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Roberta Sykes Scholar Naarah Barnes wins Young Australian of the Year for Tasmania 2024
Roberta Sykes Scholar Naarah Barnes has won Young Australian of the Year for Tasmania 2024.
Actor, musician and Indigenous activist, Naarah Barnes, has been awarded the 2024 Young Australian of the Year for Tasmania for making a positive impact through her acting and music.
Naarah has toured in Wesley Enoch’s musicals The Sunshine Club and The Sapphires, has played supporting lead Sharelle in the Amazon Prime series, Deadloch and also co-created a TikTok series, Bad Locals, filmed in Tasmania.
In accepting the award, the proud Giga woman said she was inspired by Indigenous pop singer-songwriter, Jessica Mauboy in her former years, inspiration which she aims to pay forward in the future. She said: “My main message in my what I do is ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’… I grew up amazed by Jessica Mauboy, because I had one person to look up to who I saw singing and auditioning out back in the desert.”
Naarah said it was an “absolute honour” to be to her knowledge, the first Aboriginal person at London’s Royal Academy of Music.
“It’s honestly huge to travel 17,000 kilometres away from home, and to be able to study, supported by an incredible Aboriginal scholarship in Australia, but it’s honestly life-changing to do what I love full-time,” she said.
Naarah uses Instagram and TikTok to spark conversations about First Nations identity, culture and representation. She aims to continue highlighting Indigenous issues in the musical theatre industry in the future.
“I just want young BIPOC, young… black indigenous people of colour and culturally and linguistically diverse people to see themselves on stage and to see us on screen… and for the entertainment industry, our arts industry to look like our streets. And I think that’s the main thing that I love about what I do on First Nations stories.”
“I had a realisation about a month ago that musical theatre is what I want to do for the next five years. I had it pretty late into my life, which is wild at the age of 25,” she said.
“But this is what I want to do. I want to perform and I want to sing and I want to create and most importantly, when I come back to home, I want to take it out to rural communities.
“I want to take it out to the Northern Territory. I want to take it back home to the Kimberleys, WA, where I’m from.”
Naarah was joined by Stephanie Tretheway (Tasmania’s Australian of the Year), Reverand Jim Colville (Tasmanian Senior Australian of the Year) and Clair Harris (Tasmanian Australia’s Local Hero) as 2024 award recipients.
