Andrew Sayers Memorial Lecture – CLANSHIP

- [Announcer] And now it's my great pleasure to introduce Stephen Page.

- Thanks. Thank you. Oh, so kind of you. I'm just surprised by the number of people that wanted to come out and hear me talk, so. And thank you all for coming. And my sister, Jude, thank you for that beautiful welcome. And that story on land and country and identity and belonging, all those themes and those words are, you know, a big part of me and my life and my clans and the family of Bangarra and my immediate family. But it's just so embedded into us as mob and our kinship system. Bree, thanks for having me and all the staff over there when they rung and said, "Do you wanna come and do a keynote speaking?" I was like, "Where, the portrait gallery, what has that got to do with me?" And then as we got to talk a little bit more, you know, that whole, you know, the portrait that sits within our storytelling, like I said before in our kinship system, is a huge part of our lives, you know? And so today I've called this clanship because I've always moved as a clan and I've always moved as a mob in everything I've done from my immediate family growing up right through to me leading Bangarra dance theatre ending at the end of last year.

I have a little, I'm not good with gadgets, but I thought I'd select a series of images, some personal, some family, some Bangarra images that might help me sort of navigate and lead, you know, my journey so far as an artist, as a storyteller, as a curator of stories, as a carer of stories, director, choreographer, all those things. Yeah.... I was just lucky in my life to have good people around me. And so I'm gonna start.

I might just let us go through this because we do have some images of people who have passed away in this.

Before I go on with this image, I'm a freshwater saltwater man. As we said before, my father's country is just down in Southeast of, outside of Brisbane, a place under Yugambeh Nation. There's five clans. And one of those small clans is the Mununjali clan. And my father was freshwater. And if you keep following the Logan River out to the mouth between North Stradbroke Island and South Stradbroke Island. that's all that Quandamooka Nation, right in the middle there between those big sandbars and Morton Bay Island between Brisbane and North Stradbroke which they call Minjerribah. And that's all the Nunukul mob. And that's my mum's country. And it wasn't until many, many, many many years later that mum and dad, freshwater and saltwater, worked out their little connection in their little mapping and kinship system. And they were actually the right skin to marry. And yeah, they had 12 kids, six boys, six girls. I'm right down the end. Number 10. And this is an image of my granny. We used to call her granny Polo and Fogarty. And she had my father, eight children. She had my father at the age of 55, 54, 55. And he was the last of the eight children. And when I think, the other day, I was going, wow, she was born in 18, around 1879, 1880. And dad was born in 1931. And she had my father under one of my old ghost gum trees down at Tamrookum, just outside of Beaudesert, down at a river. And it wasn't, well, my father passed that David and I went back and we actually went to that river bed and saw his birthing place. I don't remember her a lot. I remember, I was five when she passed away. And she's in this house where my dad's older sister owned. And I do remember them all in the room when she passed. And there was a lot of language being spoken. That was the first time I heard fluid language of my dad's language being spoken. And it was in that context of, sorry business. And it stayed with me as a five-year-old, you think, someone said to me, "What's the earliest thing?" And I always remember that sacred gathering in the room and just this fluent language talking over each other.

This is a painting of, I'm going on the women's side here, the matriarchal side of my father's mother and my mother's mother. And this is Granny Martha Day. She married an Irishman. And all my Black brothers and sisters say that's why I got the fairest skin. And she also had eight kids and mom was the second, the second youngest. She passed away when my mom was 15. Her father passed away when she was 14. So she was brought up by her brothers. Her mother, my great, sorry, my great-grandmother, but my great-great-grandmother was the first recorded of how we were able to trace back to her side was through some journal document that was in the Brisbane Times and the paper, and Juno was her name. And she was a young child and a survivor of one of the biggest massacres they had there on Moreton Bay Island. And that's how I knew of my great-great-grandmother who moved from the island, the Mulganpin Ngugi people. And she moved to Stradbroke, Minjeribah, and was taken in with the clans of the Nunukul. So these two women are the mothers of my mother and my father.

And I only recently, now after my 32 years at Bangarra and me working with mobs all around the country and being entrusted with their stories from rural to urban to displacement to living cultures and having this last, especially last four years, having this time to myself to go back home and to rekindle stories. And you know, they told me I was going get a ticket and wait in line 'cause I've been in the flash city for too long. I don't get off that easy in the mob but it's just really exciting times, you know, getting back and learning language and being back home. But I can talk a little bit about that later. This is my mum and dad, this is probably, they used to go to the dance in Brisbane. They actually met at a dance, but it was the wrong dance. My mum was going to Cloudland. He was working on the conveyor belt at a pineapple cannery. And she was, I don't know, mom must have been about 18, 17 and I don't know, he had a singlet on and drawstring khaki pants and muscles and Brylcreem in his hair. And it could have been emu oil, I don't know. But he was checking mum out and he asked her out to the dance. Little did he know, segregations in those days, he went to the boat shed under the bridge where all the Blackfellas would go. And mum lived down what they call, they used to call her an uptown Black. They got to live down on the other side of town. And because of mum's fair skin, she used to get into Cloudland. And so they never went on that date because he was waiting at the boat shed and she was waiting at Cloudland. But to me, just the thought of that and how they came together and then this just sense of upbringing and they're both ways of entering into who they were, and where they belong, you know.

But unfortunately, my mom's father just struggled for them to identify, you know, he used to say they were Indian. He used to keep my grandmother and my mom and her sisters away because it was harder for them to survive in the street or where they lived. And because they had money and it's because it's mixed relations as well. So my mother really, really struggled. So when she met my father, he was a real bushman from the freshwater country. That was it. All the brothers and sisters were like, wow. Like she just left. My mother left. I think she got pregnant straight away. She got shotgun weddings. She was gone. Like, she went and lived on my dad's country for most of our lives, you know, most of their lives. And all through when the girls got married, sorry, when the girls were all born. And that was obviously uprooting for my grandmother, granny Polo and my dad, you know, they all moved off, removed from their lands and you know, all dad's older brothers and first cousins, they were all, you know, God, I wouldn't say slavery, but you know, cheap labour and paid in rations. And his older sisters were taken away and worked as domestics and didn't come back for years. So there was a big age difference between him and his brothers and sisters.

This is a very groovy photo. This is later on when we had left living in the Beaudesert after the girls were born and we moved to, 1961, we moved to Brisbane and we moved to a house commission, a suburban house commission house because the fourth eldest was a boy, his name was Phillip. He had epilepsy and he needed medical help so mom, dad wouldn't leave the bush. And so we moved and we moved down into this house commission house where we had deadly curtains. And dad was... Oh, that looks early seventies to me. So it must have been after a while, once we moved in. And this is later on, like, this is when , look at how everyone's dressed up. This is a lot later on after my brother Phillip died and you know, Rusty's, Russell's alive there and obviously, David, and there's Lawrence, myself and Michael, and then there's Jerry, Janice, Rayleen, Frances, Donna and Gail. Oh, don't get me to name them all again. And that was taken in the house and they just put a big red curtain up. And yeah, David was obsessed with all of us doing this. I think it was mum and dad, one of their anniversaries.

Now I talk about all this because we, in Mt Gravatt, you know, I was born in '65, primary school, you know, in a suburb, a lot of houses, had a lot of big families and there's a few mob up the road that lived and there was, I think Mrs. Ludgate and her family, I think they had 17 kids. So I think we did okay. But you know, mom and dad had several jobs. Dad would come down from the bush. He used to do, you know, worked on the railway, timber cutter, electric linesmen. Dad did all jobs, you know, and then obviously working at the pineapple cannery. And you know, the girls had to go and work quite young. You know, the girls were out working 13, 14, shoe factory, Arnold's biscuits factory. They used to walk. And so we always made sure we had food. Dad made sure that house was there for us. And most of my time between 1965, my primary school right through to 1980, just when I left high school, you know, was in this house, commission house. And it was lots of family fights, lots of arguments. You know, dad made this huge big bed where all the boys would just sleep in, you know, from the time you were born to you're like, I don't know, seven, then you graduated to the next room and you'd go in to double bunks, you know. And anyway, then the girls we'd hurry them, and find the first fella they found to get married so they could get out of the house. No. And then by the end, you know, it was just us boys living at home with mom and all the girls were sort of gone. And I talk about this because the girls were a big influence on my life with pop culture, you know.

Dad would go the dump and that was our favourite time on a Sunday. Dad would say, "Are you kids ready?" He had a Bedford truck, we'd all get in the back of the truck and he'd go the dump because he'd find TVs, he'd find things and he's a real handyman. And he'd come home and he'd fix things up and the TV had pliers and David used to hold the antenna with the longest lead with a coat hanger and he'd be up on the roof getting reception for the TV. And I don't know, dad used to just, we used to love it. Like he'd just get things and he would just bring it home and he was just real good craftsman. But anyway, he would hold daily parties too 'cause all the mob would come from the bush. They thought we were flash 'cause we lived in the urban area and we'd invite, they'd all come and sleep over. There was always guitar playing and songs and always performance like people miming that they were Patsy Cline or you know like. Someone was Elvis or you know, like, you know, and David used to do drag from a young age, you know, he was probably doing it way before Ru Paul. But you know, what I'm trying to get at is just, there was always just performance and entertainment and you know, we were brought up with musicals and Elvis Presley as well as going on country, we'd get on the Bedford and then go catfishing and mullet fishing with dad on country, go home and see the old mob, you know.

So we had this both worlds and it really shaped my love of performance, was this having a taste already of this upbringing in this backyard of a family, this urban Black family. A little taste of language and whatever was sort of left over, you know, like I always felt sad for my dad's oldest cousins and stuff because they would try to hang on to as much as they can in language and yeah, just, they would gather and we were allowed to go down and we could hear them like rekindling the language and still trying to, my old Uncle Neville and Jian and they still go up the river there and fires and we'd always go and sit around and they would, you know, always camp back on the land. And then hearing stories from them. So you know, that one foot in that world, we would have that connection. And then this world.

When I got to high school, I got kicked out in year 11 'cause I challenged the English history teacher why we weren't doing Aboriginal history. So this is 1980. And I got sent to the principal's office and I got expelled for a week and I went home. And my mom, I was one of the first to go through 11 and 12, you know, 'cause all the girls didn't get the opportunity, we didn't have the resources. And so my mother just, you know, she like any parent, she just wanted me to finish school and have a good education. But no, big noggin Stephen, wanted to challenge the history teacher. And she said, if you don't, yeah, she said, "If you don't get a job in a week, you're going back to school." And so my cousin was working of all places at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal service down on Roma Street, and said, "Do you know how to type?" And I said, "Yeah, I did business principle. Like they taught me how to type." And he said, "Oh, come down, come down and we'll get your job down there." So I went there and I think they labelled me some training civil law clerk or something and I was in the back. But it was my first taste of law and activism, you know, this is Celia Smith, this is Odgeroo Noonuccal, this is people coming in. I was getting understanding of deaths in custody and it's just this whole social activism that wasn't in that upbringing as much, you know, dad never used to talk about it much. And it was because he was suppressed and he was, you know, he was carrying this generational trauma as well, you know, like we all carried it and he carried it and mom carried it and, you know, just to be caged up and not to feel free in spirit to celebrate their identity and their culture. But yet, in silence, they had this love of country and land and being at one with it.

And so for me to get this side of the social political world and working in a legal service and seeing this other sort of social temperament, Black social temperament... So quick, I've got a quick little taste there. And then I saw the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance theatre advertised on this poster on the wall. And it said, "A careers in dance for Aboriginal Mob to join." And I didn't know there was a dance college and at that stage I just saw "Fame, the Musical" on TV, you know. And I used to imitate the steps in the room and thought I was really good and you know, and I thought, "Oh, there's a dance college." So I put an application and it was literally three months later, I was on a TAA flight down to Sydney. And you know what? Next year or yeah, next year would almost be, it'll be 40 years I've been in Sydney. And I left, I left to go to this college and I, yeah, just, there's artists from everywhere, Aboriginal and Torres Strait, traditional, urban, stolen, displaced. You had every form of Blackfella where you come from, in that one gathering ground. And everyone's focus was to have a careers in dance. And it was extraordinary 'cause, you know, when I stepped down from Bangarra last year, I was talking a little bit about this to Jude, you know, like you constantly, for 32 years, that's all I've known. It's the only payroll I've known. You're in the momentum each day. You're making decisions every day. You've got 17 dancers in front of you. You've got mob who wants to give you a work and be in trust. You've got people in rural communities. This thing of just constantly communicating like I'm doing tonight, communicating and making decisions, you know.

And the last four months of last year, I got to step back and I let Frances Rings, our associate director, and I said, "Go on. I don't need to go that meeting. You'd be all right." And I was just relaxing back but I was packing my office up slowly, a lot of stuff I had for 32 years. And I was looking over things and I was just reflecting and I was thinking, "Wow, 40 works and Olympics and travelling overseas and all these stories." And then sometimes my ego would get hurt a bit because I didn't get told about something and I'd be like, "Why wasn't I told that?" "Well, you're not the boss anymore." And I said, "Aw, shit." Yeah, I think the point I'm making was having time to get off that Aboriginal sushi train and stop and just like reflect and have those memories. And yeah, it was like grieving, you know, like I was just like, "Wow, this is extraordinary." Like I've had such the ups and downs and the good and the bad and the sorry business and the not-so-sorry business.

But anyway, that college was the seed where all of us came together. And by the end of the time I did three years, I did a bit of stint with Graham Murphy and Janet Vernon and Sydney Dance Company. Got a taste on that side in contemporary dance. Then when I was left there after two years, 'cause I was hungry to go back to the Blackfella college. And then by two years after that, you know, by 1989, we had birthed Bangarra and my brother, Russell, had come down and did five years at the dance college. My brother, David, was in the equivalent sort of college, but it was for music in Adelaide at the time and he came to Sydney. We just started creating together. We didn't know what we'd doing. We'd just rehearse that night and create movement. And David would have his synth programme and he'd always wanna write a pop song. We'd go, "Nah, don't make it too poppy."

But you know, like he, we got to be traditional tutors, whether they are from Yolngu mob, from families from Northeast Arnhem Land, through all them families from Putijarra mob through right up to Wurundjeri Mob and Kimberley. And then all the..., which is just, and then all the urban disconnected mob. And there was just like all these different fellows from all walks of life. And us three boys were there and, they just pushed me up the front and they said, "Hey, we should take over the Bangarra." Someone rang me and said, "Oh, do you wanna be artistic director?" I said, "I didn't go to college for that. I don't know what that is." And then next minute, you know, this is one of the first images in '90, around '92. It's probably got a date there. It's probably wrong. I don't know. But what I love about this photo, has some people that have passed, but the sense of traditional Torres Strait, traditional Aboriginal urban, and at this stage we hadn't really crossed over the art form of contemporary and traditional. It was, you know, we would do our contemporary response and then we'd do traditional separate. And this was the beginning, this clanship, this relationship.

We didn't have nothing. We used to all do everything. We'd be stage manager, we used to wash our own costumes, we would teach each other and someone would hold class and this, and you know, we all would build sets with a budget of an oily rag. Like we'd have nothing, you know? And yeah, we tried to look real deadly there. I think we were all borrowing clothes, you know, we were living together, communally, hanging out. That seeded it, that was the seed. And then, you know, we did pray "Praying Mantis Dreaming" after that, which around that time, I think it was at the Canberra Theatre years, if anyone ever went to that. And "Praying Mantis Dreaming" was just this narrative, narrated story of traditional and contemporary. And that fellow up the front, Djakapurra Munyarryun, he lived with my brothers and I, and we got adopted into Yolngu families and you know, we'd come back and we'd share those experiences on country in another clan's backyard. And you know, we'd share that with our father. And you know, he never talked a lot when we were young. When we started doing this and creating and telling stories, and then coming back with learning of cultural practises from another living culture up North and showing him and Djakapurra coming out that place on 87 Canterbury Street, that urban house, that house commission we grew up in. You know, he started to, my father started to just accept that carry of that trauma and release it and then just talk about... My father, he had good principles of my father. He'd never blame anybody, you know. He'd said that was his fate, that was life. And he never made any excuses. And that's when I knew that what I was doing and what we were doing and this reconnection and through story and through the medicine of art, it's not just for us and having this mainstream company. At the same time, we were healing our own family, you know, through this experience.

Oh, that's my dad with David and Russell and me. Look at my hair, I had hair then. I was gonna say I look Mexican. Yeah, and I think with my dad, he just, he knew, like, he loved David singing. He loved David doing music and Russell performing. He used to see Russell do these contemporary moves and jump and Russell would land like a rabbit. You wouldn't hear him. And just the way, when he first saw us relive and revive traditional dance in our body, because he can remember that when he was young and singing the old mob dance, you know, so. Yeah. Good old dad. This fella, Djakapurra, this is when we created "Ochres." Do you reckon any of you could do that step? No. I used to be able to do it. "Ochres" was created, "Ochres" was about four colours, red, yellow, black, white, the significance of those colours, it's quite generic through a lot of clans, North, South, East, West of east of the country. Different practises have different purposes. You know, we looked at red as being a more generic contemporary form of kinship systems. We looked at yellow for women. Black ochres was for the sacred men's business. And the white ochres was just purely for healing and cleansing. And so really quite simple in a way, but just, I don't know, it was just this visual art form meets...

And then David got in the room composing, and then Djakapurra was singing songs. He was a song band. And they were composing songs. And Djakapurra would just create these traditional songs that were new songs inspired by old songs. You know, he'd be ringing his mother back up in the homeland and we'd be like, "Oh, we gotta try to get permission for that song." And then he'd say, "Oh mom, I want to sing this song." And she said, "You can sing that song, but you're a song man. You should sing your own version of that." We were all just like these empty vessels, just these blank canvases, just sharing knowledge with each other. And so him and David would get in the music studio and they'd just create, and they'd go, "Hey, listen to this nine minutes, we've got a good section for the men's section." And Purra would have his recording thing on and do the calls and put the traditional music through with the synth composition. And I know, you just come in the room and all the boys would be in there. It's the same thing would happen with the girls. They would go through the same process with Djakapurra's sister. And so there was these beautiful practises and the way that we would collaborate, you know, like always together, always sharing it together.

Yeah, I was bossy up the front leading and saying, "Yeah, let's have that. Let's have this. Now, let's go, we haven't got much time. We've only got two weeks to create this." But "Ochres"... Look, I spilled there. "Ochres"... Yeah, "Ochres" was special. I kind of feel like my father with a hanky. "Ochres" yeah, it was very special. And it shifted the dance landscape, like contemporary dance, like people were watching it and seeing it. And I don't know if any of you saw it "Ochres" in the very original days birthed in '94, '93. I didn't even know their nineties anymore. I'm not saying that I had bad experiences, it's just there's a lot happened. Yeah, and I think, it just, it broke down boundaries as well, like where traditional movement, contemporary movement of what knowledge we knew of contemporary were explored in the process together where from flex feet to feet to traditional motifs, physically. I don't know, it was just like, we always asked to, I think people just ring us up and say, "Hey, you know, labanotation, it's when you write down dance, can you write it all down?" We're like, "Get away with your writing. We just wanna create, you know?" Like, we'll just do it, you know? And from that moment, that crossover, it just, it was the, yeah, it's just the seed. It sparked me, it sparked David and Rusty and Djakapurra and Djakapurra used to live with us and you know, he'd say, look, "I'll be your eyes in the bush when we go home then. And you'd be my eyes in the city." So he'd be a three-year old and we'd be a three-year-old when we go up on country. And yeah, just a beautiful relationship started at that beginning and that was the, yeah, that was the real fertiliser that sort of...

And this is later on, this is 2015 with some current third generation of dancers coming through Bangarra. And Djakapurra. In '97, I got the opportunity, well, in '96 I got to opportunity, mainly Maina Gielgud was running the Australian Ballet and she wanted me to do a work for a contemporary programme. We only performed in Melbourne. And I said, "Oh, can I bring my brother, David?" And she said, "Oh yeah." And I said, "I don't know what this is gonna be like, like we gotta choreograph on non-indigenous fellows. Do you want a Black story? You can have a Black story. If it's non-indigenous, how are we gonna do this? You know, what's the politics around this?" And... We end up doing this contemporary version that I felt was maintain the integrity of what we were doing. And also it gave the experience of non-indigenous dancers. And a lot of it was very much the contemporary modern form, the grounded form of what we did. And we did that in '96 with the work Alchemy. And then the following year, Maina had left and Ross Stratton was the artistic director and he said, "Oh man, I just saw 'Ochres'." He actually saw it in Canberra. And he said, "Can we do a work with Bangarra?" And I said, "Oh, that's great." Like David and I, let's bring Bangarra. And then he said, "Oh, but can you do a work to Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'?" And I said, "Who is that?" And then, um- Then he gave me the CD. I went home, I think I fell asleep in the first three minutes. It's like 33 minutes. You all know Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And it's the rite of passage. All it's saying, nuances and story, was what I was born into. You know, it's the same in First Nations culture from ritual to rites of passage. And so there was just this yin and yang version of the same theme, you know? So we went in with the ballet and we took their ballet shoes off and they had to be barefoot and Rusty and Djakapurra.

Why I brought this image is because, you know, it might be a bit cliche, but the sense of reconciliation and learning and sharing together, like we just lived and breathed it. They had no choice. They had to smell each other and they all stunk. And you know, black skin, pink skin, one of the girls come up and said, "I've never met an Aboriginal person before." Like, this is crazy. This is '97, you know. And once again, it's these processes that dominate the product of the work. You know what I'm saying? Like it's the processes and the relationships and the sharing of culture is at its true form, you know? And yes, we had Stravinsky's score, we had this Russians' score that no one could count. But once we put story to it, our story to it, and we looked at the four different elements of earth, fire, wind and water and Djakapurra and I were, we featured Djakapurra. He listened to it first and he looked at me and he reckoned, "What are you gonna do you?" Because he was looking at me thinking, "Okay, we're gonna dance to this." Anyway, then we ended dancing with a live orchestra and usually in the ballet, that all doesn't happen until like your dress rehearsal, you know? So we just had this recording and this is Sydney intersection called Fire. Anyway, the story I want to get to, it went to the city centre in 1999 in New York, the company's first time, fully fledged performance in New York. And... Djakapurra, I don't know, he had sorry, he had sad news from home and I felt really bad and I was, "What are we gonna do?" And he said, "No, no, no." He said, so we had a little moment, we brought all the dancers together and he had his bilma and his didgeridoo. We just sung some songs just to ground our spirit, you know. And someone come knocking on the door and said, "Half hour call." And we said, "Oh wait, we're doing a ceremony waiting a minute." And then its opening night New York City and you got all the Blackfellas down at one end and we were all just, you know, we just wanted to make sure that everyone felt safe and yeah, just strong, just strong spiritually. And Purra, I turned to Djakapurra and I said, "Well you know what would make you feel good? Do you wanna sing a song before Stravinsky's, that first note of Stravinsky starts first with the orchestra?" And he said, "Well, I just sit there and you know?" I said, "Yeah, you can just sit on the ground, you know, you're sitting there in the beginning. Get your clap sticks. You could just cleanse the whole auditorium. You can just do two minutes and then I'll tell the conductor. But you've gotta make sure when you finish that note, you finish low so that he can start low from Stravinksy 'cause that note will go up." And anyway, so we went to the American conductor and Charles Baker, his name was, and I said, "This is like 10 minute core." And I said, "Oh, we're gonna put a song at the beginning before you start." And he's got his tux on, his penguin bow tie. And he's, "What are you talking about? What are you talking about?" I said, "No, no, no, we're gonna, trust me, it's all gonna be fine." Djakapurra's just gonna sit in the front. The dancers are gonna stay low on the ground like their first position and he'll just sing. You'll know when he's finished 'cause he's gonna look at you. And he went, "And he'll finish and he'll hit the clap stick." And so he was sweating more. Purra was beautiful. He just sung that whole auditorium. And he does, you know, Djakapurra used to go really high. He'd go really high and then he'd go really low and you couldn't hear a pin drop 'cause all them mob from New York, they come in for a six o'clock show, they bring all their energy, yeah, they're hopping off the subway and whatever it is. And even in the auditorium at 10 minutes two, you could just hear this chaos of people talking. Well, as soon as that light went down, people are still talking. Djakapurra hit that clip stick and he started to sing and it was just pitch quiet. And I thought, "Holy shit, you know what? They would never ever heard Native Tongues singing like this. Forget Stravinsky. This is older than Stravinsky." And he just started crying. He was sitting on the ground with clap sticks and he said, I could tell he could feel it, he could feel his ancestors and it was the right thing to do because it just comfort everybody. And I think that's why they liked the Rites section so much, I don't know, thanks to Djakapurra. But we ended up doing the Rites section and he came in with the, Charles conducted and he'd come in with the orchestra and after it he was just blown away. He just said the marination of, you just sort of had to, it was one of those moments and it was just really special. And Dkakapurra was incredible and it was an incredible night.

And that's where we met our North American agent who walked up and she said, "I wanna work with the Aborigines." And I said, "You can't say that." I said, "Politically incorrect, you can't say I wanna work with the Aborigines." And she was this rich Jewish woman and she was an agent. She looked after Rudolf Nureyev, she'd looked after many people. She ran ABT, American Ballet Theatre. She knew everybody. But she said, "I wanna look after the Aborigines." And I said, "Okay, well first you gotta start calling us Bangarra." And then, anyway, quick education for her. But we end up for the next seven years travelling through North America. We went back in 2001, two weeks after 9/11. Incredible. I could tell you a story about that, but I don't want you falling asleep. But she, just incredible.

Another cultural connection. I'll do one quickly. We get there, the dancers and then we all felt we needed to, we could only get to Union Square because that was as far as we could go 'cause everything was Ground Zero from there. And we just wanted to pay our respect in some form. So we did a ceremony in Union Square. We just sat around and we had some, that's right. We didn't have our Ochre with us, our white clay, 'cause we like to just have that as the protection to put on us. And it's just a little energy of a marking that we do. And it was just a generic protection of a marking. Well anyway, we drive in Manhattan, uptown through Harlem coming through. And I said, "They didn't pack the ochres. So I was like, "Oh, stop at this pottery shop." And the driver didn't know what I was saying. And so we pull up to this arts and craft pottery and Russell looks at me and he's like, "What are you doing?" I said, "Come with me, come with me." We go inside and I said, "They must have white clay, like it's just white clay." Like, anyway, this woman said, "Yeah, that's white clay." And I thought it might have been. And Russ was like, " gonna be right." Anyway, I take it on the bus, we put water, we mix the clay so everyone starts to, here, I was thinking, you know, really culturally ceremony, obviously looking after everyone and they put this clay on. Well, Elmer and Peggy, the two Torres Strait girls, they've got the most woolly wire hair than anybody. And so they started putting this ochres in their woolly wire hair. And they, anyway, we were there, we were really patient, we got caught in traffic and I had a bucket, went from the back to the front and we get to Union Square. Anyway, we go in there and then we all sit in the semicircle. And anyway, Djakapurra does some songs. Well, next minute, I see Sydney and Russell in there, and Sydney, I could see Sydney start picking the thing. Anyway, it ended up being the wrong clay. It was like some clay pottery mix you put into something. So it became very hard and not, and so- So everyone was like, they had like, you know, native bush Botox. Like 'cause they were all like, you know, and like Sydney's eyes were up here, you know? And then I was like, I was looking and I was trying to be like really respectful and Purra was trying to connect. And then next minute Purra's belly started going like he was- And then Peggy and them were picking their Afro hair. Anyway, Russell was just shaking his head like, "Oh this fella, why do you do this to us?" Anyway, we get back on the bus. Oh, at the end of that story, while we there going through that, Purra sang this beautiful song and he was singing for a while, like five minutes 'cause it was really hard for him. 'Cause for him, I know Purra when he's connecting 'cause I'm not saying by a minute and a half he's connected, but you know when he's connected to something and something about five, six minutes, you know? And out of nowhere, this Native American Indian fella, cowboy hat, older fella, was right at the back and just walked past and stopped right in front of us. And there was a crowd in front of them, like crowd just watching us in the park. And he walked and Purra finished and Purra, and they just walked to each other and he walked up to me and he said, "Ah, you's the Natives aren't you?" He said, "You's are natives." He said, "I could hear that singing all the way up seven blocks. I could hear that singing." And that whole tour after that we went from East coast to West coast. I tell you that, a Native American Indian black vine, no, well that's probably Facebook. I don't know what it was it called in them days, we had no phones or nothing but that black vine talking, by the time we got to the West coast and Arizona and everywhere and performing, we just had these mob turning up, like us. They were just turning up. And they don't have the Bangarra, they don't have a crossover of contemporary and traditional. And so we were just like, everyone was just connecting and then they were running little ceremonies for us, the performers, just gathering people together. But it was just this beautiful reciprocation between clans and this like the world is small, like this sense of similarities.

And it was our first connection, our clanship connection with Native American Indians. But also later on as we went down 2018, 2016, 2018... Sorry, at the end of 2018, it took us that long to organise a tour from Vancouver 'cause we wanted to go to Canada 'cause it was very strong, First Nations Canadians. And they were getting shitty. They were like why is Bangarra not coming, you know? We said, "We're gonna get there, we're gonna get there, we've gotta get there." And we went from Vancouver to Ottawa, west to east, 3000 to 4,000 seat venues, mainstream venues, four shows in each place, sold out. And so I said, and DFAT rang from here. they live here in Canberra, Department of Foreign Affairs. Sorry, I get mad with them 'cause when they want a mascot, they ring Bangarra. I said, "You don't ring the ballet or the opera, you gotta ring us." Anyway, just shows what sort of identity we run in this country. Anyway, so with DFAT, I said, we'll go and do this, but we need to have mob represented in every venue. So we got First Nations mob to open our acts in every place we were. So even if it was just through, 'cause they didn't have, their welcomes weren't coming, they weren't in their formality, if that makes sense. Like it was really interesting looking at it. When was that? 2018. So it's not that long ago. But that protocol wasn't set I suppose in form. So we brought, and they were deadly too. They would sing songs and language. There were academic versions, there were Christian versions, there were these diverse of, and I was just like, "Oh, it's just like us." Anyway, outside of Toronto, there's a place called Bradford and Philippe McGee and all the organiser, Cloudy and everyone, we all got on with DFAT and we got a regional theatre and we uprooted about 506 nations mob from their community. And we bought 'em in these buses and fed them and threw them into the theatre. And they were just crying because they'd never seen anything like a ceremony stylized in this contemporary form. But it was so core in its spirit, you know? And they got so inspired and they were like, "We've been waiting for you fellas to come for years." You know?

Anyway, so that, I dropped the 2018. I better hurry up real quick, eh. Well what I'm saying is that, you know, it's not just about playing in the mainstream for us. Like that sense of connections and family and meeting and then meeting similarities and then sharing and exchanging. Like it just makes so much more sense of why you have a culture foundation that carries stories and yeah. Olympics, we were involved in the Olympics, a lot of stories there, but we might be here to dawn. I don't really think I'm funny. I'm not really. Djakapurra played an instrumental part. We all remember him with that little Nikki Webster and all them mob. And I brought, uprooted 400 central desert women from 33 clans in the central desert who thought I was crazy 'cause they all had to come together and agree on one song. And then when I- And that took four years. I'm not lying, it took four years. You know, there's three dialects and oh, they're all old women, they're passed on now. But their kids still contact me and Bangarra go out there sometimes to communities and we do workshops and stuff. But I remember one day I was in an old troop, he was a gutted out troop at the back, bloody, no back seats, it was just rough. And they had a big , they had a big tarp in the back. And I sat on the ground and there are no roads and they were driving me. Nora, my traditional mother was up the front and another driver, no roads, they were making their roads 'cause we were going to a big riverbed. And that's where we were meeting all the women. This is the first time we were gathering the 400 women. And it was like a week before they were coming to Sydney. And this is after deciding they were all gonna tell me they've decided, this was the point. And we get close and Nora says , she told me to get in the back and she told me to cover myself with the tarp. I thought something was wrong culturally. And we're going over these roads, well they're not roads, just potholes and dirt. And I was in the back and I was just going up and down like, and I'd stopped and I just started crying 'cause it was so... I knew I was told to do something respectfully and I just felt like a three-year-old boy. And I just started crying 'cause I could hear traditional women singing. And then, the engine stopped and then I heard Nora talking in language. She told the woman to come around and then she opened the back thing and she giggled at me. 'Cause she just saw me. She was telling me that was all women's country. I wasn't allowed to see her. So, but I said, but that's a lot of women's country 'cause that took like an hour. She was laughing, she was laughing at me. Anyway, she took me in and then we went down to this river bed and all the women were divided by, in their clans by campfires. And it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It was just, and they were all calling me into country singing. And I had butcher's paper of what they were gonna look like on the Olympic field, like from a wedge tail eagle point of view. So it was like a kid's drawing of circles and I was showing them that's one stage, next stage, this stage, blah, blah blah. Anyway, they all decided, and then the bad news was that I told 'em the song can only go for a minute 40. And they said, "But we dance from sunset to sunrise." You're taking us to Sydney to do an opening and it's only a minute 40. Anyway, but they all wanted to come to Sydney. They all wanted to support, they all wanted to give a gift to the Young Nation mob 'cause there are big politics back there. I had Isabella Cour and Uncle Charles Perkins, I had all of the mob. I had to go and do a talk at the town hall tour, the Black activists. And they were like, "We need to boycott." And I said, "Well why don't we do this? Why don't we get Victoria Park and we choreograph a boycott, but we also have a spirit inside the stadium to support that girl running in the 400 metres." And they said , Isabella looked at me and she said, "You little smartass." And I thought, I thought, "Oh lord, I'm gonna get away with this. I think I'm gonna get away with." But. And we did, we had this great, they was really deadly. There was all Koori Radios and all those radio stations, and all the Black radio stations and they took over Victorian Park 'cause they needed that. The international media needed a place they could go to 'cause you've gotta have the opposite, you know. But I said, "Hey, we're not, we don't just confine as a race to one thing. We're everything." I said, "We can have a true spirit in here and we can carry the Aboriginal flag here." You know, like I said, "We can't give up this opportunity." And I'm glad we did it because it was an amazing spirit and especially for the lower nation people too. And that's all them women. They were , 'cause they had dust and they got dust in their eyes and poor darlings. But they loved it.

And you know what? We got the army barracks in Alice Springs 'cause they had to travel, it took them four days to get here 'cause Qantas had to fly them in five different planes. So many of them. And they all knew they would coming to the city, but a big mob of them were with the minders and they wanted to go the Canvas. But one night they could hear them at the dorms and they could hear people laughing in the toilets. And then women were in the, about nine of them were dying their hair because they were going to the city. It was so beautiful. And when I've seen Daisy and all them, they had like purple, green hair and like- And I was like, "Hey, you!" They wanted to be real flash coming to the city. Anyway, ah, I love that story. Anyway, but you know, 'cause well, I reckon a good 90% of them never been to the city so they were coming to do their minute and 40 dance and then it got ripped apart. The media attacked and blamed them for having their breast out and their traditional print painting. But they just all laughed. They just said, can we go to the same... They went to every St. Vincent de Paul shop in Newtown and I bought them all those Chinese laundry bags and I . We raided them all 'cause they just wanted them, they loved them secondhand shops. They've got some deadly clothes too. They just wanted to go shopping after that opening on, I took them down King Street and that was it. And anyway, beautiful moment.

I'm gonna hurry up. Sorry about that. This is Skin, this is my son Hunter when he was six. And this is Alma Chris, beautiful Alma Chris. And we performed. During the Olympics, we created Skin and Skin was a work of two halves. It was shelter and spear. And why I talk about this one is, we had a beautiful relationship. Djakapurra, Archie Roach, uncle Archie guest with us. Wayne Blair's first job in Sydney acting. And my brother, Russy, Sydney, Victor, Lewis... That's it. And that's Russell's son there, Remi. We had a Torana on stage and the Torana, we gutted it out and I wanted to flip it on its head and its belly and its side and let it have different variations. And we all lived in this Torana on stage, about a 40 minute work. It was the first time I touched really heavy social Black issues. And it's the first time, all the men sat around and they were in the process with me. And it was just, and then the women were doing the same with Djakapurra's sister, or sorry, my other amala, Kathy Marika. But just to hear Uncle Archie and then Djakapurra's knowledge and his knowledge and you know, we were all, they were crying and they're sitting around us sharing just men's healing, you know. And it was, we laid all that down and then that was what started the mapping of the sections of the pieces that we wanted to tell. So when the audience get our show, they're getting full process and heart, you know, like that's what, yeah, I know it's stylized. I know it's got costumes and lights and it's got scenic art. I almost think the processes are much better than the productions. But we start with this blank canvas and that's why I keep talking about banging on about clanship, you know, like I don't stand at the front. It's not me creating it or yes, I put my hand up to lead it and curate it and shape it and yeah, you're just leading and you're conducting, like that Charles Baker, you're just conducting the conversations and sharing it.

And this is Purra's last year, actually. This is amazing. We should put that in here, eh? This is a beautiful shot, a great shot of Russy. And he, oh, Russell was amazing. He just, we could just talk about social issues story or the psychology behind addiction or, we would, you know, caring and having conversation about mental health way back then and a foot in each world and city and energy and men's business. What is men's business in this humane moral construct of today? Where is the femininity and the masculinity in men? And those conversations were being had in this very open discussion. And, yeah, Russy really, he just took so much on in that production and then the next couple of years leading up, he was a young father and had young kids. And yeah. This is "Bush" that we did in 2007. When we lost Russell, we... We did this celebration for him , which was Bush. And it was a ceremony from Yolnga family in Arnhem Land, gave a gift to the company and it was our, even though we were quite open and put it out in the mainstream, we were very public, and we knew as a company and we knew we were playing in the mainstream. We knew we had a responsibility and we knew we were public and we knew all of that. And unfortunately, you know, your private personal and what comes with that, you know, it's just part of that initiation, part of that process and this work, "Bush" was, yeah, it was, in honour of him and his spirit and yeah, it's one of my favourite productions and stories because he was open about cleansing and healing and sending one spirit off into that next spirit world and making sure we're caring it and giving it strength and yeah, we created that work for Russy. Later on in our works, I'm probably gonna jump through on that 'cause I've probably got only, what? Two seconds? Two minutes! Wrap out! Ah, okay.

This is "Mathinna." We started to get to from our, what we were realising after a couple of decades was what I'm saying by a thematic point of view was our experiences and our relationships with mob around the country, with experiences personally with ourselves, what we were reconnecting to, they were all becoming parts of inspirations for the themes of what we wanted to create. We were spitting out works, one a year, you know. David was spitting out a composition, 70 minutes every year. You know, not even Janet Jackson or Prince can do that. You know, like, this is crazy, crazy. And then by this stage, we were doing historical works, looking at, this is based on "Mathinna," a Tasmanian young girl. We all know, so it's in the 1800s. But what we were doing then was that we were putting obviously the Black lens and having it from our perspective, working with Lola Greeno and Jimmy Everett and amazing elders in Tasmania. Once again, I got to work with mob down that way. They said here, "Bangarra, you care for this story." And they really helped look after this work. Yeah, I'll have to jump through now. Sorry about this.

Oh. Oh, that's Alma, yeah. Our experiences moved into the medium of film. We did "Spear" in 2015, gave us an opportunity. It was the first film that had about 5% dialogue, sorry. And the rest was just form and dance. It was really hard to find references. There were a few documentaries out. Pina's documentary, which was a lot of dance that was taken out of context and put on streets and then locations. But "Spear" just gave me my love of film and working in film. I've always wanted to work, you know, choreographing "Sapphires" and choreographing "Brand New Day," working with Rachel Perkins and working on film and working on television. It's an area I'm going into now and I just really love the form. But once again, you know, Bonnie Elliot, female cinematographer got working with me, lot of mob, Jake Nass, lot of mob worked on this to bring it together. These last two works, this is our work, "Nyapanyapa", from 2016. and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu who we lost, I think it's almost two years now, three years, was an amazing Yolngu artist. And I wanted to do a dance response to her process and her works, her meditative style of those long lines and inhaling and exhaling breaths of the way she used to do her work. And I still watch her. And this was a work dedicated to her.

It's also the time when I lost my other brother, David, around this time in 2016. And unfortunately, he passed before we did this work. And I mean, David, you know, I worked with David on, oh, we told David's stories, "Page Eight," his play that we told. But David, as a musician and the work I would do with him and, you know, he'd be locked in his cave, in his music. I mean, I would have dancers in the studio, you know, he would be on his own. So I had to go and make sure he was okay. But sometimes I'd go in and he'd have a wig on and he'd be real corked up. He had lipstick on and he'd just stir me up and then someday, if he was bogged down, he would just put on another performance, you know, and we just had this click and we would just tell stories with each other and then, I don't know, I'd come back and he'd have four different versions of when the wet season would come, how close, how far? And it was just amazing how he would create and you know, his playlist, his music is in my bloody head, in my playlist, in my head constantly. And he was the hum of the land of all Bangarra stories.

Later on we did "Bennelong," once again, another historical work, "Bennelong" and "Dark Emu", 2017 and 2018, were Bangarra's biggest ever works. So we played to over close to 70,000 people around the country. It's all "Bennelong" and "Dark Emu." We were at the end of a decade, you know, like we were hitting the end of our third decade. We're in the beginning of our fourth decade now. And David passing, I had to reflect a lot too, you know, like I had to step away. And anyway. Yeah... We were travelling overseas, we were touring through the world and you just think of the engine and I think I was in denial, like when David passed, that was a big part. Russy passed, a big part. But David, I was in denial and I thought I was utilising creativity for healing. Yes, it is a medicine, but, yeah, I didn't know what to do. You know, that was where I felt safe was to keep telling stories. And so doing "Bennelong" and "Dark Emu", I think was, yeah, it was me screaming out to myself, I think, pushing these works through and Bangarra success and it made me just think, "Well what is it all for? Who's it for? What's it for?" This machine that just keeps going. So anyway, it's probably one of the, it's got to this work and I think it was, I knew I wanted to step down as artistic director.

I love creating. I love nothing more than to tell stories. Oh, I've got the biggest cave of stories to tell. You ever want me to do a story or come and do a story? No. But yeah, I love telling stories. My son's already signed me up. He takes my ideas, writes 'em down. Next minute, I read it. I said, "Oh, I was talking about that last week." And he said, "No, that's ours dad, you and I's story." He took my money, got a ABN and opened a production company. I said, "You don't even have a bloody production model. You don't know what you're doing." He's very keen to kidnap me and take me into his world and continue to tell stories. "Sand Song," oh "Sand Song," the beautiful work. We did that through Covid, opened in '21, brought it back in '22. Once again, this was a gift to our wonderful Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who we lost in 2019, an amazing actress and a friend. And she always wanted to do stories from home in the Kimberley's, Always wanted to do a story for Bangarra. She acted in Bangarra stories, she sung up Bangarra stories and she always, Walmajarri home, back home, great sandy desert. And we connected with her family after her passing and wanted to give that gift back to her. And "Sand Song" is a gift to her and her family.

I went back home, 2022, I did a work, it never came to camera. It only went to bloody Sydney. What's going on? No, I did a work called "Wudjung, Not the Past." And it was language from my dad's country, Yugambeh Nation Language, Bundjalung Nation Language, a festival piece, 26 people, actors. It was a musical, it was an opera, it was a ceremony. And it was just a different way of bringing all those forms together, which I've always loved to do. And it's gonna be in Brisbane in '24 at their new venue. I might not been allowed to say that anyway, But we never got it to Canberra and we should bring it to Canberra and it's a beautiful story for my dad's country, yeah. And look, this is, I'm rushing now 'cause we've got a children's show called, "Waru," the first Bangarra children's show that I directed and wrote with Hunter, my son, and Alma Chris and Sunny Townsend and Lenora Didi and "Waru", the great turtle. I'll go back again 'cause I love that turtle. It's going on the road, regional, this year. "Waru" is going around. And this is the company. This is Fran and I at the end of last year. Oh that's with Djakapurra and Alma. God, we all look deadly there, eh? And then, you know, the company now is in, Fran is the artistic director and she's doing a new work this year and it's coming to camera soon. You know, I'm having a little break getting away and they were like, "Oh, you can still have a little hot desk down here." And I was like, "No, no, go and have a break, I think." I've got two granddaughters, a four-year-old or one, Mila Sophia's the four-year-old. She already sings and dances and she tells poppy she's got stories for me. And you know what? I'm gonna leave on the note of my grandchildren. Hey look, I'm sorry about that. That was a little bit long.