Rhoda Roberts honoured posthumously with NAIDOC lifetime achievement award

Rhoda Roberts died in March at sixty-six. On a Saturday night in Alice Springs four months later, she received the lifetime achievement award at the NAIDOC awards—a recognition that came too late for her to hold, but not too late to matter. She was a Widjabul Wiyebal woman of the Bundjalung nation, and she had spent her life doing something that looks simple until you understand what it requires: she kept culture alive. She did it through language, through dance, through ceremony—the three pillars that hold a people together when everything else is being taken away.

Roberts was not a quiet keeper of tradition. She was a force, as Lynette Riley, co-chair of the National NAIDOC Committee, said in her tribute. In 1991, Roberts became the first Aboriginal person to host a prime-time current affairs program on Australian television. The show was called Vox Populi, and it aired on SBS. A year later, in 1992, she co-founded Deadly Sounds, a radio program that would run for two decades, giving Indigenous voices a platform across Australia and the Pacific. Twenty-one years of broadcasting. Twenty-one years of making sure people could hear themselves on the radio.

But Roberts was also an artist. In 2000, when Sydney hosted the Olympic Games, she worked as a creative director and choreographed the Awakening segment of the opening ceremony. Millions of people around the world watched her vision unfold. Later, in 2012, she became the inaugural head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, one of the country's most prestigious cultural institutions. She did not simply accept the role; she shaped it. She created Dance Rites, a First Nations dance competition. She pushed for the inclusion of Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Deadly awards in the Opera House's programming. And in 2017, she became creative director of the Parrtjima festival of light in Alice Springs.

What emerges from this list of positions and achievements is a portrait of someone who understood that culture is not something you preserve in a museum case. It is something you make live in the present. You put it on television. You broadcast it on the radio. You choreograph it for the world's largest sporting event. You build institutions around it. You create competitions and festivals and spaces where the next generation can learn and perform and belong.

The NAIDOC awards, which celebrated their fiftieth anniversary this year, recognize outstanding contributions by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia. The awards are named for the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee. Malarndirri McCarthy, the minister for Indigenous Australians, spoke about this year's winners as leaders, advocates, artists, educators, innovators, and community champions. She called them people whose work creates positive change. Roberts fit that description perfectly, though she had already left the room.

Lynette Riley said something important in her tribute: that Roberts had been selected for this honour while she was still alive, and the committee felt strongly that it was important to continue recognizing her contribution even after her death. The award was not a consolation prize. It was an acknowledgment of work that had already been done, already been witnessed, already been changing things. Riley also said that Roberts's legacy would continue to inspire generations to come. That is the kind of thing people say at these events, but in Roberts's case it appears to be literally true. She built institutions. She created platforms. She made space for others. Those things do not disappear when a person dies.