Dimensions
153 x 228 x 23mm
'In my late twenties I noticed nothing had been inserted in the father section on my birth certificate . . . It made me feel like I had just fallen out of the sky or something.'
Growing up 'on country' on the west coast of Queensland's Cape York Peninsula in the 1970s and '80s, Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung had an idyllic traditional life. At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her dream of performing and moved to Sydney to attend the NAISDA Dance College. There she met her future husband and studied with the legendary Page brothers before they joined the Bangarra Dance Theatre.
The missing piece of her life was her father. As a young woman, she finds him and carves out a fragile relationship with him. This inspires her to better understand her Austrian ancestry and how it meshes with her Indigenous identity.
Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung is the model of a modern woman: mother and professional; performer and creator; teacher and student, city dweller and remote community inhabitant. Her life story offers a rare insight into the burgeoning years of the contemporary Indigenous dance movement and what it means to straddle two cultures.
