Grace Tame opens up on photo with Scott Morrison at Australia Day function – and how her mother turned against her

Grace Tame recounts the moment she refused to smile when she met then Prime Minister Scott Morrison just over a year ago.

Instead, the 2021 Australian of the Year gave Mr Morrison a cold sidelong glance over a morning tea for the winners of the 2022 Australian state and territory awards at the Lodge.

The photos attracted national and international attention, with both praise and criticism raining down on Ms. Tame.

I spoke to former Detective Gary Jubelin about his case I catch killers podcast Ms. Tame said it wasn’t about not smiling, it was about “not playing the game.”

She revealed that one of her biggest critics of the awkward altercation was her own mother, who disapproved of her icy behavior.

‘One of the people who reacted very negatively in the beginning was my mother. And my mom has been through a lot of trauma in her own life,” she said.

“She comes from a generation where things were much more repressed.”

But many other women have raved about her response to Mr Morrison, whom she has regularly denounced for his dealings with government worker Brittany Higgins’ allegation that 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 strongly denied the allegations.

“I think it’s in general, and it’s not just for women… A lot of the responses I got were about women realizing they didn’t have to smile anymore,” Ms. Tame said.

“And for me, that’s actually not what I thought. For me it was about not playing the game and especially in the context of the experiences I had had.’

Speaking of meeting Mr Morrison, she said there is a ‘fundamental respect that everyone deserves’.

“It doesn’t matter who you are, whatever your background, whether you’re a five-year-old child or the king,” she said.

She was not impressed or intimidated by meeting the prime minister at his residence in Canberra.

“When people demand inflated respect and weaponize that respect as a tool of excessive control to dominate… and use it to manipulate and really create an environment that can foster abuse or foster corruption – that’s not respect.

‘That is something completely different. And I don’t believe in that. That’s what I was trying to convey.’

Ms Tame, whose autobiography ‘The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner’ was published last year, spoke of regaining her power after being sexually assaulted.

“The power has to be returned to you, because everything 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 chance to set their own boundaries, they often don’t know how because they’ve had such poor boundaries.

“They’re so used to people coming along and being able to just push them and dictate the terms.”

Ms Tame, an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, was a staunch critic of Mr Morrison.

She took a brutal attack on him a few days before the May 2022 federal election, claiming that he “used” his wife Jenny as a weapon against Anthony Albanese.

“There is something telling about a man who repeatedly outsources his morality to his wife,” she posted on social media at the time.

“A woman he uses as an object of guilt, to ease his conscience about his bad behavior, clear up abuse, make Anthony—who has a less traditional family—appear morally inferior, and so on.”

Ms Tame became engaged to Tasmanian Max Heerey 18 months ago, calling him her ‘biggest supporter’ and ‘true soul mate’.

She also launched the Grace Tam Foundation to campaign for legal reform and support for victims of sexual abuse.