• Title
  Item 1: Liza-Mare Syron interview by Tammi Gissell
• Level of description
  item
• Date
  
  6 September 2023
• Type of material
  Nonmusical Sound Recordings, Oral Histories
• Reference code
  9680027
• Physical Description
  2 audio files (1 hr., 30 min.) - digital, WAV, stereo (48 kHz, 24 bit)
  
• Scope and Content
  In this interview, Dr Liza Mare Syron discusses her connection to country, her creative practice, and the synergies between her Blak identity and her identity as a queer woman.
  
  Liza-Mare was born in Balmain in inner-Sydney and describes growing up in the suburb at a time when it was gentrifying. She describes dynamics in the Balmain community between the working-class kids she grew up with and the children of middle-class parents who were newer arrivals to the suburb. She discusses starting a traineeship after high school as a zookeeper at Taronga Park Zoo, then moving to Melbourne where she was accepted to study theatre at Victorian College of the Arts.
  
  Liza-Mare reflects on her coming-out as lesbian and meeting other queer people, becoming a participant in Sydney's LGBTQ social scene of the 1980s and 1990s, and comments that 'coming-out as Aboriginal was a lot harder than coming-out as gay'. She considers how things have evolved in relation to LGBTQ+ issues in Australia, reflects on her time in the 1990s working for the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project in Sydney and later teaching theatre to students at Eora TAFE College in Darlington. This was a time where she says she 'learnt to articulate what I was doing as a queer Blak woman in theatre' and reflects on her elders who had established Blak theatre in Sydney in earlier decades such as her uncle Brian Syron. Liza-Mare stresses the importance of theatre as a place where she has witnessed 'Queer mob find their voice'.
  
  In 2007 Liza-Mare with a group of other Blak performance artists, educators, and community workers, co-founded Moogahlin Performing Arts. The company initiated the popular Koori Gras programme of events as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, which has included the club nights Blak Nulla and a forum/yarn-up called Blak Point. Liza-Mare reflects on the Moogahlin's work and her recent involvement in Koorie Wirguls, a NSW-based First Nations women identified LGBTQIA+ community dance group who performed during Sydney World Pride Festival in February 2023. She feels that it has been important to her creative practice to resist being siloed into 'particular forms and styles'.
• Language
  English
• Copying Conditions
  In copyright:
  Copyright holder:: State Library of New South Wales
  Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
• General note
  
  Recorded at Forbes Street Studios, Woolloomooloo, New South Wales, on 6 September 2023
• Creator/Author/Artist
  Syron, Liza-Mare
  
• Subject
  Syron, Liza-Mare--Interviews.
  Performing arts - Theatre and drama
  Social identity - Aboriginality
  
• Place
  Balmain (N.S.W.)
  Darlington (N.S.W.)
  
• Open Rosetta viewer
  IE20848662

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