Defying the odds: Adelaide’s Gill Hicks takes to the stage after surviving 7/7 terrorist bombing
Gill Hicks, who lost her legs in the deadly 7/7 London terrorist attacks, is staging a searingly personal show at Adelaide Fringe Festival and at a 20th anniversary commemoration in the UK.
On July 7, 2005 Gill Hicks was travelling to work on the London Underground’s Piccadilly line. The train was packed on that summer morning and Hicks and her fellow passengers were oblivious to the fact a suicide bomber with a backpack full of explosives had boarded their carriage.
At 8.49am, just after the train left Kings Cross station, the 19-year-old terrorist, who was standing close to Hicks, detonated his device and killed 26 people. The bomber was one of four Islamist extremists who targeted London public transport that day, carrying out the worst terrorist attack recorded on UK soil, claiming a total of 52 lives.
Hicks, then a 37-year-old Australian design curator, lost both her legs below the knee in the explosion. She saved her life by ripping her scarf in two and tying the pieces around her severed limbs. Enveloped in acrid smoke and darkness that felt like “wading through tar’’, she elevated her thighs and willed herself to stay upright.
“I held on for almost an hour,’’ she says, before rescuers came to her aid. A coroner later praised the “indomitable spirit” of the Adelaide-raised designer, who was the last living person to be removed from the train and was not expected to survive. In fact, Hicks’s identification tag described her as “One Unknown, estimated female’’ — her injuries were so severe, rescuers could not work out whether she was male or female.
Yet Hicks did survive and over the past two decades has drawn from a seemingly bottomless well of courage as she built a new life. Her voice, lungs and hearing were badly damaged in the attack. She had to learn to speak again and to walk with prosthetic legs.
From her home in “beautiful, idyllic” Adelaide, she tells Review she was initially overcome with anger at “not being able to be free to just take a step, to run, just to have a moment of not thinking of where my physical body is. That started to really infiltrate my daily thoughts.’’
Yet this remarkable woman is now a singer, visual artist, motivational speaker and peace activist and is set to explore “the wonder of knowing life through facing death” in her audaciously titled show, Still Alive (and Kicking) at the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Hicks will also perform her award-winning production at the 20th anniversary commemoration of the 7/7 bombings in London in July. There, amid tight security, she will appear in front of other survivors, bereaved families and “really importantly to me, also the incredible first responders’’ — some of whom she counts among her closest friends.
As the London commemoration draws nearer, Hicks, now 56, says with a hint of trepidation: “I was almost wondering how I’m going to be able to do it, because just even entering that 20th year, I’m starting to feel all these different emotions. So it’s going to be very odd being there and performing.’’
On the other hand, London is clearly like a second home for the Australian. As she says in this phone interview: “So much of my life was there. I was there for 26 years. I still work globally. My people are there. It will just be so incredible to be back with the rescuers and people that I feel are my family.’’
In 2011, her return to her home town of Adelaide was precipitated by another health crisis — she went temporarily blind when her optic nerves detached. Yet here she is: performing live, painting, the author of a well-received memoir, recipient of the 2015 South Australian of the Year award and holder of several honorary doctorates. She is also a gifted public speaker and a mother to Amelie, 12, who she refers to as the “second miracle” of her life.
In Still Alive (and Kicking) Hicks uses storytelling, film, pop and jazz songs and projections of her visual art to explore what she learned about life from being so close to death.
The show – which she first performed in 2021 and which she has updated for her Adelaide Fringe performance – takes audiences inside the tube carriage where many people drew their last breath, and where she almost died. She stresses it is more concerned with moments of redemptive humanity than the carnage of that day.
London commuters, she notes, have always prided themselves on their restraint: “In London, no one’s allowed to talk to anyone or look at anyone, and there’s a sort of pride in that etiquette and suddenly (after the bombing) those people, those anonymous commuters, are your lifelines.’’ Surrounded by twisted metal and deceased bodies, she and a stranger held hands, while injured commuters took turns calling out their names – “a little bit like a roll call’’ – willing themselves and each other to stave off sleep and possible death.
In a clear and steady voice, Hicks reiterates how “these anonymous commuters then became the lifelines … we held each other’s hands in the dark, and we talked to each other”.
“Indeed, even for those that were slipping away, the instinct (was there) of wanting to create something that was peaceful and beautiful for them to have their last moments in, rather than extreme trauma,” she says.
“It’s hard to even discuss that. It’s hard to put that into any sort of words. But it’s so powerful — that is who we are, the essence of who we really are.’’
Such humanity amid the horror “knits through all of my messaging for everything’’ says the anti-extremism campaigner, whose 2016 TED talk on what she learned from surviving the attack has been viewed more than one million times.
Another key memory that features in her show, in which she wears a “giant tutu”, concerns the ambiguous ID tag the first responders attached to her. She says: “I was stripped back to just being a label that said ‘One Unknown, estimated female’, and that really grabbed me as the essence of the importance of my message – that people were prepared to put their own lives at risk and to do everything humanly possible to save the life of this ‘One Unknown, estimated female’.” (That tag also inspired her memoir, One Unknown, which was released in 2007.)
As a teenager growing up in Adelaide, Hicks took singing lessons and she opens Still Alive (and Kicking) with a slow motion jazz version of the Bee Gees’ disco hit, Stayin’ Alive. “The show is created as a narrative around four songs,’’ she explains. She sings alongside a double bass player and violinist and “we start with our version of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, and when it’s sung from a jazz lens, the lyrics are extraordinary. I watch the penny drop with people, ‘Oh, I know this song’.
“So it’s quite a dramatic start. And then we go into Summertime, Bye Bye Blackbird, and end with Feeling Good.’’ She also weaves storytelling, film and projections of her art into the hour-long performance. “One of my iconic (art) pieces is a symbol of the poppy. And I love this symbolism of the poppy because it represents beauty in the most adverse conditions.’’
She first performed Still Alive (and Kicking) at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 2021 and took out the Edinburgh Award, a $10,000 grant that enabled her to take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Covid restrictions meant she couldn’t travel to Scotland to reprise the show, so she staged it live in Adelaide and her performance was projected onto the wall of a 15th-century castle near Edinburgh.
Her narrative will be reshaped for the London commemoration. “The narrative changes every time,’’ she says, to include stories not told before. She adds that, given the severity of her injuries after the bombing, “every time I’m on stage, (the feeling of) being back is extraordinary’’.
Among her many roles, Hicks has become a renowned peace advocate, focused on combating extremist beliefs and ideologies. Asked about the anger she felt towards the terrorist who blew up her tube carriage and her life, she responds: “It’s interesting. I’m involved with an organisation in the UK called The Forgiveness Project. And when they invited me to be involved, one of the things I stipulated was, ‘Look, I don’t actually forgive this person’. It’s difficult because he’s dead, and so there’s not a transaction there that I can have.
“But equally, I found that as the years went on, I was so angry that my life was compromised in such an extreme way that there’s a freedom taken away from me.’’ At one point, this became a daily preoccupation, so she has worked hard to “come to a peace with anger’’, acknowledging it as a kind of “motivational fuel’’. “Being angry has actually fuelled me to keep getting up every day, to keep wanting to make a difference; to not just feel satisfied with doing some gardening and watching the sunset,’’ she says.
The Adelaide artist is working on her second book and an accompanying podcast series called The Fragile Project. “I’m really exploring what transcends the traditional concepts of resilience,’’ she says.
An emotional highlight of the past 20 years – indeed of her life – was becoming a mum. Initially, she assumed the trauma her body sustained in the bombing would prevent her from becoming pregnant. But in 2013, at the age of 44, she gave birth to Amelie, after meeting her partner, Karl, in 2011.
When we speak, Amelie is preparing to go to high school. “I’m already crying. I’m the emotional one. She’s all raring to go,’’ says Hicks. Amelie will also attend the London performance of Still Alive (and Kicking). “Absolutely. She comes to everything,’’ says her clearly besotted mother.
Before 7/7, Hicks had a high-powered career in London. She ran a design consultancy, had been publishing director of architectural magazine Blueprint and head curator at the UK’s Design Council. She stayed on in London for years after the terrorist attack and returned home to Adelaide in 2011 after she temporarily lost her sight.
“My optic nerves detached, and that was then one of the drivers of ‘just come back’. Wonderfully, I was treated by a former Australian of the Year, (eye surgeon) Dr James Muecke. And so I’ve got some (about 75 per cent) of vision back, but I’ve lost a lot of colour register. So it’s interesting being an artist.’’
Hicks had never visited Sydney or Melbourne when she struck out for London as a 19-year-old, after her parents died in quick succession. Her father suffered a fatal heart attack and her mother succumbed 12 months later to pancreatic cancer
Given this early, devastating loss and the way the bombing upended her life, how has she been able to maintain her sense of optimism? Hicks pauses before answering. “That’s the big exploration, isn’t it? I’ve come to think about life as a quest. We can’t begrudge any experience, we need to be thankful for it all, because each experience leads to growing a position of wisdom.’’
She says it was easier to leave Adelaide for London after her parents passed away than “confront the fact that my anchors and life as I knew it no longer existed”. The designer turned performer adds: “The greatest motivator for me to leave was being with mum when she died. She died a year after dad. Here was this beautiful woman in her early 50s, just gone. And she was such a good person.’’
Before the terrorist attack Hicks was a cigarillo-smoking careerist who “lived to work”. Her near-death experience – when moments from her childhood replayed like a film montage in her head – taught her to live more in the moment. “There’s a very strong part of the performance – it’s accompanied by a film sequence – not so much life flashing before my eyes, but all these little intricate moments knitted together,’’ she says.
As she lay waiting for help in a tube tunnel in central London, and “as the blood poured from body”, she had a strong conviction that “if I get to come back, I am going to be more present, and I am going to savour up every little moment. And I’ve tried to stay true to that for 20 years. It’s something that’s really got me through some of the very low times and being able to sail on the high times.’’
Does performing Still Alive (and Kicking) bring back the trauma of that day? Perhaps surprisingly, she says it doesn’t. “Not really.,” she says. “It’s interesting because of my physical injuries that are permanent, I think of it every day anyway. That thrust of wanting to communicate really shields any reliving of events.
“It’s not reliving the event in the trauma, but from a position of just actually, truthfully, wonder. I’m still amazed that I’m here and I’m able to still function and be Gill.’’
Still Alive (and Kicking) is on Sunday, February 23, at the Woodville Town Hall, Adelaide. The Adelaide Fringe Festival runs until March 23.