Rhoda Roberts 1959-2026

A great leader of First Nations and Australian culture in the person of Rhoda Roberts AO has died far too young after a brave fight against a rare ovarian cancer. After a racist upbringing as a mixed-ancestry child in Lismore – “where you were either black or white”, she once exclaimed – she began life as a nurse in Sydney and London before deciding that she could achieve more for her Bundjalung Wiyebal people and other Indigenous Australians through the performing arts.

In the mid-1980s, she co-founded the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust with Brian Syron, Bob Maza, Justine Saunders and Lydia Miller, though it was not until 1988 that a Sydney theatre – Belvoir – would give them house room for a production. It was also there that she shone as one of three Indigenous actors in the 1993 play Radiance. Roberts and Lydia Miller worked with playwright Louis Nowra to create the work about the lives of three sisters who reunite after their mother’s funeral. Radiance really kickstarted mainstream interest in Indigenous drama.

Meanwhile, Rhoda was the first Indigenous face to appear regularly on national television via First in Line, an SBS current affairs program.

But her huge breakthrough came with the Sydney 2000 Olympiad of arts festivals – where she was appointed Artistic Director of the first in 1997 – The Festival of the Dreaming. A fascinating Rex Cramphorn Lecture by her the following year revealed just how unpopular this appointment and festival were with death threats and faeces aimed at Roberts. Many were from her own people, “who believed I had bedded the enemy”, she disclosed. “But I began the Festival with a passion for ideas and the Black stage. Not that many were happy with them at first, but it had to be done, and done our way. And I became quite relentless”!

In fact, she established a policy of “Authorship and Control. I though this was something that had to be set up, some sort of legacy and precedent. The authorship of the product or event and the control of its development had to be in Indigenous hands”. And what a precedent that has become for a burgeoning First Nations art scene.

Intriguingly, under pressure one suspects from a NSW group of Gamarada Dignitaries, Roberts was also quoted at the time of the Festival as saying, “It’s bullshit to believe you have to go to the NT to see real Aborignes. As we’re in Sydney, protocol demands we have to acknowledge and respect the local tribes and elders”. But the canny Roberts has always managed to balance her remote and urban First Nations – doing such things as inventing the Opera House’s Dance Rites annual event in which tribal performers from the North appeared regularly beside Koori groups from the South. She achieved that as the first Head of Indigenous Programming at the SOH.

In The Festival of the Dreaming, she also overcame localism with an exciting selection that included the Kunwinjku Mimi by Marrugeku from the NT, Bangarra’s Yolŋu songman Djakapurra Munyarryun (who’d go on to star in the Olympics Opening), and the late great Ningali Lawford in a one-woman show about the importance of retaining tribal languages like her Walmajarri. The other one-women performers, by the way were Leah Purcell, Deborah Mailman and Deborah Cheetham – all of whom have gone on to glory. Rhoda’s other, more personal triumph, was to commission a Bundjalung translation of Waiting for Godot, which worked even better than an all-Aboriginal production A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Rhoda Roberts was set up for a many-festival career, which began almost immediately with the Olympics Opening Ceremony itself – The Awakening section, co-curated with Stephen Page, involving a thousand remote Indigenes from Numbulwar, Yirrkala, Ramingining, Maningrida, the Torres Strait and the Central Desert. Surely one of the best recalled moments of that memorable Ceremony was the rising of Donny Woolagoodja’s giant Wandjina from the ground – “flinging a lightning bolt to ignite the bushfire that will regenerate the land”.

As artistic director of the Festival of the Dreaming, she also took the opportunity to show how First Nations people “host” people coming on to their lands. The idea was inspired by one of Roberts’s uncles who had offered to “sing that Country” during Nimbin’s Aquarius festival in 1973. “To me that was the first ‘Welcome’”, she reckoned. While it was a protocol that had been observed for generations, formalising the practice in the arts scene and coining the term “Welcome to Country” was revolutionary (and occasionally contentious!). “It makes people feel special. It’s a bit like, if I’m going turn up at your house, I’m going to bring a good bottle of shiraz and a bunch of flowers. It’s good manners”, she explained.

Sadly, her hopes of continuing her Dreaming Festival in Sydney lasted only a couple of years. But she transferred it north to Woodford and her cultural and artistic advice has guided other festivals across Australia including Vivid Sydney, Garma at Yirrkala, Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, the NATSIAAs Opening, Parrtjima in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, Shine on Gimuy in Cairns, as well as Boomerang at the late lamented Bluesfest.

Despite all this rich activity, it’s apparent that Rhoda Roberts’s personal life was never far from view. Her father Frank Roberts Jnr was a pastor and an activist, and founder of Lismore’s Koori Mail newspaper, which Rhoda became cultural lead on late in her life. Her twin sister survived a car crash but handed a baby over to join Rhoda’s two children when she was briefly married to actor Bill Hunter. Later, Lois went missing, the police refused to investigate, saying she’d ‘gone walkabout’, but her mutilated body was found in a nearby forest. Rhoda’s devastation was told in the documentary A Sister’s Love, directed by Ivan Sen. Right at the end she determined to celebrate “our ‘Rocky‘ story” — that of her cousin Frank Roberts, the first Aboriginal man to represent Australia at the Olympics. So she penned her one-woman play My Cousin Frank about how the young man from Cubawee came to compete as a boxer in the 1964 Tokyo Games.

Performing it at the Opera House last December, when many knew she was gravely ill, Rhoda’s many admirers organised a surprise event to celebrate her life and significant contribution to both the arts and Australian life generally.

A funeral service for Rhoda Roberts will be broadcast live from 12:15pm TODAY (Tuesday 31 March) from St Carthage’s Cathedral in Lismore, on Bundjalung Country. The service will be available via NITV, SBS On Demand, and NITV’s Facebook and YouTube channels.

Following that, a week-long tribute, Rhoda Roberts AO: A Lasting Legacy, will also air on NITV and SBS On Demand from 31 March to 6 April, celebrating her extraordinary contribution to the arts, media and public life.

Another arts leader to die from ovarian cancer is Simone Arol, a Gunggandji woman from Yarrabah, FNQ, an artist and arts manager associated with the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.

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