The Colleano Heart (2025) Movie Script
WOMAN: When the Colleanos came on,
they were magnificent.
It was just watching
some kind of magical thing happen.
I had six aunties and four uncles.
Uncle Con
became the highest-paid performer
in the Ringling Brothers Circus.
ANNOUNCER: Now watch how Con
Colleano, the famous wire balancer,
became one of the cleverest
in the world.
Little Winnie was a great
solo trapeze performer
and her act was unique.
Maurice was probably
the greatest acrobat of his time.
Katie Colleano,
along with my mother, Coral,
were partners
in the Triple Ladder act.
Bonar was an acrobat,
manager and spotter.
May somersaults from one horse
to the other.
Joyce loved doing rumbas
and contortionist work.
Victoria,
who was always called Babe.
Lindsay and Cousin George.
I started to feel the power
of my grandmother Julia
that kept all of that together...
..to somehow not just survive,
but have a vision.
I am Molly Colleano O'Donnell,
connected to the Colleano family
in my heart and in my soul.
When I was seven,
I spent a year in a hospital bed.
My parents visited every week,
and to give me courage,
Mum told me about a distant corner
of our family.
Daring, glamorous shapeshifters
who defied the colonial system.
This story never let me go.
But I hit a snag.
They say history is written
by the victors.
But the story
of this famous Aboriginal family
has never been told.
They are part of a hidden generation
of our country.
Luckily, Mum had also told me
to read between the lines,
to follow the back roads and listen.
I knew these stories
were still alive,
passed down and remembered.
And it turns out
I wasn't the only one searching.
Around about eight years ago,
I started to hear
some little rumours and secrets
that piqued my curiosity
to want to know more
about where I'm from.
I had a discussion with an auntie
and unearthed a fairly big secret
in our family.
Once I did some DNA testing,
I found out that my pop
was not my biological grandfather
and, in fact,
was part of the Colleano family.
We have a very strong line of women
in the Colleano family,
right back to Great-Grandma Julia.
And I think that's what I resonate
mostly with is that matriarch line.
Four years ago, we teamed up.
Like a black Nancy Drew,
I brought a trove of records.
(PHONE RINGS)
Deb had traced the family tree across
the world, and in America was Molly.
(ON PHONE) Hello. Hello.
BOTH: Hi.
Where are we? Hey!
Hi.
(LAUGHS)
The family's custodian
of oral history.
Deb wants to take you out.
I want to show you.
I want to show you.
Take you to show you.
Okay. Okay.
It gets up to 40 degrees here, Molly.
Oh, wow.
Which is about 120-something.
Molly's grandmother, Julia,
was a Gamilaraay woman.
She was born in 1878
and grew up in the town of Narrabri.
She was one of seven children.
Her matrilineal line traces back
four generations to the Upper Gwydir.
Settlers came onto their country
in the 1820s.
(COCKATOOS SCREECH)
I think it's hard
for us to understand how difficult
it would have been for First Nations
people around the 1850s to 1900.
Their way of living
for tens of thousands of years
had been disrupted.
And in the backdrop of having
to navigate a new way of survival
was always the threat of violence.
The national view
from non-Indigenous people
was that we were a dying race.
But without the government
regulation that was to follow,
you do have a larger ability
for Aboriginal people
to determine how they were going to
navigate this new environment,
and many of them did it really well.
Self-educated Aboriginal people
were writing petitions
to the state government,
asking for 30, 40, 50 acres of land
in their traditional country.
The government would then contact
the local police officer
to go out
and have a look at this land.
Letter comes back -
"It's heavily timbered,
worthless scrub. Give it to them."
Certainly from the 1880s,
something like
81% of Aboriginal people
in New South Wales
were self-sufficient.
Aboriginal people
went through a period of 50 years
of prospering
on their traditional land.
Welcome to Narrabri.
Here we are.
So I reckon your grandmother, Julia,
would have been a bub
when this was being built.
Like, when you think about it,
they lived just two streets back,
so, like, they're right
in the middle of it.
They're in the thick of it.
You know?
I found a few clues
about Julia's earlier life.
Her father, William Robinson,
was West Indian,
in official documents.
In fact, we knew him as Mum's
great-great-uncle, a Bundjalung man.
But as a West Indian,
he was able to claim
that he was a free man,
meaning he could own
prime real estate.
Narrabri was a very prime location.
Prospering in farming
and their ability
to transport that across the state.
He worked at the post office,
a respectable job for the time.
But as Julia reached her teens,
he passed away.
Narrabri was growing fast,
its population doubling,
and her mother,
fearing for her daughter's safety,
allowed them to marry young.
I'm just going to draw.
Julia met Con Sullivan,
and we'll call him Senior
because we know that there were
10 children under that
that also followed the same names.
Great-grandfather Con
was a tent boxer,
and at 16 Julia was married.
Con Sullivan was an Irish larrikin
with quick fists,
a bit of a gambler
with a knack for the hustle.
This beautiful woman, Julia,
became part of the travelling world
on the tent boxing circuit.
(BELL DINGS)
The boys, Uncle Bonar,
Uncle Con, and Maurice,
were following
in their father's footsteps.
There is a long history
of Aboriginal boxers.
This fits with an opportunity
for families to stay together
as part of those touring shows.
The reality is those jobs
are life threatening
and that's why there's not such a
barrier to Aboriginal participation.
They all love boxing.
They were great defenders.
They loved coming to the aid
of these beautiful sisters
of theirs.
They really did.
The tent boxing circuit
was run like a racket.
Not the best environment
to bring up kids.
Along the way,
they lived by their wits.
The boys used to hunt little rabbits
and things
and they would gather medicines,
herbs
my grandmother
was very knowledgeable about.
They became
completely self-contained.
The family shared this floating life
on the dusty roads with drovers,
travelling salesmen,
people moving out west for free land
and other entertainers
passing through towns.
The Sullivans
competed with sideshows and circuses
of all sizes and qualities.
The Sullivan family
kept having girls more than boys,
and in those days,
girls weren't boxers.
They had to think their way around
a new way of making a living.
Con Senior.
Their father, Con Sullivan,
was always coming up
with these ideas.
He had an old film machine,
one of the first.
He was trying to charge money for
people to come and see these films,
but the film camera kept breaking
down, so he'd send the kids out.
And we had to hop in and do a bit of
something while they mended the film.
INTERVIEWER:
But why do circus tricks?
I mean, why not just go up
and sing a song or something?
Well, I guess, no, we couldn't sing.
(LAUGHTER)
From tent boxing and understanding
how to do a travelling show,
it was a natural leap
to the circus world.
And it wasn't like the kids
were being punished.
The kids loved it.
They absolutely loved it and wanted
to train six and seven hours a day.
But just as the Sullivans
were finding their feet,
the state had other plans.
Federation unified the nation,
and with it came policies that
plunged our communities into a trauma
that we are still reckoning with
today.
Australia's 'Fair Go' only applied
if you had a fair complexion.
When Federation comes,
you actually see the increase
across every jurisdiction
in the country
of Aboriginal welfare
and protection boards
that fundamentally take away
the rights of Aboriginal people.
And, in fact,
you can look at that period
as another time of dispossession.
Expanding settlement.
There were white pressure groups
saying, "I want that land.
"I want them people moved off.
"They've got to go back
into the bush somewhere."
Aboriginal people begin to realise
where there were pockets of support
and that's where
they gravitated towards.
And that seems to be the case
with Lightning Ridge
for this particular family.
It's hard to believe
that they lived out here.
Mmm.
Rugged country.
Really rugged.
But also,
like, when you think about it,
it allows you to go straight down
the guts of the townships
that have been created
in New South Wales.
It's like right on the border
of Queensland.
And if you go diagonally,
you can get into South Australia.
So, in the old ways
it was an old Dreaming track area.
You know?
It would have been a songline...
Yeah.
..for trade.
And it's still Gamilaraay.
Lightning Ridge sprung up in 1906
after opals were discovered.
Unlike the Gold Rush,
families moved here together,
building makeshift towns
from scratch.
Entertainment was in high demand,
and the town sat just beyond
the reach of central authorities.
For the Sullivans, it was perfect.
With fortunes flush,
it was a chance to hone their skills
and build a business.
This is the historical society.
Well, this is where we found
the first records of the family.
I wonder if you can spot
who the referee is.
Wow. Great-grandfather Con Senior.
When he decided
to give up his boxing gloves,
he refereed a few of the matches
up this way.
Up here, if you put your fists up
like that, it's called the Sullivan.
So this is the application
for the establishment of a school.
J Sullivan.
Grandma Julia.
It's beautiful handwriting.
Mm.
She would have had to have been
educated,
because most Aboriginal people
marked with just an X.
Yes. Yeah.
She's trying to get four
of her children a school to go to.
There's James, Winnie, Con and Kate.
And we know that that happened
because they're in the photo
and they're listed.
Wow. And there they are.
So, Bonar, Con and Winnie
and Katherine went.
But this came back
from the New South Wales Government.
"I've received reliable information
"that four Sullivans
must not be considered,
"as they are children
of a half-caste,
"moving from station to station."
Makes you cringe at that term.
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
Yeah.
They knew that the government
was keeping an eye on them.
When the Aboriginal
Protection and Welfare boards
start to do their work,
particularly removing children,
putting Aboriginal people
on reserves
and highly regulating Aboriginal
life from where you could work,
who you could marry,
where you could move to...
..naturally, many people
didn't want to live that way.
2,000 generations of families raising
their children across 60,000 years.
And then we come to a point,
"We're coming for you.
"If your house isn't clean,
"if your children don't have shoes,
we're taking them."
People are hiding.
People are really living in fear.
When news of a fire at Julia's
childhood home reached them,
the whole family rushed to Narrabri.
Julia was so close to her family,
with her mum and with her sisters.
It'll be good to show you
some of the papers
of the day that changed the family.
"An old lady, a native of the state,
"was burnt to death
under distressing circumstances.
"The fire broke out
in a large weatherboard house."
So she was in the house
at the time that it happened?
Yeah.
I wonder if there was an undercurrent
of something more to this fire.
Newspapers across the country
reported this death,
even as far as Tasmania,
all noting that the family
were natives of the state.
The harrowing account in the papers
had some anomalies.
Julia's mum was nearly blind,
and I began to question
why would she be using a candle?
The fire was quick,
but the adjoining buildings
were contained.
It reported
that the whole town came to watch
the burning of the house,
and yet no-one rendered assistance
to the family.
The constable dropped the remains
at a relative's house,
almost like a warning.
The final note in most of the papers
was that the house was uninsured.
Five years before,
most Aboriginals in Narrabri
were forcibly removed
to Cuttabri and Pilliga reserves.
Conveniently, with this fire,
there were no more Aboriginal people
living in the town.
While still grieving for her mother,
Julia would have also realised
that the younger members of
the Narrabri family would be at risk
of being taken by the authorities.
With seven kids in tow
and one on the way,
she grabbed nephew George
and headed back to Lightning Ridge.
You know, our country
has a really dark history.
What happened back then.
What the government did.
There's so much trauma
for Aboriginal people.
I grew up white. I didn't know about
my Aboriginality.
To find out,
I was really, really proud.
But I was also mindful
that I had to listen,
I had to learn,
and I had to be respectful about it.
My grandmother
would have been very aware
that it could happen
to her children.
And that's when I started to feel
the power of my grandmother Julia.
She was not going
to lose her children.
They were not going
to be ever separated.
Any other kind of colour,
while not seen as white,
was not treated as badly
as Aboriginal people.
You could be Portuguese,
you could be Jewish.
You could be Maori,
you could be West Indian,
you could be African.
You could be anything else
but Aboriginal.
It might be a good idea
if we made it quite clear
that it's 'Colleano'.
It's pronounced
in the good Australian way.
Right?
MAN: That's quite true.
One way was to adopt this
pseudo-foreign name, 'Colleano'.
In actual fact, there had been
an American troupe of acrobats
that had visited Australia in 1897.
And I think that was the inspiration
for the name.
They were a step ahead of the posse,
so to speak,
in that opportunity at Colleanos,
with their changed identity,
covered that space
and the tracks are gone.
(LAUGHS)
The family,
that tight-knit family together,
working together, playing together,
travelling together,
constantly moving.
And this was a very masterful thing
to do
because what they were doing
was existing in spaces
where they normally wouldn't be able
to exist in,
in an era where we weren't
even allowed to be out past 6pm
or cross borders or travel.
It's quite therapeutic, really...
Yeah.
..doing this.
I'm going
to get another bunch out of this.
What's your word for 'em again?
Diniwan?
Diniwan. Yeah.
It feels like today
we are more ready to judge harshly
people who have had a history
in their family
where there's been an attempt
to live outside the system
and to not be identified
as Aboriginal
and then come back into it,
in a way that really doesn't
understand
how hard it was during that time.
The difference between
giving your children
a life outside of the mission
or being stuck on the reserve,
the difference between being
educated and not being educated.
Julia and Con Senior
decided that rather than fit
into the schools
that didn't want their children,
they would sidestep the system.
Their very first hire was a tutor
and he ended up travelling with them
for years.
In those days, a small circus
was very much of a hard struggle,
as the travelling was done by wagon,
horse and mules,
and putting a shoulder to the wheel
was something more
than just a saying.
As the years rolled by,
the family grew larger
and we learned more acts
until the time came
when our family could put on
the whole show.
Little Winnie was the one
who made all the costumes.
She made the headpieces and even
the shoes with the laces coming up.
Unique, beautiful costumes.
They were fashionistas.
They were so athletic
that they could take on almost any
kind of an act that they wanted to,
from trapeze, wire, acrobatics,
all kinds of unique things
that no-one had ever seen.
From July to October
they toured Queensland.
Moving almost daily and ending
the season in high regard.
Their success
carried on to New South Wales,
bringing rare entertainment
to remote towns.
They were so successful
they moved on to Victoria.
The Colleano Circus was praised
as a clean,
vibrant and attractive troupe.
The circus was probably the most
popular form of entertainment.
The circus had that pizzazz
of being a little bit foreign,
a little bit romantic.
But Australia had a population then
of about 5 million people.
Once you've gone around a few times,
the public easily tires
of what you have to offer.
When World War I started,
all international travel
for circuses stopped.
The family saw this
as an opportunity
to capitalise on their unique look.
This is like really early
and they actually name
all the different acts
that the Colleanos were.
Oh, great.
They're the Royal Hawaiian Troupe.
(HAWAIIAN MUSIC)
Because they had the beautiful,
beautiful, dark skin.
They've also got the Colleano Family,
which is six of them.
Air Queen, that's your Auntie Winnie.
Zeneto.
Yeah.
For a while they were Mexican,
I believe.
The Marsetta Sisters. Kate and Coral.
Senorita Sanchez.
Joyce.
Jojo, Bobo, Coco.
Mae and Katie.
I did wonder whether or not
Con Senior,
because...
Big ears?
..Sullivan ears.
(LAUGHS)
Shapeshifting allowed them
to create the illusion
of being
a bigger circus than they were.
Presenting as international acts
also gave them prestige.
They didn't just learn one trick
and that was it.
They had to be able to back each
other up should something happen.
Joyce.
And Joyce
Con Sullivan even brought
a wig and a dress
so Maurice could appear
as his sisters,
creating Lyla Colleano.
They became expert at living
a life in different skins, in a way.
By mid 1918,
the Colleano Allstar Circus
was travelling by special train.
They had 15 musicians,
30 extra star performers,
a menagerie of animals
and sideshow acts
to draw in the crowds.
But it was no walk in the park.
The circus was pretty much
of an up and down affair.
One day we would have
2,000 or 3,000,
and six or eight weeks bad run,
we would be broke.
So we all decided
we would concentrate
on whatever act
we could do individually the best.
Coming from a big family,
that little bit
of healthy competition exists.
In that moment, you get the little,
"Oh, someone's having a laugh,"
or you get this response
where I guess
it does become fuel
to push and then develop.
And next minute, "Oh, here we are."
So we had Aunt Katie
balancing three ladders
and my mother would climb
and do acrobatic things
up one ladder, over the second,
up to the third.
Joyce was a great contortionist.
She created a trick
doing an elbow stand,
and she would let the arrow go
to a target.
And she usually made it.
Little Winnie,
who was a trapeze performer
and did unbelievably magnificent
things that she created herself.
As the trapeze would go up,
she would dive toward the audience
and they would all scream,
"She's falling!"
and catch by her heels.
She would also do a back somersault
and catch by her toes.
There was no safety line
back in the days.
So to develop the confidence
and the athleticism
to master that is extraordinary.
I had the wire act singled out
as I was somewhat of a dreamer.
I dreamed of a time
when I'd travel the world,
and the wires seemed to be the thing
with which to do it.
You can walk on a tightrope,
and this long sort of aluminium,
or a long kind of bamboo pole
becomes a balance point.
But Con skipped that whole step
altogether.
I learned the wire
the hardest possible way.
That is a bounding tight wire
without any balancing devices.
Not only does this wire shake,
but it is also capable
of throwing one 20ft.
What Con achieved is the first ever
frontsault on a tight wire.
It's a pretty delicate little trick.
With the forward, your own body
obscures the view of the wire,
which makes it like impossible
to see the wire
until after you've actually landed
on there.
WOMAN: Oh.
They say it takes 12,000 hours
to perfect something.
Can you imagine how many times
Con Colleano fell off that wire?
I was about 15, I think,
when I actually started on it,
but it took me about two years
to get to where I could do it
in front of the public.
Oh, yes. I love this plate.
It's on my bookcase in my office.
I look at it often.
It's a, uh...
It's quite a wonderful memento
of a wonderful man,
Con Colleano.
Because this has been huge,
like, huge for me.
Because it could be my grandfather.
But for you...
It took a while to actually process.
I don't know how I actually reacted
when you told me.
I can't quite remember.
Yeah.
Um, it's a bit of a blur.
Yeah.
But the father who raised me
never let on.
Mm.
Having said that,
he was a good father.
You build your identity
around your parents...
..to then find out
you've got this whole other family.
Mm.
When I talk to you about
the Colleanos, like, you light up.
Just love of circus is one,
you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Similarities and connections,
I think.
Yeah, I certainly felt that.
And I'm still feeling it.
Mm.
Yeah.
So he made good, you know,
through pure hard work
and discipline,
the ability to adapt.
Mm.
They certainly did a lot of that,
and they had to do that
in order to be successful.
With their talent gaining attention,
Con and Little Winnie
were ready to dive into a new world.
Being cloaked as the Colleanos
gave them some protection.
But the new career
meant stepping into the system,
making them vulnerable again.
Circus started to be edged out
in the 1920s by vaudeville.
(BANG!)
In those days
there were two circuits.
They had theatres, Tivoli Circuit
and the Fuller Circuit.
Vaudeville was a big step up
for circus performers.
The pay was good and steady and life
in a tent swapped for hotel rooms.
That's where Con came across
this attractive young lady
with very rosy cheeks
who was named Winnie Trevail.
Now, Winnie Trevail
was what you'd call a soubrette.
In the line-up of chorus girls
on the stage,
the soubrette is the one
who comes forward
from the rest of them
to sing a song to the audience,
or tell a joke
or something like that.
Con became enamoured of Winnie.
Con Sullivan, the father,
did not want to break up the act.
So you had to pay your dues
if you wanted to marry a Colleano,
and had to be talented because
you would be part of the act.
They became a very good partnership,
dancing and styling and makeup,
stuff which would be useful
for refining the presentation
of his act.
The lure of vaudeville life
and the desire to keep the family
together was too much to resist.
The family decided
to close down the circus.
But not before a final audacious act
of shape shifting.
They did a farewell tour,
presenting as an American act
on their way home to the States.
They even dropped into Narrabri.
Using the word 'native' in press
was often just relating to being
native Aboriginal, you know.
Yeah.
But I'm sure
that they would have known.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
With the curtain closing
on the Colleano Circus,
the family reinvented once more.
The guy in charge of the Tivoli
circuit, Harry Musgrove, says,
"Well, we can't call you
the Colleano family
"because everybody knows
already everything about you.
"You had this famous circus,
so we'll have to reinvent you."
They were called the Akabah Arabs.
They had to become
the least favourite to the girls
because they hated the costumes.
(ARABIAN MUSIC)
In those days, it was common
for acrobats to present themselves
as Arabs or Bedouins.
The name 'Akabah' came up
because this is not so long
after Lawrence of Arabia had led
the Arabs to victory over the Turks
at Akabah,
so the name Akabah
was on everyone's lips still.
And my mother used to say,
"Everybody always said,
"now when you go into these towns,
don't talk a lot,
"because right now you're supposed
to be the Akabah Arabs."
The Akabah Arabs were a smash hit.
Vaudeville came with a whole
new publicity machine.
Photos of the family
were splashed across the newspapers.
As part of the promotion
of the Akabah Arabs,
Musgrove used to put them in
one of these great long limousines
that they had in those days
and drive them around
Adelaide and Melbourne and so on,
and they'd all be sitting
in the back in their Arab...
trying to look as Arab as possible
with the turbans on and everything,
and they'd attract
quite a crowd of people.
Unfortunately,
in one of those crowds,
there was a guy who knew them
and stepped up to the car
and recognised them.
No matter what you wore
or how good you were,
if recognised as Aboriginal,
the law could send you away
and take your children.
There was only one option left.
The hardest thing about this has been
how did they get out?
You know, one of the things
that we've found in the past
is whenever there was a fight
or a tussle,
you know, because the boys
were so protective of the girls,
as you know...
Yes. Very protective.
There was often benefit nights
to sort of,
kind of keep them clean
and out of the press.
Yeah.
And so it was weird
because when we did the search
for benefit nights for the Colleanos,
they sort of kind of happened
in Adelaide a lot around this time.
And it was all
for Lady Weigall funds.
Right. Yeah.
So in the research that we've done,
William Archibald Weigall
was an interesting cat,
as the governor of South Australia
at the time.
His wife, Lady Weigall,
was known for philanthropic work,
but they resigned
around December 1921
because the state was supposed
to pay for the servants.
A few of them were Aboriginal.
The state refused to pay them,
and the Weigalls
refused not to pay them.
And about three days afterwards
they met the Colleanos.
There's all these conversations
in the theatre about them
standing up and praising them,
so much so that we found the article
of the vice-regal party
within two days
at the Governor's House,
and the Colleanos performed for them,
and I think both Julia and Con
would have realised
what that potential could have been.
And I think that's where we realised
that there's obviously
a deal being struck.
No money sort of changed hands.
Someone that could give papers
to 11 children
that are Aboriginal
wards of the state could be...
Influence.
The Colleanos now had their papers,
which gave them an exit strategy.
The family left Australia
on a three-month voyage,
sailing into the great unknown
towards London.
They must have felt
a rush of excitement,
no longer looking over
their shoulders.
But even on a grand cruise,
cabin fever would have crept in.
I can't imagine them
being on the ship
where they were not allowed
to participate
in any of the games
of the children competing,
because they were winning
all the games.
All of a sudden magic,
and they're there.
They're ready.
They've trained for this.
They are ready to take on the world.
The Akabah Arabs
caused a storm in London,
but the family were keen
to shed that identity.
Con had become
an overnight sensation.
It was here he earned the title
Wizard of the Wire.
It was not until we left Australia
that I realised that I had
originated a style of wire walking
and feet upon it
that had never before been seen.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
One night, Mr Ringling was in the
audience scouting for fresh talent.
He told Con,
"If you make it to New York
and capture a major venue,
"you might just have a shot
at the Greatest Show on Earth."
The family left the Akabah Arabs
at the dock
and stepped into New York City
as the Colleanos once more.
When they hit New York, I think
the universe just exploded for them.
Brooklyn
became their Lightning Ridge,
strategically placed between
the circus precincts
and the bright lights of Manhattan.
Living in a rented walk-up
across two apartments,
all the women in one
and the men in the other...
..with Coney Island
as their backyard.
New York at the time
was 35% migrant.
And in Harlem
the Roaring 20s was erupting,
the cultural renaissance
born of the great migration
from the American South.
Racism still ran deep
beyond the city borders,
but here it was a melting pot
of diversity,
creativity and possibility.
Uncle Maurice and everybody,
they'd go up to Harlem,
to the speakeasies.
NEWSREEL VOICEOVER:
It's against the law to drink.
There's bootleg liquor
on every American lip.
They'd open up a little,
"What's the password?"
And you'd have to know it
for that day.
And then you could get in,
because they didn't want policemen
coming in to raid the place.
They would be doing their acts.
Uncle Maurice would be up on the bar
and do a back somersault,
stamp his footprints on the ceiling
and come down.
So that was a sign of you really
had it made as a speakeasy
if you had Maurice Colleano's
footprints on the ceiling.
In a sensational display of belief
and no shame,
Con booked himself into the biggest
venue in America for his audition.
The idea was,
if you made good the Hippodrome,
then your career was set.
Along with an audience
of around 5,000,
the whole family
turned up to barrack for him.
It was quite a dramatic scene
because he had an accident
the night he opened.
The theatre lights
in the Hippodrome were much,
much more powerful
than what he'd been used to.
They let off a lot of heat.
That loosened his wire.
And when he went
to do his forward somersault...
..he missed.
Cut himself across the chest.
Tried to do it again.
Again he failed.
The audience
was just going hysterical.
They were shouting,
"Don't do it! Don't do it!
"You're hurt. You're hurt."
But then he realised
what was going on.
He said, "Those lights,
they're too powerful. Dim them."
Tightened the wire.
Went ahead.
Beautiful forward somersault.
The people just went mad.
The agent for Ringling Brothers
Circus promptly signed him up.
The Ringling and Barnum
Greatest Show On Earth
demanded more than talent.
They wanted a well-rounded,
fully developed exotic persona.
And Uncle Con doing
the Spanish toreador wire act
helped to promote that.
(FLAMENCO MUSIC)
The whole family
now took on this persona,
digging deeper
into the Spanish identity.
Colleano was now Julia's maiden name,
and she was a famous flamenco dancer
from Madrid.
Con had learnt his act
as an 11-year-old
in the bullrings of Spain.
But in all the publicity,
there was one non-negotiable -
their country.
MAN: How did it all start, Maurice,
this legend of the Colleano family
in show business?
We're all Australians.
Yes.
I mean,
that is, we're Australian born.
I just thought
I was Irish and Spanish,
which is really funny
because I don't have a drop
of Spanish.
My father told me we were from,
you know,
the Portuguese islands
of the Azores,
the Spanish Azores,
and we just had no idea who we were.
We were always told we were Irish.
That's the O'Donnell and Sullivan.
And Spanish,
because it was always like,
well,
where did our dark skin come from?
So are you excited?
I'm very excited.
Deb and I have come to
the Australian Archives to gather
all of Con's home movies to share
with his American descendants.
I want to go over to America
because Molly is getting older,
and also for Dad in his 80s,
and I would love to be able to walk
in the footsteps of my ancestors.
I'd love that. I'd love that.
Right? 'Cause that's the...
That's gold.
That's the two brothers.
Yeah.
We still don't know specifically
who is my grandfather.
You know what I mean?
Dad's nose.
Yeah, I know.
That's all I can...
Yeah, because there's a few
that never had kids either,
and that makes it incredibly hard.
We may not get all of the answers
that we're looking for.
Having said that,
we know it's this family.
(LAUGHS)
I'm taking it in.
You know, this whole family
I didn't know I had.
It's just amazing
how it's all kind of
developed this stage in life for me.
Uh, Molly is my generation.
And, uh, as far as I know,
there's not too many of us left.
If there's one thing
that I do feel good about
is the fact that you guys
are a lot younger than I am.
So your journey is, as you know,
it's a longer journey than mine.
Uh, so that gives me a lot of
satisfaction to know that, you know.
At my age, I've only probably got
a few years left.
Oh. Gee.
Hopefully... Hopefully more.
But, I mean, you guys, you've got
a bit more time to explore.
Even though he hasn't been able
to come out and to actually meet
the cousins in America face to face,
everyone knows Norm.
We share everything with him.
This was Deb's first time
to New York,
and seeing her experience it
made me think about
how daunting and thrilling
the world must have seemed
to the Colleanos.
It's a long way
from Lightning Ridge.
PA: May I have your attention,
please?
Who would have thought that I'd go
all the way to America
to meet
some of my Aboriginal family?
I always felt like I was on a set
when coming to Coney Island.
Filming Deb walking around,
I kept hearing laughter.
A 24-hour circus
where Con Senior worked a sideshow.
But also a place
where you can run barefoot
and never feel closed in.
The Colleanos, they'd be walking
down the boardwalk,
and in their minds, they were kind
of counting up to 20 silently.
And all of a sudden at 20,
they'd all break into a tap dance.
Wild, wild tap dance.
And then just keep walking.
And the people,
they'd be getting applause
all the way down the boardwalk.
They'd line up along the beach
and they would have
a race to the water.
Flip flops.
Everybody had to do backhand springs
all the way down to see
who could do the fastest one
to get in the water first.
(SCREAMING)
Uncle Con went over
to the Ringling show,
then Little Winnie
went over with her trapeze act.
And of course, being Colleanos,
they had to stay together,
so all the rest of them went over
as a family act.
They were all
on the Ringling show together.
(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)
By the '20s,
this is the golden age
of the American circus.
Barnum and Ringling were the big
business of this era in many ways.
They employed tons of people,
aided in part in America
by the transcontinental railroad.
People from miles around
would know the circus was coming.
People wouldn't work that day
or schools might close.
Circus day would shut down life
in a town.
When the Colleanos came,
this was a very big deal.
My dad used to tell me
that everyone on the circus
was saying, "Oh, the Colleanos
can't be that great.
"Not as great
as everybody is saying."
So as they started
coming in to rehearse,
you know, they were walking down
kind of one by one,
and the performers were kind
of nudging each other and saying,
"Okay, that's what it is.
They're just beautiful."
And then
when they started to rehearse,
nobody was saying anything
after that.
(LAUGHTER)
I've never seen people take bows
the way that they did.
They would reach out almost like
to each person in the audience
all the way around the tent.
All of them looking
right at the people in the crowd.
It wasn't just a bow.
It was their energy
that they could reach out.
And it was actually
beautiful to see.
The idea was that this was
an immersive experience.
Before the big show itself,
there were these other
ancillary entertainments
to get people into this sense of
the biggest, the best, the grandest.
(WHISTLE BLOWS)
When he would come on the stage,
the ringmaster would blow the
whistle and everything would stop.
The band would stop,
the performers would leave,
everything got quiet.
And the ringmaster said to direct
your attention to the centre ring
where Con Colleano
would be performing.
RINGMASTER:
Presenting the coupling, dancing,
somersaulting artist
on the Silver Strand,
Con Colleano,
originator of the famous
forward somersault on the tightwire.
(APPLAUSE)
(AUDIENCE EXCLAIMS)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Con became
the highest-paid performer
in the Ringling Brothers Circus.
$1,500 a week -
that's a great salary
more than a hundred years later.
That's, you know, incredible wealth
at that time.
Con had a camera, and not a lot
of people had cameras back then.
And the fact that he took
so much footage
so we could see it
actually as it was.
For somebody who had star billing,
there might be
a little more comfort.
Maybe you had a larger portion
of a train to call home.
I started travelling
when I was two months old
with them on the circus train.
We had a little compartment
and my bed flipped down,
but I had my own window.
So all the time in my little bed
and my little window
was my little world,
watching America go by.
Wondering what they were all doing
in those houses.
The Colleanos didn't have homes
made out of bricks and wood.
Their home was them.
And they passed that along to us
also.
My grandmother Julia,
she was this little beautiful lady
that controlled everybody.
She'd always build a little fire.
She always had some food
or some tea,
or suddenly you're sitting there
eating something lovely.
And a lot of the traditions
of the country that they came from
were presented,
uh, and were part of our family.
The girls would always sit
in circles
and be putting their makeup on
and their costumes on,
and being very silly and laughing,
and I think this came from
when they travelled around
in Australia when they were kids.
Nobody was ever overlooked.
Whether you were talented,
whether you were
the red-haired person
that somehow got mixed up with these
gorgeous dark beauties everywhere.
Even though they might
have been stars at the time,
everyone was welcome
on an equal basis.
Nobody was going off trying
to be more successful
than somebody else.
No-one was ever left out.
They kept each other together
that way.
How are you feeling?
Hello.
Hello!
(LAUGHS)
Too long.
Aw.
Oh. Come here.
You look fantastic.
Ah, look at you.
Oh, my God!
Mwah!
Oh!
So good to see you.
Your dad just texted me.
Oh. Did he?
"Is she there? Is she there?"
Your dad knew you were here
before we did.
(LAUGHS)
Cousin Deb and her father, Norm,
he's my first cousin.
Didn't know he was there.
Don't know how I lived without him.
I don't know.
So did you tell Dad? What did
you just say? "Yeah, she's..."
I feel like I'm a little bit
of a connector.
Going to share information
about our country,
our ancestors and our culture.
We want to be able to unpeel
some of those layers
and see the complexity
of the family.
(LAUGHTER)
Hi. I'm Deb.
I'm Angel. Pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I love your accent.
Oh. (LAUGHS)
Hello.
Hi.
I'm Deb.
Deb is our cousin.
She was English.
Yeah.
English.
From royalty or something,
wasn't she?
There's... Oh, here you go. Watch.
Yeah.
Here you go.
Yep. There we go.
Bam!
Oh. She's happy.
There's Con and Con.
Wait, Con and...
I know Uncle Con's there. Who else?
Sullivan.
Oh!
Oh!
Okay.
(SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
Okay, here's at the farm.
Yeah.
Uncle Maurice puts on
Auntie Joyce's Hawaiian outfit.
Was this at the farm?
Yes.
Uncle Maurice.
Not bad. Not bad for an Australian
doing a Hawaiian dance.
Mom! Here's my mom and Auntie Joyce.
Oh, Con!
That's when he had
the Rudolph Valentino look.
Mm-hm.
You know,
when Rudolph Valentino died...
Did you hear this story?
Uh-huh.
They wanted Uncle Con in his place.
Oh! Oh, really?
And Con said to the family,
"I can either go into movies..."
But he wanted to stay on the circus.
The circuses would roughly run
from spring to fall,
to capitalise on good weather
and crowds.
There would be shows
almost every day.
(BOOM!)
And then the Ringling Brothers
moved their winter quarters
to Sarasota.
It was cheaper to maintain
facilities in Sarasota
than in the city.
It was much more pleasant
in the off-season.
Performers might have time downtime.
So it kind of made sense within
the circus ecosystem of that time.
When they weren't performing
on the circus in America,
they would go over to England
and they would be doing
the music halls over there.
They were very much celebrated
all around Europe.
And they're getting invited
to these incredible events
across the globe.
They were living the life.
Like, that's rock star status.
Now citizens of the world,
they travelled and performed together
around the globe,
with Julia often acting as a
chaperone for the younger children.
During these incredible times,
I have to honestly say
everybody wanted Julia.
Everybody wanted their mother
to be with them.
VOICEOVER:
Now watch how Con Colleano,
the famous Mexican wire balancer,
became one of the cleverest
in the world.
Con was in Europe performing.
They were in Berlin.
Nationalism
and ideas about racial superiority
were sweeping across Germany.
The very forces the family had once
fled were closing around them.
(DONG!)
With the rise of fascism came
a celebration of the physical form.
And Con suddenly found himself
the poster boy for the Nazi Party.
It was a precarious
and dangerous situation.
The shapeshifting that had saved him
now spun out of his control.
Hitler loved...
This is just so bizarre.
He said that Con Colleano
was his favourite performer.
And we always joke around
if he knew...
..that he was a man of colour.
He was not from Spain.
He was from Australia.
Not to be outdone,
Mussolini awarded him a medal,
claiming him as Italian.
Reality hit...
..and on the night
Germany invaded Poland,
Con and Big Winnie escaped.
Even though Con
had a passport from Hitler,
he no longer trusted
that it would get him out.
He was once again the other.
Uncle Con had to leave
all of his rigging,
everything that made him
a performer.
They escaped in the middle
of the night, squashed into a car...
..to the border...
..through the snowy Swiss Alps...
..with only the clothes they wore,
cash and Con's camera.
Con and Big Winnie went back
to the States via Australia...
..where Con went bush.
Meanwhile, the Colleano family
acrobats hunkered down in London.
(AIR RAID SIREN WAILS)
(EXPLOSIONS)
In the underground,
the Colleanos would be telling jokes
and they would be doing their act.
Bombs would be going off on top.
And they'd just go right along
to the different platforms,
doing shows to keep the morale up
and to support the people.
The Colleanos gave over 2,000
performances to the Allied forces.
Auntie Joyce told me the Colleanos
got these gold identity bracelets
from British Intelligence...
..which allowed them
into the military bases
where the soldiers
were preparing for D-Day.
On the eve of one of World War II's
most decisive battles,
the Colleanos performed 11 concerts
from the afternoon until 4am.
They gave their final show on a ship,
giving some of the soldiers
their last hurrah.
(CLOCK TICKING)
(EXPLOSIONS)
(GUNFIRE)
And all this at a time
when, back in Australia,
our people couldn't vote,
weren't trusted
to manage their own wages
or even raise their own children.
Yet the Colleanos were entrusted
with one of the greatest secrets
of the war.
Having worked on
Aboriginal military involvement,
you just shake your head
in disbelief
of where they were
at that particular time period.
Just two hours from New York,
in Pennsylvania,
they got back to country.
Not Gamilaraay...
..but it would do for now.
Here we go.
This one.
This is it.
Yes.
This is the farm.
We called it the farm,
where nobody farmed.
We have a parking lot
right in front of the house.
Yeah.
Okay, here we go.
Nobody really had houses,
and so Uncle Con bought a big farm
so that when they wanted to be
together, they had a place to go.
And then we had...
I could see every window, the porch.
I was just being flooded
with childhood memories.
She wrote a song.
# All aboard for Blanket Bay. #
(WHISTLES)
(DOG BARKS)
As kids growing up, we would run
around on the farm making up shows.
People would be telling stories,
doing dances.
Aunts, uncles, kids everywhere.
This was right here, where
the red... that red bush was...
Cons wire went across there.
It was sort of where the pool is.
Yeah.
Uncle Con would be on the wire
rehearsing.
The diving horses in the barn.
And all the kids
come in from being ragamuffins,
which is what she called us.
We can see that, can't we, Amy?
Yeah. Just a little bit.
Oh!
My grandmother would insist.
"Let's go wash up, clean up
and sit in the dining room."
And we had tea
and she would stand watching
that we were all using the napkin.
And we had to behave
for about 15, 20 minutes.
And then we always used to call it
"Fun in the kitch."
Everybody around the kitchen table
telling their stories.
They wanted us
to feel part of everything.
Uncle Con,
he would make this spaghetti sauce.
He would spend hours.
And I would always be trying
to sneak over to the pot, taste it.
Instead of saying,
"No, no, no, don't do that,"
he would quack.
Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack.
That meant whatever you're doing,
you'd better stop.
Because then I started calling him
Uncle Duck.
So the great Con Colleano,
spaghetti maker extraordinaire,
became Uncle Duck for us.
We travelled afar.
But we love Katie's Bar.
A lot of people
were attracted to them.
New York performers coming in,
musicians.
People would write songs
and parties were really big and fun.
Everyone had to get up
and do something.
My mom and dad and I
used to do a soft shoe dance.
That was our thing.
My mother, Coral, always loved
Australia, always loved it.
And I think she was 15
when they left.
She would get up and do
a very sentimental version
of Waltzing Matilda.
She'd go around to each person.
And, I mean,
we almost felt like crying
because she was missing Australia,
really.
She did love Australia.
There's two sides of it.
You're generating this adrenaline
and dopamine as a performer.
You know,
you're constantly getting this...
You're getting refuelled in a way.
After being this incredible
athletic performer,
there does come a point
where 20 years, 30 years,
things start to change.
You kind of collect these injuries
and then you can't do it anymore,
because it hurts and things don't
move like they used to, you know.
Arthritis sets in.
You know, the imbalance starts to...
You know, your body just ages.
It becomes a game
of how much pain can you live with?
And then Uncle Con
got the cataracts.
He couldn't see the wire.
Joyce, her back was beyond repair.
I mean,
they couldn't do anything for her.
And it was just so crumbled up
from arthritis
and all that bending work
that she did.
Con was,
"We're all going to become
old, broken-down acrobats."
I remember the day when my mother
told me that her mother died.
It was unfathomable
that somebody that you loved
as much as she loved was gone.
And my mother...
..just, it was like
cutting off part of her body.
Conn sold the farm.
He paid it forward to another
circus family for a dollar...
..and returned to Australia
with Big Winnie.
They've been
on international stages...
..while the country
is going through this turmoil of
who gets to have
and who doesn't get to have a right,
whether it's to vote
or to be included
into the Constitution.
They're already ahead of that.
(MARCHING BAND
PLAYS WALTZING MATILDA)
Australia in the 1950s
was a really tough place
for anyone who wasn't white.
What do you think
of the White Australia Policy?
Well, I think it's good
and they should really have it
and keep out the coloured races.
I don't think we could have anything
else but a White Australia Policy.
People here don't live
with Aboriginals, do they?
But in New York
they live side by side with colours,
and I wouldn't care to have them
living in the same house as me.
They bought a pub in Forbes,
New South Wales,
hoping to retire in peace.
Maybe he wanted a place
as himself in his homeland.
He has his own business.
He's got a pub.
There's an Aboriginal man
who owns the pub.
We don't just want a seat
at the bar of the pub.
We're going to buy the pub.
But then realises...
..this is not a good place to be.
Picture theatres, swimming pools
and, of course, pubs
were segregated,
and it being seen as quite audacious
to think
you could cross those lines.
This country still wasn't ready
for the real Colleanos.
Within a year of coming home,
the business failed.
He left and never returned.
So we had in Florida
Auntie Joyce, Con, Big Winnie,
Little Winnie,
of course, my mom and dad,
and then some of us cousins.
Now they did love that warm weather,
though, I must say.
That was it.
They were going to go fishing
forever.
It ended up being the same
as it always was,
a big party and cooking and laughing
and drinking and talking
and challenging each other to things
that nobody could still do.
My grandmother Katie.
That one over there
is the Juggling Colleanos,
including my mother.
I feel that real connection
to the family.
My mom, Aunt Kitty,
her husband, Uncle Jack.
Auntie Joyce
doing this famous trick.
It's not a closure,
but it's something
that I've really needed to do
after all these years.
Pass the hoop to this...
up, up the top there.
They would do different tricks.
They would go forward,
they would pass them up and back.
Whoo!
I think entertainment blood is in us.
We need to have joy in our life,
right?
And that's something
that's really important.
(LAUGHS) Hi, Amy.
We are very proud of our ancestors,
the struggle they endured.
Yeah. There you go.
Alright.
Good choice.
Aw. Good.
I don't know
what it's like to not be free.
I think about Julia
and trying to get her kids
out of that situation.
Things were not fair.
And they went around the system
successfully,
and we're all here now.
And I've never known a day
where I haven't been free.
And that's because of what they did,
especially my grandmother.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Thank you.
Molly really keeps that legacy alive.
These were my people
that I played with.
When we hear stories about them,
I think we bring them to life.
And when we all get together,
we bring those ancestors with us
in our hearts.
This family feels so familiar to me,
the communal way that they looked out
for one another,
the traits,
that even with a foreign accent...
(SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
..made you feel like you belong.
They're very alive inside of me.
They were so extraordinary.
It makes it hard
for me to not have them.
I didn't even realise
how much it was going to mean to me
until I got here.
All my life
I wanted to go to Australia.
My mom was from Australia.
I felt called to come back here.
Oh.
I hope
that everybody can understand that
there are a lot of people
that are in my situation...
..that are searching for family,
and we just want to find
where we're from.
My mother always used to talk about
Narrabri.
I couldn't believe I was there.
So, at last, country has released
the story of this family.
No longer hidden, we wait
for the rest of them to come home.
When I was in the circle
with the women around...
..it just became a magical event.
It was an opening of the heart.
It was an epiphany
that I wasn't even expecting.
I just wanted to see
where they were from.
And instead,
I found out where I was from.
# Not a drop in the ocean
# I'm the river
that flows like a great stampede
# I'm history unfolding
# I'm a moment in time
that will not repeat
# Can't you hear it? Hear it?
My soul inside the sound
# I'm taking higher ground
# I sing for better days
I sing for my people
# And my people breathe through me
# I sing to make a way
# I sing for my freedom
# And freedom is all I need
# Remember my name always
# I'm the daughter of the wave
# I'm brave, I'm not afraid
I'm here for a reason
# Eternity points to me
# Can't you hear it? Hear it?
My soul inside the sound
# I'm taking higher ground
# I sing for better days
I sing for my people
# And my people breathe through me
# I sing to make a way
I sing for my freedom
# And freedom is all I need
# Remember my name always
# I'm the daughter of the wave
# I'm brave, I'm not afraid
I'm here for a reason
# Eternity points to me
# Ah, yeah
Ah, yeah
# Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, oh
# Oh
# Oh, oh-ooh... #
Captions by Red Bee Media
(c) SBS Australia 2025
they were magnificent.
It was just watching
some kind of magical thing happen.
I had six aunties and four uncles.
Uncle Con
became the highest-paid performer
in the Ringling Brothers Circus.
ANNOUNCER: Now watch how Con
Colleano, the famous wire balancer,
became one of the cleverest
in the world.
Little Winnie was a great
solo trapeze performer
and her act was unique.
Maurice was probably
the greatest acrobat of his time.
Katie Colleano,
along with my mother, Coral,
were partners
in the Triple Ladder act.
Bonar was an acrobat,
manager and spotter.
May somersaults from one horse
to the other.
Joyce loved doing rumbas
and contortionist work.
Victoria,
who was always called Babe.
Lindsay and Cousin George.
I started to feel the power
of my grandmother Julia
that kept all of that together...
..to somehow not just survive,
but have a vision.
I am Molly Colleano O'Donnell,
connected to the Colleano family
in my heart and in my soul.
When I was seven,
I spent a year in a hospital bed.
My parents visited every week,
and to give me courage,
Mum told me about a distant corner
of our family.
Daring, glamorous shapeshifters
who defied the colonial system.
This story never let me go.
But I hit a snag.
They say history is written
by the victors.
But the story
of this famous Aboriginal family
has never been told.
They are part of a hidden generation
of our country.
Luckily, Mum had also told me
to read between the lines,
to follow the back roads and listen.
I knew these stories
were still alive,
passed down and remembered.
And it turns out
I wasn't the only one searching.
Around about eight years ago,
I started to hear
some little rumours and secrets
that piqued my curiosity
to want to know more
about where I'm from.
I had a discussion with an auntie
and unearthed a fairly big secret
in our family.
Once I did some DNA testing,
I found out that my pop
was not my biological grandfather
and, in fact,
was part of the Colleano family.
We have a very strong line of women
in the Colleano family,
right back to Great-Grandma Julia.
And I think that's what I resonate
mostly with is that matriarch line.
Four years ago, we teamed up.
Like a black Nancy Drew,
I brought a trove of records.
(PHONE RINGS)
Deb had traced the family tree across
the world, and in America was Molly.
(ON PHONE) Hello. Hello.
BOTH: Hi.
Where are we? Hey!
Hi.
(LAUGHS)
The family's custodian
of oral history.
Deb wants to take you out.
I want to show you.
I want to show you.
Take you to show you.
Okay. Okay.
It gets up to 40 degrees here, Molly.
Oh, wow.
Which is about 120-something.
Molly's grandmother, Julia,
was a Gamilaraay woman.
She was born in 1878
and grew up in the town of Narrabri.
She was one of seven children.
Her matrilineal line traces back
four generations to the Upper Gwydir.
Settlers came onto their country
in the 1820s.
(COCKATOOS SCREECH)
I think it's hard
for us to understand how difficult
it would have been for First Nations
people around the 1850s to 1900.
Their way of living
for tens of thousands of years
had been disrupted.
And in the backdrop of having
to navigate a new way of survival
was always the threat of violence.
The national view
from non-Indigenous people
was that we were a dying race.
But without the government
regulation that was to follow,
you do have a larger ability
for Aboriginal people
to determine how they were going to
navigate this new environment,
and many of them did it really well.
Self-educated Aboriginal people
were writing petitions
to the state government,
asking for 30, 40, 50 acres of land
in their traditional country.
The government would then contact
the local police officer
to go out
and have a look at this land.
Letter comes back -
"It's heavily timbered,
worthless scrub. Give it to them."
Certainly from the 1880s,
something like
81% of Aboriginal people
in New South Wales
were self-sufficient.
Aboriginal people
went through a period of 50 years
of prospering
on their traditional land.
Welcome to Narrabri.
Here we are.
So I reckon your grandmother, Julia,
would have been a bub
when this was being built.
Like, when you think about it,
they lived just two streets back,
so, like, they're right
in the middle of it.
They're in the thick of it.
You know?
I found a few clues
about Julia's earlier life.
Her father, William Robinson,
was West Indian,
in official documents.
In fact, we knew him as Mum's
great-great-uncle, a Bundjalung man.
But as a West Indian,
he was able to claim
that he was a free man,
meaning he could own
prime real estate.
Narrabri was a very prime location.
Prospering in farming
and their ability
to transport that across the state.
He worked at the post office,
a respectable job for the time.
But as Julia reached her teens,
he passed away.
Narrabri was growing fast,
its population doubling,
and her mother,
fearing for her daughter's safety,
allowed them to marry young.
I'm just going to draw.
Julia met Con Sullivan,
and we'll call him Senior
because we know that there were
10 children under that
that also followed the same names.
Great-grandfather Con
was a tent boxer,
and at 16 Julia was married.
Con Sullivan was an Irish larrikin
with quick fists,
a bit of a gambler
with a knack for the hustle.
This beautiful woman, Julia,
became part of the travelling world
on the tent boxing circuit.
(BELL DINGS)
The boys, Uncle Bonar,
Uncle Con, and Maurice,
were following
in their father's footsteps.
There is a long history
of Aboriginal boxers.
This fits with an opportunity
for families to stay together
as part of those touring shows.
The reality is those jobs
are life threatening
and that's why there's not such a
barrier to Aboriginal participation.
They all love boxing.
They were great defenders.
They loved coming to the aid
of these beautiful sisters
of theirs.
They really did.
The tent boxing circuit
was run like a racket.
Not the best environment
to bring up kids.
Along the way,
they lived by their wits.
The boys used to hunt little rabbits
and things
and they would gather medicines,
herbs
my grandmother
was very knowledgeable about.
They became
completely self-contained.
The family shared this floating life
on the dusty roads with drovers,
travelling salesmen,
people moving out west for free land
and other entertainers
passing through towns.
The Sullivans
competed with sideshows and circuses
of all sizes and qualities.
The Sullivan family
kept having girls more than boys,
and in those days,
girls weren't boxers.
They had to think their way around
a new way of making a living.
Con Senior.
Their father, Con Sullivan,
was always coming up
with these ideas.
He had an old film machine,
one of the first.
He was trying to charge money for
people to come and see these films,
but the film camera kept breaking
down, so he'd send the kids out.
And we had to hop in and do a bit of
something while they mended the film.
INTERVIEWER:
But why do circus tricks?
I mean, why not just go up
and sing a song or something?
Well, I guess, no, we couldn't sing.
(LAUGHTER)
From tent boxing and understanding
how to do a travelling show,
it was a natural leap
to the circus world.
And it wasn't like the kids
were being punished.
The kids loved it.
They absolutely loved it and wanted
to train six and seven hours a day.
But just as the Sullivans
were finding their feet,
the state had other plans.
Federation unified the nation,
and with it came policies that
plunged our communities into a trauma
that we are still reckoning with
today.
Australia's 'Fair Go' only applied
if you had a fair complexion.
When Federation comes,
you actually see the increase
across every jurisdiction
in the country
of Aboriginal welfare
and protection boards
that fundamentally take away
the rights of Aboriginal people.
And, in fact,
you can look at that period
as another time of dispossession.
Expanding settlement.
There were white pressure groups
saying, "I want that land.
"I want them people moved off.
"They've got to go back
into the bush somewhere."
Aboriginal people begin to realise
where there were pockets of support
and that's where
they gravitated towards.
And that seems to be the case
with Lightning Ridge
for this particular family.
It's hard to believe
that they lived out here.
Mmm.
Rugged country.
Really rugged.
But also,
like, when you think about it,
it allows you to go straight down
the guts of the townships
that have been created
in New South Wales.
It's like right on the border
of Queensland.
And if you go diagonally,
you can get into South Australia.
So, in the old ways
it was an old Dreaming track area.
You know?
It would have been a songline...
Yeah.
..for trade.
And it's still Gamilaraay.
Lightning Ridge sprung up in 1906
after opals were discovered.
Unlike the Gold Rush,
families moved here together,
building makeshift towns
from scratch.
Entertainment was in high demand,
and the town sat just beyond
the reach of central authorities.
For the Sullivans, it was perfect.
With fortunes flush,
it was a chance to hone their skills
and build a business.
This is the historical society.
Well, this is where we found
the first records of the family.
I wonder if you can spot
who the referee is.
Wow. Great-grandfather Con Senior.
When he decided
to give up his boxing gloves,
he refereed a few of the matches
up this way.
Up here, if you put your fists up
like that, it's called the Sullivan.
So this is the application
for the establishment of a school.
J Sullivan.
Grandma Julia.
It's beautiful handwriting.
Mm.
She would have had to have been
educated,
because most Aboriginal people
marked with just an X.
Yes. Yeah.
She's trying to get four
of her children a school to go to.
There's James, Winnie, Con and Kate.
And we know that that happened
because they're in the photo
and they're listed.
Wow. And there they are.
So, Bonar, Con and Winnie
and Katherine went.
But this came back
from the New South Wales Government.
"I've received reliable information
"that four Sullivans
must not be considered,
"as they are children
of a half-caste,
"moving from station to station."
Makes you cringe at that term.
Yeah.
Doesn't it?
Yeah.
They knew that the government
was keeping an eye on them.
When the Aboriginal
Protection and Welfare boards
start to do their work,
particularly removing children,
putting Aboriginal people
on reserves
and highly regulating Aboriginal
life from where you could work,
who you could marry,
where you could move to...
..naturally, many people
didn't want to live that way.
2,000 generations of families raising
their children across 60,000 years.
And then we come to a point,
"We're coming for you.
"If your house isn't clean,
"if your children don't have shoes,
we're taking them."
People are hiding.
People are really living in fear.
When news of a fire at Julia's
childhood home reached them,
the whole family rushed to Narrabri.
Julia was so close to her family,
with her mum and with her sisters.
It'll be good to show you
some of the papers
of the day that changed the family.
"An old lady, a native of the state,
"was burnt to death
under distressing circumstances.
"The fire broke out
in a large weatherboard house."
So she was in the house
at the time that it happened?
Yeah.
I wonder if there was an undercurrent
of something more to this fire.
Newspapers across the country
reported this death,
even as far as Tasmania,
all noting that the family
were natives of the state.
The harrowing account in the papers
had some anomalies.
Julia's mum was nearly blind,
and I began to question
why would she be using a candle?
The fire was quick,
but the adjoining buildings
were contained.
It reported
that the whole town came to watch
the burning of the house,
and yet no-one rendered assistance
to the family.
The constable dropped the remains
at a relative's house,
almost like a warning.
The final note in most of the papers
was that the house was uninsured.
Five years before,
most Aboriginals in Narrabri
were forcibly removed
to Cuttabri and Pilliga reserves.
Conveniently, with this fire,
there were no more Aboriginal people
living in the town.
While still grieving for her mother,
Julia would have also realised
that the younger members of
the Narrabri family would be at risk
of being taken by the authorities.
With seven kids in tow
and one on the way,
she grabbed nephew George
and headed back to Lightning Ridge.
You know, our country
has a really dark history.
What happened back then.
What the government did.
There's so much trauma
for Aboriginal people.
I grew up white. I didn't know about
my Aboriginality.
To find out,
I was really, really proud.
But I was also mindful
that I had to listen,
I had to learn,
and I had to be respectful about it.
My grandmother
would have been very aware
that it could happen
to her children.
And that's when I started to feel
the power of my grandmother Julia.
She was not going
to lose her children.
They were not going
to be ever separated.
Any other kind of colour,
while not seen as white,
was not treated as badly
as Aboriginal people.
You could be Portuguese,
you could be Jewish.
You could be Maori,
you could be West Indian,
you could be African.
You could be anything else
but Aboriginal.
It might be a good idea
if we made it quite clear
that it's 'Colleano'.
It's pronounced
in the good Australian way.
Right?
MAN: That's quite true.
One way was to adopt this
pseudo-foreign name, 'Colleano'.
In actual fact, there had been
an American troupe of acrobats
that had visited Australia in 1897.
And I think that was the inspiration
for the name.
They were a step ahead of the posse,
so to speak,
in that opportunity at Colleanos,
with their changed identity,
covered that space
and the tracks are gone.
(LAUGHS)
The family,
that tight-knit family together,
working together, playing together,
travelling together,
constantly moving.
And this was a very masterful thing
to do
because what they were doing
was existing in spaces
where they normally wouldn't be able
to exist in,
in an era where we weren't
even allowed to be out past 6pm
or cross borders or travel.
It's quite therapeutic, really...
Yeah.
..doing this.
I'm going
to get another bunch out of this.
What's your word for 'em again?
Diniwan?
Diniwan. Yeah.
It feels like today
we are more ready to judge harshly
people who have had a history
in their family
where there's been an attempt
to live outside the system
and to not be identified
as Aboriginal
and then come back into it,
in a way that really doesn't
understand
how hard it was during that time.
The difference between
giving your children
a life outside of the mission
or being stuck on the reserve,
the difference between being
educated and not being educated.
Julia and Con Senior
decided that rather than fit
into the schools
that didn't want their children,
they would sidestep the system.
Their very first hire was a tutor
and he ended up travelling with them
for years.
In those days, a small circus
was very much of a hard struggle,
as the travelling was done by wagon,
horse and mules,
and putting a shoulder to the wheel
was something more
than just a saying.
As the years rolled by,
the family grew larger
and we learned more acts
until the time came
when our family could put on
the whole show.
Little Winnie was the one
who made all the costumes.
She made the headpieces and even
the shoes with the laces coming up.
Unique, beautiful costumes.
They were fashionistas.
They were so athletic
that they could take on almost any
kind of an act that they wanted to,
from trapeze, wire, acrobatics,
all kinds of unique things
that no-one had ever seen.
From July to October
they toured Queensland.
Moving almost daily and ending
the season in high regard.
Their success
carried on to New South Wales,
bringing rare entertainment
to remote towns.
They were so successful
they moved on to Victoria.
The Colleano Circus was praised
as a clean,
vibrant and attractive troupe.
The circus was probably the most
popular form of entertainment.
The circus had that pizzazz
of being a little bit foreign,
a little bit romantic.
But Australia had a population then
of about 5 million people.
Once you've gone around a few times,
the public easily tires
of what you have to offer.
When World War I started,
all international travel
for circuses stopped.
The family saw this
as an opportunity
to capitalise on their unique look.
This is like really early
and they actually name
all the different acts
that the Colleanos were.
Oh, great.
They're the Royal Hawaiian Troupe.
(HAWAIIAN MUSIC)
Because they had the beautiful,
beautiful, dark skin.
They've also got the Colleano Family,
which is six of them.
Air Queen, that's your Auntie Winnie.
Zeneto.
Yeah.
For a while they were Mexican,
I believe.
The Marsetta Sisters. Kate and Coral.
Senorita Sanchez.
Joyce.
Jojo, Bobo, Coco.
Mae and Katie.
I did wonder whether or not
Con Senior,
because...
Big ears?
..Sullivan ears.
(LAUGHS)
Shapeshifting allowed them
to create the illusion
of being
a bigger circus than they were.
Presenting as international acts
also gave them prestige.
They didn't just learn one trick
and that was it.
They had to be able to back each
other up should something happen.
Joyce.
And Joyce
Con Sullivan even brought
a wig and a dress
so Maurice could appear
as his sisters,
creating Lyla Colleano.
They became expert at living
a life in different skins, in a way.
By mid 1918,
the Colleano Allstar Circus
was travelling by special train.
They had 15 musicians,
30 extra star performers,
a menagerie of animals
and sideshow acts
to draw in the crowds.
But it was no walk in the park.
The circus was pretty much
of an up and down affair.
One day we would have
2,000 or 3,000,
and six or eight weeks bad run,
we would be broke.
So we all decided
we would concentrate
on whatever act
we could do individually the best.
Coming from a big family,
that little bit
of healthy competition exists.
In that moment, you get the little,
"Oh, someone's having a laugh,"
or you get this response
where I guess
it does become fuel
to push and then develop.
And next minute, "Oh, here we are."
So we had Aunt Katie
balancing three ladders
and my mother would climb
and do acrobatic things
up one ladder, over the second,
up to the third.
Joyce was a great contortionist.
She created a trick
doing an elbow stand,
and she would let the arrow go
to a target.
And she usually made it.
Little Winnie,
who was a trapeze performer
and did unbelievably magnificent
things that she created herself.
As the trapeze would go up,
she would dive toward the audience
and they would all scream,
"She's falling!"
and catch by her heels.
She would also do a back somersault
and catch by her toes.
There was no safety line
back in the days.
So to develop the confidence
and the athleticism
to master that is extraordinary.
I had the wire act singled out
as I was somewhat of a dreamer.
I dreamed of a time
when I'd travel the world,
and the wires seemed to be the thing
with which to do it.
You can walk on a tightrope,
and this long sort of aluminium,
or a long kind of bamboo pole
becomes a balance point.
But Con skipped that whole step
altogether.
I learned the wire
the hardest possible way.
That is a bounding tight wire
without any balancing devices.
Not only does this wire shake,
but it is also capable
of throwing one 20ft.
What Con achieved is the first ever
frontsault on a tight wire.
It's a pretty delicate little trick.
With the forward, your own body
obscures the view of the wire,
which makes it like impossible
to see the wire
until after you've actually landed
on there.
WOMAN: Oh.
They say it takes 12,000 hours
to perfect something.
Can you imagine how many times
Con Colleano fell off that wire?
I was about 15, I think,
when I actually started on it,
but it took me about two years
to get to where I could do it
in front of the public.
Oh, yes. I love this plate.
It's on my bookcase in my office.
I look at it often.
It's a, uh...
It's quite a wonderful memento
of a wonderful man,
Con Colleano.
Because this has been huge,
like, huge for me.
Because it could be my grandfather.
But for you...
It took a while to actually process.
I don't know how I actually reacted
when you told me.
I can't quite remember.
Yeah.
Um, it's a bit of a blur.
Yeah.
But the father who raised me
never let on.
Mm.
Having said that,
he was a good father.
You build your identity
around your parents...
..to then find out
you've got this whole other family.
Mm.
When I talk to you about
the Colleanos, like, you light up.
Just love of circus is one,
you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Similarities and connections,
I think.
Yeah, I certainly felt that.
And I'm still feeling it.
Mm.
Yeah.
So he made good, you know,
through pure hard work
and discipline,
the ability to adapt.
Mm.
They certainly did a lot of that,
and they had to do that
in order to be successful.
With their talent gaining attention,
Con and Little Winnie
were ready to dive into a new world.
Being cloaked as the Colleanos
gave them some protection.
But the new career
meant stepping into the system,
making them vulnerable again.
Circus started to be edged out
in the 1920s by vaudeville.
(BANG!)
In those days
there were two circuits.
They had theatres, Tivoli Circuit
and the Fuller Circuit.
Vaudeville was a big step up
for circus performers.
The pay was good and steady and life
in a tent swapped for hotel rooms.
That's where Con came across
this attractive young lady
with very rosy cheeks
who was named Winnie Trevail.
Now, Winnie Trevail
was what you'd call a soubrette.
In the line-up of chorus girls
on the stage,
the soubrette is the one
who comes forward
from the rest of them
to sing a song to the audience,
or tell a joke
or something like that.
Con became enamoured of Winnie.
Con Sullivan, the father,
did not want to break up the act.
So you had to pay your dues
if you wanted to marry a Colleano,
and had to be talented because
you would be part of the act.
They became a very good partnership,
dancing and styling and makeup,
stuff which would be useful
for refining the presentation
of his act.
The lure of vaudeville life
and the desire to keep the family
together was too much to resist.
The family decided
to close down the circus.
But not before a final audacious act
of shape shifting.
They did a farewell tour,
presenting as an American act
on their way home to the States.
They even dropped into Narrabri.
Using the word 'native' in press
was often just relating to being
native Aboriginal, you know.
Yeah.
But I'm sure
that they would have known.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
With the curtain closing
on the Colleano Circus,
the family reinvented once more.
The guy in charge of the Tivoli
circuit, Harry Musgrove, says,
"Well, we can't call you
the Colleano family
"because everybody knows
already everything about you.
"You had this famous circus,
so we'll have to reinvent you."
They were called the Akabah Arabs.
They had to become
the least favourite to the girls
because they hated the costumes.
(ARABIAN MUSIC)
In those days, it was common
for acrobats to present themselves
as Arabs or Bedouins.
The name 'Akabah' came up
because this is not so long
after Lawrence of Arabia had led
the Arabs to victory over the Turks
at Akabah,
so the name Akabah
was on everyone's lips still.
And my mother used to say,
"Everybody always said,
"now when you go into these towns,
don't talk a lot,
"because right now you're supposed
to be the Akabah Arabs."
The Akabah Arabs were a smash hit.
Vaudeville came with a whole
new publicity machine.
Photos of the family
were splashed across the newspapers.
As part of the promotion
of the Akabah Arabs,
Musgrove used to put them in
one of these great long limousines
that they had in those days
and drive them around
Adelaide and Melbourne and so on,
and they'd all be sitting
in the back in their Arab...
trying to look as Arab as possible
with the turbans on and everything,
and they'd attract
quite a crowd of people.
Unfortunately,
in one of those crowds,
there was a guy who knew them
and stepped up to the car
and recognised them.
No matter what you wore
or how good you were,
if recognised as Aboriginal,
the law could send you away
and take your children.
There was only one option left.
The hardest thing about this has been
how did they get out?
You know, one of the things
that we've found in the past
is whenever there was a fight
or a tussle,
you know, because the boys
were so protective of the girls,
as you know...
Yes. Very protective.
There was often benefit nights
to sort of,
kind of keep them clean
and out of the press.
Yeah.
And so it was weird
because when we did the search
for benefit nights for the Colleanos,
they sort of kind of happened
in Adelaide a lot around this time.
And it was all
for Lady Weigall funds.
Right. Yeah.
So in the research that we've done,
William Archibald Weigall
was an interesting cat,
as the governor of South Australia
at the time.
His wife, Lady Weigall,
was known for philanthropic work,
but they resigned
around December 1921
because the state was supposed
to pay for the servants.
A few of them were Aboriginal.
The state refused to pay them,
and the Weigalls
refused not to pay them.
And about three days afterwards
they met the Colleanos.
There's all these conversations
in the theatre about them
standing up and praising them,
so much so that we found the article
of the vice-regal party
within two days
at the Governor's House,
and the Colleanos performed for them,
and I think both Julia and Con
would have realised
what that potential could have been.
And I think that's where we realised
that there's obviously
a deal being struck.
No money sort of changed hands.
Someone that could give papers
to 11 children
that are Aboriginal
wards of the state could be...
Influence.
The Colleanos now had their papers,
which gave them an exit strategy.
The family left Australia
on a three-month voyage,
sailing into the great unknown
towards London.
They must have felt
a rush of excitement,
no longer looking over
their shoulders.
But even on a grand cruise,
cabin fever would have crept in.
I can't imagine them
being on the ship
where they were not allowed
to participate
in any of the games
of the children competing,
because they were winning
all the games.
All of a sudden magic,
and they're there.
They're ready.
They've trained for this.
They are ready to take on the world.
The Akabah Arabs
caused a storm in London,
but the family were keen
to shed that identity.
Con had become
an overnight sensation.
It was here he earned the title
Wizard of the Wire.
It was not until we left Australia
that I realised that I had
originated a style of wire walking
and feet upon it
that had never before been seen.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
One night, Mr Ringling was in the
audience scouting for fresh talent.
He told Con,
"If you make it to New York
and capture a major venue,
"you might just have a shot
at the Greatest Show on Earth."
The family left the Akabah Arabs
at the dock
and stepped into New York City
as the Colleanos once more.
When they hit New York, I think
the universe just exploded for them.
Brooklyn
became their Lightning Ridge,
strategically placed between
the circus precincts
and the bright lights of Manhattan.
Living in a rented walk-up
across two apartments,
all the women in one
and the men in the other...
..with Coney Island
as their backyard.
New York at the time
was 35% migrant.
And in Harlem
the Roaring 20s was erupting,
the cultural renaissance
born of the great migration
from the American South.
Racism still ran deep
beyond the city borders,
but here it was a melting pot
of diversity,
creativity and possibility.
Uncle Maurice and everybody,
they'd go up to Harlem,
to the speakeasies.
NEWSREEL VOICEOVER:
It's against the law to drink.
There's bootleg liquor
on every American lip.
They'd open up a little,
"What's the password?"
And you'd have to know it
for that day.
And then you could get in,
because they didn't want policemen
coming in to raid the place.
They would be doing their acts.
Uncle Maurice would be up on the bar
and do a back somersault,
stamp his footprints on the ceiling
and come down.
So that was a sign of you really
had it made as a speakeasy
if you had Maurice Colleano's
footprints on the ceiling.
In a sensational display of belief
and no shame,
Con booked himself into the biggest
venue in America for his audition.
The idea was,
if you made good the Hippodrome,
then your career was set.
Along with an audience
of around 5,000,
the whole family
turned up to barrack for him.
It was quite a dramatic scene
because he had an accident
the night he opened.
The theatre lights
in the Hippodrome were much,
much more powerful
than what he'd been used to.
They let off a lot of heat.
That loosened his wire.
And when he went
to do his forward somersault...
..he missed.
Cut himself across the chest.
Tried to do it again.
Again he failed.
The audience
was just going hysterical.
They were shouting,
"Don't do it! Don't do it!
"You're hurt. You're hurt."
But then he realised
what was going on.
He said, "Those lights,
they're too powerful. Dim them."
Tightened the wire.
Went ahead.
Beautiful forward somersault.
The people just went mad.
The agent for Ringling Brothers
Circus promptly signed him up.
The Ringling and Barnum
Greatest Show On Earth
demanded more than talent.
They wanted a well-rounded,
fully developed exotic persona.
And Uncle Con doing
the Spanish toreador wire act
helped to promote that.
(FLAMENCO MUSIC)
The whole family
now took on this persona,
digging deeper
into the Spanish identity.
Colleano was now Julia's maiden name,
and she was a famous flamenco dancer
from Madrid.
Con had learnt his act
as an 11-year-old
in the bullrings of Spain.
But in all the publicity,
there was one non-negotiable -
their country.
MAN: How did it all start, Maurice,
this legend of the Colleano family
in show business?
We're all Australians.
Yes.
I mean,
that is, we're Australian born.
I just thought
I was Irish and Spanish,
which is really funny
because I don't have a drop
of Spanish.
My father told me we were from,
you know,
the Portuguese islands
of the Azores,
the Spanish Azores,
and we just had no idea who we were.
We were always told we were Irish.
That's the O'Donnell and Sullivan.
And Spanish,
because it was always like,
well,
where did our dark skin come from?
So are you excited?
I'm very excited.
Deb and I have come to
the Australian Archives to gather
all of Con's home movies to share
with his American descendants.
I want to go over to America
because Molly is getting older,
and also for Dad in his 80s,
and I would love to be able to walk
in the footsteps of my ancestors.
I'd love that. I'd love that.
Right? 'Cause that's the...
That's gold.
That's the two brothers.
Yeah.
We still don't know specifically
who is my grandfather.
You know what I mean?
Dad's nose.
Yeah, I know.
That's all I can...
Yeah, because there's a few
that never had kids either,
and that makes it incredibly hard.
We may not get all of the answers
that we're looking for.
Having said that,
we know it's this family.
(LAUGHS)
I'm taking it in.
You know, this whole family
I didn't know I had.
It's just amazing
how it's all kind of
developed this stage in life for me.
Uh, Molly is my generation.
And, uh, as far as I know,
there's not too many of us left.
If there's one thing
that I do feel good about
is the fact that you guys
are a lot younger than I am.
So your journey is, as you know,
it's a longer journey than mine.
Uh, so that gives me a lot of
satisfaction to know that, you know.
At my age, I've only probably got
a few years left.
Oh. Gee.
Hopefully... Hopefully more.
But, I mean, you guys, you've got
a bit more time to explore.
Even though he hasn't been able
to come out and to actually meet
the cousins in America face to face,
everyone knows Norm.
We share everything with him.
This was Deb's first time
to New York,
and seeing her experience it
made me think about
how daunting and thrilling
the world must have seemed
to the Colleanos.
It's a long way
from Lightning Ridge.
PA: May I have your attention,
please?
Who would have thought that I'd go
all the way to America
to meet
some of my Aboriginal family?
I always felt like I was on a set
when coming to Coney Island.
Filming Deb walking around,
I kept hearing laughter.
A 24-hour circus
where Con Senior worked a sideshow.
But also a place
where you can run barefoot
and never feel closed in.
The Colleanos, they'd be walking
down the boardwalk,
and in their minds, they were kind
of counting up to 20 silently.
And all of a sudden at 20,
they'd all break into a tap dance.
Wild, wild tap dance.
And then just keep walking.
And the people,
they'd be getting applause
all the way down the boardwalk.
They'd line up along the beach
and they would have
a race to the water.
Flip flops.
Everybody had to do backhand springs
all the way down to see
who could do the fastest one
to get in the water first.
(SCREAMING)
Uncle Con went over
to the Ringling show,
then Little Winnie
went over with her trapeze act.
And of course, being Colleanos,
they had to stay together,
so all the rest of them went over
as a family act.
They were all
on the Ringling show together.
(SHIP'S HORN BLARES)
By the '20s,
this is the golden age
of the American circus.
Barnum and Ringling were the big
business of this era in many ways.
They employed tons of people,
aided in part in America
by the transcontinental railroad.
People from miles around
would know the circus was coming.
People wouldn't work that day
or schools might close.
Circus day would shut down life
in a town.
When the Colleanos came,
this was a very big deal.
My dad used to tell me
that everyone on the circus
was saying, "Oh, the Colleanos
can't be that great.
"Not as great
as everybody is saying."
So as they started
coming in to rehearse,
you know, they were walking down
kind of one by one,
and the performers were kind
of nudging each other and saying,
"Okay, that's what it is.
They're just beautiful."
And then
when they started to rehearse,
nobody was saying anything
after that.
(LAUGHTER)
I've never seen people take bows
the way that they did.
They would reach out almost like
to each person in the audience
all the way around the tent.
All of them looking
right at the people in the crowd.
It wasn't just a bow.
It was their energy
that they could reach out.
And it was actually
beautiful to see.
The idea was that this was
an immersive experience.
Before the big show itself,
there were these other
ancillary entertainments
to get people into this sense of
the biggest, the best, the grandest.
(WHISTLE BLOWS)
When he would come on the stage,
the ringmaster would blow the
whistle and everything would stop.
The band would stop,
the performers would leave,
everything got quiet.
And the ringmaster said to direct
your attention to the centre ring
where Con Colleano
would be performing.
RINGMASTER:
Presenting the coupling, dancing,
somersaulting artist
on the Silver Strand,
Con Colleano,
originator of the famous
forward somersault on the tightwire.
(APPLAUSE)
(AUDIENCE EXCLAIMS)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Con became
the highest-paid performer
in the Ringling Brothers Circus.
$1,500 a week -
that's a great salary
more than a hundred years later.
That's, you know, incredible wealth
at that time.
Con had a camera, and not a lot
of people had cameras back then.
And the fact that he took
so much footage
so we could see it
actually as it was.
For somebody who had star billing,
there might be
a little more comfort.
Maybe you had a larger portion
of a train to call home.
I started travelling
when I was two months old
with them on the circus train.
We had a little compartment
and my bed flipped down,
but I had my own window.
So all the time in my little bed
and my little window
was my little world,
watching America go by.
Wondering what they were all doing
in those houses.
The Colleanos didn't have homes
made out of bricks and wood.
Their home was them.
And they passed that along to us
also.
My grandmother Julia,
she was this little beautiful lady
that controlled everybody.
She'd always build a little fire.
She always had some food
or some tea,
or suddenly you're sitting there
eating something lovely.
And a lot of the traditions
of the country that they came from
were presented,
uh, and were part of our family.
The girls would always sit
in circles
and be putting their makeup on
and their costumes on,
and being very silly and laughing,
and I think this came from
when they travelled around
in Australia when they were kids.
Nobody was ever overlooked.
Whether you were talented,
whether you were
the red-haired person
that somehow got mixed up with these
gorgeous dark beauties everywhere.
Even though they might
have been stars at the time,
everyone was welcome
on an equal basis.
Nobody was going off trying
to be more successful
than somebody else.
No-one was ever left out.
They kept each other together
that way.
How are you feeling?
Hello.
Hello!
(LAUGHS)
Too long.
Aw.
Oh. Come here.
You look fantastic.
Ah, look at you.
Oh, my God!
Mwah!
Oh!
So good to see you.
Your dad just texted me.
Oh. Did he?
"Is she there? Is she there?"
Your dad knew you were here
before we did.
(LAUGHS)
Cousin Deb and her father, Norm,
he's my first cousin.
Didn't know he was there.
Don't know how I lived without him.
I don't know.
So did you tell Dad? What did
you just say? "Yeah, she's..."
I feel like I'm a little bit
of a connector.
Going to share information
about our country,
our ancestors and our culture.
We want to be able to unpeel
some of those layers
and see the complexity
of the family.
(LAUGHTER)
Hi. I'm Deb.
I'm Angel. Pleasure to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I love your accent.
Oh. (LAUGHS)
Hello.
Hi.
I'm Deb.
Deb is our cousin.
She was English.
Yeah.
English.
From royalty or something,
wasn't she?
There's... Oh, here you go. Watch.
Yeah.
Here you go.
Yep. There we go.
Bam!
Oh. She's happy.
There's Con and Con.
Wait, Con and...
I know Uncle Con's there. Who else?
Sullivan.
Oh!
Oh!
Okay.
(SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
Okay, here's at the farm.
Yeah.
Uncle Maurice puts on
Auntie Joyce's Hawaiian outfit.
Was this at the farm?
Yes.
Uncle Maurice.
Not bad. Not bad for an Australian
doing a Hawaiian dance.
Mom! Here's my mom and Auntie Joyce.
Oh, Con!
That's when he had
the Rudolph Valentino look.
Mm-hm.
You know,
when Rudolph Valentino died...
Did you hear this story?
Uh-huh.
They wanted Uncle Con in his place.
Oh! Oh, really?
And Con said to the family,
"I can either go into movies..."
But he wanted to stay on the circus.
The circuses would roughly run
from spring to fall,
to capitalise on good weather
and crowds.
There would be shows
almost every day.
(BOOM!)
And then the Ringling Brothers
moved their winter quarters
to Sarasota.
It was cheaper to maintain
facilities in Sarasota
than in the city.
It was much more pleasant
in the off-season.
Performers might have time downtime.
So it kind of made sense within
the circus ecosystem of that time.
When they weren't performing
on the circus in America,
they would go over to England
and they would be doing
the music halls over there.
They were very much celebrated
all around Europe.
And they're getting invited
to these incredible events
across the globe.
They were living the life.
Like, that's rock star status.
Now citizens of the world,
they travelled and performed together
around the globe,
with Julia often acting as a
chaperone for the younger children.
During these incredible times,
I have to honestly say
everybody wanted Julia.
Everybody wanted their mother
to be with them.
VOICEOVER:
Now watch how Con Colleano,
the famous Mexican wire balancer,
became one of the cleverest
in the world.
Con was in Europe performing.
They were in Berlin.
Nationalism
and ideas about racial superiority
were sweeping across Germany.
The very forces the family had once
fled were closing around them.
(DONG!)
With the rise of fascism came
a celebration of the physical form.
And Con suddenly found himself
the poster boy for the Nazi Party.
It was a precarious
and dangerous situation.
The shapeshifting that had saved him
now spun out of his control.
Hitler loved...
This is just so bizarre.
He said that Con Colleano
was his favourite performer.
And we always joke around
if he knew...
..that he was a man of colour.
He was not from Spain.
He was from Australia.
Not to be outdone,
Mussolini awarded him a medal,
claiming him as Italian.
Reality hit...
..and on the night
Germany invaded Poland,
Con and Big Winnie escaped.
Even though Con
had a passport from Hitler,
he no longer trusted
that it would get him out.
He was once again the other.
Uncle Con had to leave
all of his rigging,
everything that made him
a performer.
They escaped in the middle
of the night, squashed into a car...
..to the border...
..through the snowy Swiss Alps...
..with only the clothes they wore,
cash and Con's camera.
Con and Big Winnie went back
to the States via Australia...
..where Con went bush.
Meanwhile, the Colleano family
acrobats hunkered down in London.
(AIR RAID SIREN WAILS)
(EXPLOSIONS)
In the underground,
the Colleanos would be telling jokes
and they would be doing their act.
Bombs would be going off on top.
And they'd just go right along
to the different platforms,
doing shows to keep the morale up
and to support the people.
The Colleanos gave over 2,000
performances to the Allied forces.
Auntie Joyce told me the Colleanos
got these gold identity bracelets
from British Intelligence...
..which allowed them
into the military bases
where the soldiers
were preparing for D-Day.
On the eve of one of World War II's
most decisive battles,
the Colleanos performed 11 concerts
from the afternoon until 4am.
They gave their final show on a ship,
giving some of the soldiers
their last hurrah.
(CLOCK TICKING)
(EXPLOSIONS)
(GUNFIRE)
And all this at a time
when, back in Australia,
our people couldn't vote,
weren't trusted
to manage their own wages
or even raise their own children.
Yet the Colleanos were entrusted
with one of the greatest secrets
of the war.
Having worked on
Aboriginal military involvement,
you just shake your head
in disbelief
of where they were
at that particular time period.
Just two hours from New York,
in Pennsylvania,
they got back to country.
Not Gamilaraay...
..but it would do for now.
Here we go.
This one.
This is it.
Yes.
This is the farm.
We called it the farm,
where nobody farmed.
We have a parking lot
right in front of the house.
Yeah.
Okay, here we go.
Nobody really had houses,
and so Uncle Con bought a big farm
so that when they wanted to be
together, they had a place to go.
And then we had...
I could see every window, the porch.
I was just being flooded
with childhood memories.
She wrote a song.
# All aboard for Blanket Bay. #
(WHISTLES)
(DOG BARKS)
As kids growing up, we would run
around on the farm making up shows.
People would be telling stories,
doing dances.
Aunts, uncles, kids everywhere.
This was right here, where
the red... that red bush was...
Cons wire went across there.
It was sort of where the pool is.
Yeah.
Uncle Con would be on the wire
rehearsing.
The diving horses in the barn.
And all the kids
come in from being ragamuffins,
which is what she called us.
We can see that, can't we, Amy?
Yeah. Just a little bit.
Oh!
My grandmother would insist.
"Let's go wash up, clean up
and sit in the dining room."
And we had tea
and she would stand watching
that we were all using the napkin.
And we had to behave
for about 15, 20 minutes.
And then we always used to call it
"Fun in the kitch."
Everybody around the kitchen table
telling their stories.
They wanted us
to feel part of everything.
Uncle Con,
he would make this spaghetti sauce.
He would spend hours.
And I would always be trying
to sneak over to the pot, taste it.
Instead of saying,
"No, no, no, don't do that,"
he would quack.
Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack.
That meant whatever you're doing,
you'd better stop.
Because then I started calling him
Uncle Duck.
So the great Con Colleano,
spaghetti maker extraordinaire,
became Uncle Duck for us.
We travelled afar.
But we love Katie's Bar.
A lot of people
were attracted to them.
New York performers coming in,
musicians.
People would write songs
and parties were really big and fun.
Everyone had to get up
and do something.
My mom and dad and I
used to do a soft shoe dance.
That was our thing.
My mother, Coral, always loved
Australia, always loved it.
And I think she was 15
when they left.
She would get up and do
a very sentimental version
of Waltzing Matilda.
She'd go around to each person.
And, I mean,
we almost felt like crying
because she was missing Australia,
really.
She did love Australia.
There's two sides of it.
You're generating this adrenaline
and dopamine as a performer.
You know,
you're constantly getting this...
You're getting refuelled in a way.
After being this incredible
athletic performer,
there does come a point
where 20 years, 30 years,
things start to change.
You kind of collect these injuries
and then you can't do it anymore,
because it hurts and things don't
move like they used to, you know.
Arthritis sets in.
You know, the imbalance starts to...
You know, your body just ages.
It becomes a game
of how much pain can you live with?
And then Uncle Con
got the cataracts.
He couldn't see the wire.
Joyce, her back was beyond repair.
I mean,
they couldn't do anything for her.
And it was just so crumbled up
from arthritis
and all that bending work
that she did.
Con was,
"We're all going to become
old, broken-down acrobats."
I remember the day when my mother
told me that her mother died.
It was unfathomable
that somebody that you loved
as much as she loved was gone.
And my mother...
..just, it was like
cutting off part of her body.
Conn sold the farm.
He paid it forward to another
circus family for a dollar...
..and returned to Australia
with Big Winnie.
They've been
on international stages...
..while the country
is going through this turmoil of
who gets to have
and who doesn't get to have a right,
whether it's to vote
or to be included
into the Constitution.
They're already ahead of that.
(MARCHING BAND
PLAYS WALTZING MATILDA)
Australia in the 1950s
was a really tough place
for anyone who wasn't white.
What do you think
of the White Australia Policy?
Well, I think it's good
and they should really have it
and keep out the coloured races.
I don't think we could have anything
else but a White Australia Policy.
People here don't live
with Aboriginals, do they?
But in New York
they live side by side with colours,
and I wouldn't care to have them
living in the same house as me.
They bought a pub in Forbes,
New South Wales,
hoping to retire in peace.
Maybe he wanted a place
as himself in his homeland.
He has his own business.
He's got a pub.
There's an Aboriginal man
who owns the pub.
We don't just want a seat
at the bar of the pub.
We're going to buy the pub.
But then realises...
..this is not a good place to be.
Picture theatres, swimming pools
and, of course, pubs
were segregated,
and it being seen as quite audacious
to think
you could cross those lines.
This country still wasn't ready
for the real Colleanos.
Within a year of coming home,
the business failed.
He left and never returned.
So we had in Florida
Auntie Joyce, Con, Big Winnie,
Little Winnie,
of course, my mom and dad,
and then some of us cousins.
Now they did love that warm weather,
though, I must say.
That was it.
They were going to go fishing
forever.
It ended up being the same
as it always was,
a big party and cooking and laughing
and drinking and talking
and challenging each other to things
that nobody could still do.
My grandmother Katie.
That one over there
is the Juggling Colleanos,
including my mother.
I feel that real connection
to the family.
My mom, Aunt Kitty,
her husband, Uncle Jack.
Auntie Joyce
doing this famous trick.
It's not a closure,
but it's something
that I've really needed to do
after all these years.
Pass the hoop to this...
up, up the top there.
They would do different tricks.
They would go forward,
they would pass them up and back.
Whoo!
I think entertainment blood is in us.
We need to have joy in our life,
right?
And that's something
that's really important.
(LAUGHS) Hi, Amy.
We are very proud of our ancestors,
the struggle they endured.
Yeah. There you go.
Alright.
Good choice.
Aw. Good.
I don't know
what it's like to not be free.
I think about Julia
and trying to get her kids
out of that situation.
Things were not fair.
And they went around the system
successfully,
and we're all here now.
And I've never known a day
where I haven't been free.
And that's because of what they did,
especially my grandmother.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Thank you.
Molly really keeps that legacy alive.
These were my people
that I played with.
When we hear stories about them,
I think we bring them to life.
And when we all get together,
we bring those ancestors with us
in our hearts.
This family feels so familiar to me,
the communal way that they looked out
for one another,
the traits,
that even with a foreign accent...
(SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
..made you feel like you belong.
They're very alive inside of me.
They were so extraordinary.
It makes it hard
for me to not have them.
I didn't even realise
how much it was going to mean to me
until I got here.
All my life
I wanted to go to Australia.
My mom was from Australia.
I felt called to come back here.
Oh.
I hope
that everybody can understand that
there are a lot of people
that are in my situation...
..that are searching for family,
and we just want to find
where we're from.
My mother always used to talk about
Narrabri.
I couldn't believe I was there.
So, at last, country has released
the story of this family.
No longer hidden, we wait
for the rest of them to come home.
When I was in the circle
with the women around...
..it just became a magical event.
It was an opening of the heart.
It was an epiphany
that I wasn't even expecting.
I just wanted to see
where they were from.
And instead,
I found out where I was from.
# Not a drop in the ocean
# I'm the river
that flows like a great stampede
# I'm history unfolding
# I'm a moment in time
that will not repeat
# Can't you hear it? Hear it?
My soul inside the sound
# I'm taking higher ground
# I sing for better days
I sing for my people
# And my people breathe through me
# I sing to make a way
# I sing for my freedom
# And freedom is all I need
# Remember my name always
# I'm the daughter of the wave
# I'm brave, I'm not afraid
I'm here for a reason
# Eternity points to me
# Can't you hear it? Hear it?
My soul inside the sound
# I'm taking higher ground
# I sing for better days
I sing for my people
# And my people breathe through me
# I sing to make a way
I sing for my freedom
# And freedom is all I need
# Remember my name always
# I'm the daughter of the wave
# I'm brave, I'm not afraid
I'm here for a reason
# Eternity points to me
# Ah, yeah
Ah, yeah
# Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, oh
# Oh
# Oh, oh-ooh... #
Captions by Red Bee Media
(c) SBS Australia 2025