After the glitter settles by Digital Writers' Festival

Celebrating the voices of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, sistagirl, brotherboy, inter-sexed and queer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples...beyond the 2017 Sydney Mardis Gras

Note from the author: I begin by acknowledging that ‘After the Glitter Settles’ was created on the unceded, ancestral, traditional and stolen lands of the hǝn’q’ǝmin’ǝm speaking Musqueam peoples whom have been caretakers of this land since time immemorial.

CONTENT WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are warned that this publication contains names, images and voices of people who have died. Further, this publication contains content dealing with gender-based violence, specifically trans violence within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. Also dealt with are issues of sex and sexuality in realtion to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people . If you feel that any of this content will prove triggering for you, please take care of yourself.

The ‘Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras Parade’ is the annual LGBTQIA+ pride parade and festival held in the heart of Sydney city. Muruwari man, Tim Bishop says the Mardis Gras parade is a time to ‘...claim a space to be together for one night of the year as one family, ‘one mob’ of proud gay, lesbian, transgendered, sistagirl, brothaboy, intersex and queer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, their partners and family. We always was and always will be’ (2016). However, after the festivities are over and the parade glitter settles, this space of celebration and togetherness closes-over and is resumed not only by the voices of the white queer community, but also the erasing narratives that displace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and shut down their voices. This publication seeks to hold space for Queer, Sistagirl and Brotherboy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices. It seeks to honour these peoples whom survive violence, pain and displacement, yet are able to create and flourish despite it. My name is Kate Bonser. I acknowledge my presence as an uninvited guest, white, queer-identiyfing settler student both here on Musqueam territory and on Gadigal, Wangal and Bedegal Country where I live in Sydney, Australia. As such, I acknowledge my complicity in the everyday, ongoing dispossession of these Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands and territories. cont....

cont... Making an acknowledgement of County and territory asks me to question whether my relationship to the lands and stories with which I am engaging, is one that is CREATING space for Indigenous voices (rather than centering my own). Further, it holds me accountable to the Indigneous communities, friends and professors with whom I have engaged to produce this project. In creating this publication I have reflected deeply on how inserting my voice into this conversation simultaneously closes-out a space for the voices of Queer, Sistagirl and Brotherboy Indigenous peoples to be heard. As a white settler woman, I acknowledge that my voice profits off the very same structures and forces of settler-colonial violence that silence and erase the Indigenous voices I seek to presence and celebrate in this publication. I arrive at this work recognising that I am sharing knowledge, story and ways of experiencing the world that are neither my own, nor are they ones that I will ever experience or know.

FO RD ST

These voices are here, they always have been, and always will be speaking and living thier truths within or without of community throughout Australia.

HYDE PARK

Finally, I would like to add that this publication only includes a handful of Queer, Sistagirl and Brotherboy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives from accross Australia, and certainly does not reflect the full complexity and diversity of this community.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Mardis Gras Parade route lays over a pathway of the Gadigal poeple on whose Country the parade is held each year. These pathways were used by the Gadigal people to travel on country between the harbour shores and the inland grasslandsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Bishop, 2016).

- Kate Bonser

Long before thier first ‘official’ Sydney Mardis Gras entry in 1988, the voice of theAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commuinty has been at the forefront of LGBTQIA+ liberation movements throughout Australia. Notably, the first Sydney Mardis Gras Protest of 1978 was headed by members of the Aboriginal community. Tim Bishop is an Aboriginal man with bloodlines from the Muruwari Tribe in Northern NSW. In 2016, Bishop initiated, curated and worded the ‘History of the First Peoples entries in the Sydney Mardis Gras Parade’ - a timelined archive of community-owned and shared stories, photographs, articles and videos documenting the floats, feathers and festivities of the parade each year. The full timeline can be accessed at: http://www.tiki-toki.com/ timeline/entry/590976/History-of-First-Peoples-entriesin-the-Sydney-Mardi-Gras-Parade/ The following section is an illustrated adaptation of Bishop’s timeline, capturing highlights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mardis Gras entries from 1988 to 2017.

1988 - The first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entry in the Mardis Gras parade was in the year of Australia’s Bicent enary celebrations (Bishop, 2016). The float featured ‘...Malcom Cole dressed as Captain Cook, with a black Sir Joseph Banks and two black sailor s beside him in a boat pulled by white men’ (Stapleton, SMH, 1988 in Bishop , 2016). It would be 16 more years before the position of ‘First in he Parade ’ would be achieved by an Aboriginal entry.

1992 - An Abori ginal and Torr es Strait Isla ‘Koori Wirgirl nder Lesbian s’ (women from support group, everywhere) ma t-shirts emblaz rched with bann ened in thier ers and logo (Bishop, 20 16)

Islander - The first large-scale Aboriginal and Torres Strait ted the promo ss’ Busine community float. A banner reading ‘Everyone’s prevenIDS HIV/A er Island message of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait tion campaign (Bishop, 2016). 1996 - engineered and built by the women of the community, the entry was a very large and very SPARKLY Aboriginal flag on wheels - ‘red for the earth & ochre used in ceremonies, yellow for the sun, the giver of life & black for the Aboriginal people’ (Bishop, 2016).

1995

1998 - ‘Queers for Reconciliation’ was formed in response to the

Federal Government’s Wik Legislation. A GIANT goanna took pride of place in this year’s float (Bishop, 2016)

1993- Sydney’s ‘Bangarra Dance Theatre’, a leading Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander performing arts company, entered a float in the 1993 parade (Bishop, 2016).

e created a giant Rainbow In 1988, Goomeroi peoples from More e spirit), to celebrate the proSerpent (or ‘Kurrea’, the ancestral snak under the ATSI Heritage Protection of sacred site Boobera Lagoon centrepiece for this year’s entry tection Act. The ‘Kurrea’ became the (Bishop, 2016).

1999 -

2001 -

A proud tribute to Cathy Freeman’s Gold Medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics - Our Cathy (performed by Birripi woman, Liza Marie-Syron) travelled on a truck, Olympic flame in hand, accompanied by six escorts wearing thier own red, black and yellow Freeman running suits (Bishop, 2016).

2005 2005 - The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander group got our Own Queen!!!’ ‘This float was as much to say Na. We cine Hollingsworth (dec’d), sits on (Bishop, 2016) - community elder Fran waratah septre in-hand. Commuher throne on the back of a ute with ‘Black ++ White ++ Pink’ promoted nity action group for reconciliation for Reconciliation’ - what would ‘Corroboree 2000 -– Walk the Bridge n in Australian history. be the largest political demonstratio

2000 -

achieve status as lead entry for the first time!!!!!

2006 -

‘a cheeky black Captain C(r)ook’ (who apparently bore an uncanny resemblance to John Howard) sailed up Oxford St on ‘The Endeavour Gay’, followed by a huge crowd of NAISDA Dancers (Bishop, 2016).

2014 -

In keeping with the theme of this year ‘Kaleidoscope’, the entry featured the multi-colours of the Rainbow Serpent. According to Destiny Haz Arrived, this entry was about “...respect, inclusion, respecting our ancestors and acknowledgement of our people” (Bishop, 2016).

2010 -

first place in the parade, the float ‘40,000 Years of Pride’ was a clever response to overall theme of the year, ‘History of the World’ (Bishop, 2016).

VED RRI A HAZ s Y N a n’ TI oma DES W r onde W i r ‘Koo

2008 - The theme ‘BLACKBOOTY - One Love’ was

proposed by ACON - the NSW-based sexual health organisation supprting LGBTQIA+ Indigneous peooples living/or affected by HIV. The float featured a flat tray truck carrying eight fabulous drag queens (Bishop, 2016).

2015 - a tribute to the 50th An-

niversary of ‘The Freedom Ride’ organised by Arrente man, Charles Perkins (Bishop, 2016)

2013 - Widjibul Bundjalung Queen DESTINY HAZ ARRIVED de-

buts her drag persona ‘Koori Wonder Woman’. Destiny became the face of the campaign ‘Our Destinty Has Arrived’ - encouraging Aboriginal and Torres Strat Islander poeple to get sexual health check-ups (Bishop, 2016)

2016 -

This year marked a significant decision to rename the entry ‘First Nations’ - ‘an incredible diverse group of communities, each with its own cultures, customs and languages spanning a proven history of 60,000 years’ (Bishop, 2016)

So what happens

...

Gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, sistagirl, brotherboy, inter-sexed and queer realities are lived in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities everyday. These are thier voices...

2017 -

After a nation-wide fundraising campaign, Sistagirls from the Northern Territory’s Tiwi Islands travel to Sydney Mardis Gras for the first time. “To our how son,

go to the Mardis Gras is to showcase out cultu re and peple, how Tiwi people evolved in this genera tion and we became stronger in our community” - Crys tal JohnSistagirl Tiwi Elder (Di as, ABC, 1/03/2017)

Growing up Gay at One Arm Point Community written for ABC Open by Badi-Jawi man, Dwesmond Wiggan-Dann ‘I’m Dwesmond Wiggan-Dann and I grew up in the community of One Arm Point community, 200Ks north of Broome. Later on, I moved to Broome for schooling, then Perth to persue my career. I had a really good upbringing at One Arm Point. I was the only gay kid on the community. We all knew that I was different but everyone accepted that, even though my family was very cultural. I was just a normal kid and I was never labelled, I was just Dwes to everyone; like, ‘Oh, that’s Dwes, hanging with all the girls.’ I grew up being me and feeling good about that and I’ve kept hold of that throughout my life. I love fashion and I love clothes. My wardrobe is overflowing and I never wear anything twice. I go 110 percent out there with all my outfits. I tend to call it my creative side. I love drawing, I love art, I love costumes. I’ll spend weeks designing outfits. If there’s a theme party, I like to design something that’s new and unique. I don’t want to look like others and create my own fashion statement. At the Yawuru Christmas party, last year, the theme was elves and fairies so I sewed this big fairy tutu dress with lights through it. I had the wings and the shoes and was the centre of attention! For Broome’s first Mardi Gras I wore a pink sequined top, as a skirt, with a gold corset. I had to be a little bit careful with the short skirt so I was on my best behaviour. I couldn’t wear heels, because I haven’t got the calf muscles, so I wore flats, but I still won Best Dressed.

Photo (Left): Michael Jalaru Torres - Photographer & Designer from Broome, Western Australia. 17

cont. I really look forward to the Broome race round each year. I have a different outfit for every meet. I dress up in suits and I love a lot of floral. My hair’s always up in a big quiff. I go through heaps of hairspray and gel, but I’m the best dressed on track. So I don’t always dress up in drag. I just love fashion and I love mixing and matching, getting dressed up and being that stylish person. When I wanted saw my taught

was younger I did a lot of pattern work and I always to be a designer. I had a home economics teacher, and she designs and drawings so instead of learning cooking, she me to sew.

I work at Nyamba Buru Yawuru as a social entrepreneur. Nyamba Buru Yawuru translates as ‘Home or place of the Yawuru people’. I’m also part of the Kimberley Rainbow Project which supports Aboriginal LGBTI people from and living in the Kimberley. We tell our own stories to people from different service providers and students all over the Kimberley. I’m also the Ambassador of the Kimberley Aboriginal Youth Leadership Program and on the Board of Directors of the Kimberley Land Council. So, my other life is my relaxing place. I can get bogged down from work and then I sew and create something beautiful and dress up and I’ve forgotten everything. It almost becomes my little baby and I want it to shine. But I don’t always see my other life as being completely separate. It compliments my everyday life in so many ways. I’ve always been Dwes and I’ve never been able to separate it. Me being accepting of myself comes from a strong cultural supportive family background and my community. Growing up in Broome, we’re very accepting of each other’s differences. It’s like we’ve been put in a bubble and I’d like to see that bubble expand more into the wider world - embracing every aspect of our society, heritage and culture, including gay marriage because, one day, I’d like to get married.’ - from ‘500 Words: My other Life’, ABC OPEN, Published 6th April 2016

I would like to thank my friend Dwes for generously offering his guidance, words and personal photographs for this publication. The sequins scattered throughout this book are a tribute to your SPARKLE.

Photo: Michael Jalaru Torres - Photographer & Designer from Broome, Western Australia.

Alison Whittaker - Queer poet, life-writer and essayist from Gunnedah and

By Gomeroi woman,

Tamworth, North-Western NSW.

- from â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Lemons in the Chicken Wireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (2016) - a collection of poems about the lives of Queer Indigneous Women in the floodplain fringes. I would like to thank Alison for generously agreeing to have both her extrodinary poetry and her essay writing featured in this zine

Queerness and Indigenous Cultures: One World, many lives

cont. Most people I encounter have a preconceived idea of Aboriginal queerness in the bush, and ask barbed questions like: “How does that work?” or “That must have been rough?” or “So, you mustn’t be that traditional?”

By Gomeroi woman, Alison Whittaker ‘Here we are again. Here’s a spiney train that shudders on its slippery track. It moves from Sydney, taking me home on its back. Logically, the story of Aboriginal queerness and me begins here, although, more accurately, it started immemorially before I came into the picture.

The assumptions that underpin these statements say a lot about how queerness, race and rurality appear to work in an Australian context. The big cities are imagined to be havens for queers, and from them, social change is presumed to spread to the regional and rural, where a high number of Aboriginal people reside.

I’m close to running out of life experiences I can draw upon to bring Aboriginality and queerness into focus for outsiders -– in reality, my life is made of little, dull cogs turning within a bigger picture, like all small lives. But this little explanatory cog never fails me - – the train taking me a few times a year from what I thought was unshackled freedom back into a closet, or from a concrete wasteland devoid of my Gomeroi culture back to its richest, and only, foundational spring. The story, this one at least, ends when I found out that I was wrong about the train and I was wrong about those contradictory parts of me.

‘I’m exhausted by these conversations that justify my existence...[W]hole selves can be made without the searing touch of whiteness’ (Alison Whittaker) More worryingly, white politics of sexuality are perceived to apply in the same way to Aboriginal people, regardless of our location. Indeed, Anglo-Christian ‘proper’ notions of sex, child-rearing, families and relationships, fortified the strategy of colonialism during its first two centuries.

So, the train. When I was 17, it carried me both to a new life and away from one that was just budding. I was eager for university knowledge, and perhaps more eager for the flirty halfsmiles and soft hands I thought I’d find alongside it. I wrote my earliest work on this train, missives about how I would watch myself change on it. My accent would slip from thick to thin. I’d change clothes -– slipping out of queerness and into Aboriginality, and back again, never exactly passing as white or straight, but certainly not mentioning the intricate, invisible bits.

Once, the colonial sexual ethic rejected queerness and transness as backwards, primitive and perverse. It rejected the Aboriginal sexual ethics, cultures and practices that were built around queerness and transness, along with rich social mores around love, family, sensuality and self. Now that white sexual ethics have accommodated a small and normative part of queerness, it returns on its misdirected moral conquest to suggest that it invented queerness. It suggests that, once again, it is the Aboriginal who is backwards, primitive and perverse, except now on the grounds of the same queerphobia and transphobia that whiteness itself invented.

Obsessed with this little limbo on the train, I’d travel more often than I should. At the time, the train was the only place I thought I,in all my complicated parts, could live. It was an in-between space that seemed like nowhere, and made me no-one: free to be at once queer and Aboriginal and everything. Somewhere on the other side of this, reading this story, you bring your own premise of what queerness looks like in places that aren’t the metropolis, and in communities that aren’t white middle Australia.

So, Aboriginal people, particularly in the bush, are cast off as being incapable of queerness and trans-ness, and of loving queer and trans Aboriginal people.

cont.

This warped suggestion that queerness is inherently incompatible with Aboriginality and the bush is fuelled by racism and colonisation. It’s also what motivated me in earlier days, dripping with self-loathing, to move to what I thought was queer utopia: Sydney.

It’s in this flimsy modern/traditional dichotomy that I’m asked, “If queerness didn’t come to you with colonisation, where did it come from?”

This entrapping belief had me convinced that I was living and loving in two contradictory worlds, and one had to be scrunched and stuffed away when I got to where I was going. I moved to the city, in part, as some capitulating buy-in to the idea that the only way a blak* queer could be happy was among white queers in Sydney’s inner west. Only, I never found the same peace that came with bare feet on country and culture, a practical and spiritual connection and mandate of care that I have with my homelands and those within them. Equally, being queer in Newtown, even under its famous mural, with queers to whom I feel some kind of connection, never did save me from urban racism. Although this is foundational ground to cover, I’m exhausted by these conversations that justify my existence. I burn to talk about stuff that can be extracted from white Australia’s fixation with Indigeneity and ‘identity’. Stuff where identity is more than a patronising, white euphemism for imitation or performance, and where whole selves can be made without the searing touch of whiteness. I find it fascinating that there is a question about queerness and Aboriginality. What makes being queer and Aboriginal complicated, if it isn’t a contradiction? From those questions I’m often asked, and from a growing visibility of queer blaks being reported on by the media, we can see that perhaps, from the outside, queer blakness looks like it’s being complicated by the ‘new’ concept of queerness -– wrongly described as the ‘clash’ between the modern and the traditional, and accompanied by stock images of Indigenous people painted up and using iPhones. That’s lazy logic, which first assumes that sexuality and gender are somehow tied to technological or cultural development, and, second, assumes that these developments are shut off to Indigenous peoples. Then, if we’re to view it from the outside, Aboriginality, an imagined traditional position in white fantasy, is troubled by the ‘new’ queerness. To stabilise the mythology white Australia carves around Aboriginal people, queerness is imagined as a white design, and 24 queerness in Aboriginal groups as a sign of assimilation.

The answer to that is complicated. If you’re looking for a ‘birth’ of Aboriginal queerness, you will only be met with disappointment. I was. In my mind, searching for a specific queer origin story among hundreds of nations is a fool’s errand. There may be no ‘origin’ story, because it would be ridiculous to expect that queerness in Aboriginality would mirror the narrative of Western queer history. In Western history, queerness was unnamed, then in the margins, then in public consciousness, then in a fight for change, then crudely liberalised, and now, to some extent, part of the colonial narrative that seeks to impose a heterosexual norm upon rich and complex Indigenous social mores. So, a birth of blak queerness at some point in history is likely off the table. However, if you’re willing to accept queerness not as an event, but as social architecture, I can point to lore and story throughout a suite of nations that illustrate what white Australia would call ‘queer’ or ‘trans’. Many of our languages, too, do not contemplate, or do not strictly enforce, the Western binaries of gender or sexuality that are often demanded of us. They contemplate relationships that are not hetero, and genders that are not cis. But Aboriginal queerness can trouble our ideas of Western queerness. What if not all societies put those who are ‘sex’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’ diverse on the outside of their kin structures, language, or access to power, as colonial nations mostly do? What does queerness look like if it’s not built to query something else, but rather, just is? Did whiteness import queerness? Not as much as it imported queerphobia as an act of sexual imperialism. Aboriginal queerness isn’t made by colonisation, but my, how it suffers from it.’ -----------------------*The term blak is used by some Aboriginal people to reclaim notions of Black or Blackness. - from ARCHER Magazine, 26/01/2017, http://archermagazine.com.au/2017/01/ queerness-indigenous-cultures-ab-

Growing Up as a Transgender Indigenous Australian

cont. The other time I remember being segregated from my mates for being different physically was Corroborree. For as long as I can remember, being separated by gender during ceremony and Corroboree would upset me because I was being taken away and put into a group where I didn’t belong. But I did it because that’s what my elders told me to do.

from VICE Magazine By Wakka Wakka and Wulli Wulli Brotherboy, Kai Clancy ‘I was given the name Kaitlyn when I was a baby, but I guess that isn't my name anymore. My name is Kai now, I'm 19 years old, and I'm from the Wakka Wakka and Wulli Wulli nations. My story is that is I've always felt unhappy about being identified as a girl, I felt like I was in the wrong body. When I was 17 I set out on a journey to feel comfortable and have my appearance reflect how I felt on the inside, so I transitioned from female to male.

When I decided to transition, I asked for their permission about ceremony and they gave me guidelines about what I could and couldn’t do. Being older now I do gender-neutral dances where girls and guys dance at the same time, that’s what I limit myself to these days. I’m still learning, it’s still a journey, but it feels right.

It was a really difficult decision to start the process. It was my first year out of high school and those first six months were horrendous. I didn't know what was wrong with me. When you're in an institution that's so gendered, there are pressures to conform, but when you leave that, there's nothing. There are no pressures and you can be yourself. But for me, being myself was really hard. That in-between period was really difficult. I kept asking myself, "How am I really going to do this?" It started to make sense, and I realized that I needed to do it for my own welfare. That's when I came out as transgender.

I was four years old when my mum first thought I could be transgender. It was my first instance of coming across someone that seemed to be transgender but they weren’t, they were an intersex person. Their story on a 60 Minutes episode in 2000 about how surgical intervention is taken out on young intersex children. This was leaving them confused if they don’t identify with the gender assigned to them post-op. As a result they transitioned from their assigned gender to another—in this instance it was female to male. When I saw that, I asked mum if they did that (surgical intervention) to me when I was a baby. That was my understanding of transition, it didn’t sit right with me. I was told they had a medical reason to feel that way.

The reaction from my Indigenous community was OK. They've seen people who are male-to-female transgender people, but they'd never seen female-to-male transgender people, so it was a bit foreign to them, but they've learned to understand it and accept it later one. Even though I still get called "sis" here (in Melbourne) and back at home. I grew up in North Queensland and Townsville, and there were always a lot of blackfellas and family around me. Being a kid was fine, I fit in with the boys, but when I got to puberty, I got really depressed. My mates were changing and I was changing in a different way. I remember thinking that if I'm different from these guys, and I'm not one of those girls, then what the hell am I?

Before I transitioned I looked naturally pretty feminine with long blonde hair, I was really petite. I told my friends about it first and they didn’t get it straight away, but the more they started to understand and take note of my behaviour it started to make sense that I was just different from them

cont.

I’m living in Melbourne now and working at the Victorian Aids Council on an Aboriginal project. I’ve almost finished a political science degree, majoring in international relations and public policy, and I do a lot of Aboriginal politics stuff around the town, especially back in Brisbane, like the G20 and Invasion Day.

My own community in Queensland has been really supportive, and in Melbourne they’re great. The Melbourne mob here didn’t really know that I was transgender, they’ve always known me as Kai. For the Brisbane mob it’s a bit different, they knew me as Kaitlyn and I think it’s a bit hard for them to get their heads around sometimes. But they’re good, they’re really supportive generally. All the Sistergirls and Brotherboys (names given to transgender Indigenous Australians and support groups) are really lovely, and some of them are like big sisters or cousins to me. They’re role models, and they look out for me.

I really can’t predict the future for myself. I just hope that I’m still happy. I am happy now’ - from Vice Magazine, April 6 2015, https://www.vice.com/ en_ca/article/growing-up-as-a-transgender-indigenous-australian

The transgender community knows discrimination when they see it, and it’s very rare for them to discriminate against other people. They’re pretty open about my Aboriginal identity and they accept it, no questions asked. But there are still some instances where there’s a little bit of racism.

Check out Kai Clancy’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ1jPSQqf4SgA_6ejfQI10A/feed

I’ve been making YouTube videos since I began my hormone replacement therapy, I love being able to show how much I’ve changed. It’s good for myself and it’s good for other people too I guess. I use it to document my progress and see all the differences in myself over time, but for other people it’s a really good resource for motivation, and a referral tool for other people who might be going through the same thing. Lots of transgender guys do those videos, the transition is so physical, and you can see the differences in hormone treatment over time. It’s an amazing transition. I’ve always been somewhat confident, my friends will tell you that. But I guess this confidence is more enhanced now because I’m more confident in myself. I was pushing myself beforehand, I used to force myself to be confident, now I feel like it comes naturally because I’m being who I am. There’s less discomfort in myself, I feel like I’m more at one with myself, and I know who I really am now.

- many thanks to Kai for generously agreeing to have his story featured in this zine. 28

Terminology

Reference List

Gender Identity:

& further notes

‘is a person’s internal sense of self which may be Sistergirl or Brotherboy, woman or man, neither, a combination of different genders, another gender or no gender. Gender identity does not relate to a person’s sexual orientation, or the body they were born with.’1

Sistagirl:

‘Sistagirls are Aboriginal transgender women (assigned male at birth) who have a distinct cultural identity and often take on female roles within the community, including looking after children and family. Many Sistergirls live a traditional lifestyle and have strong cultural backgrounds. Their cultural, spiritual, and religious beliefs are pivotal to their lives and identities’ 2

Brotherboy:

‘Brotherboys are Indigenous transgender people with a male spirit, whose bodies were considered female at birth. Brotherboys choose to live their lives as male, regardless of which stage/path medically they choose. Brotherboys have a strong sense of their cultural identity’3

Trans:

‘is an umbrella term for numerous gender experiences that might be described using terms like transgender, transsexual, Sistergirl, Brotherboy, transman, MTF (male to female), transwoman, FTM (female to male), qenderqueer, agender, gender-neutral, third gender, non-binary. For many people they may just want to be described as a woman or a man’.4

Sisters & Brothers NT, ‘Transgender and Gender Diverse: Terminology’, http:// sistersandbrothersnt.com/transgender-and-gender-diverse/) 2 Sisters & Brothers NT, ‘Sistergirl’, http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/sistergirl/)

3 Sisters & Brothers NT, ‘Brotherboy’, http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/brotherboy/ 4 Sisters & Brothers NT, ‘Transgender and Gender Diverse: Terminology’, http:// sistersandbrothersnt.com/transgender-and-gender-diverse/) 30

References Bishop, T (2016), ‘History of First Peoples’ entries in the Sydney Mardis Gras Parade’, http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/590976/ History-of-First-Peoples-entries-in-the-Sydney-Mardi-Gras-Parade/ Clancy, K (April 6 2015) ‘Growing Up as a Transgender Indigenous Australian’, VICE Magazine, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/

growing-up-as-a-transgender-indigenous-australian

Dias, (March 1st, 2017), ‘Tiwi Islands Sistagirls prepare to wow Sydney Mardi Gras, want to show Indigenous LGBTIQ culture’, ABC News, Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-02/tiwi-islands-sistagirls-prepare-to-wow-sydney-mardi-gras/8314132 Sisters & Brothers Northern Territory (2015), Identities, http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/basic-definitions/ Whittaker, A (2016), ‘Chicken Wire Lemons’, Lemons in the Chicken Wire (Broome: Magabala Books) Whittaker, A. (26th Jan 2017) ‘Queer and Indigenous Cultures: One World, Many Lives,’ Archer Magazine, Retrieved from http://archermagazine.com.au/2017/01/queerness-indigenous-cultures-aboriginal-australia Wiggan-Dann, D (5th April 2016), ‘Growing up Gay at One Arm Point Community’, from ‘500 Words: My Other Life’, ABC Open, https://open. abc.net.au/explore/12480

A Further note from the author: Throughout the process of creating ‘After the Glitter Settles’, I thought a lot about the practice of artistically representing Indigenous bodies. In the section ’60,000 Years of Pride’ the decision to depict Indigenous bodies on the Mardis Gras Floats (as opposed to offering mere illustrations of the floats themselves) is intended to speak back to colonial artistic practices of excavating and appropriating Indigenous art forms, then disposing of the bodies to which this knowledgee, skill and memory belongs. Drawing from the community-owned online timeline, ‘History of First Peoples entries in the Sydney Mardis Gras’, a project initiated, worded and curated by Tim Bishop (see link in ‘Reference List’), I have attempted to be as historically accurate with these illustrations as possible. All that said, I take full responsibility for any misrepresentation or error in my work.