboriginal politics such as  1965 Freedom Riders from Sydney with the repeated refrain, “Has anything changed?”.

It helps that the hard man Leslie is narrated and backed by the excellent Ursula Yovich in speech and song, and that director Nicholas Flanagan has accumulated a video wall of images that help to tell the story.

For, from being encouraged to take unlikely steps in dance – “Boys don’t wear tights”- by the chance of meeting pretty girls on the sets of TV adverts, to joining the brand new National Aboriginal & Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) in 1975 along with Lillian Crombie, Cheryl Stone, Darryl Williams, Richard Talonga, Kim Walker and Philip Langley, Leslie’s career has flown. Dancing with the pioneering Aboriginal & Islander Dance Theatre, choreographing for the musical Bran Nue Dae, to being involved in the foundation of Black Swan Theatre and the wonderful Marrugeku Company in the West, and the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts in Brisbane, all lead to his taking home the prestigious Red Ochre Award for a lifetime’s achievement in First Nations arts in 2010.

A good story told with flair and music.

But that refrain, “Has anything changed?” hit home for me when a tiny passing reference was made by Leslie which almost anyone else would have missed. For, as a student at NAISDA in 1977, Leslie was included in a substantial delegation to a huge event in Nigeria – the World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Three years of planning and generous funding had gone into the Australian contribution, lead by John Moriarty at the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. But, almost 50 years later, something that happened there still rankles enough with Michael to be worth mentioning in this brief life: “Lance Bennett wouldn’t let us dance with the tribal people”.

It was only through the archives of the now-defunct Aboriginal Cultural Foundation (ACF) of which Bennett was the manager, that I discovered how bitterly contested that mixed delegation of tribal and urban artists had been. The Bulletin covered it at length, allowing me to discover that not much has changed in the largely undiscussed contest between the two Aboriginal groups. As I’ve reported before, there hasn’t been a tribal artist on an Australia Council board since 2008.

But in Lagos, it would seem that the “urban, part-Aboriginal big talkers” (I’m quoting from The Bulletin in ‘77) thought that they could join in ceremonial dances by some of the Far North’s finest. Having experienced some of those ceremonies myself just eight years later at a festival on Groote Eylandt, I am aware just how seriously the Anindilyakwa, Wik etc take this aspect of their culture. And the fact that the late Lance Bennett, though non-Indigenous, had been appointed to manage the 17 remote dancers by the ACF’s board of tribal leaders certainly gave him the authority to pass on that message of exclusion to Leslie et al. But it lead to such bad blood that the tribal group walked out – not helped by the chaotic Nigerian organisation – leading to a statement from Jabani Lalara, a Groote Eylandt leader, that: “The half of the Australian Aboriginal delegation which left the Nigerian Festival was the tribal half – who have kept our old sacred culture strong. The half who stayed were the urban part-Aborigines who have lost their culture”!

Now that would have upset a serious man like Michael Leslie. For him, it’s clearly still a point of serious difference between Australia’s northern and southern First Peoples. Is it time to go deep and distinguish these culturally opposed parties?

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