Top End Girl

Growing up, Miranda Tapsell often looked for faces like hers on our screens. There weren’t many. And too often there was a negative narrative around Indigenous lives, and Aboriginal women especially. Now an award-winning actor, she decided to change things herself. Combining her love of romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding.

In this engaging and thought-provoking memoir, Miranda shares the path she took to create a moving film about reconnection to family and culture. And, like all good storytellers, she holds a mirror up to the society we live in to show the prejudice that too often surfaces.

MIRANDA TAPSELL was born in Darwin and her people are the Larrakia. She grew up in Kakadu National Park and began performing at the age of seven. At 16, she won the Bell Shakespeare Company regional performance scholarship. She has her own podcast on BuzzFeed, Pretty for an Aboriginal, with Nakkiah Lui, which rocks the traditional perceptions of Indigenous Australia and challenges rigid mindsets of what women of colour can and cannot do. Top End Girl is her literary debut.