Steve Dow

Mar 28, 2025 | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

On a Friday night in April 1966, 16-year-old Norma Ingram was one of seven young Aboriginal women formally “presented” as part of the inaugural Sydney Indigenous debutante ball at Paddington Town Hall. “It was a lot of that old English stuff, ‘coming out into society’,” the Wiradjuri woman says of the event, which was attended by some 200 Aboriginal people. Revellers passed under a boomerang arch to enter the hall, which was festooned with Indigenous motifs in ochre colours.

Feb 11, 2025 | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

As a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”. “My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 – I didn’t know what that meant,” he recalls now, wearing a worn bush hat and sitting at Mangkaja Arts Centre near his home in Muludja community, east of Fitzroy Crossing.

Jan 26, 2025 | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

At 91, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman dances in nature at her bushland retreat outside Canberra, Mirramu Creative Arts Centre, surrounded by writers, singers and visual artists stoking their respective muses.

Nov 29, 2024 | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

On a sunny spring morning, the Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, leaves her apartment in inner-city Redfern to walk to her town hall office. Under a canopy of mature London plane trees along Bourke Street, the 79-year-old, who recently won a record sixth term, sets a brisk pace. All politics is local, and Moore’s career began on these streets. In the late 1970s, Moore created a lobby group, Redfern Community Concern, to fix up a little park in Kepos Street and improve local traffic.

Oct 25, 2024 | theguardian.com | Steve Dow

On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged. At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines.