going it alone

When Adam Briggs was a kid, he dreamt of being loud and daring. A professional wrestler; Slash from Guns N’ Roses; a rapper – any outlandish job you could imagine, so long as it didn’t involve nine-to-five office work. Briggs, as he’s more commonly known, never saw the point in restricting himself, and that’s largely how he’s made a career bouncing from festival stage to TV set to writing with Matt Groening (yes, Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame).

At 33, the Yorta Yorta rapper, actor and comedy writer has built up one heck of a résumé. “I think you have to defy expectations to succeed in Australia as an Indigenous person,” he says. “You have to work 10 times as hard. I knew from school that I was the underdog and no one bet on me.”