Tim Minchin Roller Derby Production

I sat directly opposite Tim Minchin the night I saw Genevieve first perform on stage. It was the Sydney Festival, it was 2026, and Gen was performing as a jammer in the Sydney Inner West Roller Derby League. This was down to her size (tiny) and the years of ballet lessons paid for by yours truly back in the day of Strictly Ballroom, Paul Mercurio and my consuming effort to give her every advantage and to grant her every wish.

The jammer, in a roller derby bout, skates on a circular track, while their progress is blocked by four designated blockers, often very strong skaters. The jammer scores a point for every opposing team blocker they manage to lap. While this is happening the opposing team fields their own jammer, who gets hampered by four opposing team blockers, and all the while the blockers are out to help their own jammer at all costs.

This high energy rough and ready sport was incorporated, the night I sat opposite Tim Minchin, into live theatre in which the Derby play chorus and scene changing crew and the main story occurs in the middle of the track, where it borrows style and pizzazz from the colourfully costumed roller-skaters. It tells the story of a single mum who becomes so infatuated with the idea of Roller Derby that she joins the local team and stays out most nights, not realising how much her teenage daughter struggles with being left alone at night while confronting all the challenges of adolescence.

My own experience of being a single mum was quite different—fewer sequins and spotlights, and far less time to follow any passion.  Just me and the three girls muddling through mornings of school lunch prep, rushed breakfasts, and hair braids (a different style for each child each day), work, work, work, and then valiant attempts to get home in time for ballet lessons, piano lessons, a swim at the beach in the summer, and later most nights, a home cooked dinner and homework.

I had graduated in the seventies with a professional degree and I never had intentions of being a stay-at-home mum, in fact I’m pretty sure at that time I was determined to have it all, motherhood, a career AND a life. Fast forward a decade and a half and the cocktail of mortgage stress, work stress, time stress, and the beginnings of children with healthy adolescent rebellion stress made stay-at-home parenting seem like an unthinkable luxury.

But here I was, trying to keep my head above water enough to be an example and an anchor to my girls in a rapidly changing world that regularly threw obstacles and inconsistencies in our paths. There was no derby track to follow, no cheering crowds, no Tim Minchin’s rhyming metaphor laden commentary to supply a laugh at the critical moments of communication breakdown. Just me, ducking, steering, coasting along and trying to be both the jammer and the blocker all at once to clear the path ahead for all of us.

Where the woman in the play lost herself in the whirl of the rink, I joined a gym and started rowing. Gradually I started to regain a sense of self, a leadership quality far more important than ..well..say for instance, meticulously ensuring that each girl got both the same number and same dollar value of presents each Christmas. Maybe that’s why watching Gen out there—fast, fierce, utterly herself—hit me so hard. It wasn’t just pride. It was recognition. Because while she was skating circles around players twice her size, I realised she and her sisters had been doing the same thing in life for years: navigating obstacles I never saw, finding their own rhythm, their own strength, their own story.

You see, Gen made it look easy. Effortless.  I had spent years feeling like I was barely keeping up, but maybe I hadn’t been doing such a bad job after all. Not with roller skates. Not with perfect housekeeping. But with the kind of stubborn, exhausted, unglamorous love that gets a kid to believe she can do impossible things.

Even in front of Tim Minchin.