In this special episode of Caribbean Echoes, series producers Ben Etherington and Sienna Brown are in conversation with star Jamaican-Australian actress Zahra Newman and acclaimed playwright Alana Valentine.

They discuss the making of the series and how performance emerged as a key theme across it. Zahra reflects on being a Black Caribbean-Australian actor today, and the persistence of the racial politics that afflicted earlier generations of Caribbean immigrants.

Alana takes us through the joys of bringing Nellie Small, the subject of History Lab episode 33, back to the stage in her cabaret Send for Nellie! And we hear about Nellie’s solidarity with Indigenous performers.

The panel also talks bloopers and highlights from their performing careers in this conversation recorded in a packed room at the Abercrombie Hotel in Sydney on October 23, 2025.

Guests

Zahra Newman was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and moved to Australia at age 14. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Newman has an extensive list of credits in theatre, television, and film. Notable works include her performance as Nabalungi in the original Australian cast of The Book of Mormon, and her lead role in the adaptation of Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race. She has received a Green Room Award, a Sydney Theatre Award, and multiple Helpmann Award nominations. Newman played all 23 characters in the Sydney Theatre Company’s recent one-person production of Dracula.

Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright, and director who has had a long and celebrated career. One highlight is working with acclaimed First Nations performer, Ursula Yovich, on Barbara and The Camp Dogs, which toured nationally, was the recipient of four Helpmann Awards including Best Original Score and Best Musical and four Green Room Awards in Melbourne. She’s collaborated with the First nations choreographer and director Stephen Page on eight works including the multi-award winning Bennelong and the Opera ceremony Baleen Moondjan, which has just played the Brisbane Festival in 2025. Her cabaret Send For Nellie, which repositioned vaudeville legend Nellie Small in the Queer cultural firmament, debuted at the Sydney Festival in 2024.

Jamaican-born Sienna Brown writes historical fiction that centres on the Caribbean Experience in Australia. Her novel Master of My Fate (2019), won the MUD Literary Prize at Adelaide Writers Week for the best debut novel and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. In 2021, she was commissioned by ABC Radio National to create Caribbean Convicts in Australia. Since 2022, she's been a Research Associate at Western Sydney University as part of the ARC Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia.

Ben Etherington is an associate professor at Western Sydney University. His teaching and critical work centres on literary decolonisation and he’s currently writing a history of poetry in West Indian Creole languages from the end of slavery to independence. Ben has produced a number audio features including a documentary for ABC Radio National on Gangallida activist Clarence Walden, which he co-produced with Waanyi author Alexis Wright. His book Literary Primitivism (2018) won the Australian University Heads of English prize for literary scholarship and, from 2026, he will be an Australian Research Council Future Fellow working on the project The Decolonisation of Literary Culture.

Credits

This series was produced on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and Burramatagal people of the Dharug nation.

Writer and producer: Ben Etherington

Producer: Sienna Brown

Supervising producer: Jane Curtis

Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert

Sound designer and engineer: Simon Branthwaite

The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256). We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series.