Key Points
- When Olympia was 11 her nude body was shown on television.
- An image that her mother had taken of Olympia, was being shown and discussed live on every breakfast TV show.
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Images have long caused controversy.
One morning, when I was 11, I woke up to be told we had received a phone call saying that an image that my mother, the late Polixeni Papapetrou (1960–2018), had taken of me, was being shown and discussed live on every breakfast TV show.
With my consent, the image Olympia as Lewis Carroll's Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (2003) had featured on the July 2008 cover of Art Monthly Australia.
Olympia as Lewis Carroll's Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs (2003).
We swiftly turned on the TV, flicking through the various channels, and sure enough, our photograph was on every show. However, it was not the photo as we knew it.
On one show, my six-year-old body had been replaced with pixels blurring out parts of my body. On the next breakfast show, my body had been replaced with big black rectangles.
Waking up to see my six-year-old body blotted out is a moment in my life that I will never forget.
In that moment, society had told me that my body was something to be ashamed of. At the age of 11, I learnt that my body was an illegitimate cultural spectacle for the entire nation to discuss.
At issue was not whether there was something wrong with my body but rather whether there was something wrong with my parents for displaying it. But how do you separate the one from the other?
After all, if there was nothing wrong with my body, what was wrong with my parents?
Olympia Nelson
I didn’t feel the exploitation, but the panic over an imagined loss of innocence overtook all voices in the media.
I was also told that I was too young to understand. People rushed to disempower me.
Australia had just come out of the wake of another image controversy, Bill Henson’s serial pictures of nude teens—which were of an entirely different style to the historical image that we had made—though public opinion over my image was less to do with a fear of pornography than child exploitation.
I didn’t think twice about defending the image.Olympia Nelson
After being harassed by the media on our doorstep, I felt that I had no choice but to front up to the cameras, as the model.
I wanted to defend my mother and my father, who were being unfairly criticized and misrepresented. I wanted the world to know that we were a family who had conversations. I wanted the world to know I had agency and was capable of making decisions for myself. I wanted my dignity back.
My choice to go on television was further met with criticism.
The then prime minister Kevin Rudd said: “A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.” “Frankly, I can't stand this stuff”. Fourteen years later, I would love to know what Kevin Rudd means by ‘this stuff’.
Other leading politicians and child psychologists criticized me and claimed that I had been brainwashed.
Psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, author of The Princess Bitchface Syndrome, said: “Now she’s very mouthy at eleven-years-old… she’s already been paraded in front of the cameras, and I, as an expert in bullying, would be very, very concerned about what that might mean for her in her school life later on.”
Olympia at her graduation
The Sydney Morning Herald journalist John McDonald assumed that it was part of some jealous desire to be in the limelight, saying “This is a stage family pushing a daughter out there.
Watching stuff happening to Henson, asking, ‘Why him and not us?’” and then, with a flourish of Schadenfreude, he concludes: “Well they’ve got it now.” I would love to think that these conservative male voices have been overtaken by time.
Life can have an uncanny way of coming full circle.
This experience made me who I am today, and has made me curious about how far back anxiety over the image goes.
I have chosen to study art history and the debatable meaning of the image in Byzantium in my PhD. With the example of my mother’s work, I think I can appreciate iconoclasm (the destruction of images for religious or political reasons) with a vengeance.
