Reckon you know the Wiggles? You haven’t met Tsehay

Deep in the north-western suburbs of Sydney, nestled among the office blocks and residential villages of Bella Vista, is a creative oasis painted in shocking strips of bright pink and pastel yellow, a vast multi-level space filled with dinosaur costumes, pirate props and stacks of sombreros.

Hot Potato Studios, better known as Wiggles HQ, is a one-stop-shop for the Wiggles’ empire of children’s entertainment, housing a TV studio, a recording studio, the odd corporate boardroom, and aisles of Wiggles paraphernalia. Hey, weirdo, want to fondle the original red skivvy worn by founding Red Wiggle Murray Cook? It’s just hanging there in some loaded backroom, amid a veritable IKEA warehouse of Wiggly artefacts.

It’s where 16-year-old Tsehay Hawkins, wearing a vintage Elton John t-shirt and bright daisy earrings, bounds through the halls with the restless energy of a natural-born theatre kid. Since officially joining the group as the new Yellow Wiggle in October, replacing the outgoing Emma Watkins, she’s lived a thousand lives in five months.

Tsehay Hawkins: “Little girls with curly hair have been wanting to wear their hair in an afro puff. It’s like, they’re wanting to be themselves because they can see themselves.”Credit: Wolter Peeters

“It’s been five months?” Hawkins asks incredulously. “Because it feels like it’s been one month. It’s been a blur.”

The kids entertainment phenoms have hit an unlikely purple patch. In January, they somehow topped Triple J’s Hottest 100 with their cover of Tame Impala’s Elephant; in March, they scored their first ARIA no.1 with their covers album ReWiggled. Hawkins has been in the midst of three live tours with the group, including The Fruit Salad TV Big Show! stadium tour, which travels the country and hits Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on April 23.

Of course, there’s also schoolwork — a hefty workload she’s been completing by correspondence in between travelling an hour and back between home and the studio to record and rehearse with bandmates Anthony Field, Lachy Gillespie and Simon Pryce a few times a week.

“It’s a lot, but it’s so cool,” says Hawkins with an indefatigable energy I’d need 13 espressos to replicate. “There really isn’t any routine; there are new things happening every single day and there’s always new projects. It doesn’t feel like work or a job. I’m loving it.

“I’m literally just having the time of my life.”

Tsehay Hawkins, the new Yellow Wiggle, knows far more than the gestures for hot potato.Credit: SMH

A student at Brent Street Academy, the famous performing arts school in Sydney’s Moore Park, Hawkins had already figured out how to balance school with dancing aspirations. In 2017, she won her first dance title, Sydney Latin Festival Mixed Latin Champion (samba), and has since won 20 titles altogether, most recently the 2021 World Latin Dance Cup (solo youth ladies salsa champion), which she calls her “most intense” competition yet.

For parents Robyn and Reg, that determination curbed any concerns they had about Tsehay taking on such a prominent role as the Yellow Wiggle while just a teenager.

Tsehay Hawkins at Darling Harbour Fiesta in 2014 when she was 9 years old.

“She won dance titles while studying at school and she achieved really good school marks as well, so that always put us at rest,” laughs Robyn. “And Tsehay’s very mature. She’s a very determined and hardworking person. Every time we pick her up from the Wiggles, she comes out twirling around and singing, and this continues all the way home in the car, which is an hour’s drive. We know she’s happy, so I think that’s our indication that this is what she’s meant to do.”

Hawkins’ love of dance, and skill with it, is infectious. Watching her on the Wiggles’ Fruit Salad TV (I have a toddler, it’s always on) is almost surreal, the exacting shapes at which her neck bends and shoulders pop as though they’re being pulled by strings. On Instagram and TikTok, she posts slick routines set to the likes of Lil Nas X and Normani.

Hawkins says she started dancing as soon as she could walk, inspired, serendipitously enough, by Wiggles songs she heard on the TV and CDs. She was two years old when her mum enrolled her in ballet, jazz and tap classes.

Robyn, who was 27 when she and Reg adopted six-month-old Tsehay from an orphanage in Ethiopia, says dance offered an important opportunity for Tsehay to delve into her culture. At six, she joined a dance troupe called Afro Kids made up of Aussie kids from across the African diaspora and performed at African community festivals where she learned about countries and their cultures through dancing.

The Hawkins family: Kendly, Robyn, Tsehay and Reg.

“Ethiopian dancing’s funny; it’s basically all about the neck and the shoulders,” Tsehay explains. “Whereas the west African and south African styles are very much the whole body, and definitely the hips and the legs. It’s amazing because they all have such different ways they focus on the body.”

Her foray into Latin dance started from a similar place, when at six she accompanied her parents to South America, where they adopted her little brother, Kendly, from Buenaventura, Colombia. In Bogota and Cali, she watched Colombian women in fancy dresses dancing cumbia and thought, “oh my God, I have to do that!”

“When we came back to Sydney, we found a little studio that taught Colombian dancing and I fell in love with it,” says Hawkins. “Then I saw some older kids doing salsa, and it was so showy and charismatic, I was like, ‘I need to do that!’ And then, like, I love the movie Rio, so just seeing the samba in Carnivale, I was like, ‘I want to do that!’ And so there I was at nine years old, with a huge feather backpiece, dancing on stage and just living my best life.”

That trip to Colombia was eye-opening for another reason, illuminating a personal experience she’d been too young to remember. She recalls waiting in the orphanage while her parents did interviews and filled out forms in another room.

“It was heartbreaking. I met all these kids that hadn’t been adopted yet, and they looked at my parents hopefully. They were all so lovely, and you could see they had such amazing personalities, and I remember I said to Mum, ‘can we adopt more?!’ Mum was like, ‘it’s not that simple — you can’t just come here and pick up a kid.’ I was six then, but it registered when I was a bit older and I understood it more.”

This is what Hawkins knows of her background: she was born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia on November 15, 2005. Five days later, her biological mother dropped her off at an orphanage, where she was then transferred to Koala House, an adoption place for families from Australia.

Tsehay with the OG Wiggles: Anthony Field, Jeff Fatt and Murray Cook at the 2021 ARIA Awards.Credit: Getty Images

“My files got lost, so we don’t know much more about my background at all,” Hawkins explains. “All we know is that she dropped me off, that she couldn’t take care of me, and that’s why she left me there. That’s all I know.

“My parents have been to Ethiopia since. My dad went over twice in the past few years since I’ve been here, trying to search for my files and going through all the orphanages to try to backtrack my story, but we can’t find anything at the moment.

“They put an ad out on the radio to see if they could find my birth parents or anything like that, but they haven’t found it yet. But hopefully with my big platform, you never know, we might. I would love to meet my birth parents one day. It would be amazing if I could.”

Being adopted has always “felt normal” to her, says Hawkins.

“That’s another thing people always ask me: ‘when did you find out you were adopted?’ I’m like, well, obviously. Because I’m Ethiopian and my parents are Caucasian! Like, I can tell the difference,” she laughs.

“But I feel like I’ve always known. I was probably around two when I first asked Mum why we looked different. She said, ‘your mum couldn’t take care of you, so we got to adopt you.’ And I was like, ‘okay, cool.’ It wasn’t an ‘oh really?!’ moment. It was just like, yep, that makes sense!”

Growing up in Bargo, a small town 100km southwest of Sydney, had its quirks. For one, the kids in kindergarten assumed she was Aboriginal because that was the only other dark skin they’d seen.

“There was one other kid who was brown-skinned, but I was obviously the first Ethiopian. At first, the kids didn’t see any difference, but as I got older they’d start asking questions: ‘so where are you from?’ They’d get confused when my parents would pick me up, like [points and squints], ‘how?!’” Hawkins laughs.

Not that their parents were any wiser.

“They’d see Mum and they’d automatically assume she had a dark husband. Then both my mum and dad would come to a parent-teacher night or something, and they’d be like, whaaat? You could see them try to figure it out in their heads,” she laughs.

“Growing up in a small town, I learned a lot about Aussie culture, and I’m proud of living there. But I’m also very proud of being Ethiopian and of my brother’s Colombian heritage. I always say, we call my family the ‘Aussiecolopians’, because we represent all those cultures together.”

Robyn and Reg were adamant their kids grew up strongly aligned to their cultural identities, filling the home with knick-knacks, food and music from their countries.

“When we adopted Tsehay from Ethiopia and Kendly from Colombia, our intention was that when you adopt the child, you adopt their culture as well. We were really happy to take on that obligation,” says Robyn.

Raised in multicultural Bankstown and seeing how bringing culture into their lives helped kids with their self-identity and self-pride, she wanted her children to have the same experience.

“It’s been so positive in our lives,” says Robyn. “When we mingle with Ethiopians and Colombians, I can see how comfortable our kids are; I can see a connection and they feel a sense of belonging to those communities.”

When Hawkins initially joined the Wiggles last August alongside Evie Ferris, John Pearce and Kelly Hamilton as part of their auxiliary and diverse Fruit Salad TV troupe, the group’s expansion was mocked by the anti-woke establishment, including the Murdoch media and conservative politicians such as Matt Canavan, who claimed the group was pandering to political correctness. But founding Wiggle Field maintained that the group needed to reflect the audience at its shows.

“I’ve had people saying their kids are going, ‘Oh my gosh, she looks just like me!’”Credit: Wolter Peeters

Like much of her beautifully enlightened generation, Hawkins recognises the responsibility she’s been offered. She already knows what she wants her legacy with the Wiggles to be.

“It’s the representation of people of colour; that’s been a very lovely thing to be a part of because I think representation is so important,” she says. She’s already received positive feedback from African viewers and the adoption community, as well as Latinx viewers whose culture she so affectionately showcases through dance.

“It’s the way kids perceive what society accepts in the world, and so the more diverse that range is in media and on TV, the better. I’ve had people saying their kids are going, ‘oh my gosh, she looks just like me!’, or that little girls with curly hair have been wanting to wear their hair in an afro puff. It’s like, they’re wanting to be themselves, because they can see themselves.”

Although she has the expected parental anxieties of seeing her child in such a high-profile role, Robyn is also confident Tsehay will thrive in it.

“Even when we go to the concerts, it brings absolute tears to my eyes,” she says. “Like the last one we went to, there were these little Ethiopian girls in the audience all dressed up like Tsehay. Usually, they sort of keep to the back and they’re a little bit shy, but these little ones moved right to the front and they were dancing up there amongst the other kids. She’s having such a lovely impact already.”

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