The Nine Lives of Grace Tame

(Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.)

I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt, the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments.  

I had also never heard of Grace Tame when she was announced as the 2021 Australian of the Year, but the rest of the year sure made up for that!

Before the award, she was reasonably well known in Tasmania (everyone is well known in Tasmania) as the key spokesperson for #LetHerSpeak, a movement campaigning for law reform to end the legal silencing of survivors of child sexual abuse.

Grace was sexually abused at 15 by Nicholaas Bester, a teacher at her high school.  Taking advantage of her vulnerability he groomed her over a period of months, followed by six months of regular rapes before she finally called a halt and reported him to the police.  He was convicted and spent 18 months in prison for his crimes, which seems pretty lenient for what he did.

Of course this is not the end of the story, because having been a child at the time of the offences she was unable to speak publicly about what had happened to her, and no media outlet was allowed to publish her name or anything that would identify her.  On the other hand, no such bar applied to Bester.  This meant that he could be named in media reports, but also that his self-serving confession was on the public court record and reported extensively in the media.  Once his sentence was over he could talk all he liked, and in 2017 Australia's favourite rape apologist Bettina Arndt conducted an interview with him in which they had a good laugh together about how young girls will seduce older men and then ruin them.  He even went back to jail after posting details of some of his rapes on social media.  Yet despite being an adult by this time Grace had no right of reply.

Eventually, with the help of others who formed the #LetHerSpeak campaign, she succeeded in getting an exemption from the Tasmanian Supreme Court and spoke up for the first time in 2019.  She's been speaking up ever since, campaigning for changes to the gag law and on issues of child sexual abuse more generally.  It was this work which led to her being made Australian of the Year in 2021 at the age of 25, and catapulted her onto the public stage.

I think we can learn a lot from Grace Tame's eventful reign as Australian of the Year, but let's focus on two things.  The first is that sexual assault and sexual abuse are disturbingly common.  In her book, she cites the widely quoted research that one in three girls and one in four boys experience some form of sexual assault during their childhood.  This is not new information - I was told similar figures when I worked in child protection in the 1980s.  This abuse is often perpetrated by people who are in positions of trust - priests, school teachers, sporting coaches, and so on.  But women in particular are also at risk of sexual assault as adults - in workplaces, in pubs, at parties, anywhere really.

So we should not be surprised that in 2021 we didn't only hear from Grace Tame.  We heard from Brittany Higgins, who told of being raped by a colleague in Parliament House in 2019 and then pressured not to pursue the case because it would harm the government's chances of re-election and (by implication) her own future employment.  Her finally speaking up in 2021 sparked a wider investigation into working conditions in Parliament House which revealed that about a third of the staff there had either experienced or witnessed sexual harassment.  

Courtesy of the work of Chanel Contos, we also heard the stories of thousands of young women who had been sexually assaulted in their school years by male classmates.  The perpetrators included students at prestigious private schools, and the abuse was often brazen and more or less public.  

The second thing we learnt is that because abusers are often powerful people, generally more powerful than their victims, and often clever psychopaths to boot, they are able to mobilise significant forces to their aid.  This is also not new information - we had a whole Royal Commission into how powerful institutions protect and enable child sexual abuse. Reading Grace Tame's book we see how Bester was able to bring the school authorities around to his side.  During the grooming phase of his abuse he managed to have it understood across the school that he was Grace's supporter and confidante, so if she was upset and overwhelmed at school (recovering as she was from anorexia and coping with prior trauma) they would fetch him, or take her to him.  Delivering the lamb to the wolf's door.  Her parents understood that this was massively inappropriate (her father was a high school teacher himself) and complained to the school about it more than once, but the grooming and abuse proceeded unchecked.  Even once she had disclosed the abuse and was weeping uncontrollably the principal said to her words to the effect that 'I had boy trouble at high school, too'.  'Boy trouble' was the least of her problems at that point.

But once you report the abuse this is just the beginning.  It's incredibly hard for an abuse survivor to genuinely escape further abuse.  The world is full of psychopaths who will take advantage of a survivor's trauma and confusion and abuse them again.  If they stay silent, they escape the glare of the spotlight but this means they have to cope with the trauma on their own.  Yet if they speak up they find there are even more powerful forces lining up to question them, reinterpret the abuse as their fault, deny it happened or otherwise gaslight and belittle them.  The louder they speak, the louder the backlash and the more powerful the attackers.  

Hence, Brittany Higgins found her former employers backgrounding the media against her partner, insinuating that her allegations were part of a political plot aimed at bringing down the government.  As the public anger about these multiple abuses swelled, Higgins and Tame became friends and found themselves sharing stages at the Women's Marches and the National Press Club, but they also suffered accelerated online trolling and the abuse of the old white men and snarky women who occupy the opinion pages of the Murdoch media.  Higgins found the ACT arm of the Australian Federal Police distinctly hostile towards her and reluctant to prosecute her alleged attacker.  In the end his trial was aborted due to juror misconduct and the ACT Prosecutor decided not to proceed to a retrial because of the devastating impact the process was having on her mental health.  Yet even today, as I write this article, The Australian has published an interview with Linda Reynolds, Higgins' former employer, in which she casts herself as the victim in the whole affair, alongside leaked extracts from Higgins' private diaries which the paper could only have got from the AFP.

By speaking up Grace Tame also painted a big target on herself and there was no shortage of powerful people lining up to take pot-shots at her, dig up dirt from her past like the photo of her with a giant bong, and suggest once again that maybe the abuse was her fault.  (It wasn't, abuse is always the abuser's fault).  Like Higgins, by the end of 2021 her mental health was in tatters and she stepped back, took a deep breath and got help.

I could go on in this vein and this article would never end for all the awfulness of abuse and the ubiquity of its apologists.  But having just finished reading Grace Tame's memoir, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner, I think we need to go beyond the conflict and awfulness of it and get to the heart of why it matters.  It matters because Grace Tame is not a cause, a stereotype, a poster-child for surviving abuse, or any other paper lion.  She is a real, living, 3D, complex and multiply gifted young woman.  She is a loyal, loving daughter, sister, lover and friend.  She is a gifted artist (the book cover is one of hers), a talented comedian with a gift for mimicry and a wicked sense of humour, a yoga teacher, a pretty fair endurance athlete and no slouch at writing (no ghost writers here!).  She is also incredibly courageous, not afraid to call a spade a f***ing shovel, and fiercely determined to stand up against injustice.

Alongside this are some more difficult things.  She has autism, which is neither good nor bad, just different.  Like a lot of girls she went undiagnosed until young adulthood, so she didn't get any support to navigate these differences in a world designed for people who are closer to the centre of the spectrum.  She has also experienced multiple traumas over her life - of course the abuse at 15, but before this her parents' divorce and her subsequent childhood shuffling between two households, emotional abuse by an adult who she doesn't name but whose identity you can perhaps reach some conclusions about on your own, sexual assault by an older child at the age of six.  No wonder she broke down at 14 and became easy pickings for a clever, practiced psychopath.  

Her story from here on is a story about the effects of trauma, but it is also a story of an adventurous, unconventional and courageous young woman who moved to the US at 18, worked in multiple shit jobs to put food on the table, lived in various dives and at times in her car or friends' couches, studied at a community college in California, learned yoga and became an instructor, did art commissions for stars and had a show at an avant garde gallery, got to meet and work for one of her childhood comedic heroes in John Cleese and became friends with his daughter, and was married and divorced by the age of 24.  She doesn't pretend to be a saint, nor aspire to be one, but her sins, if such they are - drug use, short-lived relationships, risk-taking - are the kind of coping strategies and pain responses used by trauma survivors the world over.  

By the time she returned to Australia in 2020 she was approaching the kind of maturity and self-confidence born of hard living and hard lessons.  She had learned not to let other people set her agenda for her, to stand up for herself and others without apology, to be herself whether others liked that or not.  It was not easy.  Reliving her trauma in public over and over again, acquiring an army of online trolls, fielding inane and hostile questions from right-wing journalists, being pilloried in public for not being polite enough to the man who backgrounded journalists about her friend's partner (no, it wasn't her autism, she genuinely loathes him), all the while travelling the country from one gruelling speaking engagement to the next.  

Fortunate for her that just before all this hell broke loose she met a man who neither wanted to abuse her nor was dealing with traumas of his own, who just wanted to be with her, to the extent that he quit his job to become her full time supporter on the road.  Hopefully in the years to come they will be able to build a slightly less frantic life together, although I doubt Grace will ever slow down to the same speed as the rest of us.  

The big danger for us is that we forget what we have learnt about sexual abuse in the last few years, continuing to put women and children at risk and apologise for their abusers.  After all, it's happened before. But the big risk for Grace Tame is that she will be seen for the rest of her life, which is barely one third over barring accidents, as an abuse survivor and advocate.  I hope that after the whirlwind of 2021 and 2022 she will find more space to be all the other things she could be.  That she can get off the treadmill of always being asked to retell the tale of her harrowing 15th year and talk about something else.

I don't say this because I think she should shut up about the abuse.  As if she would!  I say it because she is more than that.  I hope that she gets to put on an art exhibition in her native Hobart and all everyone talks about is her pictures.  That she gets to do more stand-up gigs and everyone laughs at her impersonations and her off jokes.  Perhaps she'll get to sit in one of the chairs on Spicks and Specks and tell funny stories about touring with John Cleese.  Perhaps she'll write a book about her three wonderful grandparents (not the one who was a dud), or maybe a bit of gonzo journalism about  life as a broke Aussie expat in California.

Perhaps she'll do none of those things.  Perhaps she and Max will settle down to a quiet life in suburban Hobart where he goes back to his job as an accountant, she teaches yoga and they make babies together.  Seems kind of unlikely, but you never know....