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On a Friday night in April 1966, 16-year-old Norma Ingram was one of seven young Aboriginal women formally “presented” as part of the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball at Paddington Town Hall. “It was a lot of that old English stuff, ‘coming out into society’,” the Wiradjuri woman says of the event, which was attended by some 200 Aboriginal people.
Revellers passed under a boomerang arch to enter the hall, which was festooned with Indigenous motifs in ochre colours. Ingram wore a white ballgown. “We were all just teenagers,” she says of her debutante cohort. “It was fun for us, and we made a whole lot of new friends.”
Ingram had just left school. She was born in the country town of Cowra in central-west New South Wales, but like many Aboriginal people made the trek to Redfern, seeking employment opportunities among the kinship of extended family. “You’d get out at Redfern station and go to the Empress hotel – because that was the only pub that would allow Aboriginal people in – and say, ‘I’m looking for my cousin’,” she laughs.
“Usually, landlords wouldn’t rent to Aboriginal people, so the ones lucky enough to rent would take all their cousins in. That’s why the houses were so full.”
The deb ball was set up by the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, which held dances at Redfern Town Hall and concerts each week at its cultural centre in George Street. On Sunday nights an Aboriginal band, the Silva Linings, performed, and anyone else with musical talent was allowed on stage. Ingram and three friends – Marjorie, Bertie and Jimmy – would jump into the spotlight and “go-go dance” to entertain the throng.
Ingram’s granddaughter, Gumbaynggirr/Wiradjuri playwright and actor Dalara Williams, recalls listening to her nan and aunties share tales of dancing and laughter. “Even in the world of segregation, they found time to dress up and go to dances in places they were allowed to go in,” she says. In the face of racism, “they still found joy connecting and holding on to each other”.
Their stories inspired Williams’s play Big Girls Don’t Cry, making its premiere at Belvoir St theatre in April, about three young Redfern women (one of whom, Cheryl, she will play) who seek their own joy at a deb ball in 1966.
Williams understands the power of joy as resistance. Born in 1989, she grew up on The Block – a historic site of activism in Redfern – “raised and surrounded by single Black women”, with her younger sister Jacinda. She attended the childcare centre Murawina (meaning “black woman”), which her grandmother helped set up in the early 1970s – the same era in which Redfern became home to Australia’s first Aboriginal-owned and controlled legal and medical services, and the trailblazing National Black Theatre.
Williams, like her nan, still lives in Redfern. Looking back across her life there she recalls police brutality and the unrest following the death of teenager Thomas “TJ” Hickey in 2004, and laments the ongoing gentrification pushing Indigenous people out of the area – which she calls “the second coming of colonisation”. In the face of this, Aboriginal people are “really good” at finding joy, she says.
“If we kept pouring hatred or frustration and anger towards a group of people that don’t want us, we would be burnt out,” says Williams. “And so how do we pour love into each other, to keep going?”
Seated next to her nan at Belvoir’s rehearsal space and listening to her talk about her experiences as a young woman in Redfern, Williams admits to mourning the loss of the weekly inner-Sydney Indigenous socials of the 1960s. “Where are those spaces now, those gathering places for Indigenous people to mingle and mix?” she asks. “There needs to be spaces for dancing and gathering that kind of energy, rather than just sitting around a pub. That engagement needs to be intergenerational, across Elders and teenagers, and not just an annual festival or event.”
Williams’s most joyful childhood memories include her mum inviting cousins and their babies over to their house on The Block for nights of painting at the kitchen table, listening to music.
Many old terraces have since been torn down at The Block, but Redfern Park, site of prime minister Paul Keating’s 1992 speech acknowledging the damage done by colonisation, remains a gathering ground for Aboriginal joy and protest, including in the lead-up to the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament.
On adjoining hallowed ground, in 2013, Williams’ mother Lisa was elected the first female president of the Redfern All Blacks rugby league team, and Williams has “great memories of how much a gathering ground” the oval was during Sunday football.
Williams studied in Redfern, too: at Eora Tafe, founded in 1984 (as the Eora Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts) by playwright Robert Merritt, author of The Cake Man, the first full-length play by an Indigenous Australian to be professionally produced. It was there that Williams met fellow actor-turned-playwright Megan Wilding, for whom she wrote the role of Queenie, one of the three young women at the centre of Big Girls Don’t Cry.
Having also studied Aboriginal theatre at Waapa in Perth and acting at Nida in Sydney, Williams hopes her new play will fill a gap in “sisterhood stories” and stories about “the blackness I know, only taught in the city”.
She cannot see herself leaving Redfern – at least not permanently. “Aboriginal people have not disappeared; you can walk down Redfern Street and still connect with Aboriginal people there,” she emphasises.
“I really think people don’t understand how special Redfern is to the Aboriginal community here. It’s not just another suburb. The roots run deep.”
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Big Girls Don’t Cry runs 5-27 April at Belvoir St theatre, Sydney.
