Grace Tame has opened up about the moment she refused to smile when meeting then-prime minister Scott Morrison more than a year ago.
Instead, the 2021 Australian of the Year gave Mr Morrison a cold side-eye glance at a morning tea for the 2022 Australian state and territory award recipients at the Lodge.
The photos drew national and international attention, with both praise and criticism raining down on Ms Tame.
Speaking to former detective Gary Jubelin on his I Catch Killers podcast, Ms Tame said it wasn’t about not smiling, it was about ‘not playing the game’.
She revealed one of her biggest critics to the awkward exchange was her own mother – who disapproved of her icy behaviour.
Grace Tame (right) gave Scott Morrison (left) a filthy side-eye glance at a morning tea for the 2022 Australian state and territory award recipients at the Lodge in Canberra
‘One of the people who had a very negative reaction at the outset was my mother. And my mother has been through a lot of trauma in her own life,’ she said.
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‘She comes from a generation where there was a lot more suppression of things.’
But many other women were delighted at her response to Mr Morrison, who she has regularly condemned over his handling of government staffer Brittany Higgins’ allegation she was sexually assaulted by a colleague in a minister’s office in 2019.
Bruce Lehrmann was later identified as the colleague and he has strenuously denied the allegations.
‘I think just generally and it’s not just for women … a lot of the response that I got was about women realising that they didn’t have to smile anymore,’ Ms Tame said.
‘And for me, that’s not actually what I thought. For me, it was about not playing the game and especially in the context of the experiences that I had gone through.’
Speaking about her encounter with Mr Morrison, she said there is a ‘basic respect that everybody deserves.’
‘No matter who you are, no matter what your background is, no matter if you’re a five-year-old kid or the king,’ she said.
She was not awed or cowed by meeting the prime minister at his Canberra residence.
Grace Tame is pictured holding up her Australian of the Year award in Canberra on January 25, 2021
‘If people demand inflated respect and they weaponise that respect as a tool of excess control to dominate … and use it to manipulate and really create an environment where abuse can foster or corruption can foster – that is not respect.
‘That is something entirely different. And I don’t believe in that. That’s what I was trying to communicate.’
Ms Tame, whose autobiography ‘The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner’ was published last year, spoke about reclaiming her power after sexual abuse.
‘The power has to be returned to you because anything that happens to you as a child against your will happens to you before you’ve ever had a chance to establish yourself,’ she said.
‘With children who have never had the opportunity to set their own boundaries often they don’t know how, because they have had such poor boundaries.
‘They’ve been so used to people coming along and just being able to push them around and dictate the terms.’
Ms Tame, who is an advocate for sexual assault survivors, has been a staunch critic of Mr Morrison.
She took a brutal swipe at him days before the May 2022 federal election, claiming he was ‘using’ his wife Jenny as a weapon against Anthony Albanese.
Grace Tame (left) got engaged to Tasmanian Max Heerey (right) 18 months ago, calling him her ‘biggest supporter’ and ‘true soulmate’
‘There’s something very telling about a man who repeatedly outsources his morality to his wife,’ she posted to social media at the time.
‘A woman he uses as an object of blame, to ease his conscience about his bad behaviour, clarify abuse, make Anthony — who has a less traditional family — look morally inferior, and so on.’
Ms Tame became engaged to Tasmanian Max Heerey 18 months ago, calling him her ‘biggest supporter’ and ‘true soulmate’.
She also launched the Grace Tame Foundation to campaign for legal reform and support for victims of sexual abuse.