Namila Benson: ‘A big part of our culture is denialism. We just don’t know how to have difficult conversations’

Namila Benson is not someone who blends into the background. As the presenter of several arts shows on the ABC, she has captivated audiences with her keen intellect, exuberant manner and the vibrancy of her fashion. So when we organise to meet at Edwardes Lake in the northern Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, she’s not hard to spot.

“This is my hood,” Benson enthuses with an infectious smile when we meet at the old steam train that sits near the edge of the lake. “I actually grew up in Camberwell – lovely area, very polite – but not known for its arts. There are so many creative people living here,” she says of “Resa”. “I love that you’ll go to your local Woolies and run into [singer-songwriter] Emma Donovan or Andy Williamson from Bombay Royale.”

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It’s a scrappy, bitterly cold day and the wind whips across the surface of the water as we circumnavigate the lake. Despite this, Benson seems perfectly at home, resplendent in a brightly coloured dress and massive earrings. Even her shade of lipstick matches the lustrous blue plumage of the Australasian swamphens pecking at our feet. People stop us as we walk to compliment her on her attire. When I ask her if that happens often, she answers definitively. “It does. Shout out to Resa!”

Benson spent many years working on radio – as a field reporter and then as a producer and presenter on Radio National and 3RRR – before making the switch to television. While she was always drawn to the arts, it wasn’t something she thought much about. “Coming from a Tolai-Melanesian background, what is thought of as ‘the arts’ in a western context is for us ritual, ceremony and custom. When it comes to dance and song and body adornment, we just do it naturally. Not in a conscious way.”

She was, however, obsessed with music. Benson’s parents had eclectic taste in music and a healthy vinyl collection – everything from vintage reggae and ska to Carole King and Don McLean – and it rubbed off on their daughter. “I started getting into hip-hop in the late 80s, early 90s. Especially Fear of a Black Planet. When Public Enemy dropped that album, particularly growing up in Camberwell, that was profound. I was around 14, and it felt like my brain was zapped in a lot of ways.”

For the last few years, Benson has hosted Art Works, a magazine show very much based on the kind of programming the ABC has always produced on the arts – short-form scatter-gun reportage covering a wide range of art forms, whatever happens to be opening at the time. But a new show that interrogates artists about a central subject, The Art of … , aims for something different, deeper perhaps and more considered. Benson agrees.

It’s odd that you feel grief for a place you’ve not lived in or visited for a long time

“Arts coverage on the ABC has often been about the who and the what. [The Art of…] is trying to tap into the why and when. When you’re doing a magazine format, it’s very difficult to anchor the audience. You go from an AI artist to a watercolorist to a dancer, and it’s too busy.” By sitting with a particular topic or theme – whether that be heartbreak, grief, masculinity or rage – you can slow things down a bit, draw out intriguing connections and associations. It’s even possible to ask some serious questions.

“We started with heartbreak because it’s something everyone can understand.” And while it’s a topic that has produced an enormous amount of art – pop music seems almost entirely devoted to it – Benson was less interested in hackneyed stories of first loves and more in the kind of heartbreak that changes a person, that cracks them open.

“My true heartbreak is of the diaspora kind,” she says. “It’s the particular sadness of living away from matrilineal land, from family and clan.” Tied up in that is Benson’s regret that her children weren’t raised among their Tolai matriarchs in the archipelago of eastern Papua New Guinea – who’d have been able to guide them in community and culture.

It’s “this strange, lingering feeling that never really goes. It’s odd that you feel grief for a place you’ve not lived in or visited for a long time.”

In that episode, illustrator Celeste Mountjoy (AKA “filthyratbag”) grappled with an art project she made with someone she subsequently broke up with, and Josh Thomas opened up about his mother’s mental illness. Emma Donovan “was really amazing. The way she spoke about heartbreak in a cultural and community context was really beautiful. That’s what all the artists are doing [on this show]. It’s incredible, ridiculous really, how much people share.”

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A lot of this is due to the skill and warmth with which Benson interviews her subjects. She’s relaxed and authentic on camera, and her passion and integrity allow her to draw out intimacies. She’s such a natural front-of-camera presenter, it’s surprising when she reveals a certain ambivalence about the role.

“I don’t always love it,” Benson says not of the actual job, but the burden that seems to come from being a prominent woman of colour. “I think it can be a heavy responsibility, because you become the go-to spokesperson for a whole community.”

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This is true even when you don’t identify as a part of that community, Benson explains. “There’s a real specificity to how I identify in Australia. I don’t use the term “black”, because that has a particular association and history I can’t claim to be part of, because I’m not first nations.” She looks at me with the slightest hint of weariness, albeit generous and good-natured. “But people forget.”

Specificity is a kind of organising principle for Benson, informing her interest in individual artists and their practices regardless of their backgrounds and experience. She’s averse to ways of framing culturally diverse people that other or lessen them in subtle ways, which she blames on “the laziness of the media” more generally.

Even the concept of diversity itself feels problematic for her. As we cross a small wooden bridge over the water, the conversation – which until now had been disparate and free ranging – tightens its focus. It’s as if we’ve tapped into a deeper well or energy source.

“Folks of colour don’t want that term, diversity. We just want to be here because we’re skilled, because we have the experience. It’s easy to forget that the arts in this country isn’t always a neutral or welcoming space.

“A big part of our culture is denialism. We just don’t know how to have difficult, open and honest conversations”.

Benson sees the arts, the coverage of it in the media and the ways it’s undervalued in society, as endemic of a greater malaise. “Art and artists are dangerous. The commercial stations do a great job of keeping things simple, uncomplicated. They don’t want range, depth or breadth because if people become more educated, that means you ask more questions, right? And that’s not good for those in power.”

We arrive back at the steam train. If anything, it’s colder and rain feels imminent, but Benson seems as indomitable as ever, as bright and energetic as when we set off. “I guess I just want to open another avenue, to widen things a little to let all folks step in and share their story and perhaps a side to them and their work that others might not know about. That’s super important to me. Because I know what it’s like to be overlooked or erased from experiences.”