She gave First Nations story a national stage.
Rhoda Roberts is a Widjabul Wia-bal woman of the Bundjalung Nation, and one of the most consequential cultural producers Australia has, though her name is less known than the work she has made possible. For decades she has built the stages, the festivals and the ceremonies where First Nations culture is presented nationally on its own terms, curated and led by First Nations people rather than explained by others.
She co-founded the country's first national Aboriginal and Islander performing arts company. She has directed the Indigenous programming of major arts festivals. She created the Boomerang Festival to put First Nations arts at the centre rather than the margins of a mainstream event. And she is the person who has, again and again, designed the Welcome to Country and the great public ceremonies that open national moments, shaping how the whole country begins its most important gatherings.
That last part is easy to underestimate. A ceremony is a designed thing. Someone decides who speaks, in what language, in what order, with what fire and smoke and dance, and those decisions determine whether an audience of millions experiences First Nations culture as a genuine act of sovereignty or as decoration. Roberts has spent her career making sure it is the former, holding the line on protocol and meaning under enormous commercial and political pressure.
She has done this work through profound personal loss, and has spoken about turning grief into a determination that her people's stories be seen, safely and powerfully, by everyone. The platforms she built did not exist before she insisted on them. She is a producer in the deepest sense, the person who makes the room in which other people's brilliance can finally be witnessed.
Her career is a lesson in a quieter kind of creativity, the creativity of building the platform rather than only performing on it. Sometimes the most important creative act is not the work itself but the stage you construct so that a whole culture of work can finally be seen on its own terms.
What platform could you build so that other people's work finally gets witnessed?
