Beneath The Sky 2025: Bebe Oliver

Videography by James Henry

This performance was a part of Beneath the Sky: Resist. Reveal. Reclaim. It was filmed at Peppercorn Lawn along the Birrarung in the heart of Naarm, and was proudly supported by Aboriginal Melbourne at City of Melbourne.

Photography by Tiffany Garvie

‘Australia’ by Bebe Oliver

Australia. There’s an unspoken rule you try to teach me: Don’t be Aboriginal. Be something diluted, something easier to digest and something more acceptable. Be anything but Aboriginal. You demand I fit in, blend in and wear a label that you can embrace, like ‘Australian’. You want your name to obliterate my customs, my story and my identity. You say that to be Aboriginal is to carry shame. You paint my culture with your fear, your ignorance and your prejudice. You want me to fold into your narrative and deny the tenacity of my race. You want to rewrite my continuation in paler shades. 

You say, “Be ashamed,” but I ask: ashamed of what? Of a history that predates your own? Of endurance in the face of erasure? Of being Blak and unyielding in a society that demands my silence? I won’t apologise for existing as what I am. I am Aboriginal and I am unashamed

You tell me to embrace my chameleon colours but not as a celebration of my identity. No, you’d rather I wear the washed-out hues of assimilation you’ve chosen for me. “Blend in,” you say. “Not as a proud custodian of the oldest living culture, but as a sanitised version of yourself, wrapped in a racially colonised label.”

Be a Christian you insist. Be patriotic as if allegiance to your flag could overwrite the pain it’s caused. Be a capitalist chasing wealth at the cost of connection. Be like Aunty Pauline and strive for ‘One Nation’ as though unity could ever be forged from silencing the demands of the many. Be straight, be palatable, be ordinary. Be the status quo, and only that.

You say this because you believe my people are gone, blanked out by the tides of history and the cruelty of colonisation. You say my societies have vanished as if the heartbeat of our culture no longer resonates in the land and the language. You act as if our histories have been swallowed whole and leaving behind only your version of who I should be. But even as you try to bury it our culture lives on. It lives in me. It lives in us. And no matter how much you demand conformity I refuse to let you rewrite who I am.

You call it assertiveness until it comes from me. The clout I was taught to emit and the potency inherited through generations suddenly becomes a threat in your eyes. “Too aggressive,” you say as if my voice when raised in defiance is too much for your comfort. You want to see my calm side, the side you find appealing, acceptable and safe. But that calm doesn’t exist for your benefit. It’s not a mask I wear to make you feel at ease, nor is it an invitation for your approval. My calm isn’t a retreat. It’s a quiet influence rooted in my closeness to who I am and where I come from.

You want me to be soft, to yield and to suppress the fire you deem “too much.” Why should I? My assertiveness is not aggression, it’s survival. It’s the symbol of my birth rising with me every time I stand tall. It’s the refusal to shrink myself to fit your narrow expectations. So no, you don’t get to enjoy the parts of me you find convenient while rejecting the courage that defines me. I am fire and calm, defiance and grace, and I won’t apologise for any of it.

Australia. “Speak English,” you tell me. It’s a command dressed as practicality and a subtle dismissal of the tongues that once repleted this land with vitality. Vote, you urge as if participating in your systems could repress the fact that your systems were never built for me. And then comes the backhanded revelation: “I didn’t know your language was still alive.” The ignorance in your surprise cuts deep. You don’t see the influence of what’s been taken nor the fragments we hold onto, trying to keep our tongues from slipping into silence.

I am Jarndamirri, a man of saltwater, a man of the Bardi and Jawi. I resonate the stories, the wisdom and the heart of my lineage even though you tried to strip them from me before I ever had a chance to hold them. You look at me and see an opportunity for a voice lost and a leader silenced. But you don’t see the fight burning within me.

I stand for identity. I stand for reconnecting the threads of who we are even when those threads were deliberately severed. My philology is growing in ways you cannot understand and no matter how much you demand we conform, we are still here, still speaking in ways you cannot hear.

There are lessons you try to teach me. You say feeling ashamed is healthy. You tell me that shame is the proper response to my identity, and I should lower my head for simply being. But my mob taught me another lesson long before your words reached me: my privilege to culture, to belonging and to the land. This land nourishes my roots, and I belong to it in a bond you can’t undo no matter how hard you try. Yet you’ve declared it conquered and stamped it with your claim as if you could ever truly own it. Land is not a possession, it’s a relationship. It speaks to me and my family in ways you will never comprehend. You may call it yours, but it will never sing to you like it sings to us. 

Your conquest is a lie. The land remembers, my culture remembers and so do I. No amount of shame you try to instil can change that.

You think I belong to your government. You call it participation and hold a place for me in your institutions and your systems. You don’t say aloud that your institutions have tried to destroy and rewrite who I am. Your systems try to form a narrative that excludes me yet demands my compliance. Every form I fill, every vote I cast, every document I sign is written in a jargon that denies the languages of my nation. Every step I take in your structures feels like walking through the remnants of something sacred that was torn down to build this. And yet I move while reclaiming what you try to bury.

My resistance is not something you can understand. It’s the protests and petitions, and the quiet defiance of continuing to be, of remembering and of refusing to forget. My resistance has survived your invasions, your policies of erasure and your rewriting of history, and it will continue even as you claim victory for yourself.

I belong to your government, yes. But my spirit belongs to something far older, far deeper, and far more enduring. And that is something you can never conquer.

Australia. I was taught that capitalism works, and resistance doesn’t. You call it progress, as if standing silent and compliant is the only way forward. You say protesting is primitive. Speaking up is unsophisticated. You cut down the brawn of defiance and frame it as something lesser and unworthy of your world. Your recitations ring hollow when I look at the symbols engraved into my skin. These marks are history, identity and instruction. They reflect my descendants’ whispers through years, reminding me to listen, act and speak with care. They are a guide to living in harmony with others, with the land and with myself.

To you these symbols are unprofessional and unattractive. You see my heritage as something to be covered, hidden and wiped out. Your vision of success leaves no room for what makes me who I am. You want me to wear your uniform and strip me of everything that connects me to the past and grounds me in the present.

I know better. These symbols, this skin and this history are not barriers. They are bridges and a proof of survival, of thriving and amplifying what you’ve tried to silence. I refuse to trade authenticity for approval. I will listen, I will act, I will speak, and I will pay tribute to the teachings you’ve tried to suppress.

You tell me that what I am is ugly. You look at how I reflect my identity through my words, my actions and my devotion to my culture and you see something to critique, diminish and neglect. To you my identity is awkward, flawed and something you wish I’d hide. But what you call ugly I call truth. My entity is not fashioned to please your eyes or fit into your definitions of beauty or worth. It is raw, unyielding and unapologetic because it bears thousands of years of survival, storytelling and sincerity for a land you can never understand. 

What you find ugly is the mirror I hold up to your history, your actions and your ongoing attempts to deny the reality of what I represent. Your discomfort does not define me, and I will not distort who I am to suit you. What I am is real and there is nothing more beautiful than living in truth, no matter how hard you try to convince me otherwise.

Who I was meant to be and who I am has always been seen as a threat to your defence. My strength, my pull to this land and the truth of my actuality unsettles you and your reliance on control to maintain your place. You avoid me. You try to silence me. You try to preclude the very idea of me. My presence is an inconvenience and a disruption to the narrative you’ve built. You turn away from me as readily as you ignore the voice that claims to speak for me in parliament. My struggles are footnotes, my victories are glossed over, and my pain is buried beneath a façade of progress. You promise balance but deliver disparity. You preach justice but practice denial.

But despite your efforts I remain. I am here. While you may silence the voice that speaks for me in your institutions you cannot silence the voice within me or those who stand with me. That is power you will never own.

In this strange and bitter irony it’s popular to mimic my Blak brothers and sisters. You don’t want the fullness of our existence, just the parts you can wear like costumes. You embrace brown skin when it’s painted over pastiness and strip it of the struggle and history that comes with it.

You imitate the curves that the earth gifted my mothers. You imitate them with irreverence and a shallow homage to fertility and beauty without understanding the depth of what you’re borrowing. It’s a hollow echo of something sacred and what you take is cultural and spiritual. You pick and choose what’s convenient and trendy and leave behind the meaning of being Blak in a government that still works to overlook and erase us. You borrow without acknowledgment, imitate without respect and celebrate the surface while ignoring the soul.

You extend your judgment to our children so our generations to come will inherit the same disdain. You stole us away and threw us to the church and called it care. You stripped us of our genetic obligations and lores and left our hollowed-out remains as trophies of your imperialism. You mine the wealth of our land and the sacred parts of our substance. You carve into my home in the name of conquest.

We are not your trophies. This land and my culture are beyond your reach, no matter how deeply you dig or how much you take. We remain unbroken and unyielding, and far stronger than the narratives you try to impose upon us.

Australia. Every time I’m called ‘Indigenous’ you try to dominate me and flatten the complexity of who I am into a convenient term of breadth and abstract. Boo-boo, I am not ‘Indigenous’. I’m Blak. I am the child of my family and the keeper of their depth, the tongue of my community. I am more than your words can hold, and you cannot reduce me.

Every time I see your assimilated wear emu feathers and pearl shells and paint in dots and play the yidaki, you try to dominate me. None of these hold meaning to you beyond of a dollar sign. You take what is sacred and reduce it to something disposable with no thought of the exploitation. Honey, you cannot take what is ours. Their worth is beyond your reach and no matter how much you try they will be undiminished by your attempts at profit.

Every time I’m called ‘Australian’ you try to dominate me and dismiss everything that connects me to this place and replace it with the shallowness of your patriotism. Around here we don’t speak Bardi, or Kokatha or Yamatji. Our pronunciations are silenced and replaced with the ones you brought across the seas. But this land speaks the body of dust and rain. Babes, you will never look me in the eyes and say kunya ngardma karnda bardi bardi ngardma. But I will and it will echo long after you’ve been destroyed.

You know, Blakfullas are the most victimised race in this place you call Australia. Yet, somehow, you still manage to twist even that truth into something that serves your narrative. Let me tell you about your claim to being “an Indigenous Australian” just because you were born here. Every time you tokenise those words, you strip away what little privilege of identity I have left.

Your hyper-degraded and distorted version of what it means to be Blak defines how you see us and how you justify your actions. We’re moulded by your prejudice and ignorance and this image you’ve created kills. I am more likely than anyone else in this country to be imprisoned. To be beaten. More likely to be murdered. You’ve turned your misconceptions into systems. Justice as you define it was designed to suppress and control us. You see through the lens of your fears and biases, but they are yours only. I refuse to accept this as inevitable. I refuse to accept your version of who I am. I am Blak and this truth stands against your lies and resists your violence.

You’ve done your best to fracture us. I see it when my brown cousins forget we come from the same roots and hold the same belonging. We are forcibly separated by the borders you drew, the government labels you imposed, the plasma quantum that divides us, the religions that replaced our culture and by your colonising language that silenced our tongues. Yet with all you’ve taken we still remember. Our culture is the everywhen of then, now and the future and no matter how hard you try you’ll never be able to bury what it is to be Blak.

Australia. Whatever origin, race or whatever identity you claim there is a truth that predates it all: we were once all belonging to the land. Not to governments or systems of oppression. The land was our original home, teacher and our first belonging. It articulated our speech and gave rise to the words that delivered our stories. It was the land that moulded our faces and was reflected in the contours of our features. It formed our bodies, our movements and our connections to one another. It was the land that gave us our knowledges. Our ancient and enduring truths born from listening, living in balance and as a part of something far vaster than ourselves.

Somewhere along the way you broke it. You placed borders where none belonged and claimed land that could never be owned. You replaced it with your laws, yet Blak quintessence will outlast your structures and your entitlements.

Your colonisation isn’t over. I see it when I’m the only Blak person at a conference table and my presence is reduced to representation. I see it on Smith Street where my brothers and sisters are harassed and antagonised by the police once again like they’re problems to be managed. Your society looks at them and sees failure, irresponsibility and chaos but the truth is they are fighters of your system that stripped away everything and gave nothing back. The truth is your colonisation comprises judgment, control and violence. The ones you look down on are me. We own the scars of what you have done, and the ache stretches across generations. We survive in a colony that never tried to make space for us.

The reality of being white in this country means you were never stolen from your family or never taken to be converted by the church or forced to abandon your belonging or your culture or your identity. You didn’t have to be legalised by a government to prove your permanence. You didn’t have your liberation and recognition and resistance beaten out of you. You didn’t have to endure humiliation and molestation and rape as a child in institutions that claimed to better you, to make you ‘better.’ 

Colonisation exists when your rules are designed to exclude the understanding that we hold. You place value on degrees and institutions while dismissing the wisdom that has sustained us for tens of thousands of years. You ignore that our education is anthropology, theology, geology and sociology. It is science, philosophy and innovation. It holds intellectual tools that address modern-day problems you’ve failed to solve. Your systems reward those who conform to your standards and leave no space for the depth of my culture to thrive in the way it deserves. 

I see colonisation in moments that are rooted in what you’ve taken from us. I see it in my first experience of getting drunk when there was no one to teach me how to pace myself, how to respect myself or how to hold my ground. There was no one to assure me that I had nothing to fear even if I couldn’t remember my actions the next morning. Instead, I was taught to lose control and to let go of myself in ways that were only meant to harm.

Control only existed in the hands of the men I thought desired me and took advantage of the hollowness colonisation created. They wielded control in ways that deepened the scars handed down through generations pain. Your colonisation took the safety of knowing I had a circle of people who would catch me when I fell. And even now as I piece myself back together, I recognise what should have been and what you took away.

I see colonisation in the spaces where love should have existed but didn’t. I see it in the alcohol that became the only excuse for damaged men to tell me they loved me. Their words were hollow, and their actions were soaked in the legacy of broken systems and fractured spirits. I see it when I was choked and sexually assaulted by a man who justified his violence with lies. He told me it was okay for my body to be abused because I was drunk, and he called it kinky. Your colonisation taught him that my worth could be liquidated, that my body was his to use and that his desires mattered more than my will. 

Australia. What happened to me was your fault. Blak silence is the heirloom of your system that taught us to suppress without healing. It’s the consequence of the dynamic you created in which my safety doesn’t exist. I had no brother not born of the same mother or father who could protect me without a hidden agenda. The roles of siblings were lost when you tore us apart and dismantled our families. Brothers and sisters were meant to teach me how to be respected and loved in a way that uplifted me. But I learned how to smoke crack before I ever set a goal for myself. I learned how to make myself vulnerable before I understood how to set boundaries. 

It took me twenty years to find a brother who could stand beside me. It took me thirty years to believe that a man could exist without the intent to strip away all that is sacred to me. For so long your systems made it impossible to see anyone as more than harm. But our families prove that healing is possible and the bonds you tried to sever can be mended. 

My presence is undeniable, and my existence is my resistance. In an environment that has tried to abandon us, that owning a Blak identity is an act of defiance and with this will always be hope. Hope that the world as we know it won’t perish at its own destruction. Our survival is a blueprint for a time to come where good will, care and justice prevail. We stand as proof that heart is stronger than erasure and that hope is more enduring than despair. 

You alleviated yourself of responsibility by turning every Blak person into a victim stripped of agency. You made us believe we had forgotten what it meant to be warriors.

If you ever did anything responsible and accountable in this life it was this: you made my white father who helped create me because now I can tell you that colonisation still exists, but so do we. Everything we reverberate is a testament to our fortitude. We resist. We reclaim. We refuse to accept your version of who we are. And every act of dismantling your colony is a rebuilding what you tried to destroy.

Australia. I don’t want human rights you offer, wrapped in bureaucracy and conditional acceptance. I don’t need your help, your financial assistance or your proclamations of fairness. I don’t need you to tell me I have rights as if they were yours to give in the first place. I don’t want acts or policies created to grant me permission to exist on this land. This land is mine in ways no document or government can define. My relationship with it isn’t something you can legislate or validate. It predates your systems, your rules and your attempts to control what you can never understand.

What I want is what was always ours: the freedom to be. What I want is for you to stop pretending that your acknowledgment is the foundation of our presence. We have always been here, and we will always be here, with or without your permission. I need your responsibility. Not your pity, your excuses or your hollow gestures. I need your commitment to protect the land that gave me these eyes, this skin and this soul. The land that wrought who I am and who we are as a nation of many nations.

Protect our identities. Protect what remains and what survives despite everything you’ve done to erase it. Protect the languages, the wisdom, sciences and the custodianships that still breathe through this land. 

Recognise what we still have, what you could not destroy. Let this be the end of your denial, your apathy and your erasure. There is no future without us.