Grace Tame: ‘The media has a lot to answer for’
Grace Tame doesn’t think she would be alive today if not for her fiance, Max Heerey. “I always like to be two steps ahead,” she told a packed theatre on the weekend, revealing she had been admitted to hospital with suicidal thoughts in the week prior to the festival. “Or, in the case of the Daily Mail, eight years ahead.”
“I actually lost control and I was really scared,” Tame continued. “I called up the clinic and I said ‘I can’t, I can’t, I steeped too deep into the shame spiral and I’m thinking about killing myself.’”
Such are the pressures on Tame and other trauma survivors who obtain a public platform. Their activism is born from necessity, and is necessarily tied up in pain and hurt. But their successes are also wrapped up in the same painful memories.
“It’s a great privilege to be heard and one that very few people get,” Tame said. But the relentless weight of the press has taken its toll: “The media has a lot to answer for as to where it directs its shame. It should be directed at perpetrators of abuse, not survivors.”
Her fellow panellist Rosie Batty has also not escaped media attention. The day after her 11-year-old son was murdered by his father, a shell-shocked Batty swiped away her friends to powerfully address journalists with: “Nothing can hurt me now.”
But Batty said being interrogated by the media at a time when she had barely begun to process her grief had prevented her from facing it.
“If it makes people uncomfortable to sit with real feelings, well – tough shit,” she said, amid tears.
“Am I relieved I’m alive or disappointed I’m still here?” Batty said in response to Tame’s revelation, reflecting on a particularly dark period in her own life. “I want to live – I have to live,” she said. “That bastard who took Luke can’t take my life.” CC
The girls are coming out of the woods
What is it to be a woman in the world? What is it to survive, to be a “survivor” of trauma? The All About Women opening night gala was a testament to the power of vulnerability, a thread which wound throughout the evening and the panels to come.
The artist, lawyer and advocate Amani Haydar reread the victim impact statement she wrote after her father murdered her mother and before she channelled her rage into acclaimed memoir The Mother Wound. And Joelle Taylor read her TS Eliot prize-winning poem C+nto, a call for arms for any woman who has been belittled or abused, roaring to the crowd: “There are landmines buried deep beneath your skin, and no one understands them.”
The night served a reminder that the female body is, and will always be, political. These women’s bodies – and that of their mothers, friends, lovers – have been belittled, objectified, abused, murdered and judged. But what if these women forced the world to look at the landmines beneath their skin?
At the conclusion of the show, the poet Tishani Doshi read from her poem, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods. She was powerful, beautiful; sensual, yet not sexualised, as her words rose in a crescendo:
“Girls are coming out
of the woods the way birds arrive
at morning windows – pecking
and humming,
until all you can hear
is the smash of their minuscule hearts
against glass,
the bright desperation
of sound – bashing, disappearing.” CC
‘The criminal justice system was not designed for rape cases’
In 2021, the then-attorney general Christian Porter named himself as the person at the centre of an ABC report on a historic rape allegation. He has consistently denied that he assaulted a 16-year-old girl in 1988, when he was 17. His accuser, only known as Kate, killed herself in 2020 after withdrawing her complaint to the police and the investigation was discontinued. In the aftermath, her friends, including the theatre director Jo Dyer, advocated on her behalf for further investigation.
Porter later settled a defamation case against the ABC, with the broadcaster publishing a statement that it did not intend to suggest Porter was guilty.
As the situation now stands, Porter has resigned, following controversy about his declaration of a “blind trust” as the source of his legal fees for the defamation case, and the story has been a lightning rod in the nation’s culture wars.
And like the reporting of the story itself, the panellists – Dyer, Kate’s lawyer Michael Bradley, and the journalist Samantha Maiden – had to tread carefully, making clear at the outset that Kate’s allegations were just that. Chaired by Julia Baird, the panel debated the question: in the case of sexual assault allegations, is our legal system fit for purpose?
“The criminal justice system runs this clear line – he is innocent until proven guilty, beyond reasonable doubt,” said Bradley. “And throughout he can maintain his right to silence. What this does systemically is it puts the complainant in the frame as the sole witness as to what’s happened. And she’s coming from a starting point of not being believed. She has to constantly tell her story. Why would any volunteer subject themselves to that?”
The disincentive for making a rape complaint, particularly an historic one, is strong, he added. “The criminal justice system was not designed for rape cases.”
Dyer said that she believed that there should have been an independent inquiry into the allegations against Porter – “and whatever the outcome had been, we would have been satisfied.” BD
‘It’s hard to think of a future … we are deemed destined to die’
More than 20 years after Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s seminal analysis on the whiteness of Australian feminism, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, was first published, all that has changed for Indigenous people, she says now, is they have been further wrapped up in the state.
Appearing alongside Chelsea Watego, Amy McQuire and Larissa Behrendt, Moreton-Robinson gave a frank assessment of the continued ripples of colonial violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in Australia, wrapped up in the illusion of progress.
In 1986, the first taskforce report into Indigenous women’s business in Australia was released. 35 years later, the human rights commission released a similar report, virtually mimicking the recommendations of the 1980s.
“Only two things were different,” Moreton-Robinson said. “Climate change, and youth suicide. The fundamental change that’s happened is we have been further incorporated into the state’s orbit … and the bureaucratisation of Indigenous service deliveries has hindered our opposition.”
Moreton-Robinson said it was hard to feel optimistic about the future – but asked what she hoped for, looking forward, as the nation grapples with another Aboriginal death in custody, she replied: “See, I find that hard to answer. The past is in front of you, the future is behind you.”
We live with the past, we know how slowly change has been made. The future is unknown.
Amy McGuire agreed: “Dealing with death on the daily,” she said, “it’s hard to think of a future at times … when we are denied it. We are deemed destined to die.” CC
‘The way the gender binary is enforced affects everyone’
The gender binary is deeply intertwined with other systems of oppression, such as colonisation. The academic and Wiradjuri trans/non-binary person Sandy O’Sullivan told the audience, “The colonial project is all about putting everyone into boxes, but people have been outside the gender binary for eons.”
Amao Leota Lu, who is Samoan fa’afafine and a trans woman, as well as a performance artist and activist, agreed. “It can be problematic going into western settings because there’s the expectation that we are one or two genders rather than three, four or five, or anything in between. In the west I seem to be stuck in a world that seems to challenge my own indigenous identity.”
Everyone suffers in a binary world, including cisgender people, said the writer Jinghua Qian. “Cis people still suffer under this binary. How many cis women have discomfort with womanhood because it does have so many social constraints? The way the gender binary is enforced affects everyone.”
As the moderator, academic and author Yves Rees observed, “fluidity keeps things simple. Why do we have to complicate things with binaries?” BD
Roxane Gay: ‘I’m more patient and I’m happier … and part of it is that I feel loved’
Like the other sessions I attended, there was a strong message of needing to confront colonisation in concert with fighting for women’s rights. But while we are fighting the good fight, we should not forget to love.
I’ve seen the US writer Roxane Gay speak on a number of occasions. While she is consistently brilliant, I have never seen her so happy and relaxed as she was on stage on Sunday night at the Sydney Opera House. She got married during the pandemic (to the designer Debbie Millman) and has found the relationship to be transformative.
“Everyone in my family has noticed I’ve changed and I’m more patient and I’m happier … and part of it is that I feel loved. If someone tells you you’re beautiful often enough – you think ‘OK – maybe I’ve got something going on here …’ Sometimes you need validation – especially when it’s coming from a place of real love. It makes you walk with a bit more of a strut.”
Gay told the story of how they met, which almost didn’t happen, because she felt too overcommitted to go on Millman’s design podcast. But Millman persisted and friends intervened to encourage the meeting. Before their first datehad ended, they were planning a second.
“On the sidewalk, she asked if she could kiss me. No one’s ever asked me that before!” said Gay. “Debbie came along at the right time … you get tired of chasing, waiting for someone to love you enough to stop chasing them – to have that space where you feel increasingly confident.”
And from that place of love and confidence, Gay’s work continues. BD
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
