‘You can’t imagine the rejection’: The odd-couple friends pushing for a Yes vote

Advocate and Gomeroi woman Nicole Laupepa 51, and educator Jacqui Parker, 64, travel all over Australia giving workshops on the Voice. Their odd-couple friendship is reconciliation in action.

Nicole Laupepa (left): “We’re very different in many ways, but she’s the other half of me.”Credit: Abril Felman/City of Sydney

Jacqui: We met about six years ago, when we both worked at a multicultural settlement service in Sydney, where I was implementing a training program. Soon after, I asked Nic to do an acknowledgment of country. Afterwards, on the feedback forms, it was the thing everyone liked most. Many were refugees. She has this way of making people feel incredibly welcome, of opening their hearts.

We have each other’s backs. In the work of late, I’ve come up against some antisemitism. She won’t tolerate it. She’s very spiritual and very religious; I don’t believe at all, although I’m culturally Jewish. When we’re home in Sydney, Nic comes over regularly for Shabbat dinner. It means so much to her: the prayers, the lighting of the candles and so on. She has a very strong and passionate connection to Judaism and Israel, much stronger than mine.

If I could, I’d take away some of her pain and heartbreak. It is threaded all through her life as an Indigenous woman, including the racism she grew up with and still experiences, as well as the trauma of losing six babies to miscarriages. She came from a very loving family and absolutely adored her mother, but I can tell that her mum’s attitude was very much: “We don’t indulge our emotions; we just get up and get on with it.” I think that has left its mark. You feel guilty if you indulge yourself, so you go to a place of anger rather than sadness.

“Nicole has this way of making people feel incredibly welcome, of opening their hearts.”

Jacqui Parker

Nic is very triggered by racism, understandably. She can go into a furious rage and vent a lot and it can take a while to get over it, but we talk it through. When she calls out intolerance or stupidity, it’s never unwarranted, never, but let me tell you, it’s often uncensored!

Through this relationship, I see the innate privilege I experience. We walked out of a department store together recently and I’m talking away and suddenly I realise she’s not there. I look behind, and she’s unpacking her bags for security. It never occurred to me to stop. I’m not sure whether they asked her to stop or she just knows they’ll expect it.

Our workshops use the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a framework for understanding and we’ve travelled all over the country. My suitcase is basically a backpack and Nic’s is a 25-kilo trunk. She just looks at me and says, “Shame, Jacqui. Shame.” Shoes are a big part of her luggage and she has to take her own hair-dryer; I’m lucky if I apply a bit of mascara. Nic has her trademark eyelashes and her nails are so long that sometimes I have to open cans for her. Everything for me is about being outdoors. As soon as I can, I’m in the ocean, camping, anything like that. That’s Nic’s idea of hell.

If [the Voice] doesn’t get through, she’s going to feel devastated. For her, it’s a case of “We’re putting ourselves out there and we’re making a very humble, reasonable request.” A No vote would be a slap in the face to her and all First Nations people. It would literally feel like that.

Nic’s a really special person in my life but not because she’s an Aboriginal woman. It’s all the other stuff. She adores my family, she tells great stories, she makes me laugh.

Nicole: I happened to walk past Jacqui’s desk not long after we both started working at SSI [Settlement Services International]. I’d never spoken to her, but my spirit told me: “This woman will walk with you forever.” I went over and said, “You’re probably going to think I’m mad, but you and me? We’re going to be mates and walk together forever.” She was very polite and said, “Oh, okay then.”

She started to invite me to her training sessions. We got talking and realised we were both women who wanted to advocate for human rights. That was how the friendship began.

“You know a friendship has turned into a sisterhood when the other woman will put her own life on the line for you.”

Nicole Laupepa

We’re very different in many ways, but she’s the other half of me. My family have been [born-again, charismatic] Christians forever. I was taught that we were to love Israel, to pray for Israel, because we believed we served the god of Israel. You’d probably call me a Zionist Christian. Then I met this beautiful Jewish woman, but I think I know more about Judaism than she does. She says things like, “I didn’t realise there were so many Jewish organisations until I met you, Nicky.” And we don’t agree on Israel.

I’m from the Gomeroi nation [in north-west NSW], so we’re real mountain people. Jacqui has to go to the beach every day and when we’re staying somewhere near water, she keeps saying, “You have to come down!” And I just say, “Yeah, nuh.” My totems are all land animals!

Her parents were Jewish refugees, about four or five years old when they came to Australia from Germany with their parents. She has talked about the struggles around that and how it shaped her parents’ lives. She often talks about how alone she felt as a little girl.

What I see in her now is this incredible passion and commitment to creating an extended family for her children. Jacqui’s in her second marriage, but when you go to Shabbat dinners at her place, her first husband and his partner and children are all there, everybody’s there.

I don’t call her my friend any more; I say she’s my sister. You know a friendship has turned into a sisterhood when the other woman will put her own life on the line for you, and Jacqui has done that for me a thousand times. I would do it for her, too.

I live in Bankstown [in Sydney’s west]. She lives on the north shore. We delivered a workshop there once and afterwards, they popped champagne. I said, “Shit, is this what happens here? I’ve been slumming it on the other side of the bridge! It’s just coffee there.”

If there’s a No vote, she’ll be devastated. And you can’t imagine the rejection Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will feel. I’ve told Jacqui I don’t think I could get involved in anything to do with reconciliation ever again if that happened. It would leave a wound inside me I don’t think I could heal from.

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