SIENNA BROWN
Caribbean Echoes
A 4 part podcast series
🎤 Caribbean Echoes is an Impact Studios History Lab 4 part podcast series that delves into the overlooked stories of Caribbean people in Australia.
Hosted by me - co-produced with Western Sydney University's Professor Ben Etherington, made with Impact Studios - supervising producer, Jane Curtis & executive producer Sarah Gilbert and sponsored by Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. Sound design by Johnny Atmos.
The series has launched and features the voices of Grantlee Keizer, Historian, Professor Jordana Moore Saggese (US), Historian Cassandra Pybus, Vanessa Cassin (SAG), Professor Suzanne Francis-Brown (JA), Gary Chapman, Professor John Maynard, Myron Jackson (St Croix), and author Tony Birch. Peter Jackson and Nellie Small will be brought to life by actors Zahra Newman and Alpha Kargbo. Click on the pictures for a link to each episode.
Episode 1 features Peter Jackson
Did you know that the most famous Australian in the world in 1890 was from the Caribbean? Peter Jackson was born in St Croix in the Caribbean in the years after slavery was abolished. He arrived in Sydney as a teenager and got noticed when he single-handedly fought off seven in a brawl at Wynyard Square. He soon stepped into Sydney’s boxing rings and, by 1890, he was Australia’s heavyweight champion and chasing the world title in the United States.
Episode 2 features John Maynard and Tony Birch
What does boxing have to do with anticolonial politics?
How did the sport become a space where Black and Indigenous fighters in Australia pushed back against racism and empire?
From Peter Jackson to Jack Johnson, Marcus Garvey to Les “Ranji” Moody, this episode explores how Black and Indigenous fighters turned the ring into a stage for resistance and anticolonialism.
Episode 3 features Nellie Small
Who was the Caribbean-Australian cabaret star who could bring down the house — and come back at racism with a joke?
“Come sit by me, we don’t eat people anymore.”
Nellie Small was born in Sydney in 1900, just before the White Australia policy was introduced. She became one of the country’s most beloved performers, famous for wearing men’s suits on stage and off, and for her sharp comebacks.
Past Episode
Episode 4 features Gary Chapman and Suzanne Francis
What connects a VFL “Champion of the Colony” to a woman born enslaved in Jamaica? In 1919, Richmond footballer Vic Thorp won the league’s highest honour for the second time — the equivalent of today’s Brownlow Medal. But just a century earlier, his great-grandmother Susannah Andrews was enslaved in Jamaica, before gaining her freedom.
This episode uncovers Susannah’s remarkable journey: from enslavement, to freedom, to becoming matriarch of an Australian family that would include football legends and mining startups. We hear from her descendant Garry Chapman, who discovered Susannah’s story while sifting through his father’s papers.
Past Podcast - Caribbean Convicts
CARIBBEAN CONVICTS IN AUSTRALIA
While working as a guide at Hyde Park Barracks, Sienna discovered several convict indents of men from the Caribbean. This was at odds with the largely Anglo-Celtic story about convicts that fill our history books. This discovery sent her on a decade-long quest to learn more about them and to reimagine the lives they lived.
In the Caribbean Convicts in Australia podcast, Co-produced with Associate Professor Ben Etherington, the listener follows Sienna on her research journey, as she discovers the presence of these Caribbean men in the convict database at Hyde Park Barracks. As the research deepens, Sienna discovers that the men were slaves and takes the listener into the world of life on a British sugar cane plantation.
Coming full circle, Sienna uncovers what their lives were like while serving their convict sentences, until in some cases their evidential freedom and mergence into rural Australian life. Throughout the program, Sienna also reflects on her own passage from Jamaica to Australia a hundred and fifty years later.
The men’s lived experiences of slavery and convict-hood, are brought to life using layered archival material from the period, interviews with experts and descendants, on-location soundscapes and descriptions, along with, excerpts from Brown’s award-winning historical fiction novel Master Of My Fate to give voice to the convicts’ inner lives.
The story of progressive discovery gives the program a strong narrative arc, but its main purpose is to immerse listeners in the world of these convict men so they can imagine for themselves what life might have been like as slaves and convicts and come to understand the challenges they faced in becoming masters of their destinies. It also allows for reflection on how this might change our view of Australia’s early colonial history.
The full draft script of the program has been prepared with funding support from the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and is available on request.