Essieina Shillingsworth Jibbah[a][1][2] was born near Goodooga in northern New South Wales, Australia,[3][2][b] with her birth year variously cited as 1940,[4][5][6] 1941,[7][8] or 1942.
She later said that she thought she was lucky to be brought up this way, free and able to learn her own culture and traditions, not having to grow up in a white man's mission (Aboriginal reserve).
[3] In the 1960s, with Tombo Winters (Thomas "Tombo" Martin Winters, c. 1938[14]) and Steve Gordon, she co-founded the Aboriginal Movement in Brewarrina[2] (which, among other things, successfully campaigned for integration of the open-air cinema in Brewarrina),[11] and they co-founded the Western Aboriginal Legal Service (WALS) in the 1970s.
[17][18] In 1974, when a huge flood hit Brewarrina, Coffey was called upon, along with Tombo Winters, Steve Gordon, and Phil Eyre, to mobilise the Aboriginal community to build levees.
[8] Also in the 1990s, Coffey supervised the Community Development Employment Project in Brewarrina,[2][3] and promoted the scheme as essential to Aboriginal self-determination.
In the film, which was the first documentary to be directed by an Aboriginal woman, Coffey relates what happened to her people in Brewarrina.
In this, Coffey not only raises issues of the impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples, but also offers a solution by way of continuing cultural practice... My Survival as an Aboriginal, though a call to justice, is also tempered with beauty, and the audience is allowed to glimpse the private world of Essie Coffey and the people of Brewarrina.In 1980, she appeared as Maggie in Part 2 of the award-winning SBS TV historical drama miniseries Women of the Sun,[2][11] titled "Maydina: The Shadow".
[1] Coffey gave a copy of My Survival as an Aboriginal to Queen Elizabeth II as a gift at the opening of Australia's new Parliament House in 1988.
[25] She felt pain for the loss of her traditional lands, which led to alcohol abuse during some periods of her life, which she did not conceal.
[11] In later life she suffered from kidney disease, with her struggle documented in Darrin Ballangarry's 2002 short film Big Girls Don't Cry, which featured three Aboriginal women with renal failure.
[29] Coffey died of a common cold, owing to her immune system having been weakened by kidney failure,[28][26] on 3 January 1998, aged 56.
[3][2] After her death, her family started crowdfunding for a life-sized statue and a memorial garden to be erected in her honour in Brewarrina.