Top end girl. Miranda Tapsell. 2020.

As a young Latakia Tiwi girl, Miranda Tapsell often felt like an outsider. Growing up, she looked for faces like hers on her screens. There weren’t many. And too often there was a negative narrative around First Nations lives, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women especially. As she got older, Miranda stopped expecting that others would help change things and set about doing something herself. Combining her pride in her Aboriginality and passion for romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda co-wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding.

In this engaging memoir, Miranda shares the path she took to acting and how her role in ThemSapphires, and then in Love Child, inspired her to create a film about coming back to family and country. And, it would turn out, that as she was writing this romantic and funny film, her own romantic story was unfolding. This deadly, ballad-loving rom-com nerd also asks us all to open our minds and our hearts to the importance of community and culture. In doing so, Miranda shows us how we will all be richer for it.