How An Outdated Tradition Became A Source Of Aboriginal Empowerment
"To me, that is the best ‘eff you’ to oppression."
Historically, debutante balls have been associated with privilege, class and overwhelming whiteness. For generations it wasn’t a place where minority groups were welcomed — on the contrary, when Britain celebrated its first debutante ball in 1780, its colonies were in the process of massacring many of those groups.
But that painful history is partly what made one debutante ball held almost 200 years later so significant.
In 1968 at Sydney Town Hall — a year after Australia voted to recognise Indigenous Australians and have them included in the census — a group of 25 women gathered in front of hundreds of people — including the Prime Minister — for the first national Aboriginal debutante ball.
It was a moment of celebration for a community that had been excluded from such displays for years.
“This beacon of whiteness, of classism, to take that and to completely demolish everything that they wanted to be exclusive about it and go, ‘we’re going to celebrate our community and we’re going to say we’re still here’ … to me, that is the best ‘eff you’ to oppression,” Nakkiah Lui told Junkee.
That’s something that the writer and actor explored in a new podcast called Debutante: Race, Resistance & Girl Power, which she put together with fellow actor Miranda Tapsell. Together they use the centuries-old tradition to interrogate modern ideas about race, beauty and colonisation.
They’ve both had exposure to the glittering world of debutante balls — Tapsell’s mum had her debut as a young woman, and Lui’s mum runs debutante balls in Mount Druitt in Sydney’s western suburbs.
Their experiences are worlds away from the traditional deb balls, which saw only the wealthiest young women presented to society as a way of indicating they were ready to be married off.
“I think it’s interesting, I think it’s in a big way a big act of rebellion and of protest, to take something that traditionally, you were excluded from,” Nakkiah said.
But it’s more than a subversive act of protest; it’s about giving Aboriginal girls an opportunity to create memories and celebrate each other.
“What it made me appreciate was that I grew up in a community where I had leaders, and family and mob who wanted to create these experiences for us to be involved in, who wanted to create those memories and sense of community in the face of oppression. So for me, that idea that you create hope for people around you, that you create community, that is a huge part of protest. Being an Aboriginal person, and just being a citizen, that changed my life,” Nakkiah said.
For Miranda, the tradition also posed some tricky, but ultimately rewarding questions.
“I’m always grappling with the idea of beauty. I’m aware of how much money women spend on products … so should we be dismantling that? But there’s just so much confidence that comes with getting dressed up and feeling good. It’s just such a human thing to look at yourself in the mirror when you’ve put a bit of make up on or you’ve styled your hair, and you think ‘wow, I look really great today’. I think not a lot of Aboriginal youth get the opportunity to do that.
“To have a space where they can be their best selves and get dressed up, I think it’s no small thing.”
The podcast takes listeners to London, where Nakkiah takes an etiquette class; to Sydney, to meet excited new debutantes; and to Minnesota, where they met the Ojibwe people and learnt about how similar their First Nations history is to our own.
Minnesota has since become the centre of a global Black Lives Matter protest movement, following the death of George Floyd.
In some ways, Miranda says it feels strange to be releasing a podcast under the current climate. But it’s also very pertinent.
“What we speak a lot about in the podcast is we encourage our non-Indigenous listeners to engage in the conversation, because the only people that can really dismantle the structure that their ancestors built is them,” she said.
“It’s not about blame. It’s about (the fact that) we continue to live with the reverberations of colonisation and you don’t. So what are you going to do to change that?”
Debutante: Race, Resistance & Girl Power is an Audible Original podcast, and is available here.