Grace Tame's surprising, irreverent memoir has a message of hope
- Written by Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
Grace Tame’s The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner shifts expectations. It’s not a minute-to-minute backstage account of the 12 months Tame spent as Australian of the Year, or the #LetHerSpeak campaign[1] or the March4Justice.
It’s not wholly focused on her struggles with hostile elements in the commercial media or the former prime minister she calls “Scott” – which is only democratic after all, given “Scott” invariably called her “Grace”.
The book presents a horrifying account of being groomed and sexually abused as a 15-year-old by her 58-year-old schoolteacher, but it’s also not entirely taken up with “that part of my story that has been magnified and scrutinised publicly”.
What the book reveals is that while such events are “undoubtedly traumatic” they haven’t “defined” her “unfinished experience of life”.
Grace Tame poses for a photograph at an International Women’s Day breakfast in Sydney in March.
Bianca de Marchi/AAP
Inevitably, this sense of optimism is tempered with a warning. The “ninth life” of a cat is the point at which the creature becomes vulnerable.
For feminists of my own generation, who were taught that you had to be stronger, and tougher, and smarter just to get by, the book surprisingly reveals that “there is great strength in vulnerability”. Being vulnerable, says Tame, is about remaining open to life.
Tame writes about her aunts and cousins, about her parents’ divorce, her fight with anorexia, her neurodiversity, and the six years she spent living in the United States, where she moved aged 18. There’s her brief marriage to former Hollywood child star Spencer Breslin in 2017, with an Elvis-themed wedding, her friendship with actor John Cleese and his daughter Camilla, her work as an illustrator and indeed her brief stint working on a marijuana farm.
She writes about partying in California, hanging out in New York, and experimenting with drugs, which she says she no longer does. She has strong views on everything from the politics of Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke to her visit to the house of Frida Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera in Guanajuato, Mexico.
The book is loosely chronological, but mostly follows the rhythms and shapes of Tame’s thoughts. It is held together by a strong, irreverent, irrepressible voice, and is enclosed within a cover illustration that she drew herself.
Growing up neurodiverse
Tame was born in 1994, in Rokeby, a working-class suburb of Hobart, growing up in the same street as her aunts, cousins and grandparents, surrounded by a boisterous crowd of relatives who taught her, “Solidarity. And lots of love.”
She describes childhood days spent “climbing trees, jumping fences” and running in and out of cousin’s houses.
But she also recollects her childhood as a time of instability, being carted back and forth between the houses of two amicably divorced parents, which was, she says in retrospect, too much for a neurodiverse child.
“My mind sees time through the glass door of a front-loading washing machine on a never-ending spin cycle,” she writes. “I can pull out specific memories that look as clean as yesterday because at any given moment everything is churning at high speed in colour”.
Tame writes that she learnt survival strategies as an autistic woman.
Kishna Jensen
She quickly learnt “mimicking and masking”, the “survival strategies” of autistic women. Much later, she would find out that neurodiversity can also be a strength. Tame calls herself “the autistic artist who finds everyday socialising harder than calculus, but walking onto a stage as easy as kindergarten maths”.
She is at pains to point out that although she has “seen some strife” – unlike the former prime minister’s characterisation of her as person who has had “a terrible life[3]” – “on the whole” her life has been mostly “wonderful”.
Abuse
But in the background was “our family’s sixth spidery sense”, largely directed at divining the presence of huntsmen, which Tame learnt to carry out of the house “by the leg”. Aptly, this description foreshadows her encounter with the “rock spider” Nicolaas Bester, the serial sex offender lurking in the private Anglican girls’ school for which Tame’s mother, aspiring to a better education for her daughter, worked hard to pay the fees.
Bester began preying on Tame at age 15 in “the very same year my mental health began to decline”. The grooming started in the classroom with Bester telling what he claimed were jokes. Once, about a student “obsessed with tubular objects”. At another time, about a former student[4] who he claimed was “as easy as a McDonald’s drive-through”.
Through “innocent, permissive laughter” students became acquainted with a “supposedly harmless man”. His “recycled racy comments were just part of his schtick, and they didn’t alarm our young inexperienced minds in the same way they might have adults”.
Nobody suspected there was something fundamentally wrong in all this, alleging “he pushed the boundaries, that was all”.
Bester soon began following Tame about, attempting to gain access by pretending to be her uncle at a medical facility where Tame was being treated, also turning up at the kiosk where she had a part-time job.
Tame’s parents had two consecutive meetings with the school, asking them to put an end to Bester’s “inappropriate behaviour”. But Bester “coolly laid the groundwork for a narrative in which I was the supposed aggressor, and mentally ill one that he felt ‘sorry for’.” And the school, she writes, believed him. “This would, in fact, be his line of defence in court.”
The police statement given by the school principal was, she argues, “perversely, almost as damning of the school as it was of him”.
It revealed that “despite regular and consistent complaints from students, staff, parents and visitors to the institution” the school “allowed him to continue working”.
Police found “videos of adults raping children on his computer”.
Tame writes that after she disclosed the sexual abuse by Bester, the school sent her mother a bill for outstanding fees.
Read more:
Not a 'relationship': why the legal language of child abuse needs to change[5]
Bester was sentenced to two years and 10 months in jail in 2011[6] for the abuse of Tame. Yet, writes Tame, he was surrounded by apologists. His church group invited him back to play the organ as soon as he was released. On social media, or simply standing on the street outside a nightclub, Tame was surrounded by a barrage of victim-blaming abuse.
Advocacy and the media
Over time, the media narrative around child sexual abuse has begun to shift, due to the public advocacy of countless men and women, including Tame. But the change is inconsistent and uneven.
In 2018, Tame teamed up with Nina Funnell, a Walkley Award winning freelance journalist and sexual assault survivor who began the #LetHerSpeak campaign in partnership with Marque Lawyers and End Rape On Campus Australia. The campaign was aimed at overturning the gag clauses in Tasmanian and Northern Territory law. In 2019, Tame won a supreme court exemption to tell her harrowing story of being groomed by Bester.
Advocacy takes its toll, she writes, in “the re-traumatisation that results from reliving the abuse.” It is predicated on an incessant “unpacking and processing”, with the reality of abuse “playing on a loop”.
All the while Tame says she has been called everything from a “feminist hero of the fourth wave” to a “man-hater” and a “transgender child abuser”.
The brief accounts Tame gives of her interactions with commercial television producers and journalists are far from flattering to the media. Though she looks strong, the media furore frequently left her “shaking”.
I’d never had such intense panic attacks, coloured by flashbacks cut with criticisms so violent that all I could hope to do was knock myself out in the hopes of knocking them out of me.
And there were, consequently, missed opportunities. The 2021 National Press Club address “in which I talked about how the media retraumatises survivors by not listening closely to the boundaries they set” was “overshadowed that day by a confected feud” between Tame and the former prime minister “that then spiralled and became an ongoing convenient media distraction used to dilute the work I did.”
Read more:
Making change, making history, making noise: Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame at the National Press Club[7]
Other media encounters are slammed as “trauma pornography in disguise” and the “unethical, disingenuous gathering of vulnerable people for the purpose of entertainment”.
Towards the end of the book Tame recounts the frenzied criticism generated by the so called “side-eye” moment, where she was photographed with then PM Morrison at this year’s morning tea for Australian of the Year recipients.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame during a morning tea for state and territory recipients in the 2022 Australian of the Year Awards at The Lodge in Canberra, Tuesday, January 25, 2022.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
In the wake of these photographs, she writes, her partner Max Heerey was “sent a barrage of text messages” including repeated messages from one journalist asking whether her “autism” had “something to do with” her frosty exchange with Morrison and if “I frowned because I was autistic”.
At this point, Max informed the journalist that their questions were ableist and “incredibly offensive”.
“I have no idea if it’s offensive or true or what but just wanted to ask as it’s a discussion being raised,” the journalist shot back, followed by a screenshot sampling an article citing autistic “so-called ‘social-deficits’”.
“I said please don’t contact me again. This is all incredibly offensive,” Max repeated. “Grace is autistic but not stupid”.
But the texts kept coming.
Tame writes,
I didn’t frown at the Prime Minister because I can’t control my face, because I’m disabled, because I have some kind of deficit, or because I need help. I didn’t frown at him because, in his words, ‘I’ve had a terrible life’’".
I frowned at Scott Morrison deliberately because, in my opinion, he has done and assisted in objectively terrible things.“
Without specifying what those things are, Tame writes, "No matter what your politics are, the harm that was done under his government was … not limited to survivors of domestic and sexual violence”.
To have “smiled at him” would have been a lie.
In place of confected outrage, which is “disturbingly skewed”, this memoir attempts to “bridge gaps in understanding” and “ignite a conversation”. It’s worth the “risk and pain”, Tame writes, because “evil thrives in silence”.
References^ #LetHerSpeak campaign (www.theguardian.com)^ labelled it a myth or moral panic (www.routledge.com)^ a terrible life (7news.com.au)^ a former student (www.theage.com.au)^ Not a 'relationship': why the legal language of child abuse needs to change (theconversation.com)^ two years and 10 months in jail in 2011 (www.abc.net.au)^ Making change, making history, making noise: Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame at the National Press Club (theconversation.com)
