‘I became a pariah in my home when I was still a child. It’s very damaging’

Like many Australians, Grace Tame moved overseas when she was a young adult. What led to her leaving couldn’t have been more different to the reality of her peers.

“That had a lot to do with the experience that I had at 15 in a small town, a one-paper town. Thank you very much Rupert Murdoch,” she says.

“It wasn’t just the experience itself of being abused over a period of time by a very sadistic, psychopathic individual, but it was the experience of that being reported on so erroneously, so misrepresentatively, and then those rumours being so pernicious, I didn’t want to be in my home any more. I became a pariah in my home when I was still a child. It’s very damaging.”

Grace Tame: “I didn’t want to be in my home any more.”Credit: Jason South

Best known as an advocate for child sexual abuse survivors and as former Australian of the Year, Tame is referring to the coverage of her rape and continued abuse for years by a high school teacher older than her father. It was trauma upon trauma.

So she ran away to Santa Barbara aged 18, studied liberal arts at a community college and worked as an illustrator. Interestingly, political commentary was part of her work back then.

Posting a drawing of Los Angeles gallery Made by Jimbob on Instagram led to them exhibiting her work, then came other commissions and shows which put her on comedian John Cleese’s radar; she subsequently toured as an artist with him and later did some work for Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore. “I’ve sort of gone where the winds blow me in my life,” she says.

Fast-forward a decade, and she’s been Australian of the Year, published a memoir and, in 2021, established the not-for-profit Grace Tame Foundation.

“I’ve certainly had some extreme lows, but also some extreme highs in my life. I’ve drunk experiences through a fire hose … when I look back on all the things that I’ve done in a relatively short space of time. I’m only 29; it’s been quite a lot.”

We meet in Collingwood, in Melbourne’s inner north, at 102 UNIQ, a funky Vietnamese restaurant run by chef Steven Ngo (formerly of Melbourne’s Chin Chin and Firebird, and Sydney’s Long Chim) and Jess Doan. We have the place to ourselves and bunker down in a corner near the front window, half an eye on the ominously grey Melbourne skies outside.

After we order – turmeric lemongrass chicken for her and the crispy fried barramundi for me – I have to ask: how was being Australian of the Year?

“It was equal parts exhilarating and rewarding and exhausting and frightening and overwhelming,” she says with a big sigh. “And unpredictable.”

The turmeric and lemongrass chicken and the crispy-skin barramundi at 102UNIQ in Collingwood.Credit: Jason South

“It was special. I try to hold on to the positives where I can. The greatest privilege for me in that time was just getting to be a witness of what happened for the broader community of survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and the conversation around childhood sexual abuse and incest is something that is long-standing, it’s been rumbling before I became Australian of the Year, and, in many ways, that groundwork allowed for that alignment, for that message to be well-received. It’s one thing to have a message, it’s another thing for it to be received.”

What Tame reveals next is an ugly reality few would realise came with her time in the role. When you poke the underbelly of the child sex offender network, you come up against hell in real life, she says. “I’ve been chased home. I’ve been in a car chase. I’ve had thugs come to the house, go through the bins, come to the front door, pull the door off its hinges,” she says.

“They come for you. They engage in networked abuse. They proliferate your inboxes on every channel ... Offenders like that are very sophisticated, they know how to walk just along the black letter of the law so they can’t get caught.

“I try to hold on to the good things, the change that we were able to help drive as a collective, and the foundations that we’ve laid in order to continue to do more work that needs to be done.”

Tame with then-prime minister Scott Morrison at an Australian of The Year function in 2022.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

There was also a certain image captured by the media at The Lodge when Tame was a guest of then-prime minister Scott Morrison. “I should probably get my eyebrows insured,” she quips. “It was such a brief moment, too. I think it’s as they say, a picture paints a thousand words.”

Some commentators, however, criticised Tame for that “picture”, labelling her ungrateful and childish. Others applauded the outgoing Australian of the Year for her uncompromising honesty.

“I think for a population of people who were frustrated, but also just f--- you to civility politics and the danger of what buying into civility politics can do,” Tame says.

“For me, it came from a lifetime of fawning to very powerful, very dangerous people and how very dangerous people exploit that; we’re supposed to just fold to them because what they do with that is very scary.”

“Fawning”, as she explains in her memoir, is one potential response to trauma. Even before her abuse, it was her default MO, partially a result of being the child of divorced parents, desperately seeking recognition and approval. “The disease to please”, is how her mother describes it.

Tame is whip-smart, engaging, passionate and funny, despite being up well before sunrise to appear on ABC breakfast television that morning. “I get up typically around 5am or 5.30am anyway, so it’s not too much of a stretch,” she says. “I’m an early riser, full of beans.”

It’s something of a recurring theme. She doesn’t drink coffee (“that’d be a worry, you’d be pulling me off the walls”) and declines a wine with lunch. And no, there are no two-foot bongs in her life, she says pre-emptively, alluding to one media report about her after the Morrison side-eye incident.

“The Daily Mail went and burrowed down in my Instagram and found a photo when I was 19. They didn’t have to try very hard – it was on my own Instagram … I don’t really do that sort of thing any more. In fact, I’ve been sober for nearly two years,” she says. “I just like to lead a healthy lifestyle. I eat pretty clean food. I like to get good sleep.”

These days, her work revolves around advocacy and the foundation. I wonder how she remains optimistic after all she’s been through. “Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you get really angry. And I think you’re entitled to be angry. That’s a natural reaction for something like that, [to] someone who treats you with such blatant disregard, like you are not a human being.”

Doing things that are restorative is a priority. “Hanging out with my family and my friends, especially my best friend, Dom, I see him every Saturday night and his family, who I’ve known since I was seven; we’re both autistic,” she says. “Watching good old classic films – I’m a big schlock horror fan. I love David Cronenberg, I love David Lynch, and I love classic rock and roll – ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, maybe Talking Heads, Little Feat.”

Tomorrow she’s heading to Sydney to see the Texan psychedelic funk band, Khruangbin. Much to her amusement, I mishear the name as Crumbwind. “Oh, that’s good,” she says with a big laugh.

During the course of lunch I realise how quickly Tame can change gears mentally. One minute we’re talking about music, the next it’s incest. (“Eighty per cent of all child sexual abuse is incest and that’s a word that we just don’t want to say, let alone properly look into it.”)

Later today, she’ll head to a yoga class, one of three a week. “It requires a lot of discipline and patience, especially Bikram – it’s fascist yoga,” she quips.

Once the photographer has the shots he needs, Tame changes from her suit jacket into a jumper, which has me regretting my very un-Melbourne lack of an extra layer. “I am a Tasmanian, we know,” she jokes. Colourful and warm, it’s the creation by Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey, which I covet; she owns several.

Tame’s first foray into ultra-marathon running came in support of Australia’s First Nations people. In the wake of Black Lives Matter in the US, she and her cousin decided to run for 437 minutes – one minute for every Black death in custody since the royal commission into the issue in 1991.

“We were meditating on that theme. As two white women, we were never going to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of a First Nations person, but to act, as opposed to speaking, that’s silent solidarity through action,” she says.

Since then, long-distance running has become part of her life. Running was always a passion but the mental capacity to do so over hours and hours is next level. “You can train your body only to a certain extent, most of the challenge of long-distance running is psychological,” she says. “Obviously, mind and body are not separate entities, but you need to have a lot of grit, a lot of patience, and a deep well of self-belief.”

Have things changed in terms of media reporting? “In some ways they have and in other ways they haven’t,” she says. “In some ways, they have gotten worse, and that is a stain on the mainstream media industry.”

Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins during their address to the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on February 9, 2022.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Using correct language is key. Not describing situations where an adult offender has engaged with a child as a relationship, for example. “Because it’s never a relationship, it is the ultimate power imbalance where an adult is exploiting the incapacity of a child who is not neurologically, physically or socially developed enough to understand what is happening to them,” she says. “It’s the media perpetuating this myth of false balance between an adult and a child.”

As a society we are often not good at talking about healthy, positive sex, about calling body parts by their correct names – particularly important for children. Euphemisms abound to this day, which surely is part of the problem.

“We’re very contradictory as a species. On the one hand, we are very out there and we’ll make very degrading jokes and things like that, but then when it comes to actual sex positivity and things like that, we’re really almost closeted and repressed.”

Receipt for lunch at 102UNIQ in Smith Street.

Tame’s approach has been to play it straight. “I’ve been pretty candid and that’s because we need to be because part of the problem is that we do not understand how bad the problem of child sexual abuse is, and until we fully grapple with it, we’re not going to be able to prevent it. There’s this very pervasive mythology that we just have to accept child sexual abuse as a fact of life, which is very dangerous because we don’t put enough emphasis on prevention.”

Later this month, she embarks on a national speaking tour, called Lightening the Load. “One of the things that struck me very early on is that child sexual abuse survivors and people who are in the public eye, everyone often thinks of as being one-dimensional. And that’s just bullshit, isn’t it? We’re all human beings who contain multitudes.”

According to the 29-year-old advocate, the idea is “to reflect on the very jarring, very bizarre experience of being thrust out of obscurity and into this blaring, glaring spotlight”.

“I like being in a room with people who are like me. The audiences that come to see me are often people who for whatever reason – it might be because they’re also autistic like I am, or it might be because they also have a similar experience of abuse or some kind of trauma – and they might have spent a lot of their life feeling like they’re on the outer, feeling isolated. I love that we can all come together and share a moment of lightness, of laughter and human connection in the room together.”

Lightening the Load with Grace Tame is in Sydney on September 28; Canberra on September 29; Brisbane on October 5; and Melbourne on October 19.

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