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Still driven by the desire to fit in, Lisa (Phaedra Nicolaidis) angers Marlene (Maria Tusa) by ditching the basketball game for Roberta’s (Natalie Blair) party. Lisa attends the pool party confidently with newly straightened hair only to find out Roberta has other plans.
Curator’s notes
Lisa is still torn between her desired acceptance by Roberta, whom she associates with a perceived ideal, and finding a place in the All Blacks where she is accepted for who she is. So when Roberta invites her to a pool party she readily accepts and finally feels like things are going her way, including her hair. In the continuation of the motif of Lisa’s hair as gauge of normality, Lisa’s mother chemically straightens her hair in an attempt to repair familial damage.
Her mother also portrays the undercurrent of racism present in the characters as she declares that it’s fabulous that the girls were invited to hang out with other Italian Australians. Roberta overtly expresses this racism by repeatedly offering Lisa Coon cheese, ‘coon’ being a derogatory term for Aboriginal people, to signify Lisa’s preference for hanging out with her new Aboriginal friends.
