‘A champion for Indigenous artists’: Pioneer Rhoda Roberts leaves a huge mark

Warning: this story contains the name and images of an Indigenous person who has died.

The passing of Rhoda Roberts, who died at the weekend aged 66 after a battle with a rare form of ovarian cancer, has robbed Australia of one of its most respected advocates for First Nations culture and representation.

Roberts made a huge impact across multiple platforms as a theatre producer, actor, podcaster, arts administrator and curator, and journalist. In a statement, SBS confirmed media were permitted to use the name and image of Roberts, who had served as the broadcaster’s first elder-in-residence.

Her work was so wide-ranging that it’s difficult even to know what label to apply to her career. But in co-creating with choreographer Stephen Page the Indigenous component of the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, she helped put her culture on the global stage like never before. And by coining the phrase and helping establish the practice of Welcome to Country, she ensured it has remained a part of broader cultural practice since.

Speaking in 2021 to mark Roberts’ departure from the Sydney Opera House after 16 years as its head of First Nations programming, Deborah Mailman described her as “my champion”.

“She’s been a champion for so many Indigenous artists,” Mailman added. “She’s an advocate, she’s a lobbyist, she’s grown up in the industry in a group of people who really were trying to change the landscape, changing the narrative for First Nations people, how we view Indigenous work. She’s opened so many people’s minds about contemporary Indigenous work.”

Roberts was one of the founding members of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust in 1988. The following year she became a co-presenter of First in Line, an SBS current affairs program that focused on Indigenous people and issues; she and co-host Michael Johnson are widely regarded to have been the first Indigenous presenters on prime-time TV in Australia.

She had come a long way from her childhood in Lismore, a town “where you were white or you were black”, as she told filmmaker Ivan Sen for his 2007 documentary A Sister’s Love. “There was this invisible divide across the town, whether it was in pubs, coffee shops or the local swimming pool.”

She dreamed as a child of becoming a writer, she told Sen. But everything about her education seemed designed to beat such ambition out of her.

“Our careers adviser told us we would never get a job, that we’d end up pregnant on the mission, and so there was no point in educating us,” she recalled. Every few months the Aboriginal students would be pulled out of classes at Richmond River High for an exacting inspection – shoes, uniforms, attendance records, even hair. “If we had lice, God help us – then we could be taken from our mother and father.”

After leaving high school short of matriculation, Roberts entered nursing, a profession that took her overseas. But after six years in London she returned to Australia “with a greater awareness of the position of Aboriginal people” in the culture at large, and a determination to improve it.

Her father Frank was a preacher with the Church of Christ and a land rights activist. From him she inherited both a sense of right and wrong and of mission.

Frank Roberts spoke at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, second only to Gough Whitlam. In some circles he came first: ASIO had him tagged as its number-one troublemaker.

Years later, when Frank sat in the audience for a theatre performance, he unofficially handed the baton to his daughter. “Now I see what you’re trying to do,” he told her. “The platform for us was the church. The platform for us now is the theatre. This is where we can tell our stories, and we can have a voice, and we can address the imbalances.”

Arguably no platform was bigger than the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, for which Roberts and Page assembled a huge cast of Indigenous Australians from all corners of the country for a breathtaking opening sequence that showcased traditional culture like never before.

Among them were women from remote Central Desert communities who had never been to a city before, let alone set foot on a global stage; they had to walk two hours to get a bus, to get a train, to get a plane from Alice Springs to Sydney.

“There were over 1200 performers involved in what was, on paper, an unachievable piece of work,” recalls David Atkins, artistic director of the opening ceremony. “And Rhoda and Stephen managed to deliver, with grace and great artistry, what remains one of the most powerful segments not only of Olympic ceremonies but of ceremonies and performances in general.”

Atkins recalls flying around Australia with Roberts and Page. It was in part about finding talent, he says. “But primarily it was a consultation process to seek approval and to see what each of these groups of elders and artists would want to contribute.”

Roberts considered her own contribution to the Olympics ceremony one of her proudest achievements. But it was tinged with deep sorrow: in July 1998, as she was deep in the planning process, she was called away on a family emergency.

Her twin sister Lois had gone missing from Nimbin in northern NSW. Six months later her body was found in bushland. Police determined she had been held captive, tortured and sexually abused for more than a week before being murdered. Her killers have never been identified.

That loss never left her. Years later she admitted to filmmaker Sen: “I get saddened by my sister who was murdered but I guess I’ve got to put it in perspective. What about all those [Indigenous] people who were murdered on Ballina beach? Women who lost their children and husbands and their mothers and their grandmothers.”

Whatever grief she carried, Roberts never stopped trying to find a way to connect across that “invisible divide”, be it on stage, on TV or radio, on podcasts, or in public Welcome to Country ceremonies.

At a tribute event at the Sydney Opera House in December, staged in the knowledge that Roberts had stage 4 cancer and would soon pass on to her Dreaming, actor and filmmaker Wayne Blair played MC and Governor-General Sam Mostyn was among the speakers.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute via video message to Roberts’ “generosity, her mentorship, her courage and her unwavering commitment to truth telling and cultural sovereignty” and acknowledged “her extraordinary career and the pathways [she] carved for all who follow”.

After her death broke on Saturday, the tributes began to flow.

“Rhoda’s extraordinary gift to us all is her generosity of spirit,” said Blackfella Films boss Darren Dale. “She was truly a trailblazer and she instilled in us all to dream bigger, be bolder and be more daring. I’m immensely thankful to have known her.”

Producer David Jowsey of Bunya Productions said: “Rhoda believed in the power and impact the arts offered for telling the stories of First Nations peoples and communities, not only for telling history and expressing cultural creativity but for the benefit of wider Australia, too. She had a beautiful presence and was a force for good but Rhoda also carried the pain of the unsolved murder of her twin sister Lois.”

On social media, former colleagues from SBS and the creative industries joined in celebrating Roberts as a fierce champion of her people and the arts.

She was “an extraordinary, inspiring woman who gifted so much”, said actor Tasma Walton; “one of the finest, most honest and formidable women I’ve ever been graced to know”, observed talent agency boss Mark Morrissey.

“What a woman, what a voice for our people, our arts and for song women and men all over the world,” musical theatre star and Australian Idol winner Casey Donovan said. “The influence Aunty Rhoda has had on me and my career over the past 25 years has been absolutely life- and career-changing.”

She was, Donovan added, and surely speaking for many, “an extraordinary woman gone far too soon”.

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