My Cousin Frank
Attending as a reviewer, a critic of the theatre, at this show is somehow an inaccurate power dynamic. For me to sit in the audience preferencing my critical eye over my felt sense would be wrong. It is NAIDOC week, a time of opening up to the experiences of existing on unceded Aboriginal land. Where the urgency of storytelling is so strong that the audience must stop thinking and start feeling. The need to share in community and be listened to is an archetypal human process. As the show starts I totally accept Rhoda as the leader of this moment, I fully surrender to the what and the how of her storytelling. It reminds me that this is what all excellent storytelling should do; override the listeners' rational brain and absorb them emotionally.
Rhoda, a seasoned performer, takes her time. No rush. I really have to stress this point. It is her time that is important here. With time, comes timing, and five or so minutes into the show the front of house let in some late comers. Rhoda welcomes them warmly and slides in a good humoured jibe: ‘White fellas are always late.’ The audience erupts with laughter, the white fellas in the audience are happy to be poked at like this, by her. It’s a very light, spontaneous and meaningful little moment that subverts the power.
This little lively comment keeps resonating with me throughout the show. White fellas are continually ‘late’ in showing up for First Nations people. Since occupation, the time and timing of Aboriginal people has been controlled by the colonizers. We see this throughout Rhoda’s story, in her family history, in all they fought to achieve, in the dignity they sought tooth and nail to preserve. In this show, Rhoda keeps the spotlight off herself. The focus is on her cousin, Frank Roberts, the first signed Indigenous Olympian, boxing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Frank, even though reaching the status of Olympic athlete had to travel as a British subject as he wasn’t entitled to an Australian passport. In 1964, systemic racism was alive and well in so-called Australia.
In the Northern Rivers, social and everyday racism was rife too. Cousin Frank and the family around him lived in Cubawee near Lismore. She paints the picture of Cubawee which was a simple, self-managed, Aboriginal run settlement existing between 1932 - 1965. Lismore residents were not happy with Aboriginal people living in the town so Cubawee seemed to work to keep the whites comfortable. Rhoda speaks warmly and proudly of what her great grand father and father were able to establish at Cubawee. Then, heartbreak, when Frank returns home from the Olympics, Cubawee had been bulldozed. This is but one reminder of how expressions of colonial power were so readily employed against the human rights of Aboriginal people.
At one point Rhoda widens the scope to liken the genocide on this stolen land to the genocide currently happening in Gaza. It is important to note that she did include this. In Melbourne and Australia there is a growing number of artists and events being actively shut down and silenced due to directly addressing this genocide. It’s no great leap of the imagination to consider that the control and oppression of stories is something that Rhoda knows well.
Rhoda layers in a proud and hard-working family history, a history that straddles the need to work both with the white oppressors and against them. To try and sum it up in a review won’t do justice, I risk simplifying the complexities and flattening out the richness. So I implore the reader to connect with the live storytelling experience. My Cousin Frank by Rhoda Roberts (AO) is powerful storytelling delivered by a magnetic Bundjalung woman, without a doubt a national treasure.
By Kimberley Twiner
Photographer: T J Garvie
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