A Friday Hoyden for you: sporting legend Nova Peris, also known as Nova Peris-Kneebone, also known by her current married name, Nova Batman.

Nova Peris Kneebone was born in Darwin 1971, a member of a family who are traditional owners in the Coburg Peninsula area. Her first memory is of Cyclone Tracy. Half her house blew away on the Christmas before she turned four.

On Enough Rope, Nova discussed her grandmother’s experience of abduction and slavery:

She was two years old. Her mother was a full-blooded Aboriginal. Her father was a white Irishman. And she never knew her father. And back in those days, the Native Affairs Department, like in the ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, they took half-caste children off their full-blooded mothers. So for the first two years of her life, when the police and Native Affairs were coming around, her mother would rub charcoal on her to make her skin look blacker. And then one day, she eventually got caught, and she was taken to a homestead. And from the time she was two years old for the whole 10 years, she grew up in that homestead, and it’s really quite sad, because on one side of the river, her mother used to walk up and down the river, you know? […] then when she was 12 years old, that’s when the Second World War came, and they just let all the little kids out “” half-caste kids “” and they had to go fend for themself. So for years they were dodging bullets, lived off the land where they could.

Nova’s childhood wasn’t particularly easy, either. Her police officer stepfather taught her how to box, to defend herself from the neighbourhood boys when she proved herself superior at cricket. Nova told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope:

I was always bowling James and Joseph out, so there came a time when, you know, I had to defend myself against the boys, so Chappy taught me how to fight.

But it wasn’t only James and Joseph beating Nova. The interview goes on:

Denton: “And he wasn’t afraid to use the strap either, was he?”

Nova Peris: “No. I mean, like, I look back on it now, and I think, “Jeez,” you know, “he was a bit tough on me,” but to be honest with you, I was one of those kids”¦ He described me as a wild stallion, you know? You let the reins go and I was out of control, to a certain extent.”

Peris expands in an interview with the Herald Tribune:

My stepfather was a policeman, a very hard, strict man. I was really stubborn as a kid and him coming into our lives at such a late stage, he was stubborn and I was stubborn and he had to sort of chase me down to grab hold of me. There was none of that ‘sit in the corner and face the wall’ kind of thing. I was always being chased across the road with a strap.

Nova fell pregnant at 18 with baby Jessica. Despite being a young mother, she continued her hockey training, and made the Australian Under 21 hockey squad. She put her 2 yo in car, a lone single mum, and came to Perth, where the Australian hockey team trained. Just as being repeatedly assaulted didn’t beat her down, motherhood didn’t hold her back:

Jessica was part of me. I breastfed her until she was 10 months. When she was four months old I was back at work and going to training. I had no social life. You’re committed first to your child, then your sports and your work. I would ride my bike to the hockey centre, put her on one side of the fence while I trained starting at 6am then I would ride to childcare and drop her off before riding into town to work. I was cycling probably 30 kilometres a day on top of training and looking after Jess. It just never crossed my mind that I would do anything else.

[Image Credit: National Pioneer Women’s Wall of Fame]

Nova Peris went on to win gold medals as part of the victorious Champions Trophy hockey team in 1993 and 1995, followed by gold in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. It was a collection of astounding triumphs. She was the first indigenous Australian to win Olympic gold, the first Territorian gold medallist, and one of only three Australian mothers to walk away with gold.

But hockey was not her first passion. Running was, and it was only the circumstances of her birth that led her away from her dream and into hockey.

You know, for me, athletics was my first love and it was a dream of mine to run at the Olympic Games, and obviously lack of opportunities and facilities in Darwin sidetracked me from athletics to hockey.

So Nova switched gears to athletics training in 1997, the same year she won the Young Australian of the Year award. Her hockey coach wasn’t thrilled at the idea! From the Enough Rope interview:

Peris: “Everyone thought I was mad, especially in the hockey circles. Ric Charlesworth, he sent me a letter four months after the Olympics and said, “What’s up with this athletics?” You know? “Get your butt back to Perth. You’re required to be back in your training.” And I said, “Ric, this is what I want to do.” And, you know, Ric, being the freakish perfectionist that he is, was like, you know, “Yeah, you’ve won Olympic gold medal, World Cup gold medal, all this sort of stuff, but you still haven’t played your best days yet.” So”¦”

Andrew Denton: “What you want to hear, isn’t it?”

Nova Peris: “Yeah. And so, that’s what happened. Um, I just followed my dream. It was actually my first dream, was to run in an Olympic Games.”

And she made her dream come true. Peris won gold in the 200-metre sprint in the1998 Comm Games, and went on to make the 400-metre semi-finals in the 2000 Olympics.

[Image Credit: Beijing Olympics]

Her dreams didn’t stop there. She was also the first Australian to carry the 2000 Olympic torch on Australian soil, starting from Uluru, barefoot:

You know, we’re show casing the world – our culture to the world – and the Mulgurra [phonetic] people, we should be very grateful that they’ve allowed all of us to come onto their land and for this special ceremony to take place. So, it’s an incredible day for all Australians. It’s a time that we should all embrace.

Nova’s Hoyden journey doesn’t stop there. In 2001, she stopped being quiet about her personal life. She walked out on her abusive marriage, and courageously stood up to a track teammate repeatedly calling her racial epithets. The case went to arbitration, but was hushed up and kept from the media. Australia’s sporting culture is deeply racist, but we don’t like to talk about that, instead holding up our few indigenous sporting heroes as trophies while vilifying them on the field and in the locker room.

Nova is now married to fellow track athlete Daniel Batman, and has had two more children, Destiny and Jack.

[Image credit: Aussie Bub Blog]

She has moved further into activism. She has worked as a treaty ambassador for ATSIC, running racial sensitivity and communication workshops, working with the National Violence Caucus, joining in with a healthy lifestyle roadshow for indigenous children, advocating for indigenous rights, and doing postnatal depression awareness work.

Roadshow 2006
[Image Credit: NovaPeris.com.au]

I’ll let Nova have the last word:

At the end of the day, I wake up and I know who I am and the direction that I want to go in life, and I never lose focus of what’s true to me, and the true thing to me is that fighting for ongoing rights in this country for indigenous people.

Nova Peris Kneebone 2000
Sporting Archibald Prize entry
Glenda Jones
[Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery]

Categories: arts & entertainment, gender & feminism, indigenous

Tags: activism/charity, hoydens, indigenous, race & racism, sport