Grace Tame: 2021 Australian of the Year continues to deal with pain and adversity
Grace Tame says she’d run as an independent if she ever got into politics, as she reveals her view on the Tasmanian government’s response to child sexual abuse in institutional settings.
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Former Australian of the Year Grace Tame would run as an independent if she ever made a tilt at politics and has described the nation’s two-party system as “very unhelpful”.
Ms Tame, 27, was named Australian of the Year in 2021 in recognition of her advocacy for victim-survivors of child sexual abuse.
The Tasmanian has just published a memoir called The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner and spoke to TasWeekend on the eve of the book’s release.
When asked if she’d considered embarking on a political career, Ms Tame didn’t rule the option in or out.
“I’d want to go in as an independent if I went into politics,” she said. “But then to get anywhere seriously you have to be part of one of the major parties, I think.”
“And I just don’t see myself doing that.
“It is an inherently dirty game of deal-brokering and compromising. It’s so slow, it’s so stop-start. Not that there’s anything wrong with compromise and negotiation [but] it’s not the nice sort of compromise. It’s the backroom compromises.”
Ms Tame, known for her uneasy relationship with former prime minister Scott Morrison, said she didn’t approve of the “binary model” of politics in Australia.
“In life, nothing maps neatly into these binary constructs or into good and bad,” she said. “Thinking Liberal is good or Labor is bad, and vice versa, is very unhelpful.”
Now running her own charity, the Grace Tame Foundation, Ms Tame said she had been closely following the commission of inquiry into the Tasmanian government’s responses to child sexual abuse in institutional settings.
She has backed calls for the Ashley Youth Detention Centre to be closed immediately.
“Why they don’t just close down that f***ing centre right f***ing now, I don’t understand,” she said. “Because there’s no reason for it to be kept open.”
“It’s just atrocious.”
The ninth life of a diamond miner
She’s been called brave. Defiant. Even divisive.
But it’s unlikely anyone has ever called Grace Tame silent.
The 2021 Australian of the Year has had a whirlwind couple of years, using her new-found platform to speak up for people like her: survivors of child sexual abuse.
With that platform has come intense scrutiny.
While the 27-year-old has received strong support for shining a spotlight on the insidious nature of child grooming, she’s also faced an enormous backlash.
But it’s clear that will never deter her from giving a voice to those who have for so long been voiceless.
“Vulnerability is a really powerful force and authenticity is a really powerful force,” Tame tells me. “And honesty is a really powerful force.”
“And I think if you’re really open with people and you bring them along the journey with you and account for your mistakes and things like that, I think that’s where political leaders [miscalculate], thinking that vulnerability is a weakness and that if you make errors that it’s the end of the world and that you have to hide them or obfuscate the truth if the truth is something that reflects badly on you.”
We speak on the eve of the release of Tame’s memoir The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner. She wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt and shows a wisdom well beyond her years.
“One of the things that motivated me to write this book is that it’s been the first time that I have in my words, on my terms, fully in detail, actually done a chronology of not just the abuse itself but my whole story,” she says.
“I’ve lived this whole life actually before [the abuse]. And so much of my story, I think, is unknown. You can’t step out there and address it all in one go. And there are also all these projections of me that come from all angles and all sides.
“And it’s a chance to show this multidimensional person.”
It’s striking how well Tame’s memoir captures her real voice. It’s freewheeling, darkly funny, foul-mouthed, hauntingly candid, and peppered with pop culture references.
One page might touch on her deep love for Robin Williams and the Ramones, and the next on her disjointed childhood, living between different homes on Hobart’s eastern shore while grappling with undiagnosed autism and ADHD.
Most Australians know Tame’s story – or at least its darkest chapter. At age 15, she was repeatedly sexually abused by her maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, then 59.
Bester was later sentenced to two years and 10 months in jail for the abuse, as well as possessing child exploitation material, but served just one year and eight months.
Tame says the act of writing a memoir was a form of catharsis for her; a means of processing her experience.
“It’s not a diary of trauma pornography,” she says of the book. “It’s very much a lyrical, colourful narrative that reeks of as much honesty as I could possibly give.”
As she recounts the horrific abuse she suffered, I can see that, no matter how many times she returns to this part of her life, it doesn’t get any easier.
I don’t presume to know how she feels in this moment but it’s almost impossible to deny Tame’s apocalyptic fury as she excavates her past for the umpteenth time.
There are junctures in our conversation where she pauses to consider her words carefully. At other points, they burst out of her like magma, scorching everything they touch.
“At first, as a kid, someone like [Bester] didn’t seem that evil,” Tame says. “When you’re a kid, it’s never like, ‘Wow, that’s evil!’ But now, obviously the stuff that he did to me … it’s [like] the frog in boiling water.”
“So to be able to write the memoir was so empowering for me, as well, to be able to do it all in one go. … It was hard to do, though. I had to really put myself in a sort of self-preservation state and to arm myself with a lot of anger.
“Because at times I was just like, ‘What a cruel, cruel, cruel man’. You know, like, ‘What a sick, sick, sick person’. And people are like, ‘Why are you so angry?’
“And I’m like, ‘If I wasn’t angry, I think I would be a f***ing psychopath’.”
Tame’s strained relationship with the former Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been fodder for countless headlines and culminated in her being criticised for failing to smile during a photo opportunity with the Member for Cook earlier this year.
Standing alongside Tame at the time was her fiance, Max Heerey, who has been instrumental in helping her establish the Grace Tame Foundation, which lobbies for law reform to stamp out sexual abuse and grooming.
Heerey says Tame handled her tenure as Australian of the Year with “courage and fearlessness”.
“Grace never wavered on her determination to constantly vouch for the underdog the whole year, even when she felt the nation was against her and she was being used as a political football,” he says.
“The public weren’t privy to 99 per cent of the work and tests that Grace faced and undertook during her tenure – most of it is even too complex for me to describe.
“Through the ups and downs, Grace was Grace the entire year and I’m very proud of her. In the end, authenticity shines through.”
That authenticity is evident in the alternatingly blistering and lighthearted posts Tame fires off on social media, particularly Twitter, commenting on everything from politics to her dog Zappa.
But she’s recently shut down her account to focus on the publicity tour for her book. Her self-imposed blackout also came in the wake of apparent threats from her abuser.
Last month, Tame posted screenshots of messages from a since deleted account with the handle ‘Nico Bester’. One read: ‘At last I shall come for’ and then included Tame’s childhood email address.
Tame has said Bester was “counting down an act of revenge” to coincide with the day her book was released – September 27.
A week before the date arrives, I ask her how she’s feeling about the threats.
How they’re affecting her.
She takes a long pause before answering.
“He may well do his last-ditch effort and I’ll probably just come out and be like, ‘Aw, you’re so f***ing sad’,” she says.
“I mean, he’s really just like this pathetic little Simpsons character of a man now. I used to be scared of him as a child, of course. Because he’s scary to a child. He’s really scary to a child.
“But the more I think about it, when I really think about it … the fear part of me that’s activated is the part of me that’s a child. And that’s fair. How could you not be afraid of that as a child?”
Tame rose to prominence in 2019 as the initially anonymous face of the #LetHerSpeak campaign, run by Walkley Award-winning journalist Nina Funnell.
She was finally given the opportunity to speak publicly about her abuse after Funnell’s campaign obtained a court order through the Supreme Court of Tasmania, which afforded Tame an exemption from laws applying to Tasmanian victim-survivors of child sexual abuse.
Since then, the state’s victim gag law has been overhauled, making it easier for people to talk publicly about the abuse they’ve suffered.
After she took the story of her own sexual assault public in 2007, Funnell became a “lightning rod” for other victim-survivors, who flocked to confide in her. It was the genesis of the #LetHerSpeak campaign.
“As a survivor myself, to work with numerous other survivors in Tasmania, particularly Grace Tame, Tameka Ridgeway and Janelle O’Connor … was really empowering because it’s not often that we see opportunities for survivors themselves to be the ones leading the change,” Funnell says.
She believes Tame being named Australian of the Year showed that society was now more willing to discuss the scourge of sexual assault.
“I think that there’s … obviously been backlash [to Tame] and very vicious backlash,” she says. “Part of that is being a public figure but part of that is also highly gendered and targeted at women who hold strong opinions.”
Before Tame decided to tell her story, she relocated to Santa Barbara, in California, to escape the constant reminders of her abuse in Tasmania. She was just 18 at the time.
There she graduated with associate degrees in liberal arts and theatre arts from Santa Barbara City College. She also worked as a yoga instructor, boasting famous clients such as comedian John Cleese and Depeche Mode founding member Martin Gore.
It wasn’t until Covid-19 up-ended the world that she moved back to Hobart for good.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to get myself out of here, I’m so far away from my base, my roots’,” she says.
“And I returned to Hobart and what’s kept me here is sort of the same thing, as well. And I also thought to myself, ‘It’s not fair that I should have had to have left in the first place’.”
Bass Liberal MP Bridget Archer, herself a victim-survivor of child sexual abuse, has been among Tame’s most vocal supporters in the Australian parliament.
One of the greatest strengths of Tame’s advocacy, according to Archer, is her willingness to make people feel uncomfortable, to leave them no choice but to confront difficult subject matter head-on.
“[Sexual assault is] a deeply uncomfortable topic for people to talk about – and it should be,” Archer says. “I have an enormous admiration for Grace, particularly because she, I think, has made a point … of making people feel uncomfortable, of making them sit with that discomfort.
“Because you think you feel uncomfortable talking about it – imagine living it.”
I reflect on my conversation with Tame and reckon with the discomfort I myself felt when listening to her relay the story of her abuse.
The visceral detail, the raw emotion.
Much of the information she volunteered without being prompted.
I’m reminded of a passage from her memoir, in which she explains what motivated her to relive her abuse in the book, effectively immortalising it.
“I’m asking now that you hear my words,” Tame writes. “Where I am about to go might cost me dearly. But it is a price I am willing to pay if it means saving lives; if it means that others do not have to retrace their steps to find their way to where I am now.
“Only through learning from survivors’ lived experience will we break the cycle of abuse.”
Every time she returns to her own abuse, Tame makes a sacrifice: she retraumatises herself for the sake of normalising frank discussions about the evils of sexual assault and grooming.
So that others like her may feel emboldened to speak up and demand justice.
Demand change.
Simply be heard.
Towards the end of our interview, Tame describes the toll the abuse has taken on her.
“It’s really awful,” she says in a low voice.
“It hurt me. It really hurt me.”
Silence, it seems, just isn’t an option for Tame.
No matter what the personal cost may be.
The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner, published by Pan Macmillan, is available now.
Tame will give a talk at the Odeon Theatre on Monday, October 3 at 6.30pm. Tickets are available via the Oztix website.
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