Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who as a teenager was believed to be the first female Indigenous person to star in a feature film in Australia and later became an Aboriginal rights activist, died on Jan. 26 in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory. She was 85 and had been living in Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland.
Her daughter, Ngarla Kunoth-Monks, said the cause was a stroke. Her family gave permission to use her name and image.
Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was cast in the title role of “Jedda,” a film directed by Charles Chauvel, which he wrote with his wife, Elsa. The story is about a teenager who is raised apart from her Aboriginal culture by a white woman after her mother dies in childbirth. Eventually, she is abducted by an Aboriginal man (played by Robert Tudawali).
The Chauvels had come to her school in 1953, chosen her for the lead and taken her to locations around the Northern Territory and in Sydney. Away from her family and school, she recalled being lonely and scared. She said Mrs. Chauvel bullied her and, on several occasions, she tried to escape but did not succeed. She did not know how to be an actor, so she did as she was told, speaking the words she was fed.
“I was in a state of confusion, a state of trauma,” Mrs. Kunoth-Monks said in an interview with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in 1995. “I really didn’t want to ask questions about what I was doing there, or what they were going to do with me. I was quite literally petrified that I wasn’t going to see my family, or my country, again.”
She attended the premiere in the summer of 1955 at a segregated theater in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, but was allowed, she said, to sit in the whites-only section.
In a review of “Jedda” in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, the critic Brian McArdle wrote that despite some rough edges to Mr. Chauvel’s direction, “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades.”
Mrs. Kunoth-Monks recalled being horrified when she saw the sexual context of scenes with Mr. Tudawali in which he touched her. But looking back as an adult, she recognized in her character’s assimilation into her white foster mother’s world a subject that was not only true to life for people like her in Australia but one that would animate her future activism.
Rosalie Lynette Kunoth was born on Jan, 4, 1937, in Utopia. Her father, Alan, sheared sheep. Her mother, Ruby Ngale, was a homemaker, and was an Aboriginal of the Anmatjere group. Her father’s parentage was mixed: his father was German and his mother was part-Aboriginal.
Five years after the release of “Jedda” — the only movie she acted in — she joined an Anglican order in a suburb of Melbourne, where she took her final vows as a nun in 1964. But she recalled feeling sheltered from the travails of Aboriginal peoples, which she followed on television, and left the order in 1969. The next year, she married Bill Monks, whose sister had known Mrs. Kunoth-Monks while she was still a nun.
She soon joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where she persuaded college students to help young Indigenous students with their school work, and set up what she said was the first group home for Aboriginal families in Victoria whose goal was to keep children from being separated from their parents.
She left in 1977 to run a hostel in Alice Springs; started the social work section at a hospital there; was the chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service; a commissioner of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an adviser on Indigenous affairs to the chief minister of the Northern Territory and chairman of Batchelor Institute, a school for Aboriginal students, also in the Northern Territory.
Malarndirri McCarthy, a senator in the Australian parliament from the Northern Territory, in a statement after Mrs. Kunoth-Monks’s death, praised her “quietly spoken yet determined focus on challenging institutional racism.”
In 2008, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was elected to a four-year term as president of the Barkly Shire, a local governmental entity in the Northern Territory. It was a year after the Australian government’s imposition of a series of laws on the Northern Territory that were, in part, designed to crack down on child sexual abuse and alcoholism in Indigenous communities.
The government’s raft of measures — referred to as the Intervention — included the compulsory acquisition of dozens of Aboriginal communities under five-year federal leases; restricting the sale, consumption and purchase of alcohol in certain areas, and linking income support payments to school attendance for people on Aboriginal land.
Mrs. Kunoth-Monks opposed the Intervention as discriminatory because it so clearly targeted Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. As part of her protest, she and the Rev. Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra, a clan leader and ceremonial lawman in the Northern Territory, met in 2010 in Geneva with the United Nations’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The two later issued a report which said: “Ordinary Australians can see this injustice in a democratic country and know that it shouldn’t be happening. When you share with a body such as the U.N.,” they wrote, “straight away they see that Australia is racist and that the Government does not govern with the spirit of peace and order.”
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by many grandchildren; her sisters Teresa Tilmouth and Irene Kunoth; her brothers, Don Kunoth and Colin Kunoth; her foster daughters, Elaine Power, Natasha Adams and Patrice Power, and her foster son, Mathew Adams. Her husband died in 2011.
In 2014, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was a featured voice in “Utopia,” a documentary by John Pilger about the mistreatment of First Nations peoples, as Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are called.
In a panel discussion on Australian television after the film’s release, she articulated her opposition to the federal government’s policies toward her people and any attempt to forcibly assimilate them.
“This is the country I came out from,” she said. “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here. My language, in spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists — I am alive, I am here and now — and I speak my language.”
She added, “I practice my cultural essence of me.”
