I was saddened to read in today’s Age that Dr Roberta (Bobbi) Sykes, PhD. died yesterday, aged only 67.
Born in 1943, Sykes was an activist for indigenous rights and the first Black Australian to graduate from an American university, Harvard. She was a journalist, author and poet, winning the Patricia Weickert Black Writers Award in 1982. I read her autobiography Snake Cradle (1997-2000) and was shocked by the picture she painted of life for Black Australians. The first volume Snake Dreaming won The Age Book of the Year Award in 1998, and it was, I thought, the first book written by an indigenous Australian that I read.
I thought that because, for a long time, Sykes herself believed that she was indigenous. She was born in Townsville, where she was brought up by her unmarried White Australian mother. Because Sykes was dark-skinned, she suffered the routine racism that Aboriginal people experienced, which included, for girls, gang rape by the local white boys ‘on a spree’. She left school at 14 and eventually went to Sydney and became a freelance journalist. Her activism grew out of these experiences and she took part in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. People my age knew and admired her as ‘Bobbi Sykes’, a strong woman who was determined to achieve change.
In 1973 her mother revealed that Sykes’s father was an African-American soldier, and at the age of 30 Sykes had to confront a radical change to her sense of identity. It was an invidious position: her ‘Aboriginality’ had defined her adult life but she was criticised by indigenous Australians for claiming identity that wasn’t hers, and of course she was still subject to racism on an everyday basis. In her autobiography she wrote that she dealt with this by defining herself anew, choosing the snake as her own totem, an emblem of the courage with which she lived her life.
What Sykes’s book revealed to me was, Aboriginal or not, she lived the life of many mixed race kids in country towns. She refused to let the expectations of others rule her life, and her capacity to achieve a PhD from one of the world’s most prestigious universities was an inspiration to those who, like Sykes, left school without finishing their education. She was a role model who proved the possibility that going back to school and on to university opened the door to all kinds of opportunity.
Author: Roberta Sykes
Title: Snake Cradle
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN:9781741147476
Source: Personal library
Thanks for this post Lisa, which I’ve just got around to reading. I had heard of her, without knowing a lot about her really, and had heard that she had died recently. I didn’t know of her African American heritage rather than Aboriginal. What a shock that must have been to realise that her identity that forged her politics was incorrect. You wonder really at how her mother let it go on for so long. Perhaps that was an even bigger shame for her mother than if her daughter had been Aboriginal?
By: Louise on November 30, 2010
at 9:02 pm
Oh Louise, who can know the pressures on a single white woman having a dark-skinned child back in those days? If you watched Small Island on the ABC on Sunday you saw Queenie relinquish her child to Caribbean parents rather than have it grow up in a white society that was going to reject it. From what I have heard, Aboriginal communities have always been accepting of mixed-race children in a way that mainstream Australian society has not. It would take enormous courage to admit the truth after so long, I think.
By: Lisa Hill on November 30, 2010
at 9:18 pm