FROM INVISIBILITY TO HISTORICITY: A STUDY OF SELECTED

PLAYS OF JACK DAVIS, JANE HARRISON

AND LEAH PURCELL

A THESIS

SUBMITTED IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH

BY

M.C. LALTHAZUALI

Regn. No: MZU/Ph.D/282 of 30. 03. 2009

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

MIZORAM UNIVERSITY

AIZAWL – 796004: MIZORAM

2015
 
 
 FROM INVISIBILITY TO HISTORICITY: A STUDY OF SELECTED
PLAYS OF JACK DAVIS, JANE HARRISON
AND LEAH PURCELL

M.C. LALTHAZUALI

SUPERVISOR

PROF. SARANGADHAR BARAL

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

MIZORAM UNIVERSITY

AIZAWL – 796004: MIZORAM

2015
 
 
 
 
 
 CONTENTS

CONTENTS TITLES PAGE NO.

DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

CHAPTER –I INTRODUCTION 1- 32

CHAPTER –II THEATRE AS A RESISTANCE

AND REPRESENTATION 33- 79

CHAPTER –III THE BODY AS A SITE OF ABORIGINAL

IDEOLOGY AND IDENTITY 80- 121

CHAPTER –IV PROBLEMS OF ASSIMILATION 122-171

CHAPTER –V CONTESTING OF ABORIGINAL FEMALE

EXPERIENCES AND IMAGES 172- 213

CHAPTER –VI CONCLUSION 214- 228

BIBLIOGRAPHY 229- 239

APPENDICES

BIO –DATA
 DECLARATION

I, M.C. Lalthazuali, hereby declare that the subject of the thesis From Invisibility to

Historicity: A Study of Selected Plays of Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell, is

the record of work done by me, that the content of this thesis did not form the basis of the

award of any previous degree to me or to the best of my knowledge to anybody else, and that

the thesis has not been submitted by me for any research degree in any other university or

institute.

This is being submitted to the Mizoram University for the award of the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English.

(M.C. LALTHAZUALI)
Candidate

(Prof. SARANGADHAR BARAL) (Prof. SARANGADHAR BARAL)

Head of Department Supervisor
Department of English Professor
Mizoram University Department of English
Aizawl Mizoram University
Aizawl
         ACKNOWLEDGEMENT  

Words cannot express my deepest gratitude to the Almighty God for the countless
blessings he has showered upon me to complete this work successfully.
My profound gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Sarangadhar Baral, Head of the
department of English, Mizoram University for his inspiring guidance and
encouragements throughout the course of study. It is my great privilege to thank him for
his patience, sincere dedication and the efforts that he has put in the materialization of this
thesis. I am extremely grateful to his wife, Mrs. Sailabala Baral for her kindness and
moral support throughout the course of study.
I am grateful to all the faculty members of the Department of English, Mizoram
University for giving me an opportunity to pursue research work, for their help and
support during the course of study and for making the submission of this thesis possible.
I am deeply grateful and indebted to Dr. P. Rajani, my former teacher from
University of Madras for helping me in collecting the materials for my study and for his
kindness and encouragements.
I am very thankful to the Mizoram Scholarship Board for providing me N.E.C.
scholarship which helped me in the procurement of several research materials. I sincerely
thank F.V.L. Biakchhawna, Principal, and colleagues of Women’s Polytechnic, Aizawl,
for their encouragements and moral support during the course of my research.
With deep sense of gratitude I express my love and respect to my parents
M.C.Thanchhuma (L) and Chawngthluaii and my brothers and sisters for their
unconditional love, prayer, support and encouragements. I express my deep gratitude to
my two sisters- in- laws, who are very supportive and are always ready to help me. I thank
them all for the sacrifices they’ve made into fulfilling my requirements during the course
of my study.
Once again, I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Almighty God for
his unfailing love and for putting all the above-mentioned people in my life; they are the
ones who made me become what I am today. I am extremely grateful.

M.C. LALTHAZUALI
 CHAPTER – I

INTRODUCTION
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Out of the Aboriginal1 non-history there has emerged a group of sensitive and self-

conscious writers among Australian Aborigines who reclaim identity and claim to have their

history which is more misrepresented than forgotten. The Aborigines were not invisible non-

entities when the white Britishers encountered them on the Australian land, they were not

invisible when wars were massacres of hostile black tribes, or when their children were

snatched away from home to fill the servants quarters, Christian churches, and to serve the

Imperialist expansionism. But in the early white histories they were simply nonexistent. As

expected the Aborigines had no written history to challenge and answer the white man’s

records, the so-called histories of Australia. But as Aboriginal races they are not devoid of

their oral stories. With such stories as the backdrop to new developments in modern history,

some Aboriginal writers have brought out their life-stories in the form of literature which the

world takes cognizance of as important for a tribe or community’s identity marker. Some of

these writers especially dramatists are selected for the present study. Jack Davis, a male

author and two female authors Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell are studied in order to place in

view their human concerns and struggles which write their history as a counter-balance to

other historians. The underlying reason for Indigenous playwrights and writers need for

reconstructing their history stems mainly from the catastrophic and complex nature of the

Aboriginal’s encounter with colonialism. They have not only been colonized but have been

permanently rendered the most victimized and marginalized people in their own land.

With the growing migration of the white Europeans they were completely

outnumbered and so the chances of any radical political action or any sustained cultural

resistance are insignificant. Moreover the post-contacts displacements of Aboriginal people

in reserves and missions had a profound impact on their lives, which continued to have

deteriorating effect on their culture. Thus, it becomes imperative for the Aboriginal writers

and playwrights to challenge, examine, recognize, accept, and affirm their past, though it
might represent their conquest and dispossession. Having a link with the past is necessary for

racial self-retrieval and for creating an acceptable and emancipating sense of individual and

cultural wholeness. It also becomes therapeutic for the cultural fracture instigated by the

destructive impact of colonial subjugation and a requirement for cultural retrieval and for a

continuing struggle against white oppression. In the first hundred years since the arrival of

the Europeans, the Aborigines were invisible; they lived on the fringes of the white society.

The white colonizers robbed the Aborigines of their land rights, destroyed their religion and

deprived them of the language, culture and tradition. They felt the Aboriginal people as

heading for inevitable extinction.

To first put things into perspective, a brief history of Australia’s colonization becomes

essential. The British Empire comprised of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates

and other territories ruled or administered by the imperialist, United Kingdom. This

imperialism originated with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by

England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire

in human history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1922, the British

Empire held sway over about 458 million people and covered more than 33,700,000 Km2

(13,012,000 sq. m). As a result, its political legacy, linguistic and cultural legacy remained

widespread. At the peak of its power, the phrase “the empire on which the sun never sets”

was often used to describe the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant

that the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. Since 1718, transportation to

the American colonies had been the outcome of a penalty for various criminal offences in

Britain. When Britain lost its thirteen colonies in 1783, it turned to the newly discovered

lands of Australia.2 In 1770, James Cook discovered the eastern coast of Australia while on a

scientific voyage to the South Pacific Ocean, and claimed the continent for Britain, and

named it New South Wales. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on the voyage, presented
evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal

settlement, and in 1787, the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. After a

grueling eight-month voyage from Portsmouth, the First Fleet reached Australia and sailed

into Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. On 26 January, 1788 (now Australia’s national day),

the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove, and the land became a ‘settled colony’ and a

dominion of the Crown. Under common law, all those born in dominions were British

subjects. Aborigines therefore became British subjects but lost any proprietary rights in the

land they inhabited. Upon annexation of the colony, ultimate title to all land was vested in the

Crown. Captain Arthur Phillip, a naval officer, was appointed the first governor of Australia

(Flood 33).

The original inhabitants of Australia before the British arrival were the Aborigines.

Australian Aboriginal culture was complex and extraordinarily diverse. It is one of the

world’s longest surviving cultures, which goes back at least 50,000 years. They were semi-

nomadic hunters and gatherers, with each clan having its own territory from which they made

their living. These territories or traditional lands were traditionally demarcated by geographic

boundaries such as rivers, lakes and mountains. Aborigines were supremely skillful in

adapting to their environments. They all shared an intimate understanding of, and relationship

with the land. For the Aboriginal people all that is sacred was localized in the landscape. It

was the basis of their spiritual life. In short, the land and identity were inseparable. With the

establishment of Britain’s penal colony in 1788 in Australia, the lives of the Aborigines

changed radically. All local attempts to resist the white colonizers were effectively quelled;

and the Aborigines came under the control of colonial government. With passage of time, the

Aboriginal people were evicted from their traditional land, deprived of their traditional bush

food and got continually devastated by disease, malnutrition, poverty, alcoholism, violence

and despair. They lost their language, their culture and ancient ways of worship. Rape and
abduction of Aboriginal women became common. Most Aboriginal people existed on the

fringes of towns and pastoral properties or were herded into reserves and missions. Until the

1960s, they had no citizenship, no voting rights. The state was the guardian of all Aboriginal

children and many (mostly half-castes) were taken away by force from their families to be

raised in institutions. They have become aliens, outsiders or the other in their own land.

From their first contact with the Aborigines in 1788 in Australia, the white European

settlers saw the Aborigines as naked, dirty, savage, pagan and uncivilized. One European

wrote in 1888 that the Aborigines were ‘wandering, restless, half-starved, lazy, dirty naked

savages, homeless and miserably depraved by superstitious and terrors, distrust and fear’

(Broome 93). They were even compared to dogs as in 1835, Reverend W. Yate told the

government inquiry that he had heard again and again what people said of the Aborigines,

that they were nothing better than dogs, and that it was no more harm to shoot them down as

it would be like shooting a dog (Broome 34). The white3 Europeans viewed their Christian

religion and European values and practices could “civilize” the Aborigines. So, in order to

“civilize” the Aborigines, the white government set up reserves for the Aborigines, those who

stayed at the reserves were provided food, clothing, etc. In these reserves the Aborigines were

not allowed to perform their religious rituals. There were many rules imposed by the white

colonizers that the Aborigines had to follow, and if the Aborigines did not follow those rules

they were kicked out from the reserves. The problem faced by the Aborigines was that, inside

the reserves they were taught to live in the European lifestyle and so they tended to forget

their skill of hunting and gathering. So when they were kicked out from the reserves, their

life support stopped, as they were made dependent on the support and aids provided by the

Europeans. They had become dependent on the European invaders since their land and food

sources were taken away. This framework of dependence was symbolized by the annual feast

and blanket distribution that governor Macquarie had instituted in 1817 at Parramatta. In
succeeding years Aborigines came from almost 150 kilometers away to receive this handout

which they perceived as easy takings. No article of trade in return was demanded and the

blanket could quickly be traded for alcohol, food or tobacco. By the 1830s the government

transferred the blanket distribution to the interior and suspended it in 1844, because it

encouraged idleness much to the anger of some of the Aborigines (Broome 39). Therefore,

within a short span of time the white European colonizers were able to achieve their goal i.e.

making the Aborigines fully dependent on them, thus rendered themselves an ownership of

the land and the people in it.

The white Europeans felt that their culture is superior to all others, especially to

indigenous cultures, and they felt that it was necessary for European culture to subjugate and

assimilate Indigenous cultures in European cultures. This complex of superiority has

pervaded the Eurocentric world for centuries. Even Western thought has viewed indigenous

people as inferior. With this thinking, they assumed that the Indigenous people needed to be

saved and civilized from their own social structures and cultures. They felt that they needed

to teach the indigenous people their Western lifestyles, culture and religion. The Europeans

and Western thinking could not comprehend or acclimatize with the nomadic and communal

cultures of the indigenous peoples. Europeans and Western culture viewed indigenous

peoples as outlandish, in need of enlightenment and need to conform to Western standards.

Therefore, since the first white settlers had arrived in 1788 in Australia they had tried to

impose their own values, customs and beliefs on the Aboriginal peoples.

In executing the colonizing discourse, the colonists employed different and

clandestine methods to achieve their goal of colonization. The first colonial method was to

acquire land, primarily through the Western Policy of Discovery. The prevailing international

(European) law concerning the ownership of newly discovered lands held that the inhabitants

only had sovereignty over that land if they practice agriculture, construct buildings and
towns. If the Europeans discovered land inhabited by an agricultural people with

recognizable systems of government, the European discoverers could think of possession of

that land only with the consent of the inhabitants. However, if the land was either

uninhabited, or inhabited by a people who did not use the land (in the European sense of use)

then according to prevailing ideas of international law it could be freely taken (Broome 30).

So in the case of the Aborigines of Australia, when Captain Cook arrived, the Aborigines

wore no clothes, did not till the soil for agriculture and had no buildings or any perceptible

forms of government. They decided that Australia was ‘terra nullius’4 that is a wasteland that

could be taken. At this point, they did not imagine that non-Europeans might have had their

own cultural conception of land, their own religious idea of non-possession of land. So the

British government was convinced that Australia was ‘terra nullius’ and took possession of it

without asking the native inhabitants. The Policy of discovery justified the white colonizers

in taking the indigenous Aboriginal land because they assumed that they discovered the land.

Europeans always used the language of discovery as self-justification, which will not address

the inherent irony in discovering a land of treasure but not in discovering any native of the

place. The Indigenous Australian playwrights have aimed to address this constructed irony

with their narratives.

The white Australians generally assumed that the Aborigines of Australia had not

effectively resisted the coming of the British, as they had not been prepared themselves for a

war and, therefore, they spread the notion that Australia was settled in rather than invaded.

However, it has been proved that the Australian Indigenous people had strongly resisted the

invasion of their lands, and that frontier history of Australia was a bloody one. However it is

impossible to say precisely how bloody, as an indication of the number of indigenous deaths,

it is estimated that there were 11,500 Indigenous people in Victoria at the time the land was

taken up at Port Phillip; but hundred years later the proportion was only 800; 93 percent had
been killed or displaced. It is estimated that approximately 100,000 indigenous people lived

in Queensland in the late 1700s, but the population had been reduced to 26,670 (Moreton-

Robinson 5). The frontier conflict was related to the fact that the Indigenous people and

White Colonialists came from entirely different cultural backgrounds. And as land was

essential to the survival of both peoples, they both have different attitudes towards its use.

Therefore, conflict between the two cultures was inevitable. However, earlier historians have

not shown any interest in writing or documenting about the conflicts between the two

cultures. As in the words of historian, Henry Reynolds ‘the other side of the frontier’

(Reynolds 50) was not mentioned in the histories written by the earlier white historians.

Thus, the resistance by the Indigenous people is not mentioned in the histories written

by the whites, and the misdeeds of the Europeans are buried as non-issues. The hidden stories

that were never told by the whites have begun to be told by the Indigenous people in the form

of narratives which work as a counter history against the dominant history written by the

whites. As W.E.H. Stanner, white Australian anthropologist argued in his book, After the

Dreaming, there was a “Great Australian Silence” that had written Aboriginal people out of

Australian history in the twentieth century (qtd. in Wheeler 156). Stanner further argued that

the exclusion of Indigenous people from Australian histories, rather than being ‘inattention’

on a grand scale, was an active frame, ‘a structural matter, a view from a window which has

been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. ‘What may well have

begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into

something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale’ (qtd. in Casey 137).

Historian Walter Murdoch commented in an introductory text, “When people talk about the

history of Australia they mean the history of the white people who have lived in Australia”

(ibid.).
 White obliteration of Aboriginal history and culture in Australia has been as much

work of the pen as of physical violence. Aborigines have been written out of literature, out of

the law, out of history (Arthur 55). In this context of the exclusion of Aboriginal versions of

Australian histories by the white historian, focusing on the first encounter of the Europeans

and the Aborigines highlighted in Kullark is significant. One of the select playwrights, Jack

Davis’s plays symbolizes the tragedy of the Nyoongah (Nyungar) Aborigines in the

southwestern part of Australia viewed through the eyes of the Aborigines. Along with the

other Aboriginal writers, Jack Davis relies heavily on black oral literatures, and for his

historical sources he looked upon the documentary materials that were almost entirely

collected by whites and stored in white Australian institutions. Davis’s first play Kullark

(home) has been described as a ‘documentary on the history of Aboriginals in Western

Australia’ (Casey 138). In Kullark, Davis’s depicted the arrival of Captain Stirling and his

comrades and their first encounter with the Aborigines in 1827. At first both the parties were

amazed and at the same time, were terrified of each other. After the Aborigines left the scene

Captain James Stirling addresses the audience as if they were attending a meeting in England:

The natives are fascinated by the color of our skin, believing it to be painted white,

but care must be taken in all dealings with them, for they are vengeful and capricious

and will not hesitate to resort to offensive weapons. The intention I adopted,

therefore, in dealing with the natives, was to avoid all possible means of quarrel with

them, and the necessity consequent thereon of rendering them hostile to future settlers

in revenge for the severe measures we should obliged to take, if put to our defense. I

am happy to say in this plan I was not disappointed (Davis, Kullark 15).

Captain Stirling’s words indicate the racial prejudice and assumptions that white British

invaders had of the native Australian and how inclined they were in taking over the land of

Australia. It also shows how ready they were in resorting to violence in their dealings with
the native. The first Europeans were so light-skinned, the Nyungar believed them to have

come from the traditional island of souls of their own ancestors, and called them djanga, ‘the

dead’ – their own dead relatives returning. Ironically, the coming of ‘the dead’ meant death to

many Aborigines (M. Berndt xv).

At first the Aborigines did not bother much about the white intruders, as they had no

idea that the white intruders intended to stay and take over their land. As time passed, the

Europeans began to feel greedy in acquiring the land and the authorities forbade handing

food to the natives and even having friendly attitudes. With the growth in the establishment

of the British penal colony, the British began to acquire more lands and even the hunting

grounds of the Aborigines. They viewed the land as a commodity to be owned, and the

authorities distributed the land to the white settlers, as Captain Stirling announces, “By

authority vested in me by His Majesty the King. I do hereby authorize William Patrick

O’Flaherty to take up a selection of one thousand acres on the Upper Swan River…” (Davis,

Kullark 18). On the other hand the Indigenous people view(ed) the land as an integral part of

their life, religion, and culture. As a nomadic hunter and gatherer, the Aborigines began to

lose their hunting grounds, which resulted in scarcity of their food supply. If the Aborigines

were seen hunting on the grounds hoarded/owned by the whites they would be shot.

Therefore, conflict began to rose between the two parties, which later resulted in the death of

Yagan in 1833; Yagan was an important and symbolic figure of the Nyoongah people. In

Kullark, captain Stirling and his friend Mr. Fraser, a botanist to the colony, viewed the

Aborigines as ‘savages’ from their very first encounter. However, among the white settlers,

there are a couple named Will O’Flaherty and his wife Alice, who are friendly with the

Aborigines. The couple even finds that the natives were actually intelligent as Alice reads her

diary:
 I am sure that Meg would never believe me if I told her that there is a native here who

actually appears to be intelligent and who has already learned several words of

English. He calls himself “Yagan” and often comes to visit us…I find him rather

fascinating, really. Sometimes he brings a catch of fish to exchange for flour…He’s a

decent soul, my Will, and he believes it is good to share our food supplies with the

natives… (Davis, 22).

The couple also helps the natives and hands out food to them. As the Aborigines began to

lose their hunting grounds due to the white settlers, they used to sometimes steal from the

white settlers, which is not liked by the whites and so they feel the need to set up a militia

force. So Captain Stirling announces:

I hereby proclaim that whereas the safety of the Colony from invasion and from

attack of hostile native tribes may require the establishment of a militia force, which

on emergency may be depended upon to assist. His Majesty’s regular troops in the

defense of the lives and property of the inhabitants of the territory, all male persons

whatsoever between the ages of fifteen and fifty are hereby required to enroll

themselves in the militia of the country (Davis, Kullark 21).

With the establishment of the militia force conflict between the natives and the white settlers

began to become more violent. The white settlers were not allowed to share their food

supplies with the natives and the authorities prohibited even friendly contact with them. As

Alice reads from her diary:

… There have been a number of incidents here resulting in the deaths of the

natives… Lives are being lost for a mere sheep or a bag of flour. It’s a tragedy,

that’s what it is, a tragedy (Davis, Kullark 25).

This shows the violent conflict of the invaders and natives, which were ignored and

discounted by the white colonizers in talking about Australian history.

 Like many of the contemporary Aboriginal writers, Linda Briskman feels that

Aboriginal people were excluded from the pages of the white Australian history and

remained nameless men and women (Briskman 12). Therefore, with this view in mind, it

becomes imperative for the Aboriginal writers to bring out their existence from that of their

invisible status to historicity. Thus, the Aboriginal writers are writing from their perspectives

and are determined and focus on creating contradictory version of the white history that

confront a formidable corpus of white- authored historical and quasi-historical discourse that

misrepresent and discard the Aboriginal role in the story of Australia. A few quotations of

white texts that represent the body of writing that has shaped white Australians perception of

the Aborigines are needed in order to understand and witnessed the white Australians

depiction of the Aborigines and their culture. By the 1840s, at the height of the southern

frontier war against the Aborigines, some Europeans were claiming that the Aborigines were

not merely savages, but not even men, ‘being a species of tail-less monkeys’(Broome 95). In

1843 father Raymond Vaccari, a Passionist missionary, in his letter to Archbishop Polding

wrote, “Among these evil dispositions of the aborigines I may mention an extreme sloth and

laziness in everything, a habit of fickleness and double-dealing, and uncontrollable

vindictiveness, so much so that they will stop at nothing in the pursuit of revenge. They are

deceitful and cunning and prone to lying. They are given to extreme gluttony and if possible

will sleep both day and night” (qtd. in Broome 95). This was a convenient view of colonists

who claimed that killing Aborigines was no worse than destroying wild dogs. In 1899

Richard Simon, a historian, asserted, “The Aborigines are nothing but nomadic huntsmen,

and this very circumstance is the reason for their low intelligence level and scantily

developed artistic sense…They are entirely devoid of imagination” (qtd. in Arthur 56). Henry

Parker the editor of The Empire – a Sydney based newspaper that was progressive by

prevailing standards – complained in an editorial published on 30 January, 1851 of the

Aborigine’s “mental imbecility” and remarkable inferiority” (qtd. in S. Nelson 31). F.T.

MacCartney, an influential Australia historian, poet and literary critic, in his 1967 article

titled “Literature and the Aborigine” claimed “on a lower mental level than any ordinary

thoughtful man amongst ourselves” (qtd. in Arthur 56). Even more insidious and politically

more dangerous than McCartney’s blatant racism are the more subtle strategies of writing

Aborigines completely out of history. P.R. Stephenson, a contemporary Australian historian,

wrote; “Australia is a whole continent, unique in its natural features, and unique in the fact of

its continual uniformity of race and language. We are the only continent on earth inhabited by

one race, order and government, speaking one language and sharing one culture” (qtd. in

Arthur 56). In this way the Australian historians are ignoring and excluding the very presence

of the Aborigines in a land which was once theirs.

Historically, the white Australian texts similar to the ones quoted above supported in

forming racist ideologies which functioned as instruments of preservation as well as

transmission of those ideologies. Tools of imperial domination, such text have assured an

easy victory for the Europeans in their cultural and political conflicts with the indigenes; the

Aborigine Culture, with its exclusive reliance on oral – performance forms, was until recently

unable to counter these white – authored texts and the ideologies embedded in them (S.

Nelson 31). Aboriginal orality was helpless in the face of European literacy. The very

absence of any Aboriginal challenge simply granted further validity to the racist assumptions

of the European- generated discourses. As Kateryna Arthur argues, the unequal conflict

between Aboriginal and European Australians has indeed been “to a large extent, the struggle

between literacy and orality” (55). An oral tradition has no defense against the white

convictions of the Aboriginal people. The issues and the contentious nature of oral tradition is

further emphasize in the next chapter.

 In order to expose the lies and chicanery of the colonizers, it becomes imperative for

the indigenous writers to voice themselves in fiction, poetry and drama, all of which carries a

political character. More than poetry and fiction it is the Aboriginal drama that is effectively

able to dramatize the Aboriginal experiences under the white colonizers. The Aboriginal

playwrights have also used theatre to dramatize their stories in order to resist the white

construct of black life. The main concern of their plays is to create national and international

awareness about the problem of the Aborigines in Australia. These plays play an important

role also in awakening the conscience of the white Australians. However, with the progress in

creative writing, Aboriginal writers shift the theme of their writing from resistance to

representation, to assimilation and self- determination, and from self-determination to

reconciliation. Moreover, the persistence of the earlier themes, however subdued, in their

later works, evidences that the historicity of the Aborigines has been ideologically suppressed

by colonial regimes. According to Marcia Langton, “Aboriginality is remade over and over

again in a process of dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation” (Langton 119).

Aboriginality remade even for theatre would definitely point at a continuity of self-awareness

as the Aborigine without historical breaks that the white histories like to project.

The present thesis therefore has undertaken to study the Aboriginal plays. The

Aboriginal playwrights used theatre to bring out their stories of personal or historical

experiences of Indigenous life, predominantly verbatim, biographical and autobiographical,

taken from real stories. Indigenous people have started to redefine themselves and are trying

to break the stereotypes constructed by the white Australians. Michael Dodson asserts that

what the Aboriginals need is to resist essentialism which make them a fixed, unchangeable

category and the necessary human characteristics are denied them which might allow them

for transformation or variation. The resistance to white oppression and representation of

Indigenous people is expressed or shown in many forms, which attract sound postcolonial
perspectives. When Aboriginal playwrights began to claim ongoing space on the main stages

of Australian and international theatres, their main aim were to challenge and break the

silence that surrounded their history and survival. In the context of problematic history,

marginalized Aboriginal identity and culture, three important Aboriginal writers Jack Davis,

Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell are selected for this proposed thesis. Both male and female

playwrights are selected in order to complement their works in theatre and to gauge the

difference between the two sensibilities, male and female, in reacting to the common

Aboriginal problems- colonization and the loss of the native identity and the mode to reclaim

identity in performance. Thus, theatre is used as a way to express social and political

criticism and has often been used as a political tool, reflecting the cultural situation of the

country. Post-colonial performers have used theatre as a tool of resistance, a form of

interrogation of the dominant myths and a way of sharing or building an identity.

The modern history of Indigenous Australian writings is widely held to have begun in

1964, with the publication of Kath Walker’s first collection of poetry We are Going.

Walker’s poem in the 1960s and 1970s in particular challenge easy and complacent

distinctions between the “creative” and the “critical” and her writing during this period can

be situated within the context of what is known as “resistance literature” (Grossman 2). She

wrote many books, beginning with We Are Going (1964), the first book to be published by an

Aboriginal woman. The title poem concludes:

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.

The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place.

The bora ring is gone.

The corroboree is gone.

And we are going.5

This first book of poetry was extraordinarily successful, selling out in several editions, and

setting Kath Walker as one of the Australia's highest-selling poets. Walker who later changed

her name and adopted an Aboriginal name, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, continued to hold a

prominent place as an Aboriginal poet and activist over the next twenty years till she passed

away in 1993 at aged 72. With the increasing numbers of Aboriginal writers, soon

productions of Aboriginal works began to occupy the different genres of writings; poetry,

drama, prose and fiction in Australia. Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1968) was the first

Aboriginal play which was performed in 1971 at the Mews Theatre in Sydney. Kevin Gilbert

produced many other plays and his work, like Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker), was

focused on ‘shattering the wall of misunderstanding’ (Casey 16). It was also during this

period that Jack Davis began his commitment for performance first found expression. Davis

had been attracted to writing plays after reading a script of a short play by Oodgeroo in 1970.

He found the potential of the medium interesting and ‘an exciting way of reaching a wide

audience’ (Casey 134). Though, Jack Davis was the contemporary of Kath Walker and Kevin

Gilbert, his works shifted from that of resistance to reconciliation. In most of his plays Jack

Davis takes up the theme of the squalor and the meaninglessness of some of the

contemporary Aboriginal living, combined with nostalgia for a traditional Aboriginal past.

He wants to present the situation of the Aboriginal as seen through the eyes of the Aboriginal

people.

In the early 1980s the Aboriginal Writers, Oral Literature and Dramatist Association

(AWOLDA) was formed in Perth at the initiation of writers such as Jack Davis. The aims of

the association were to stimulate Aboriginal writing, provide an editing service and promote

the inclusion of Aboriginal writing in courses at secondary and tertiary levels (Casey 166). In

response to this need, 1987, Brian Syron, Justine Saunders and Lesley Fogarty initiated and

organized the First national Black Playwrights Conference and Workshop in Canberra. The
aim of the conference was to encourage and nurture writers and the creative process. At the

conference nine plays and five film scripts were workshopped. These included Man Hunt

(1968) by Oodgeroo, Coordah (published 1989) by Richard Walley, Murras (published

1989) by Eva Johnson and Hijacker (1987) by Eric Walmott and Richard Guthrie, as well as

by Kevin Gilbert, Jimmy Everett, Mudrooroo, Bob Maza, Vivian Walker, Archie Weller and

Jack Davis. The directors at the conference included Ernie Dingo, Bob Maza, Jimmy Everett,

Vivian Walker and Richard Walley. In a documentary shot during the conference, Kabarra

the First Born, some leading Indigenous Australian playwrights set the context for their work

and their hopes for the future. Jack Davis, with national and international tours to his credit

and decades of fighting for Indigenous rights, sounded an active and positive note:

I can see in the near future we’ll have our own theatres, our own publishing

houses…within the next ten years. Twenty years ago…the white Australian

public…didn’t believe [Aboriginal people] were capable of writing…They were

brought up with the concept that Aboriginal people were children. [Images of] the

mission and the dying pillow were still in the minds of white Australians.

Now we are very vital part of the Australian scene…This conference shows how

quickly [the poets and the playwrights] came forward. Once the opportunity was

given to us we grasped it and we used it (Casey 167).

There were many immediate outcomes of the 1987 Black Playwrights’ Conference.

One was the establishment of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust (ANTT). At the

conference many people had argued for the need for a national theatre organization. The

ANNT, based in Newtown, Sydney, was officially incorporated in May 1988. It was

inclusively Indigenous enterprise managed and staffed by Indigenous Australian. The aims

outlined for ANTT reflected the concerns of the conference participants and provided a

challenging brief. They were:

 • to establish and maintain a national Aboriginal theatre

• to complement existing Aboriginal arts organizations

• to be responsible for national linkage of Aboriginal performing arts groups

• to encourage performance of Aboriginal works

• to present and tour, inside and outside, Australia, public performances of Aboriginal

theatre of cultural and artistic merit.

• to act as a central resource for Aboriginal directors, actors, producers, technician sand

writers and to provide training in these fields (Casey 169).

Other aims included the establishment and maintenance of an Aboriginal theatre network on

a national and international level and through this network to stimulate and develop

investment research and sponsorship in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performing arts.

Interculturally, the ANTT aimed to promote the recognition of Aboriginal cultures within

Australian education systems and to promote cross-fertilization between Australian

mainstream contemporary theatre arts and Aboriginal culture.

With the growing increase of Aboriginal playwrights and production of plays, the

1990s were a time of intense and high profile activity both artistically and politically for

Indigenous Australians. The number of works by Indigenous artists that were produced and

toured nationally and internationally increased significantly, as more and more new artists

negotiated for space in a political climate that focused on Indigenization from a range of

perspectives both positive and negative. Jack Davis’s prediction in 1987 that Indigenous

artists would be operating their own independent, ongoing theatre becomes a reality. The

process of building bridges of understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous

Australians was a major motivation behind theatre work produced by Indigenous artists

through the 1970s and the 1980s. The arts played a pivotal role in this process. As Djon

Mundine has observed, ‘most non-Aboriginal people’s contact with Indigenous Australians is
through Aboriginal art’ (Casey 212). The struggle to achieve recognition as people and artists

had been an ongoing theme within the work of Indigenous Australian artists. The socio-

political implications of the critical responses and programming decisions in relation to

theatre by Indigenous artists were heightened. Under these conditions, artistic control of

processes and production continues to be primary importance for the Aboriginal playwrights.

The first Indigenous-controlled theatre companies were established in the early 1970s, and

since then there have been various attempts in different cities to set up such companies. In the

1990s three companies were established: IIbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Theatre Co-operative in Melbourne, Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Arts in Brisbane and Yirra

Yaakin Noongar Theatre in Perth.

John Harding, Kylie Belling, Bev Murray and other members of the Victorian

community established IIbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative in

1990. Since its inception IIbijerri has been Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander controlled. It

produced many plays which represent the predicaments of Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander people experienced under the white Australians since colonization. Throughout the

1990s, IIbijerri produced show aimed at community education and also focused on creating

new work dealing with major issues affecting Indigenous communities. This theatre was the

one who commissioned Jane Harrison to research and write a play about the ‘stolen

generations’. Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Arts was established in 1993, and Indigenous

artists who have been producing theatre work often in collaboration with Brisbane-based

theatre companies formed the company. In 1995 and 1996 the company began producing new

plays by Indigenous artists aimed at mainstream audiences. In 1995 it produced Murri Love

(1995) by Cathy Craigie, as part of the Fringe festival in Brisbane in May. The play deals

with domestic violence and friendships. Then later that year Kooemba Jdarra produced the

inaugural season of The 7 Stages of Grieving (published in 1996) by Wesley Enoch and
Deborah mailman at the Metro Arts Theatre. Kooemba Jdarra has continued producing

already extant plays, developing new work, and working in detention centers, schools, hostels

and community centers. Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre was initially established as a youth

theatre company in 1993, in 1997 the company formally broadened the focus of their

activities to wider community, while continuing youth and community-oriented programs.

This theater was established on a similar basis to Kooemba jdarra as a community based

theatre.

The practices and priorities of the Indigenous-controlled companies created space for

Indigenous artists both within and outside the roles designated to them by non-Indigenous

communities. In order to achieve this, the Indigenous companies continually negotiate a

number of specific issues on common. For IIbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Theatre Co-operative, Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Arts and Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre

their communities have, since the beginning, been a priority. Despite the socio-political

challenges of the 1990s and the pressure to conform to others’ agendas, the range and volume

of theatre work successfully produced by and with Indigenous artists continued to increase.

Works in the 1990s, ranging from the highly successful domestic tours and international tours

of shows such as The 7 Stages of Grieving, Stolen and Box the Pony, in many ways

consolidated the achievements of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the multiple pressures,

Indigenous artists continued to expand the focus of their writing, both men and women,

pushing the frame of representation and against the frames of reception (Casey 266).

The selected Aboriginal playwrights, Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell had

written their plays in a less ideologically charged tone compared to the earlier works of some

Aboriginal writers. A little biography and works of the selected playwrights will be useful

here as introduction to Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell respectively. Jack Davis

was born in Perth in March, 1917 spent his childhood in Yarloop, about 140 kilometers to the
south of Perth. He was a notable Australian playwright and poet of the 20th Century, also an

Indigenous rights campaigner. At a young age Davis was outraged and indignant at the

treatment of Aboriginal people by the white Australians. There were many policies carried

out by the successive white Australian governments on the Indigenous people since

colonization and over the years, Davis became enraged by the injustices of an apartheid

system, he began to write poetry as a means of expression. In Perth Davis joined the

Aboriginal Advancement Council and began agitating for changes in government policies.

For five years, he was editor of the Aboriginal periodical Identity and helped many

Aboriginal writers. The magazine was a national, quarterly publication, which began in July

1971 and focused on Indigenous issues, for Indigenous readers, and Davis was the first

indigenous editor. Identity operated with two main aims. One was to provide a forum for

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander opinion. The other was to provide a public outlet for the

‘expression of the literary and artistic talents of the Indigenous people of Australia’ (Casey

131). Davis was strongly dedicated in trying to bring out the works of the other Aboriginal

writers and he believed that print media was the best way to express Indigenous Australians

viewpoints. As he went on to say years later on the launched of his book Kullark/The

Dreamers (1982) in February 1983:

We used to speak in those days when we were talking about politics – black politics –

of how we were going to make ourselves heard within the white Australian society.

And even in those days when we went back to our little dingy rooms, we said

(referring to, among others Kath Walker [Oodgeroo], Faith Bandler, and Ken

Colbung), ‘Well we’ve gotto write about this, we’ve got to tell the people’ (Casey

131).

Davis went on to become a well-known and respected playwright and actor, and continued to

write his very moving and popular poetry. He spent his early years fighting political battles
over land rights and racial equality in Australia. He became Director of the Aboriginal Center

in Perth during 1967-71 and, in 1971, the first chairman of the Aboriginal Land Trust in

Western Australia. He was also the first President of the Aboriginal Advancement Council

Western Australia. As an activist Davis played an important leadership role and he made

major contributions to intercultural relations in Australia, a contribution that has been

acknowledge through a range of awards. His awards include: the British Empire Medal for

Services to Literature and the Aboriginal people of Western Australia, 1977; members of the

Order of Australia, 1985’ WA Citizen of the Year, 1985; the Australian Medal, 1986; Human

Rights Award, 1987; and the BHP Award, 1988.

Davis’s contributions as a writer are equally extensive. He wrote stories in prose and

for performance about the early Indigenous/European wars, Stolen Generations, the treatment

of Aboriginal war veterans after world wars, assimilation policies etc. His plays mark and

anticipate major points of transition in the process of reconciliation between Indigenous and

non-indigenous Australians. As another Aboriginal writer, Mudrooroo describes it, Davis

wrote in order ‘to enrich Australia’s culture and conscience by centering Aboriginal

experience since invasion’ (qtd. in Casey 130). Davis’s intent was to produce Aboriginal oral

literature and history in general and so provide information about Aboriginal oral traditions

for urban Aboriginals who through various protection and assimilation policies had been

isolated from their own traditions. Jack Davis will always be remembered as a great

humanitarian and for his writing about Aboriginal history and culture and for his unyielding

struggle for justice for his people. He gained national and international recognition for his

work and made immense contribution in helping to bridge the gap between cultures and

communities. His works includes poetry, dramas and prose, and Davis' first book of poetry

The First Born and Other Poems was published in 1970. His poetry, which expresses a

yearning for a past connectedness with the land, is innately political. Being an Aboriginal
Noongar, much of his work dealt with the Australian Aboriginal experience. He has been

referred to as the 20th Century's Aboriginal Poet Laureate.

As a child, Jack Davis and his brother Harold were sent to Moore River settlement (a

settlement that housed Aboriginal people from across Western Australia) north of Perth with

the promise of training in farm work but he left when this didn't eventuate. This experienced

he had in the Moore River Settlement is reflected in most of his plays. His love for writing

plays found expression in a number of plays andhis plays are Kullark (1979), The Dreamers

(1982), No Sugar (1985), Honey Spot (1985) Moorli and the Leprechaun (1986), Barungin

(1988), Plays from Black Australia (1989), In our Town (1990) and Wahngin Country (1992).

He passed away in March 2000 aged 83.

Jane Harrison, an Indigenous Australian writer and playwright was born in 1960. She

is a descendant of the Muruwari people of New South Wales from the area around Bourke

and Brewarrina, Harrison grew up in the Victorian Dandenongs with her mother and sister.

She began her career as an advertising copywriter, before beginning work as a writer with

Ilbijerri Theatre Company. Her best-known work is Stolen, which received critical claim and

has toured nationally and internationally. In 1992, the Ilbijerri Theatre Co-operative

commissioned Harrison to write Stolen, a play about the lives of five Aboriginal people from

the “stolen generations”. Tackling the issue the “Stolen Generations”6, Stolen premiered at

the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne in 1998, and has had productions every year since - in

Melbourne and country Victoria, Sydney, Adelaide, and Tasmania, the United Kingdom

(twice), Hongkong and Tokyo, along with readings in Canada and New York (2004). In

Sydney, it was performed at the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Wayne Blair. Stolen

won the Kate Challis RAKA award in 1998. Harrison’s other plays include On a Park Bench

which was a finalist in the Lake Macquarie Drama Prize. Rainbow’s End premiered in 2005

at the Melbourne Museum, and toured to Mooroopa, and to Japan in 2007. Blakvelvet is
Harrison’s most recent play; it won the 2006 Theatrelab Indigenous Award. Harrison also

contributed a chapter to Many Voices, Reflections on experiences of Indigenous child

separation, which was published by the National Library of Australia, Canberra. As well as

writing, Harrison teaches Cultural Studies to Indigenous performing arts students at

Swinburne University. She lives in Melbourne with her two daughters.7

The selected play of Jane Harrison Stolen refers to the “Stolen Generation”. It is about

the sufferings and the traumatic conditions of the Aboriginal children who were removed

from their families and the way it weaves common elements of the stories of many

Aborigines who were removed from their families at a young age. Although the earlier white

Australian governments denied the existence of ‘the stolen generations’, Stolen vividly

reveals the history of separation and the abuses that the children underwent while in the care

of the whites. However, Stolen is not about putting blame on white Australians, as the

playwright Jane Harrison in the ‘playwright’s note’ commented, “My brief was to tell many

stories, not just one…what impressed me most was the lack of bitterness from the many

survivors of these policies and I’ve tried to mirror that attitude in the play. Stolen is not about

blame, it is about understanding and acceptance” (Harrison vii). The plight of the ‘stolen

generation’ children holds as an important theme in most of the Aboriginal writings.

Leah Purcell was born on 14 August, 1970 in Murgon, Queensland. She is an

Indigenous Australian actress, director and writer. She is a film, television and theatre actress,

singer, director and playwright. She is the youngest of six children of Aboriginal and white

Australian descent. Her father, a white man, was a butcher and a boxing trainer. After a

difficult adolescence, looking after her sick mother who died while Purcell was in her late

teens, problems with alcohol and teenage motherhood, she left Murgon and moved to

Brisbane and became involved with community theatre. She began her professional career in

1993 in Bran Nue Dae. In 1996 she moved to Sydney to become presenter on a music video
cable television station, Red Music Channel. This was followed by roles in the ABC

television series ‘Police Rescue’ and ‘Fallen Angels’. She co-wrote and acted in a play called

Box The Pony, which played at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, the Sydney Opera House

and the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, and in 2000 at the Barbican Theatre in London. Leah had

won numerous acting awards and the play-script for Box the Pony won NSW and Qld

Premier’s Literary Awards. She then wrote and directed the documentary Black Chicks

Talking, which won a 2002 Inside Film Award. She went on to appear in many roles in film

and theatre. Leah Purcell has also won The Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright’s

Award 2014. The Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright’s Award was established to

encourage the telling of Indigenous stories with the aim of fostering understanding and

reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. ‘Most non-Indigenous

Australians are largely sheltered from the lives of Indigenous Australians,’ said Hamish

Balnaves. ‘For many, they only see news reports of the Indigenous community’s interactions

with police and justice, and motherhood statement from governments. This award is about

creating the opportunity for Indigenous playwrights to tell their own stories directly to an

audience that needs to hear the unfiltered reality of Indigenous experiences.’8

Leah Purcell’s Box The Pony (1997) is a monodrama which portrays the rawness of

contemporary Aboriginal experience. It is semi-autobiographical story of Leah Purcell, a

young girl growing up in a bush community and how she overcomes obstacles and free

herself like a “bungaburra” (blue crane). Through this play we are taken to a world of an

Aboriginal woman. The play deals with such themes as the plight of the children of the stolen

generations, racial prejudice, alcoholism, survival, endurance, family ties, self-determination

and, of course, reconciliation. Box The Pony helps in unpacking the hidden assumptions of

racism, to understand its entanglement with class, cultural ignorance and fears of the “other”

conceives by the white Australians. The play is in the form of stories told by Leah Purcell
and as a collaborative work, which synthesizes the native oral tradition and the European

genre of drama. In using the European genre of drama, Sonja Kurtzer commented, the

dominant culture requires Indigenous writers to conform to white genre of writing that

enables the manufacture of acceptable representations of Indigenous authenticity for its white

audience (Kurtzer 182).

This thesis examines the selected works of Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and Leah

Purcell for a number of reasons. Jack Davis while highlighting the present predicament of the

Aborigines in Australia, in most of his works we also find the historical account of the

Aborigines which were “white washed” by the white historians. The production of Davis

works confronted colonial framings of Indigenous people. The sole selected work of Jane

Harrison of the present thesis Stolen, touches the theme of the ‘Stolen Generation’, which is

pivotally important and inherently present in almost all the works of the Aboriginal writers.

Leah Purcell monodrama Box The Pony is a semi-autobiography play in which she plays all

the sixteen characters. The characters central to the play are all women and it deals mostly

with women issues. Purcell touches on themes that are inherently important in the writings of

the Indigenous women. In this play she engages even the themes of domestic violence,

racism, survival and inner strength, self-determination and to locate the place of female in the

Aboriginal community.

The works of semi-autobiographies and autobiographies became very common among

the Australian Indigenous writers since the 1990s and it is especially prevalent among women

writers. There are many notable works, which are worth mentioning and among the plays,

monodramas such as Leah Purcell’s Box The Pony (1997), Deborah Mailman’s The Seven

Stages of Grieving (1998) and Tammy Anderson’s I Don’t Wanna Play House (2002). Using

their diverse stories, the writers and performers through their performance contest the

generalizations of Aboriginal people on the basis of racist attitudes of the white Australians.
As Hilary Glow argues, monodramas are “notable and distinctive for capturing the particular

nature of Indigenous experiences in order to achieve a new set of negotiated meanings

between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians” (qtd. in Wheeler 162). The selected

playwrights sought to tell their people’s stories and counter negative representation of the

Aboriginal people. They wanted to produce their versions of their histories against the

misrepresentation of the white Australians. They wanted to retell the younger generations of

Aborigines that the white Australian historians had misrepresented them. The experiences

and personal journeys in these monodramas are as varied as the individuals who write and

perform them. Many of these monodramas are based on autobiographical details of the

performer’s or writer’s life; others combine details from many lives into a representative

central character or characters (Wheeler 162). As Leah Purcell in her introduction to her book

Black Chicks Talking states, “If these sorts of books aren’t written then there will be another

generation that will grow up in ignorance of the plight of Indigenous Australians.” She

introduces her book as “our way of giving you a little look into some of our lives” (Purcell

xiv).

The present chapter “Introduction” has made an attempt to briefly introduce the

selected playwrights, while keeping in view their central artistic preoccupations which bring

to a focus the Aboriginal identity vis-à-vis the mainstream Australian historical viewpoints.

The Aboriginal poets and playwrights have succeeded fairly in challenging the white

Australian myths about the Indigenous people and in the process, recovered their life-stories

and rewritten their status of presumed non-entity by historicizing themselves for the world

humanity to take cognizance. Reclaiming identity under a dominant structure of power and

politics as prevailing in Australia is not an easy get-away for the Aboriginal artists and

writers. However, writing their side of Australian life has tremendously impacted the nature

of history in postcolonial Australia and all possible future histories, for that matter. Hence,
the present thesis has undertaken to study in greater detail the playwrights’ concerns and

issues to historicize their cultures in the historicist frameworks of art and literature in view of

many threats to their identity and existence.

 ENDNOTES
1
Whenever the terms ‘Aborigines’, ‘Aboriginal’,’ Indigenous’, ‘Black’ or ‘Native

Australian’ are used in the thesis they refer to the entity of all Australian Aboriginal people

i.e. the native inhabitants of Australia before the British invasion.

2
“British Empire.” Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc., Mar.

2015.Web. 26 Mar. 2015.<en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRITISH EMPIRE>

3
In this thesis, whenever the term “white” is used it refers to the non-indigenous, Europeans,

colonizers, the Anglo-Celtic descendants who came from Europe to settle and rule over

Australia and its native inhabitants.

4
Terra Nullius is a Latin expression deriving from Roman Law meaning "land belonging to

no one", which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject

to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly

relinquished sovereignty. Sovereignty over territory, which is terra nullius, may be acquired

through occupation, though in some cases doing so would violate an international law or

treaty. The British followed the conventions adopted by European nations over the previous

two centuries for legally acquiring unowned land, or terra nullius. This Latin phrase

translates as ‘nobody’s land’, and was actually not used with regard to the colonization of

Australia until the later twentieth century. In legal terms, terra nullius means ‘land over

which no previous sovereignty has been exercised’ or more simply ‘land of no sovereign

power’ (Broome:30, Flood:19)

5
“Oodgeroo Noonuccal” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 17

Mar. 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodgeroo_Noonuccal>

6
“Stolen Generations”, the term first used by historian Peter Read in 1981. He made it the

title of a brief, 21-page pamphlet he wrote for the New South Wales Ministry of Aboriginal

Affairs. The full title was: The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in
New South Wales 1883 to 1969.“Stolen Generations” refers to the forcible removal of

Aboriginal children from their families in Australia which is widely believed to have begun

in 1910 to continue till the 1970s.

7“
Jane Harrison (Playwright).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation,

Inc.,16 Dec. 2014. Web. 17Dec.2014.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jane_Harrison_(playwright)>
8
“Leah Purcell.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Web. 17

Dec. 2014. Web. 18 Dec. 2014.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Purcell>

 WORKS CITED

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pp 55-60. <www.westerlymag.com.au>. Web. 17 Aug 2014.

Briskman, Linda. The Black Grapevine- Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen Generations.

Sydney: The Federation Press, 2003. Print.

“British Empire.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc., Mar.

2015.

Web. 26 Mar. 2015. <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRITISH EMPIRE>

Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australian- Black Response to White Dominance 1788-2001.

N.S.W. 2065 Australia: Allen & Unwin. 2002. Print.

Casey, Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1990,

Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2004. Print.

--- “Bold, Black, and Brilliant: Aboriginal Australian Drama.” A Companion to Australian

Aboriginal Literature. Ed. Belinda Wheeler. New York: Camden House. 2013. Print.

Flood, Josephine.The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People. N.S.W. 2065

Australia: Allen & Unwin. 2006. Print.

Grossman, Michele. “After Aboriginalism: power, knowledge and Indigenous Australian

critical writing.” Introduction. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by

Indigenous Australians. Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003.

Print.
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Jane Harrison (Playwright).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation,

Inc.,

16 Dec. 2014. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jane_Harrison_ (playwright)>
Marcia Langton. “Aboriginal art and film: the politics of representation” Blacklines:

Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman.

Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen.Talkin’ Up To The White Woman: Aboriginal Women and

Feminism. University of Queensland Press. 2000. Print.

“Oodgeroo Noonuccal” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 17

Mar. 2015. Web. 26Mar. 2015.

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Reynolds, Henry. “The Other Side of the Frontier: Early Aboriginal Reactions to Pastoral

Settlement in Queensland and Northern New South Wales.” Ed. N.D. McLachlan,

HISTORICAL STUDIES, Vol. 17, No.66.April 1976, University of Melbourne. Print.

S. Nelson, Emmanuel. “Literature Against History: An Approach to Australian Aboriginal

Writing.” World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp 30-34.JSTOR.

Web. 18 Dec 2012.

Wheeler, Belinda. A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature. New York:

Camden House. 2013. Print.

 CHAPTER – II

THEATRE AS A RESISTANCE AND REPRESENTATION

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Resistance and representation are very wide areas in which a number of dramas of

colonial relations and post-colonial analysis eliciting subversion of those relations have been

enacted. In the Aboriginal drama the Aboriginal playwrights have re-appropriated prevailing

stereotypes about the Aboriginal people in their scripts and performances, attempting to make

apparent the colonial assumptions made by the colonizers. In all the selected plays of the

present thesis, the playwrights such as Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell share a

common theme i.e. the Aboriginal experience in the white dominant society. They depicted

the historical displacement of the Aborigines and their associated loss of identity as a

consequence of more than two centuries of colonization. But while Aboriginal playwrights

detail the catastrophic effects for indigenous peoples made by the Europeans of Australia,

they often propose methods of deconstructing Eurocentric epistemological and ontological

systems, of reconceptualizing place and space in order to undermine the imposed legitimacy

of white settlement and assert Other(ed) version of history (Gilbert 53). The Australian

Aboriginal playwrights have consistently utilized the potential for theatre performance to

create different frames for images and representations of indigenous Australians. They strike

immediate rapport with the multicultural audience in the theatre by dramatizing their stories.

In the act of performing their plays in Australia and other countries they awaken the

conscience of international community, which in turn exercises moral pressure on white

Australian. A clear example of this was the creation of the World Council of Indigenous

People (WCIP) in 1975, officially sanctioned by the United Nations as a non-governmental

organization, and also a French Society for the Promotion of the Culture of Australian

Aborigines has been in existence since 1980.

The western world of the performing arts became increasingly interested in both

traditional and contemporary Aboriginal culture. In 1978, the New York scout, Elaine Gold,

visited Australia with a view to securing scripts of plays written by Aborigines, for possible
presentation at Joseph Papp’s Shakespearean Summer Festival in Central Park, New York.

Four years later, Robert Merritt’s play The Cake Man was invited to the World Theatre

Festival in Denver, Colorado, in July 1982 where it was so enthusiastically received that its

two weeks season was sold out. After two years Jack Davis’s No Sugar was Australia’s

representative at the same festival and held both popular and critical acclaim. In May 1987,

Jack Davis’s The Dreamers was also received for a four-week season in Portsmouth

(Shoemaker 1-3). The dramatized stories of the Aboriginal playwrights have the power to

resist the lies perpetrated by the government and at the same time they serve the purpose of

passing on the stories to their children, ensuring the preservation of their history and culture.

There are two main sources for a narrative about the history of theatre production by

Australian indigenous artists- one is the text-based reviews of productions. The other is

indigenous community knowledge, and is largely a series of individual oral records. They

worked to bring out the historical perspectives by turning to oral sources in the form of

interviews with Aboriginal people. The main concern of the Aboriginal plays is to create

national and international awareness about the problem of the Aborigines in Australia. The

message of resistance is embedded in myriad ways their plays which may be collectively

called ‘Resistance Theatre’.

The white colonizers viewed the colonized subject within the ambit of their cultural

standards and deemed the other as uncivilized and barbaric. Through education or general

colonialist cultural relations, the colonizers projected themselves as superior to the colonized

subjects and taught them authoritative identity of themselves. However, the colonized

subjects of Australia since the 1960s and 1970s have started to redefine themselves in two

ways: trying to break the stereotypes constructed by the whites and trying to reconstruct the

white construct of indigenous life, culture and history. The Australian Aborigines’

imagination of freedom and search for identity must have been spurred by worldwide
political destabilizations of colonial regimes in the mid- twentieth century. Different post-

colonial writers have extensively examined this context; in particular Edward Said examined

this context in his famous work Orientalism, which is mainly a study of how the Western

people viewed the Eastern people in terms of their religion, way of life, etc., and it can also

mean the assumptions about the East by the West.

Edward Said’s Orientalism forms an important background for post-colonial studies.

In Orientalism, Said emphasizes the erroneous assumptions and also questions various ideas

and thoughts accepted as standards on individual, academic and political levels. Said calls

into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. It

may be observed that a rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological

generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is an erasure of

the line between ‘the west’ and ‘the other’ (Sered 2011). Said argues that the West’s view of

the Middle East and Islamic World is distorted by an indulgent epistemology of ‘Otherising’.

The West viewed the East as the ‘Other’- ferocious, savage, barbaric and uncivilized. So,

Said rejects these assumptions of the Western people and urges the Western thinkers to

reexamine their assumptions based on Christianity and Textualist attitude, i.e. an attitude

conceptualized by the text written by those earlier Western scholars who were biased in their

writings about the Middle East and the Islamic people. As Gina Wisker, remarks:

Said discusses Orientalism as a Western institutional way of dealing with the Orient,

the East, and as he uses discourse analysis inspired by Foucault, he notes the Orient is

dealt with ‘by discourse, describing, teaching, ruling, settling: in short, Orientalism

as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over ‘the

Orient’… ‘the Orient’ is also used to suggest the Far East and the treatment of others

who are culturally not white; and Western imperial/colonial…Non-Western people

 are depicted as ill-educated, violent, savage, less than human and also, often,

fascinating because exotic” (Wisker 202).

There is less to dispute that the Europeans viewed the Aboriginal society in terms of

European values and so they developed a complex of superiority towards them. This feeling

of superiority led them to have a paternalistic attitude towards the Aborigines. And what is

crucial is they felt the need to change them according to their beliefs and what they felt

necessary, in order to reproduce all European self-images.

In his essay “Jack Davis and the Emergence of Aboriginal writing” Bob Hodge states

“For more than a century Aboriginal Australia had been constructed through a discursive

regime that can be termed ‘Aboriginalism’ a regime that functioned to what Edward Said has

called ‘Orientalism’” (Hodge 98). He continues that Aboriginalism, like Orientalism, is a

familiar strategy of imperialism, and Australian Aborigines have been mediated throughout

the English speaking world. Aboriginal culture is ‘known’ in Britain and America, yet,

because of the strategies of Aboriginalism Aboriginal writers and artists were not taken as

experts on this culture, respected and deferred to. The disadvantages of this situation for

Aborigines were by no means trivial. In spite of Aboriginalism’s claimed knowledge of

Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal people felt themselves victims of a profoundly racist

misunderstanding from the dominant society in Australia. Aboriginalism disvalued living

Aborigine and severely limited the way in which they were allowed to produce and

communicate their sense of Aboriginality to a wider community (Hodge 99).

The term ‘Aboriginalism’ is scarcely mentioned in the writings of Aboriginal writers,

this may be due to the difference in opinion of the different writers in its implications to post-

colonial writings. An Aboriginal writer Ian Anderson in his introduction to ‘The Aboriginal

Critique to Colonial Knowing’ also states that it would be a mistake to argue that indigenous

critical writing and post- colonial analysis are one and the same thing. Here he quotes Linda
Tihiwai Smith who says that, “…The field of ‘post-colonial’ discourse has been defined in

ways which can still leave out indigenous people, our ways of knowing and our current

concerns” (Anderson 23). He goes on saying that in the context of settler colonial states,

such as Australia, colonial structures have never been dismantled. Colonial ways of knowing

are not historical artifacts that simply linger in contemporary discourse; they are actively

reproduced within contemporary dynamics of colonial power (Anderson 24). Yet this

fundamental observation does not really seem to have penetrated mainstream post-colonial

theory. Ian Anderson’s argument is understandable, which would approve of an evolutionary

growth and change of power relations within the established political order. In political terms,

alteratively, no Gandhi, no Mandela, nor even Martin Luther King is allowed possible

beyond the colonial order or epistemologies. This conviction has not convinced Australian

Aboriginal writers, so far.

However, in the Post Colonial Studies Reader Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and

Helen Tiffin, in their introduction to ‘Ethnicity and Indigeneity’, states:

The indigenous people of ‘settled’ colonies, or ‘First Nations’, have in many ways

becomes the cause célèbre of post-colonialism. No other groups seem so completely

to earn the position of colonial group, so unequivocally to demonstrate the processes

of imperialism at work (Ashcroft, Bill. et al 1999: 214).

They also state that ‘post colonial’ can apply to white settler/invader colonies as much as to

the indigenous people (Ashcroft, Bill. et al 1999: 213). This latter reasoning seems more

convincing for the present study is not averse to utilizing postcolonial perspectives to do

justice to Aboriginal writings.

Aboriginal theatre is definitely energized by anti-colonial perspectives in the first

place, which usually takes on spurs from post colonial frameworks, since the theatrical

representations of Australia’s marginalize peoples took roots in the post-colonial era across
the world. In regard to these debates and issues we have perceived in this theatre common

topics such as found in postcolonial theory. Some of these are underlined by Lois Tyson

perceptively in her book, Critical Theory Today- A User Friendly Guide:

• The native people’s initial encounter with the colonizers and the disruption of

indigenous culture.

• Othering (the colonizers treatment of members of the indigenous culture as less than

fully human).

• Mimicry (the attempt of the colonized to be accepted by imitating the dress, behavior,

speech and lifestyle of the colonizers).

• Exile (the experience of being an outsider in one’s own land or a foreign wanderer in

Britain).

• The struggle for individual and collective cultural identity and the related themes of

alienation, unhomeliness (feeling that one has no cultural “home”, or sense of cultural

belonging), double consciousness (feeling torn between the social and psychological

demands of two antagonistic cultures), and hybridity (experiencing one’s cultural

identity as a hybrid of two or more cultures, which feeling is sometimes describe as a

positive alternative to unhomeliness).

• The need for continuity with a pre-colonial past and self-definition of the political

future (Tyson 427).

These themes are also very much present in the writings of the colonized people of the

imperial power, whether they are the settlers nation like that of the Americans, white

Australians etc., the natives (the original inhabitants) and the nations who gained

independence from imperial power. Although some of their experience under the imperial

might be different from each other but much of their experience is common such as
oppression, racism, identity crisis etc. Thus, the definition of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths,

and Helen Tiffin in their book Post Colonial Studies Reader is relevant:

Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds:

migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender,

place and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe such as

history, philosophy and linguistics, and the fundamental experiences of speaking and

writing by which all of these come into being. None of these is ‘essentially’ post-

colonial, but together they form the complex fabric of the field (Ashcroft, Bill. et al.

1999:2).

The Aboriginal playwrights used theatre to bring out their stories of personal or historical

experience of indigenous life, predominantly verbatim, biographical and autobiographical,

taken from real stories. The resistance to white oppression and representation of indigenous

people is expressed or shown in many forms in their writings, which have sound post-

colonial perspectives.

Helen Gilbert, in her book Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary

Australian Theatre states, “Aboriginal theatre, developed over the past two decades, poses

Australia stage’s most trenchant challenge to the hegemony of imperialism” (Gilbert

1998:51). Though theatre is growing rapidly, it also becomes increasingly difficult to define

because there are plays about Aborigines written by whites and those written by the

Aborigines themselves are also collaborated with white directors to cast and produce.

Referring to literary productions, critics such as Mudrooroo express reservations about the

Aboriginality of any text that is not wholly produced – written, published, and presented-

under Aboriginal control (ibid.). Yet this kind of classification of Aboriginal writing

especially performance text is very difficult, because theatre is rarely a site where the

conventional notions of authorship and authenticity are validated. The notion of authorship
and authenticity is very complex in theatre comparing to other narrative genres as it involves

mediation at a number of levels. For example Box the Pony by Leah Purcell though an

autobiographical play is collaboration with Scott Rankin. Leah told her life story to Rankin

and Rankin picked out stories and events that would suit good theatre. In the postmodern era,

the notions of authenticity as well as authorship are much disputed concepts; even thinkers

like Roland Barthes and Derrida in turn supported by Freud, Lacan, Marx and Nietzsche of

gone by eras have deconstructed the ‘concept’ and ‘intention’ of author. While Barthes has

announced the death of the author, Foucault performed the death of the subject, and Derrida

disputed and rejected the logocentrism of western metaphysics outright. Coming back to

Leah Purcell’s theatre, thus, the notion of authorship and authenticity becomes very complex

in regard to the text of Box The Pony. Sarah Rubidge in her essay, Does Authenticity matter?

The Case for and against authenticity in Performing Arts (1996) states ‘Plays are written for

performance, not publication… In any play, intentions other than those of the author are

involved in its creation. These include those of the designers, directors, composers as well as,

of course, the performers’ (Rubidge 228).

Still, performance text may sound very difficult to define and may seem precarious as

it seems, it could be examined within the post-colonial context. Within the post-colonial

frameworks that promotes “hybridization” and “literary contamination” as weapons of

cultural transformation; thus delimiting notions of an authentic indigenous text becomes a far

less useful task than examining how the multiplicity of indigenized elements of a text might

be deployed (Gilbert 51) to subvert colonial metanarratives. Though political freedom of self-

determination is not allowed to natives, the Aboriginal writers’ creative resistances appear all

the more worthy of genuine support even from postcolonial nations as well as postcolonial

epistemologies. Because, the Aborigines’ new approach to identity issues more subversively

questions colonial paradigms and master narratives of authenticity. There are criticisms about
using postcolonial perspectives to certain writings emerging from colonial structures in place.

Gina Wisker in her book, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature, quoting New Zealand

writers, Johnston and Pihama in her book: “For Maori women in colonial setting (we avoid to

use the term postcolonial since we believe that this country remains very much colonial)

much to ourselves has been denied, and hence, for many Maori women there is an ongoing

struggle to center ourselves, to deconstruct colonial representations and to reconstruct and

reclaim knowledge about ourselves” (Wisker 7- 8). Even Wisker cannot deny the borderline

of convergence between postcolonial critiques and Maoris’ nascent critical awareness of

colonial representations.

All the selected playwrights used oral sources as their main foundations in writing

their plays. Oral sources were used by the Aboriginal people to talk about their past. With the

help of these oral histories, scholars of history and anthropology have compelled the

Europeans to hear the Aboriginal perspectives of the in past rather than non-native narratives

maintained to deprive and effectively silenced the Aborigines. Thus, it has become essential

for the Indigenous people of Australia to reclaim their culture, identity, history, and land

rights and to counter the kind of history produced by the whites. As the writings of the

Aborigines is mainly based on the oral histories, the authenticity of the oral tradition can be

much debated, because there can be a dispute of validity of memory in constructing the past.

But, we may remember that the Aboriginal playwrights and writers do not base their writings

on just one account of an individual, it is formed from interviews and writings of those who

have experience firsthand or witness past events. Jane Harrison was commissioned to write

Stolen in 1992 by the IIbijerri and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative based in

Melbourne. During the course of writing the play, Harrison read thousands of oral transcripts

and spoke with many members of the Stolen Generations of Australia. She heard countless

stories from stolen children about abuse, rape, the trauma of parents who were told that their
children were dead and the trauma of children who were told their families were dead or had

abandoned them, and being taken away as children and to have their own children taken

away as adults and of forced servitude to white families. In Stolen (published 1998) Harrison

weaves together the stories of five Aboriginal children stolen from their families and who

were put up in an institution. The play does not move in chronological order, but switches

between past and present. On the series of events the story traces each child’s individual

journey and experience of grief and abuse they faced in their lives. At the end of the play

each cast member (who actually once was stolen into white institutions) steps out and tells his

or her own story. Some cast members, like the characters in the play have tragic stories to

tell. This moment, is crucial in many senses, i) claiming ownership of these stories. This

claim helped the suppressed and blurred history into a gestation, ii) self-revelation, self-

empowerment and realization of identity, iii) generating solidarity with the silenced, perhaps

self-denigrated Aborigines, iv) disseminating information across a multi- cultural world

including whites. The theatre breaks the centrality of the dominant non-indigenous audience.

It also challenges the tendency to generalize all Indigenous people as having the same

experiences (Casey 221).

Thus, hearing accounts directly from indigenous people who had had the experience

maternally of the policies and practices of the colonizers had an immense impact in changing

the consciousness and perspectives of the nation (Briskman 13). Theatre also assists in the

maintenance of spoken languages that are essential to oral traditions and their transmission of

history, culture, and social order. Oral cultures emphasize not only the sound and rhythm of

language and its accompanying paralinguistic features, but also the site from which it is

spoken. A dramatic focus on oral traditions opens up the possibility of challenging the

tyranny of the written word through which many imperial languages claim their authenticity.

By restoring to oral discourses their topology as performance pieces, theatre allows the
orality of post-colonial languages to be fully realized, especially since each performance

defers and deflects the authority of any written script. This descripted (performative) model

of orality refers not to a language that has never been written, but to one which is unwritable

at its moment of enunciation. While orality’s utterance is unable to be inscribed, the

inscriptions/utterances prohibited by censorship can be inferred in performance. Expressing

that which has been forbidden in a public forum like the theatre can be effective in

challenging a repressive law or state (Ashcroft et al 1995:166-167).

New historicists believe that the writing of history is a matter of interpretation, not

objective display of facts. For them, the literary text and the historical situation from which it

emerged are equally important because text and context create each other (Tyson 283). Oral

tradition of narrating histories is used by different writers in different parts of the world, and

is present in every society. Orality of history and written discourse of history are equally

subject to further investigations, since written history more involves the historian’s point of

view constructed in turn by his culturally colored ideologies and prejudices. Australian

histories written by white elites are testamentary of such attitudes and therefore cannot claim

to be true and factual in any scientific sense. Oral tradition is like one kind of tool that

historians, anthropologists and sociologists have used to give a chance to ordinary people to

voice their opinions in written histories. Oral documents record all those important things that

the written documents prejudicially ignore, and above all, in the present context, obtain the

Aboriginal point of view (Briskman 13). Moreover theatre, according to Helen Gilbert,

“allows the orality of oral cultures to be partially realized; it restores to the myths and yarns

of indigenous cultures their topology as performance pieces, and in doing so dismantles the

forms and conventions, and hence the ideologies, of imposed narrative structures” (Gilbert

82). She emphasizes, “Orality is a practice and a knowledge, a strategic device potentially

present in recuperating indigenous voices, potentially in de-scribing empire” (95). Thus,

Aboriginal theatre re-activates Aboriginal stories to their performative value in real

indigenous life besides recovering from abandoned sources the lost memories of tribes.

Most of the Aboriginal playwrights and writers make use of their oral history, as they

have no written record of history. For example, Jack Davis used two main weapons in his

writing i.e. his Aboriginal use of white histories and European modes of thought. The other is

his use of such aspects of Aboriginal language and cultures as have survived in urban

Aboriginal societies (Hodge 100). The most powerful among the Aboriginal historical plays

of Jack Davis is Kullark, a carefully researched work in which many of the characters are

based on and named after historical personalities such as an Aboriginal legend Yagan,

Captain James Stirling, founder and first Governor of the Swan River Colony, Mr. Neale,

Superintendent of the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement and his wife Matron Neale, black

tracker named Bluey and Mr. A.O.Neville, Chief protector of Aborigines in Western

Australia. Kullark (1979) is the first full-length play Jack Davis and the actions moves

between different time frames and places in Western Australia: the Yorlah family’s kitchen in

Perth in 1979, a scene from the Swan river in 1827-34, the Moore river settlement in the

1930s and the Yorlah family in their camp at the edge of the town in 1945. The play does not

move in chronological order, this device is used by Davis to represent a complex set of

parallels and opposition between past and present, dramatizing the different possibilities and

strategies that were available at different times while also seeing many fundamental

continuities (Hodge 100). The fictional versions of the Yorlah family portrayed in Kullark is

also the experiences and stories with which Davis was familiar; his stories were from the

Aboriginal past as told to him by his family. The past and the present of the Yorlah family

intermingled in the play to provide an insight into the present-day problems and issues faced

by the Nyoongah Aborigines. In the play, we see one character, Alec Yorlah as a man with

low expectations who has turned to alcohol as a way to cope. As his son’s disgust with him
grows, we find flashback of young Alec returned from the war hoping to live as an equal to a

white man in his own country. Kullark is about the experiences of Nyoongah in Australia in a

single piece of work. For Davis the focus on Kullark was not primarily on reclaiming the

past. It is the present and the place for indigenous people in the present that was Davis’s main

concern. As Davis states:

(The stories from my family) are still very important to me but I write about my own

experiences and very much from urban Aboriginal point of view… Our culture didn’t

die when Captain Stirling arrived- there is a new urban Aboriginal culture emerging

that remembers the past while looking to the new (Casey 140).

Kullark poses challenge to the imperial methods of historical construction because

within the teaching of Australian history, thewhite historians particularly mentioned the basic

premises such as myths of terra nullius and the images of heroic pioneers.As story of

colonization has been described in a school reader in 1911 as:

The story of our winning is peaceful a one. It is the story of fine colonization. In this

case there were no powerful tribes to oppose our settling in the land: the original

inhabitants were few in number, and of a very low order of civilization. Their

occupation of the country was of such a sort as to strike no roots in the soil (Casey

138).

This projection of the Aborigines as passive onlooker of the European colonization made it

important for the Aborigine writer to contest the European concept of colonization and

historicism of Australia. It is particularly challenging for Aborigines of Western Australia as

they had witnessed or heard stories of the events of the century-long history of resistance at

the frontiers of settlement. The image projected in this reader denies the history as

remembered by the Aborigines. It wiped out the history of resistance at the frontiers of

settlement, from the battle of Pinjarra in the early 1830s to the Oombulgarri (Umbali)
massacre in 1926 by police and settlers in Kimberly. These two incidents were projected and

highlighted in Jack Davis’s Kullark and No Sugar respectively.

There were many notable massacres of the Aborigines by Whites and vice versa. In

No Sugar Jack Davis used the historical record of documented play. He is able to establish a

simultaneous position as a chronicler of, and participant in, the Aboriginal past. He is doing

this by using one of his characters Billy. Billy’s recounting of the Oombulgarri (Umbali)

Massacre is as follows:

BILLY: Big mob, 1926, kill’em big mob my country…

Big mob politzmans, and big mob from stations, and shoot ‘em

everybody mens,Koories, little yumbah. (he grunts and mimes pulling a trigger)

They chuck ‘em on a big fire, chuck ‘em in river.

(They sit in silence, mesmerized and shocked by Billy’s gruesome story)

JIMMY: Any-body left, your mob?

BILLY: Not many, gid away, hide. But no one stop that place now, they

all go another Country.

JOE: Why?

BILLY: You go there, night time you hear ‘em. I bin bring cattle that way for

Wyndham meat works. I hear ‘em. Mothers cryin’ and babies cryin’,

screamin’. Wai wai! Wawai! Wawai!

They sit in silence staring at Billy who stares into the fire (Davis, No Sugar 67-68).

Billy’s account of the massacre of his people in the Kimberly region is adapted from the

report of such a massacre by Daniel Evans, taken down verbatim by the novelist Randolph

Stow and quoted in full in his book To the Islands, Picador, 1983 (Davis, No Sugar 117).

The Aborigines in return responded with violence. At first revenge was taken on those

Europeans who were thought to be responsible, however as time passed the violence and
conflict between the Europeans and Aborigines escalated as the violence began to took sexual

form as well. Rape and abduction of Aboriginal women became common as Reverend

Threlkeld at his Lake Macquarie mission in 1824 wrote that he was tormented at night by the

shrieks of girls, about eight or nine years of age, taken by force by the vile men of New-castle

(Broome 45). Though the Aborigines tried their best to resist the European invaders, all their

attempts were effectively quelled by the Europeans as they were more powerful with their

guns, horses and the ‘Native Police Force’- created specially to fight the Aboriginal

resistance and eventually it helped end the resistance of the Aborigines. The ‘native’ police

force was established in Port Phillip in 1842, in New South Wales in 1848 (officially in

1855), and in Queensland in 1859. “They marked the absolute rock bottom of government

Aboriginal policy. Not only was violence against the Aborigines being institutionalized, but

several hundred Aborigines were being encouraged to hound and kill other Aborigines in the

service of colonial expansion” (Broome 49). Young Aboriginal men joined these forces for a

number of reasons- they were promised uniforms, wages and education, and to many, it

seemed to be a means of survival as the Europeans outnumbered them anyway and murdered

those who resisted them and got in their way. Stories of European atrocities spread widely

and fear crept into the hearts and minds of many Aborigines. As Dr. Aileen Moreton

Robinson quote Elsie Roughsey’s grandfather, who told his son; “Never kill a white man,

because that fellow got plenty more like him, to come here and kill us all” (Moreton-

Robinson 4). Thus white Australian government strategized a multi-pronged policy to

stabilize its hegemony in a hostile land, which disputes telltale the grand myth of Australia’s

great silence.

Some allied perspectives too need to be discussed in the present context. One of the

most important methods used by the colonizers in their process of colonization was to make

the colonized subjects forget their language. Many British officials no doubt possessed some
good intentions towards the Aborigines, but the desire to possess, to dominate, to colonize,

was at odds with their humanitarianism. The contradictions between conscience and belief in

British supremacy arose again and again in the history of Australian colonization. For

instance, in 1838 Governor Gawler addressed the Aborigines in Adelaide: ‘Black men. We

wish to make you happy. But you cannot be happy unless you imitate white men. Build huts,

wear clothes and be useful… you cannot be happy unless you love God… Love white men…

learn to speak English. If any white man injure you tell the Protector and he will do justice’

(Broome 31). Thus, it became very important for the colonizers to make the colonized

subjects learn their language in order to understand and communicate effectively which

would help them in their process of colonization. The British officials taught some English

language to some of the natives in order to have a proper communication with the Aborigines

so that could turn to the advantage of the colony. Some of the British officials even

kidnapped the Aborigines when they could not find anyone willing to come into contact with

them. These captured Aborigines were forced to learn English so that they could act as

mediators between the two races.1

One of the main features of imperial oppression is the control over language and

therefore, language plays an important role in the writings and studies of post-colonial

literature. “Language is a fundamental site for struggle for post-colonial discourse because

colonial process itself begins in language” (Ashcroft, Bill. et al. 1999, 283). Therefore it

becomes one of the most crucial indicators of colonial authority. The crucial function of

language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing defines itself by seizing

the language of the center and replacing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place.

There are two distinct processes by which it does this. The first one is the abrogation or

denial of the privilege of ‘English’ involves a rejection of the metropolitan power over the

means of communication. The second one is the appropriation and reconstitution of the
language of the center, the process of capturing and remolding the language to new usages,

marks a separation from the site of colonial privilege (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 37). One of

colonization's missions was to enforce the English language on the colonized subjects in

order to control them more easily. One method of installing the overarching power of an

imperial tongue is to prohibit the ‘old’ language. Forbidding people to speak their own

tongues is the first step in the destruction of a culture (Gilbert and Tompkins 164). As one of

the characters in Jack Davis’s play, Barungin (Smell the Wind) (1988) Granny Doll states

that the wetjalas (whites) ‘killed [her] language’ (1989:36), which, to her, is the most

monumental crime that the wetjalascould have committed. The loss of one’s language leads

to the loss of oral history that could have far-reaching implications in the loss of culture,

tradition, customs and beliefs. Indigenous children were frequently taken from their parents

to be educated in schools and homes set up by the colonizers and there the children were

taught in the colonizer’s language. In these schools and homes the children were not allowed

to speak their own languages and they would be harshly punished if they disobeyed.

Language is wholly related with the speaker’s perception of freedom of expression

and dignity, but could both be diminished if the colonizer denies and rejects the linguistic

legitimacy of indigenous languages. Language’s ‘system of values—its suppositions, its

geography, its concept of history, of difference, its myriad gradations of distinction—

becomes the system upon which social, economic and political discourses are grounded’

(Ashcroft et al. 1999:283). The authority that the imposed language commands is much the

same as the authority of literate, official history over the unwritten, changeable histories of

the colonized subject. The naming and interpellative functions of the imperial language

exacerbate the disempowerment of indigenous peoples/cultures. To name people and places

in English, replacing any earlier constructions of location and identity, is to establish at least

partial control over reality, geography, history, and subjectivity. Interpellation, or ascribing
subjectivity to—here—the colonized subject, equally denies the existence of a previous

subjectivity or selfhood. The interpellative process of European languages frequently resulted

in a reductive and simplistic construction of colonized subjectivity as ‘other’, ignoring the

necessary cultural and personal individuation that selfhood generally presumes (Gilbert and

Tompkins 165).

However, the prevalent power of the imperial language has not been entirely

successful in its attempt to eradicate local, potentially resistant languages that threaten the

boundaries of imperial authority. The Australian experience as well as situation in this regard

is not materially different from the African experience. In order to resist the colonialist

ideology and recover their pre-colonial cultures, some native authors, such as Ngugi wa

Thiong’o of Africa, write in their own local language. The reason for Ngugi’s abrogation of

the English language can be seen in his chapter on “The Language of African Literature”

from his book Decolonizing the Mind in which he reads, “In Kenya English became more

than a language, and all has to bow before it in deference” and he goes on stating,

One of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the

vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment – three to five

strokes of the cane on bare buttocks – or was made to carry a metal plate around the

neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY… The attitude to

English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken or written English was

highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket to higher realms. English

became the measure of intelligence and ability in arts, the sciences, and all other

branches of learning. English become the main determinant of a child’s progress up

the ladder of formal education…orature (oral literature) in Kenya languages

stopped…Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from

ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds…Language as culture is the
 collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is the most

indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking,

articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next… Language

as communication and as culture is then a product of each other. Communication

creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and

culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by

which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world…I believe that my

writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and

parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenya and African peoples (Ashcroft et al.

1999:290).

However, many more writers have felt that this appeal to some cultural identity is doomed to

failure, and that the determination to use the language as an ethnographic tool has been a

more common of post-colonial writers. The appropriation of the colonizer’s language is

alternatively a subversive strategy and a subtle rejection of the political power of the standard

language. By adapting the alien language, such writers and speakers construct an ‘english’

which amounts to a very different linguistic vehicle from the received standard colonial

‘English’. As Bill Ashcroft demonstrates, “the belief that the English text is unable to

communicate a ‘non-english’ cultural meaning is based on the misconception of the way

language ‘means’. Meaning is seen to be a constitutive interaction within the ‘message

event’” (Ashcroft et al. 1999:284). However, the critical point still remains why the colonizer

did not encourage the native language to prosper, and why he did not write history of a

people in their own language. The other important thing to note is that when some writers

abrogate the English language, they face the difficulty of surviving in a publishing industry,

both in their own countries and internationally that requires the use of the English language.
 On the other hand there are many indigenous writers from former British colonies

who prefer to write in English such as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who had said, “[F]or

me there is no choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it” (Tyson 422).

There are also people/writers who follow Achebe and they state that English provides a

common language for the various indigenous peoples within the third and fourth world

nation, who use a number of different local languages, to communicate with one another.

English reaches across many local dialects, it is understood. But does English help the native

language grow to a competent state of literary expression? The colonial paradigm could least

afford such imaginations. Jack Davis also commented on his view in regard to the use of

English language:

I had always been interested in language, and found the English language and its

history exciting to study. The hidden roots of English, in particular Latin and Greek,

made the dictionary a constant source of fascination to me. Now that I was living

among the Nyoongahs, that interest embraced the Nyoongah language (qtd. in Crow

and Banfield 55).

Here Jack Davis expresses his appeal to both English and his native language. He seems to

show no resentment against English.

The use of Creole and Pidgin language also promotes to subvert the authority of

Standard English. Created from the combination and mixture of different languages, Pidgin

and Creole derive from contact between the colonized subjects and the colonizers in some

post- colonial cultures. The term ‘Pidgin’ tends to refer to linguistic forms which have arisen

from the blending of one imperial language with an indigenous language, whereas ‘Creole’

often points to the input of several source languages. Pidgin and Creole are considered as

inferior versions of particular imperial languages as it lacks correct grammatical structures.

Although their vocabulary commonly derives largely from appropriated and indigenized
European words, Creole and Pidgin languages also maintain significant pre-contact elements,

particularly in their phonology, syntax, and lexico-semantic structures. Creole languages are

prominent in regions where there has been a significant hybridizing of disparate cultures

(Gilbert and Tompkins 184). Jean D’ Costa, the Jamaican Children’s author, among other

writers, uses the concept of the ‘Creole continuum’ to describe the Caribbean writers:

The [Caribbean] writer operates within a polydialectical continuum with a creole

base. His medium, written language belongs to the sphere of standardized language

which exerts a pressure within his own language, community while embracing the

wide audience of international Standard English (Ashcroft et al. 2002:44).

This variable use of language—referred to as ‘code switching’—can be an effective means of

abrogating the imperial standard in favor of a culturally significant discourse (Ashcroft et al.

2002:46). Within the continuum, Creole languages are now becoming accepted not only as

the mass vernacular but also as a more democratized language for art, commerce, and

education. This movement represents a refusal to accept the imperialist judgment that Creole

or dialect languages should be suppressed since they are ‘corruptions’ or ‘bastardisations’ of

a pure model (Gilbert and Tompkins 185).

The Pidgin languages used by some post- colonial writers perform a similar resistance

to the imperial language. In almost all of Jack Davis plays he uses Aboriginal Pidgin English.

For instance, when Worru talks about Billy Kimberly:

WORRU: Ole Billy Kimberly, kia, not young Billy; that old man was moorditj

with kylie. He could make it go three times ’round that football ground

and come back right near his tkenna, An’ he use to ride that ’orse,

’member: Black – Black ’abit. [Clapping his hands and laughing] An’

when ’e used to ride that ’orse you couldn’t see him at night ’cause ’e

was black and the ’orse was black. Proper moornawooling, them two.
 Kia. [Laughing] An’ when ’e used to ride up the river the kids used

to hide in the bushes and call out ‘Wahrdung…Wahrdung…Black

Crow…Black Crow…’ an’ he used to allus carry a long gidtji, nor’-

west one, an’ he would ride over to them boys and yell out, ‘Which

boy call me black crow, which boy call me black crow? And them

boys would laugh and doogeearkiny down the river (Davis, The Dreamers 93).

Thus, in using Creole and Pidgin English post-colonial writers are appropriating as well as

abrogating the English language in order to subvert the Standard English maintained by the

imperialists. As Ashcroft et al. states in The Empire Writes Back:

The theory of the Creole continuum, undermining, as it does, the static models of

language formation, overturns ‘concentric’ notions of language which regard

‘Standard’ English as a ‘core’. Creole need no longer be seen as a peripheral variation

of English… the concept of what actually constitutes ‘English” consequently opens

itself to the possibility of radical transformation. It is indisputable that english

literature extends itself to include all texts written in language communicable to an

english speaker (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 46).

Most of the Australian Aboriginal writers write in English, however, there are writers

like Jack Davis, a Nyoongah, who also deliberately used untranslated Nyoongah words in

most of his works. For example, he used Nyoongah words such as ‘wetjala’ which means a

white person, a corruption of the English ‘white fellow’. Nyoongah characters use the term

‘wetjala’ (singular and plural) to refer to whites; this is not an Aboriginal word as such but a

new term created from the English: ‘white’ and ‘fellow’ (usually pronounced ‘fella’ in

Australia) have been merged and given a different pronunciation. Such changes in the lexicon

illustrate the colonized subjects’ ability to appropriate the language of the imperial center and

use it for their own expressive purposes. This indigenising process often has affective as well
as referential functions; in other words, it produces languages which operate not only to

convey new cognitive information but also to establish group identity. There are also many

other Nyoongah words in Davis’s plays, like ‘boondah’ for money, ‘kienya’ for shame, ‘kia’

for yes, ‘unna’ for isn’t it?, ‘moorditz’ for good etc. (these Aboriginal words are selected

from Jack Davis’s plays) Leah Purcell also uses traditional Murri language and Murri English

in her play Box The Pony. The use of “this composite ‘impure’ language survives in words

and phrases embedded in vernacular English, it functions as a secret code that excludes

members of the white audience, giving them the salutary experience of not quite

understanding what is going on” (Hodge 103). This technique is continuously used by almost

all Aboriginal playwrights and writers and it is one of the most important dramatic devices

used in the Aboriginal theatre.

The use of this “technique of selective lexical fidelity which leaves some words

untranslated in the text is a more widely used device for conveying the sense of cultural

distinctiveness. Such a device not only acts to signify the difference between cultures, but

also illustrates the importance of discourse in interpreting cultural concepts” (Ashcroft et al.

2002: 63). The deliberate use of untranslated words clearly suggests that the language which

informs the text is an ‘other’ language. When a playwright chooses an indigenous language

over English, he or she refuses to submit to the dominance of the imposed standard language

and to subscribe to the ‘reality’ it sustains. Indigenous languages can be broadly defined as

those which were native to a culture prior to colonization; however, it should be noted that

such languages undergo changes, mostly at the lexical level, as speakers adopt ‘foreign’

words and invent new ones to describe a changed order of experience. Given that colonial

authorities often banned the use of indigenous languages, especially in public places, their

presentation on stage can represent an act of defiance and an attempt to recover cultural

autonomy. It could also suggest that by using these untranslated words the writers in a way
urge and wish that the non-indigenous spectators or audience would bother to look up the

meaning or learn the Indigenous language, if not words. “While in semiotic terms, language

resonates with every other theatrical signifier, it is often viewed by audiences as the

fundamental and most important system through which a play ‘means’. When colonized

people hear dialogue spoken in their own tongue—and not in the ‘correct’ British English

often erroneously assumed to be the only language worth staging—they understand it through

literal, metaphorical, and political frames of reference which are specific to their own culture

and experience” (Gilbert and Tompkins 168). The use of an indigenous language on stage

therefore ‘localizes and attracts value away from a British “norm” eventually displacing the

hegemonic centrality of the idea of “norm” itself’ (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 35-36). In regard to

this, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins define post-colonial performance as including the

following features:

• acts that respond to the experience of imperialism, whether directly or indirectly;

• acts performed for the continuation and/or regeneration of the colonised (and

sometimes pre-contact) communities;

• acts performed with the awareness of, and sometimes the incorporation of, post-

contact forms; and

• acts that interrogate the hegemony that underlies imperial representation (11).

Thus, with the points mentioned above it could be concluded that it is not wrong or uncritical

to study and view the Australian Aboriginal drama in the light of post-colonial theory. Post-

colonial stages are primarily significant areas from which to enunciate linguistic resistance to

imperialism.

Indigenous Australians playwrights utilize subversive techniques in theatre by

borrowings from western literary and stage models and at the same time they symbolizes

truth telling in the act of speaking about their versions of history. They produced a number of
auto-biographical Aboriginal works such as Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell’s Box the Pony,

Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The Seven Stages of Grieving, and Tammy

Anderson’s I Don’t Want to Play House etc. As Helen Thomson quotes, “Hybridity in

various forms is a well-documented postcolonial strategy that can be confronting and

subversive and sometimes has a particular fitness in expressing the mixed racial and cultural

heritage of many Aborigines. It also complicates assumptions that naturalism is the stage

convention to which Aboriginal writing has almost exclusively adapted itself” (Thomson

136). In Deborah Mailman’s semi-autobiographical play, The 7 Stages of Grieving she comes

forward and approaches the audience in the 22nd scene ‘Plea’ and what she reveals is what

most Aboriginal playwrights want to do:

You know there has always been this grieving,

Grieving for our Land, our families.

Our cultures that have been denied us.

But we have been taught to cry quietly

Where only our eyes betray us with tears.

But now, we can no longer wait,

I am scared my heart is hardening.

I fear I can no longer grieve

I am so full and know my capacity for grief.

What can I do but...perform.

These are my stories.

These are my people's stories.

They need to be told (Mailman 73).

Stolen, by Jane Harrison, provides an interesting example of an adaptation of fictional

biographies into a different realm of truth-telling, through the device of linking the five
children’s stories with the real-life stories of the actors, each of whom tells the audience, as

actors and Aborigines, at the end of the play, of their own family’s involvement in the stolen

generations narrative. It also fore grounded an issue that has become an important theme in

most of the other Aboriginal plays. The fact that it was originally commissioned by the

Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op- erative indicates that it is not

entirely inaccurate to describe the play as an adaptation of oral history into performance art.

It represents a selection of representative stories from the vast oral history archives of

Aboriginal Australians, only some of which have found their way into print. Its power also

derives from the incorporation of so many other Aboriginal narratives, usually recast in

various white dis-courses, all of which are have been caused by child theft. These range from

serial child theft, sexual abuse, alcoholism, suicide in custody, cultural con-fusion, violence,

mental illness to physical and psychological cruelty. In Stolen, the negative, racist stereotypes

of Aboriginality can be deconstructed to reveal their source in the grotesque imbalance of

power between black and white, neatly captured in the utter powerlessness of black children

in an orphanage.

In Stolen, the character of Jimmy while representing the Stolen Generation children at

the same time he also represents members of death in custody. Jimmy is always told that his

mother was dead, which, he didn’t believe in the scene “Your Mum’s Dead”:

JIMMY: She’s not dead, she’s not.

MATRON: [voice over] Just forget her.

JIMMY: She’s wouldn’t have left me alone, she’s going to

come for me, just you wait… (Stolen 12).

Jimmy is always in a quandary of whether his mother is alive or not. The Matron keeps on

telling him that she’s dead and to forget her, but, Jimmy is hopeful of reuniting with his
mother. The feeling of being unloved and left alone makes Jimmy angry that he finds no

purpose in obeying the government, police or officials, which very often lets him gets into

trouble with the law. He is frequently in and out of jail and he describes himself as a ‘thug

and a thief’. It was during his visit to a bar after just being released from prison that Jimmy

learns about his mother. At first he didn’t believe, as he is always the impression that his

mother is dead. After the mention of his mother’s name, he was filled with shocked and

excitement:

JIMMY: Willy what? Wa-ju-ri! Willy Wajurri. Fuck me dead.

[He laughs.] So my mother’s not dead – those lying bastards.

And I’ve got a family. It’s a long time since I’ve seen my

people… so I’ve got a mother, eh?… I’ve got a mother (Harrison, Stolen 27).

Having found out about each other Jimmy and his mother are very excited and at the same

time anxious to meet each other. In the scene “What Do You Do?” the son and the mother

project anxiety in the prospect of meeting each other is seen:

JIMMY: What do you do when you meet your mother for the first time in twenty-six

years? Shake her hand? Give her a hug? Do I show her me footy trophies, and me

chool reports?

JIMMY”S MOTHER:Twenty- six years is a long time. Gees, what if I don’t

recognize him? What’ll I say to him?

JIMMY: Do I say, ‘Hi, Mum, what’s new? How have you been? Where have you

been all my life?’ Do I give her twenty- six Christmas presents and twenty-six

birthday presents? Bloody hell, I don’t even know when her birthday is…

JIMMY”S MOTHER: Maybe we’ll be like strangers. Maybe he’ll be

ashamed of me. He probably doesn’t even know how much I’ve missed…

…
 JIMMY”S MOTHER:Will he like me?

JIMMY: She might not even like me.

JIMMY”S MOTHER:Will he love me?

JIMMY: Will she feel like my mother…? I don’t even

know what having a mother feels like (Harrison, Stolen 29-30).

The heart of a mother has not dried up, but the heart of a son is not grown in absence of the

mother. Jimmy’s mother ardently writes letters to Jimmy which he never gets hold of. She is

also searching and enquiring about him and at long last when they are about to meet finally,

there is a poignant twist of fate. Jimmy’s mother has always warped a present for Jimmy of

all the twenty-six years he was kept away from her. Before meeting her son she pulls the

presents out of the box and lays them on the floor. She takes time to consider each one, as

they represent all the love she was not able to give her son. Then she collapses and dies. At

the same moment Jimmy stands happily, oblivious of his mother’s death, says: “I’m finally

going to meet my mother” (Stolen 30)

His mother’s death is a heavy blow for Jimmy’s troubled soul. There is a profound

grief in his words: “Oh Mum, if you’d just held on a little longer…” (Stolen 32) A lifelong

quest and effort to be with his mother has come to nothing, Jimmy seeks refuge in suicide.

The prison warden finds him hanging.

The warden shines her light on Jimmy’s letter. Anger, despair, sorrow and finally

resignation well up in Jimmy as he speaks from his noose:

They kept saying she was dead… but I could feel her spirit. Mum was alive and I

waited for her to come and get me, to take me home. I was just a little tacker, for

god’s sake…Dear Mum, forgive me. I have sinned. I’ve been a thug and a thief – but

I’ve never stolen anyone’s soul… Oh, why couldn’t you have lived a bit longer just so

I could meet you? I waited so long. Brothers, don’t give up fighting. Don’t let it
 happen again. Don’t let them take babies from their mother’s arms. Someone’s gotta

fight. I just can’t no more. They stuck a knife into me heart and twisted it so hard.

Prison don’t make you tough, it makes ya weak, ya spirit just shrivels up inside. I’m

going now, to be with my mother. I can’t fight. I’m punched out. My only wish is that

we go to the same place. Willy Wajurri (Harrison, Stolen 33-34).

Jimmy’s suicide note contains significant messages of the plight of the stolen generations.

The statement “I’ve been a thug and a thief – but I’ve never stolen anyone soul” is an

implication that white Australia has stolen his soul by depriving him of his family, his

culture, religion etc. Jimmy is punched out he couldn’t fight it any longer, he has been

subjected to so many cruelties that he doesn’t have the strength to fight back. However, he

urges his fellow sufferers to continue to struggle against the oppressive measures that have

rendered them into their miserable conditions.

The Jimmy story is not only a trace of the endless torment and persecution of the

Aborigines under white colonizers. It also tells the story of many Aboriginal deaths in

custody. It also challenges the white Australians notion of the history of Australia in the form

of many such personal experiences being narrated in the theatre. He presents Australia’s

Aboriginal history in a language that goes straight to the heart, a language that could shake up

the latent conscience of the white Australians and make it view with horror its appalling

subjection of the unfortunate inhabitants. Wesley Enoch, the director of Stolen, commented,

“It reminds the audience that they haven’t just sat through a show. They sat through people’s

lives.” The Stolen’ narrative brings to view a significantly different notion of the soul other

than the white man’s concept. It is resoundingly a living concept which houses all

relationships in one place and furthers their growth. This seems to truly reflect the original

Aborigine’s natural spirit.

 A literal adaptation of a black narrative which could be included in the field of semi-

autobiography or biography, can be found in Richard J. Frankland’s Conversations with the

Dead, first performed at the Carlton Courthouse in February, 2002. In this play we find a

deliberate blurring of fictional character and autobiographical confession. The main

character, Jack is a prototype of the author, Richard Frankland himself, whose experience as

the only indigenous member of the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody cost him

dearly. Jack begins with a direct address to the audience:

Imagine that you’re a Koorie, that you’re in your mid-twenties, that your job is to

look into the lives of the dead and the process, policy and attitude that killed them.

Imagine seeing that much death and grief that you lose your family, and you begin to

wonder at your own sanity. Imagine when the job’s over but the nightmares remain

and the deaths keep on happening more than ever. What would you do? Where would

you put the memories? What would keep you sane? Who do you think could

understand what you carry inside you? (Frankland, Conversations with the Dead 221-

222)

In the play Frankland is giving witness to Aboriginal deaths in custody, and as the only

indigenous participant in the investigation, he assumes the burden of spokesperson for his

culture. The play is a massive subversion of the official report, converting its official form

and conclusions into a testimony that claims for the subjugated narrative all the power of

performance, its huge emotional affect, its confrontation of actors and audience in the same

time and place, its demand that the spectators witness the ongoing cost of killing black people

while they were in police custody. In fact it draws upon all the power of the imaginative

work, of a work of literature as well as performance, using songs and music, for example, to

great effect, to make us understand the horrendously destructive cultural encounter that has

characterized black/white relations in Australia from the start (Thomson 138).

 Like Stolen, Conversations with the Dead dramatizes a series of stories about

individuals with whom, because they are dead, Frankland can only imagine conversations.

Where Harrison’s play encapsulates five characters out of hundreds of stolen stories in

Stolen, Conversations with the Dead similarly condenses into a handful of stories, the 124

deaths in custody in an eight year period, of which 99 were investigated, and for which no

one was ever charged (Frankland, Conversations with the Dead, 232 & 242). The play not

only represents the official report that was in part written by the play’s author, but also an

imaginative adaptation of the many spoken sources behind this report. Frankland was almost

broken by the ordeal of listening to the narratives of death; his torment is seen throughout the

play. In a scene where his prototype Jack addresses the audience:

Sometimes you have to be what you don’t want. Maybe its fate, maybe it’swhat

meant to be, maybe you have to use this pain to help others. My pain, your pain, our

pain (Frankland, Conversations with the Dead 231).

He feels the pain of the death and at the same time he feels guilty as he is employed by the

white Australian government as one of the members in Royal Commission into Deaths in

Custody. He feels guilty to his fellow Aborigines as he says to David, a character in

Conversations with the Dead, whose dead body was examined by Jack:

So I get to feel guilty because your life and death make me more well-known, because

your experience becomes mine and our lives become more so intertwined that I don’t

know where one begins and one ends (ibid.).

Richard Frankland was deeply tormented by his job at the Royal Commission into Deaths in

Custody and at the same time he felt that he was able to help his own people and understands

them better. His projected his ordeal and pain in the play, as in one scene Jack, addresses the

audience:
 I have death in me and on me and I can’t get rid of it. Sometimes I am too scared to

hold children because I feel like I am sucking the life from them and I can see death

when I walk down the street…

In fact, when I walk down the street I see pain in people’s faces and I know that they

have lost someone recently or that they are having a hard time.

Like I said earlier, I see the faces of the dead, and I see the world through a

mother’s tears all the time. I can see sadness in the streets, pain in people’s faces,

grief in their hands and the way they walk. I can see loneliness like a man sees a long-

lost brother, I do see hope sometimes… and love, I see love, from pain and grief, this

is what hurts most of all (Frankland, Conversations with the Dead 260).

Frankland’s profound understanding of the Aborigines who died in custody is emphasized

throughout the pain and his own feeling of powerlessness permeated throughout the play. The

mental agony he has gone through and the deep scaring of his psyche is found in a scene

where his prototype Jack, once again address the audience:

I’m looking for hanging points, ’cause every morning when I wake up I talk myself

out of killing myself. But I go through the motions, I find the hanging points in my

house, start off my bedroom and then work my way through the lounge into the

backyard.

I don’t think I’ll ever do it but I try different stuff out…(Conversations with the Dead

264).

This scene clearly suggests his quandary and at the same time the last line indicates his

aversion to suicide unlike the character Jimmy from Stolen, who urges his fellow Aborigines

not to give up fighting, but give in to suicide. Although, Frankland felt the mental torment

and pain in examining the Aboriginal dead body in custody and also the dilemma by having

to convert them into a white Australian official document. He found some kind of healing in
then undertaking a further adaptation into a play, where some of those voices could be given

a public airing. As his mother Tina Saunders, in an interview said, “He couldn’t speak about

it, but I always knew he’d write something out of that pain” (Bunworth “interview”).

The theme of survival is another one important aspect in the Aboriginal writings.

Most of the Aboriginal writings have carried the message ‘we have survived’. It is a message

that runs through Jack Davis’s The Dreamers and Kullark. In Kullark, Davis develops the

theme of survival and sustained Aboriginal resistance. The sentiment of the entire play can be

seen in the last part of the play when a black actor came forward with a poem and ends the

play as:

With murder, with rape, you marred her skin,

But you cannot whiten her mind.

They will remain my children forever,

The black and the beautiful kind.

The black and the beautiful kind (Davis, Kullark IV).

The pithy sentences here are characteristics of the Aboriginal spirit. The Aborigine paradigm

of ‘black and beautiful’ proudly dismisses the other paradigm of white as beautiful. This is

recognition and acknowledgement of native identity with forceful conviction. However,

though they survived oppression of different kinds under the white dominance, The Dreamers

addresses the problems of how the Aborigines survive in the suburbia with an Aboriginal

sense of identity, as Worru an Aboriginal old man puts in the first scene:

Now we who were there

Who were young,

Are now old and live in suburbia,

And my longing is an echo

a re-occurring dream,
 Coming back along the track

From where the campfires used to gleam (Davis, The Dreamers 73).

In The Dreamers, Jack Davis takes up the squalor and meaninglessness of some of the

contemporary Aboriginal living, depicting the lifestyle of a typical Aboriginal urban

household in the 1980s, combined with nostalgia for a traditional Aboriginal past. The play

makes clear that the current social problems and demoralization of the Wallitch family have

long historical roots.

The title of Davis’s play brings into memory the relevance of the ‘dreamer’ to the

Australian past. The Australian Aboriginal ‘dreamer’ is a spirit with transformative powers.

He is usually accompanied by clapsticks and the music of the didgeridoo, the dreamer

appears as a (male) dancer who is only visible to the audience and to certain chosen

characters. He represents the pre-contact past (when traditions, laws, and taboos were

observed without the interference of white society) and functions dramatically to highlight

the destruction of Aboriginal culture that has ensued since European settlement. This

emphasis on the past does not mean, however, that the dreamer is fixed in time and place;

rather he is a timeless figure situated outside, and in opposition to, the bounded and

quantifiable spaces of western empiricism (Gilbert and Tompkins 236). As a link between the

present and the ancestral world, the dreamer’s tasks include ‘dancing’ the spirit of a dying

person back to the land of his or her individual dreaming. Performatively, the dreamer

embodies indigenous tradition since he is costumed, adorned, and marked with ceremonial

paint as a cultural icon that signifies Aboriginality. The Aboriginal dreamer performs

subversively as he claims all areas of the stage, his dance reinforcing the tangible presence of

the Aboriginal past in spite of western encroachment upon indigenous time and space.

Davis’s The Dreamers centralizes its spirit character for precisely this purpose: while the

derogated body of Uncle Worru is prominent at the level of realistic action, the metamorphic
body of the dreamer supplies a surrealistic frame that stresses the persistence and resistance

of Aboriginal culture. At times, the dreamer also temporarily imbues the ill, diseased, or frail

human body with ‘super-human’ strength (ibid.).

Like in Kullark, the past and present are intermingled skillfully in the character of

Worro, as memories both happy and sad. Survival and inner strength is also one of the

themes of Leah Purcell’s Box The Pony. It is a semi- autobiographical story of Leah Purcell,

a young girl growing up in a bush community, and how she overcomes and frees herself like

“bungaburra” (blue crane). The play is a one-person show which portrays among other things

the rawness of contemporary Aboriginal experience. Leah creates Steff, her alter ego, to retell

her life, which is characterized by a difficult upbringing to a nearly disastrous young

adulthood and then to a triumphant later life as Leah, an acclaimed performer and boxer. The

word box is used in two ways in the play: “to fight” and “to package something” and the final

scene determines that Leah will not be boxed up; instead she’s going to fight her way out as

she says in the scene: “I came from a long line of champions.” Box The Pony records the

struggle of many Aboriginal people by tracing Leah’s life.

One of the important characteristic features of Aboriginal writing is representing life

in stories with subtle humor. The Selected playwrights have all used humor in their works,

though none of their plays could be termed as a comedy. In almost all the works of Jack

Davis humor plays an important part, as in The Dreamers, humor is an important component

of the Aboriginal self-image. In the scene Act One – Scene Seven of The Dreamers, we find

the conflicting convictions, which dictate the life of the Aborigines i.e. between the

traditional Aboriginal religion and modern Christianity. As the Wallitch family is sitting

down to a meal of roast kangaroo:

SHANE: Do we only say grace when we are eating kangaroo?

 ROY: [putting his spoon back on his plate and swallowing] We

thank you, Lord, for what –

WORRU: You put some bacon in this?

ROY: We thank you –

WORRU: Bacon, wah?

SHANE: Ssh, ssh, Popeye, close your eyes.

ROY: We thank you, Lord.

WORRU: What for? Can’t eat with my eyes closed.

ROY: We thank you, Lord, for what we have got.

WORRU: [to Shane, pointing upwards] I forgot about that fella up

there.

ROY: Oh, Gawd! (Davis, The Dreamers 103).

This is subversive of the Christian paradigm which was brought to the Aborigines. The

Christian sacred habit is not borne out of conviction. Worru’s casual tone of playfulness does

undermine not too deep a belief but with a tinge of irony. This language aspect also uncovers

the nexus between other forces of power relations in Australia.

Though the language barrier between the Aborigines and the missionaries facilitated

to the Aborigines efforts to remain traditional, the Aborigines were not prepared to

comprehend some Christian concepts. They had no understanding of hell, no knowledge of

geography to place the events of the Bible, and no comprehension of the Christian parables

about flocks and shepherds for they had never seen sheep. When shown Biblical pictures, the

Aborigines saw only a white God, a white Jesus, a white angels and a black devil, and were

naturally alienated by this European color symbolism of white as good and black as evil. The

Bible stories to them were a story of power and injustice. Therefore, the Christian message

was either confused or was not accepted as it was intended (Broome 117). According to
Richard Broome, “If the European missionaries all over Australia had been able to detach

themselves from association with European power and cultural dominance, they might have

gained more Aboriginal converts. As it was, they remained colonial managers as well as men

of God, and this mixture alienated the Aborigines” (Broome 119). Thus, missionaries in

colonial cultures are interesting and ambiguous agents of empire. Although they were very

well intentioned towards the indigenous people they encountered, they have little regard in

preserving the indigenous cultures. The missionaries occupied a very ambivalent and

ambiguous position within the Aboriginal cultures. They were driven by the ideas that

Christianity could bring a better tomorrow for the ‘pagan Aborigines’. While most other

Europeans in contact with the Aborigines did little to change Aboriginal ways, the

missionaries tried to strike at the heart of Aboriginal culture, defeat it, and put Christianity

and European customs in its place. Though the Aborigines resisted this attack for a long

while, but great changes have occurred and the battle has been lost in some communities. The

heartening thing is that a number of missionaries saw the value of Aboriginal culture from the

outset, and that others were flexible enough to change their opinions. As pastor Albrecht of

Hermannsburg mission in central Australia once remarked: ‘When we first came here we

thought we had found the only people in the world without a religion. Now we have learnt

that they are among the most religious people in the world’ (Broome 123). As Johannes

Fabian has argued, not only ‘the crooks and brutal exploiters, but honest and intelligent

agents of colonialism need to be accounted for’ in order to build up a nuanced, complicated

vision of colonialism and its aftermath (Johnston 105).

Though, there is violence, sorrow and suffering in Davis’s plays there is humor and

endurance, which is bitter sweet. Davis’s great skill is his ability to balance conflict between

police and prisoners, “protectors” and their “cares”, magistrates and defendants- with the

usage of a little humor relevant to their situation as we find in the scene from No Sugar:
 SERGEANT: Look, there’s nothing I can do about it except put in a reminder to the

Department in Perth. Why don’t youse go around to St.John’s and ask the vicar?

MILLY: For blankets? He’ll give us nothin’, he’s like that.

GRAN: (adopting a praying attitude) Yeah, when he come to Gubment Well he

goes like that with his eyes closed and he says the Lord will help you,

and now he prays with his eyes open, ‘cause time ‘fore last Wow Wow

bit him on the leg… musta wanted a bit a’ holy meat (Davis, No Sugar 43).

Here, Gran is making fun of the vicar, throughout the play we find ironic humor in a subtle

manner. The humor seen in many Aboriginal plays derives from the traditions and particular

skills of the Aborigines, especially those of mime and impersonation. In his interview with

Adam Shoemaker, in talking about the distinctive Aboriginal world view, which was

reflected in the Aboriginal drama, Davis’s states:

Oh, yes. You see, we've always been acting. Aboriginal people are the greatest actors

in the world... we've acted up before magistrates, we've acted up before the police,

we've acted up before social workers; we've always done our own mime. It's not too

long since we were introduced to television and all that type of thing, and when we

lived in the Bush we had our own way of doing these things ourselves, so that's why

it's not so difficult for me to find an Aboriginal theme.... Like the man who burns his

feet and he doesn't even know his feet are alight. He's standing on the fire and he says,

[imitating voice] 'By Crikey, I can smell somethin' burnin' there! You fellas burn an

old bag over there somewhere? Or you burnin' kangaroo skin?' [New voice] 'Uncle!

You're standing in the fire! Get out of the fire there!' He never wore boots for forty

years and he's got callouses on his feet that thick, and he was standing in the fire. His

feet were burning and he didn't even know it! And laughed-you know that, [claps]

that went around the camp for a week. Well, little incidents like that, you know, that
 carry on all the time-it's not very hard to put 'em down on paper. I'm sure the

Aboriginal playwrights have seen that (Shoemaker 111-116).

The humor is often critical but is never really offensive. Adam shoemaker rightly states in his

book, Black Words, White Page, “The mimicry and mockery of whites and the humorous

celebration of their own lifestyle has been one way in which blacks have opposed the

encroachments of European society, and have asserted their own independence and capacity

for endurance” (Shoemaker 233). He also stated that this reliance upon laughter in the midst

of adversity is an important element in the Aboriginal self-image. It is one which emerges

very clearly in Aboriginal literature, particularly in Black Australian drama.

To corroborate his statement, he further quoted Australian anthropologist Anna

Haebich who has commented: “Aboriginal people keep on laughing to stay afloat. In

interviews they emphasize the good times and it’s very hard indeed to get them to talk about

the bad times” (ibid.). Moreover, humor serves as an important twofold to undermine white

authority and to reinforce agency: Blair [an indigenous film director] uses humor to chide or

subtly mock or ‘take the piss’ out of non-Aboriginal viewers, and contest their perceived

‘knowledge’ of Aboriginal people and their preoccupation with notions of cultural

‘authenticity’. Humor also in a way emphasizes the action of the Aboriginal subjects through

non- confrontational, but as an active and effective mode of resistance. Humor then is not

only a means of making the audience laugh. The non-Aboriginal viewers or theatre-goers are

sometimes laughed at by the playwrights and performer without them acknowledging it. The

humor and mimicry could act as an important means of non-confrontational ways of

resistance. Mimicry, according to Bhabha, is an exaggerated copying of language, culture,

manners and ideas. This exaggeration means that mimicry is repetition with difference, and

so it is not evidence of the colonized servitude. In fact, mimicry is also a form of mockery, it
mocks and undermines the ongoing pretentions of colonialism and empire. According to

Homi K Bhabha:

Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of

difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse

mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must

continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference…mimicry emerges as the

representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal (Bhabha 122).

Bhabha further comments: “Under cover of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-

object that radically revalues the normative knowledges of the priority of race, writing,

history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them.

Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its ‘otherness’, that which it disavows”

(Bhabha 130). Thus the colonized subjects, in the aspect of this thesis i.e. the Aboriginal

playwrights are resorting to mimicry to unsettle the artistic domination of the Western and

European canon. Their use of mimicry is clearly subversive: rather than signally a form of

cultural cringe, it creates a “third hybrid space” which de-stabilizes rigid aesthetic Western

categories (Maufort 105).

Colonial discourse essentially wants the colonized subjects to be like the colonizers

but at the same time they do not want them to identical, they just want them to meet their so

called standard i.e. European or western standards. When the colonized subjects act and

dressed like the colonizers they were mocked by their own people. This is why derogatory

term like ‘coconut’ etc. came in existence among the colonized subjects. In both the plays of

Jack Davis’s No Sugar and The Dreamers, there is a mention of Billy Kimberly, a black

tracker, who used to track and bring back the run-away Aborigines to the Settlement. He was

called and teased by his fellow Aborigines:

 ‘Wahrdung…Wahrdung…Black Crow…Black Crow…’ an’ he used to allus carry a

long gidtji, nor’-west one, an’ he would ride over to them boys and yell out, ‘Which

boy call me black crow, which boy call me black crow? And them boys would laugh

and doogeearkiny down the river (Davis, The Dreamers, 93).

Thus, the Aboriginal writers used humor and mimicry to relive themselves of the repressions

faced by them, to critique the colonized modes of colonization and as a resistance tool against

the hegemony of white Australians. Using these techniques the Aboriginal playwrights are

(re)presenting their version of history in Australia. It may be acknowledged that the

Aboriginal theatre sharing with other genres of Aboriginal literature has been able to

dramatize more creatively the past of Australian history as suppressed or marginalized. This

theatre while representing the Australian reality becomes another cultural mode for

recovering Australian history from its assumed non-existence to historicity.

 ENDNOTES
1
The first prisoner who was captured by the Europeans was Arabanoo, he was captured at

Manly. Arabanoo quickly learned the language and proved to be quite a gentleman.

Unfortunately he died in the smallpox epidemic which wiped out half of the Gamaraigal in

mid 1789. In the following November, Bennelong was kidnapped but this clever fellow

escaped six months later with a smattering of English (Broome 31).

 WORKS CITED

Anderson, Ian. “Introduction: the Aboriginal critique of colonial knowing”. Blacklines:

Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman.

Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

Ashcroft, Bill. et al. The Post- Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

1999. Print.

---Ashcroft, Bill. etal. TheEmpire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial

literatures. London: Routledge. 2002. Print.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture.2nd Edition Routledge Classics, 270 Madison

Avenue, New York, NY 10016, 2014. Print.

Briskman, Linda. The Black Grapevine- Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen Generations.

Sydney: The Federation Press, 2003. Print.

Bunworth, Mick. “Indigenous playwright delves into dark memories.”Australian

Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast: 28/05/2002 Web 5th Sep 2014

<http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2002/s566701.htm>

Casey, Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1990,

Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2004. Print.

--- “Bold, Black, and Brilliant: Aboriginal Australian Drama.” A Companion to Australian

Aboriginal Literature. Ed. Belinda Wheeler. New York: Camden House. 2013. Print.

Davis, Jack.Kullark /The Dreamers. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1984. Print.

--- No Sugar. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1986. Print.

Frankland, Richard. “Conversations With the Dead”. Blak Inside: 6 Indigenous Plays form

Victoria. NSW 2012: Currency Press. 2002. Print.

Gilbert, Helen. Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, practice, politics.

London: Routledge. 1996. Print.

Gilbert, Helen. Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian

Theatre. USA: The University of Michigan Press. 1998. Print.

Grossman, Michelle. Blacklines- Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous

Australians. Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

Harrison, Jane. Stolen. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 2002. Print.

Hodge, Bob. “Jack Davis and the emergence of Aboriginal Writing.” Critical Survey. Vol. 6,

No.1, Australian Writing Today (1994) pp 98-104.JSTOR. Web. 19 Dec 2012.

Johnston, Anna. “The Well-Intentioned Imperialists: Missionary Textuality and (Post)

Colonial Politics.” Resistance and Reconcilaition: Writing in the Common Wealth.

Ed. Bruce Bennett et. al. The Association for Commonwealth Literature and

Language Studies (ACLALS) Canberra. 2003. Print.

Mailman, Deborah., and Wesley Enoch. The 7 Stages of Grieving. 2nd ed. Brisbane: Playlab

Press. 1999. Print.

Maufort, Marc. “Unsettling Narratives: Subversive Mimicry in Australian Aboriginal Solo

Performances Pieces.” Antipodes Vol. 14, No. 2 (December 2000) pp 105-110,

Wayne State University Press. JSTOR. Web 14 Oct 2014.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen.Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and

Feminism. Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2000. Print.

Rubidge, Sarah. “Does Authenticity matter? The Case for and against authenticity in

Performing Arts” Analysing Performance: A Critical Reader. Ed. Patrick Campbell.

Great Britain: Manchester University Press. 1996. Print.

Purcell, Leah. Box the Pony. Hodder Headline Australia Pty Ltd. 1999. Print.

Sered, Dannielle. Fall 1996. Accessed Web: 8 Sept. 2011.

<http://english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html>
Shoemaker, Adam. Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988.

Queensland 4067: Australia. University of Queensland Press.1992. Print.

--- Shoemaker, Adam. An Interview with Jack Davis. WESTERLY Imprint: 1982,

Volume 27, No. 4, DECEMBER, 1982, Pages 111 – 116.

Thomson, Helen. “Windshuttling The Right: Some Australian Literary and Historical

Adaptations for the Stage.” Web. 21 Sep 2014.

<https://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/viewFile/40/60 >

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today- A User Friendly Guide, 2nd Ed. Routledge: New York.

2006. Print.

Wisker, Gina. Key Concepts in Post Colonial Literature. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan.

2007. Print.
  
 
 
 
 
 

CHAPTER – III

THE BODY AS A SITE OF ABORIGINAL IDEOLOGY

AND IDENTITY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The ‘difference’ of the post-colonial subject by which he or she can be ‘othered’ is

felt most directly and immediately in the way in which the superficial differences of the

body; skin color, eye shape, hair texture and body shape, are read as indelible signs of the

‘natural’ inferiority of their possessors (Ashcroft et al. 1999:321). The Englishmen were

influenced by the notion of ‘black’ as dirty and evil and ‘white’ as clean and pure. The

English saw the Africans as ‘savages’ who were violent, lecherous, treacherous, and akin to

the apes of Africa (Broome 29). The first Englishman to document Australia, the then New

Holland, William Dampier, wrote in 1688: “The inhabitants of this Country are the

miserablest People in the world… They differ but little from Brutes… They have great Heads,

round Foreheads and great Browls. Their Eye-lids are half closed to keep the Flies out of

their Eyes”(Thompson 2011). So, generally the body became the dominant feature in which

the colonizers determined and undervalued the colonized subjects. As noted by Franz Fanon

many years ago, this is the inescapable ‘fact’ of blackness, a ‘fact’ which forces on ‘negro’

people a heightened level of bodily self-consciousness, since it is the body which is the

inescapable, visible sign of their oppression and denigration (Ashcroft et al. 1999:321).

Performance, as an embodied encounter, between people of different cultures

occupies a crucial position within the processes of recognition and misrecognition of the

other (Casey 155). In the context of the Australian aboriginal people, performance has been a

pivotal point of encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. The colonized

subjects are concerned with rejecting the colonially determined markers and descriptions of

themselves. They actively take part in trying to redefine themselves in their writings and are

redefining their identity on stage in order to overthrow the traditionally stereotype assigned to

them. This oppositional process of embodiment, whereby the colonized creates his or her

own subjectivity, ascribes more flexible, culturally laden, and multivalent delineations to the

body, rather than circumscribing it within an imposed, imperialist calculation of otherness.

The post-colonial stage offers opportunities to recuperate the colonized subject’s body—

especially when it has been maimed or otherwise rendered ‘incomplete’—and to transform its

signification and its subjectivity (Gilbert and Tompkins 205). Hence, the Aboriginal

playwrights have used theatre to reconstructs the white constructs of black life, culture and

history.

As theatre’s medium of articulation is space, it becomes a vital element in theatre

study. Theatre is consistently about space and it is always “a multifaceted space” (Tompkins

3). The space in the theatre adjusts to include several dimensions comprehensively, including

all the surroundings and places that are in real spaces and also the imagined spaces for

performance. The theatre is frames and sets in such a way that it intersect with the world off

stage. Or, as Anne Ubersfeld explains, ‘the stage symbolically represents sociocultural

spaces….In one way, theatrical space is the place of history’ (Tompkins 4). Space in theatre

is sometimes difficult to characterize as it could have number of possible meanings. In

Australia, the Aboriginal space performed in Australian theatre contests conventional

Australian history and culture, theatre became a contested space as Gearoid O Tuathail puts

it:

The struggle over geography is also a conflict between competing images and

imaginings, a contest of power and resistance that involves not only struggles to

represent the materiality of physical geographic objects and boundaries but also

equally powerful and, in a different manner, the equally material force of discursive

borders between an idealized Self and a demonized Other, between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Viewed from the colonial frontier, geography is not just a battle of cartographic

technologies and regimes of truth; it is also a contest between different ways of

envisioning the world (Tompkins14-15).

O Tuathail’s analysis of geography and space of both the colonizers and the colonized

perspectives in regard to land rights, nationalism, settlement etc. depicts the unsettlement that

take place in a place like Australia. The history of white settlement in Australia is precarious

and cause cultural anxiety. The white settlers have the notion that Australia was an empty

land, owned by no one (terra nullius) and therefore the white history overlooked the killing,

taming or ignoring the indigenous peoples and the redistribution of the lands among the

European settlers. The indigenous people started to talk about the real history of the

settlement and contestations of the white history actively take place in their writings,

especially in theatre. A key part of theatre’s potential social significance is the public

performance of theatrical events in a context that facilitates a dialogue with ideas, however

performance alone is not enough; theatre needs to be historicized as well (Tompkins 7).

In Aboriginal theatre, the body itself is the site of greatest potential resistance to white

Australians conceptualization of the Aborigines in Australia. Helen Gilbert, while discussing

“body politics” quotes Elizabeth Ferrier, “the body is the site of greatest potential resistance

to imperialist structurations of reality” (Gilbert 66). Performance as the verbal and visual

articulation of the body is seen as a logical medium for enacting such resistance, as it enables

to defy the imperialists’ scrutiny, which strives to subjugate the indigenous people in

constructing their being as inferior being. Performance allows the colonized subjects to

position themselves as a speaking, moving subject rather than manipulated objects. And as

the culture of the Aborigines is a preliterate culture it does not privilege the written word,

thus performance offers them spaces in theatre in which their versions of history might be

represented. And giving importance to the body can sometimes be very advantageous on the

part of the indigenous playwrights in reconstructing post-colonial subjectivity, because

European colonizers conceptualization of the Aborigines has been both deceptive and

convincing in their construction of the colonized subject as an inscribed object of knowledge.

The Aboriginal playwrights try to do away with the ideology of the white i.e. their

construction of their own body as superior and the Aboriginal body as inferior.

The Aboriginal playwrights and writers are now in position to accept and representing

their body in their own way. They try to subvert and break the stereotype of the whites who

believe and constructed that they were superior because of their skin color. In his plays Jack

Davis, skillfully address the unsighted accounts of settler history and literature on a number

of levels; he intelligently brings the black body to visibility through individual characters,

dancers and also through group interaction. Kullark, for example, reverses colonialism's

racial standards in a comic depiction of first contact when Mitjitjiroo responds to Captain

Stirling’s proffered hand by rubbing its skin vigorously to see if the white stain can be

removed:

STIRLING: [slapping his chest] Captain Stirling…Stir-ling.

[He extends his hand in a friendly gesture. YAGAN and MOYARAHN are reticent

but MITJITJIROO advances. Instead of shaking STIRLING’shand he rubs it

vigorously, to see if the colour will come off. Astounded, he runs back to the others.]

(Kullark 14).

This gesture, along with the Aborigines’ astonishment at the strange appearance of the

Europeans, denaturalizes the white body as the dominant sign of humanity. In a related scene

when Captain Stirling in trying to be friendly with the natives says:

STIRLING: Have we got anything we can give them?

FRASER: My butterfly net?

STIRLING: I don’t think they would attach much value to that. No, something

colorful. Your coat and trousers.

FRASER: I beg your pardon, sir?

STIRLING: Take your coat and trousers off, Mr. Fraser.

 [FRASER does so]

FRASER: Sir, is this really necessary?

[FRASER folds his trousers neatly. STIRLING offers them to MITJITJIROO. With

STIRLING’s help, MITJITJIROO dons the coat, but hands the trousers to YAGAN,

who tries to put them on as a coat. STIRLING moves to help YAGAN, but raises his

spear. They began to enjoy their new clothes.]

MOYARAHN: [Screaming] Allewah, allewah! [‘Look out, look out!]

Kynya, kynya, niijuk. Warrah bok, arrah bok. [‘Shame,

shame, this clothing is bad.’

[Didgeridoo music and clapsticks fade in.]

Baal warramut, warramut. [‘They are bad, bad.’] Yuarl

gnullarah kooliny.Yuarl gnullarah kooliny.Yuarl, yuarl, yuarl.

[‘Come, let us go. Come, let us go. Come, come, come.] (Davis, Kullark 14-15).

The scene here highlights the different opinion of the white Europeans and the native

Australians, while the white Europeans believe that clothing is a sign of civility the natives

clearly differ, as to them it is a bad sign. It evokes fear and mistrust in the female character,

Moyarahn. European clothing does not bring a particular level of civility desired by the

invader but functions instead as a wayward signifier that might provoke white audience to

shift their perspectives – to see themselves as the others of their Others (Gilbert 68).

In Stolen, Jane Harrison also uses this kind of reversal technique in the scene,

“Sandy’s Story of a Mungee”. Sandy tells the story of a Mungee in order to help Ruby get

over her fear of dark. The Mungee was an “outcast from the mob”, who would sneak into the

Aboriginal people’s camp and “stole one of the children” and ate them up. The mob couldn’t

catch the Mungee as he came under the cover of darkness. As Sandy continues:
 …The mob were frightened and upset and crying. They tried hiding the children but

the Mungee always found them. ‘The Mungee’s stealing our babies’, they cried to the

elders. ‘What are we going to do? We can’t catch him because we can’t see him in the

dark!’ The elders thought about it and came up with a plan. They would cast a spell

on him. The next day the elders waited for the Mungee, and when they sensed his

presence they threw magic powdered bone all over him. It stuck in his hair and on his

skin and couldn’t scrub it off. The Mungee was turned into a pale skin and that was

his punishment. He would never be able to sneak into the camp to steal the children

because he would be seen. And the people would know. And the people would never

forget. … It’s not dark you need to be afraid of (Harrison, Stolen 10).

Here Sandy’s story skillfully portrays ironical reversal of the dark, evil, child-eating Mungee

who is being exposed and punished and made into a "pale skin", and reminds Ruby that it is

not dark that ought to be feared. There is a direct hinting of the Mungee as the white

Australian government who stole children from their black mothers and all the children as the

children of the “stolen generation”. “The Mungee came for them, in big cars, disguised as

‘welfare,’ or church ministers, and they gobbled up in a powerful bureaucratic system solely

and simply because their mothers were black” (Thompson 16). In the context of the

Aboriginal people, the white ideology of evil, associated with the dark/black, is in now in the

guise of white stealing children from their parents.

In theatre, the actor’s body is one of the most prominent symbols; the physical body is

prominent from other symbols because of its ability to suggest diverse meanings. As drama is

the most primal method of artistic expression, mediated by no pigment, print, or lens, it

communicates directly through the raw material of the pulsating human body; its rhythmic

movement, sounds, and presence (Figueiredo 82). The performing body indicates the

meaning of the drama through its appearance and actions. It also indicates categories like race
and gender and also express place and account of the story through skillful mimic and action.

Furthermore, the body relates to all the other adjuncts of theatre such as costume, stage

setting, lighting, music, acting and dialogue and needless to say with the audiences. Thus, it

can be said that the body functions as one of the most charged sites of theatrical

representation. The colonial subject’s body contests its stereotyping and representation by

others to insist on self-representation by its physical presence on the stage. The colonized

subject’s body, according to Elleke Boehmer, has been an object of the colonizer’s

fascination and repulsion (and, in effect, possession) in sexual, pseudo-scientific, and

political terms:

In colonial representation, exclusion or suppression can often literally be seen as

‘embodied’. From the point of view of the colonizer specifically, fears and curiosities,

sublimated fascinations with the strange or the ‘primitive’, are expressed in concrete

physical and anatomical images.... [T]he Other is cast as corporeal, carnal, untamed,

instinctual, raw, and therefore also open to mastery, available for use, for husbandry,

for numbering, branding, cataloging, description or possession (Gilbert and

Tompkins 203).

The self-representation of the colonized bodies on the stage as performing agents is

discernibly essential for post-colonial theatre. In narrative writing the race of the characters

tends to be obscure if the author does not give detailed description. However, in theatre, the

actors’ race and gender can be known by their being merely on the stage and the movement

of the body on stage provides many possible sites for decolonization. Thus, Aboriginal

theatre becomes very political and it tends to be relevant to their present situation. Their

stories through drama help in revisiting their place in history and how they got to the present

and revealed the structures of power through which they have been controlled.
 Jack Davis for instance is a good example of how Aboriginal artists have developed a

strategy of resistance against European hegemony through the use of Western structure of

drama in order to foster the issue. Davis received his education from the white Australians

and through this it paved a way for him to develop a literary career in Australia. In his plays,

Davis describes the condition of the Aborigines in his country, Australia, where

discriminations take place. He represents the injustices that Aborigines had to face in society

led by white settlers. Davis introduced the Aboriginal art form and ‘gave a new status to

performance by Aboriginal artists’ (Brisbane 3) most obviously by working with Aboriginal

performers and including Aboriginal dance and music. He also made various use of white

contribution and did not hesitate to use the white method and form in order to serve an

Aboriginal discourse. The presence of the colonized subject body and awareness in one sense

or another is one of the features which are crucial to post-colonial rejections of the

Eurocentric norms. In Jack Davis’s Kullark the naked body of the Aborigines as costume acts

as an agent of resistance that functions as a wayward signifier that might perturb white

audiences to shift their perspectives – to see themselves as the other and their Others as the

subject (Gilbert 67). In Kullark, Davis’s uses Aboriginal actors for the characters of

Aborigines in the play. In the scene where the white Europeans meet the Aborigines for the

first time at Swan River in the year 1827 the Europeans view them as savages because they

were carrying a spear and were naked:

STIRLING: Mr. Fraser a British colony would stand a better chance of

prospering here on the Swan River than anywhere in the world.

FRASER: But, sir, it’ll soon be dark.

STIRLING: Just a bit further, Mr. Fraser! Come on man!

[YAGAN, MITJITJIROO and MOYARAHN enter, clad in kangaroo skin

capes. The men carry spears, the woman a wahna.]

 FRASER: Look sir, savages (Davis, Kullark 13).

Here Davis depicted a situation where racial prejudiced was formed by the white colonizers

in their first encounter itself with the Aboriginal people.

In the Anglo-European theatre, when non-white characters were portrayed on stage

white actors played the characters, and the differences in appearance were constructed with

costume, make-up, and/or mask. William Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, was played by

a white actor whose skin was blacken and put on a curly-haired wig to fit the character of a

black moor. The white-Australian theatre, being an imitative of and influenced by the Anglo-

European theatre, the Aboriginal people were hardly projected in the white drama/play and

even when they were portrayed; the non- Aboriginal actors played the characters. According

to Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, “When racially marked characters are played in this

way, the resistance potential of the fictionalized black/colored body is compromised by the

‘way- ward signification’ of the actor’s whiteness. Matching the race (and/or gender) of the

actor with that of the character does not mean, however, that the performing body completely

escapes the web of imperial inscription. Rather, the body is inevitably ‘read’ through multiple

codes and contexts and shaped not only by the narrative structures of a play itself but also by

its audience” (Gilbert and Tompkins 206). They further states that historically, this has meant

that when the non- white actor performed on western stages, his/her body generally carried a

kind of mystique that both heightened and detracted from its significance. Another mode of

misrepresentation consistent with colonial attempts to figure racial others as inferior and/or

subordinate was thus conventionalized (ibid.). Thus, it becomes important for the Aboriginal

playwrights to present the colonized subjects on stage in order to subvert the

conventionalization of the Aborigines by the white Australians.

However, when a colonized subject wears the dominant culture’s costumes, he or she

is never simply framed by and within imperial representation. Most often, some kind of
appropriation is at work so that imposed or adopted dress codes, like hegemonic language(s),

are changed or otherwise ‘indigenized’ in order to suit their new context. Even in situations

which seem to present a simple case of acculturation, there is always a separating gap

between western clothes and their colonized wearers, especially when the usual race or

gender significations are complicated rather than clarified by dress. Because it is in a position

to manipulate costuming codes, theatre praxis can exploit this gap to foreground the

ideological apparatus of representation itself (Gilbert and Tompkins 247). In Kullark, for

instance, the Yorlah family who features the Aboriginal people of the 1970s were wearing the

‘dominant’ costumes. However, one of the characters Jamie Yorlah, a young Aboriginal

student enters the stage ‘with an overnight bag and a guitar case, liberally plastered with land

rights stickers’ (Davis, Kullark 22) thus demonstrating the potential politicality of costume.

With the production of Kullark (1982), Davis confronted the colonial framings of the

Aboriginal people. Kullark stars Aboriginal actors and the image of Aboriginal people on the

stage strongly highlighted the message that the Aboriginal people are alive and part of the

present. For many of the non-Indigenous audiences it was the first time they had seen

Aboriginal people on stage as ordinary people, rather than as examples of archaic forms and

traditional dancers (Casey 140). Thus, after the performance of the play when white members

of the audience approached the Aboriginal actors, it was often the first time they had spoken

to an Aboriginal person. The physicalized stage presence of Aboriginal actors cannot be

undervalued in discussing the counterdiscursive possibilities of the body in performance

(Gilbert 67). But one cannot hold the notion that only black body could truly represents the

Aboriginal people in performance and what constitutes Aboriginal or non- Aboriginal

identity is neither fixed nor objectively measurable. However when white actors play

indigenous roles as they have been in earlier periods of Australian theatre, the resistance

potential of the fictionalized Aboriginal body is compromised by the “wayward significance”

of its whiteness, manifest in the actor despite the illusion created by the role (ibid.). Therefore

in the selected plays Stolen, Box the Pony, The Dreamers, No Sugar, Kullark and In Our

Town, the playwrights used Aboriginal actors to perform their play.

In Stolen, at the end of the play each actor steps forward briefly to recount his/her

own autobiography: each one shares some of the experiences of the acted autobiographies,

which they have just performed. This functions as an effective validation of their speaking

positions, of the communality of loss and shared racial identity. It blurs white literary

distinctions between biography and autobiography in a unique way. The deliberate

autobiographical stance and the blurring of acted and “real” roles strengthen the impression

that this is in a sense pan-Aboriginal, that these stories exist indeed in the Aboriginal

community (Thomson 25). The performing Aboriginal body is a symbol of resistance in three

ways. Firstly, as a physical body, the very presence of the body on stage signifies the ‘racial

other’ that resists appropriation through the metaphysics of its insistent presence on stage.

Secondly, as a social body, it contrasts the ideologies of the Aborigines and the whites.

Thirdly, as an artistic body, it bridges the gap between the physical and social, grounding

Aboriginal voices and perspectives in the theatrical subject (Gilbert 66-67). The performing

body on the stage, in a way, releases the Aborigines from the control of the written text. In

general, the post-colonial body disrupts the constrained space and signification left to it by

the colonizers and becomes a site for resistant inscription. For instance, the decapitate Yagan

in Kullark signify the history of the Nyoongah in Western Australia which is communicate

through the actor’s body. The colonial subject’s body contests its stereotyping and

representation by others to insist on self-representation by its physical presence on the stage

(Gilbert and Tompkins 204). Costume and body movements (like Aboriginal dance, which is

present in most of the Aboriginal plays) are most effectively used in the Aboriginal theatre as

an agency of the decolonizing body and to expose the ways on how hegemonic regimes have
masked the Aborigines as invisible and blank spaces. As well as harnessing costume as a

strategic marker that might resist imposed identities and/ or abrogate the privilege of their

signifying systems, the theatrical body can function to recuperate postcolonial subjectively

through movement. As Cynthia Novak argue,

The body and movement are social realities interacting with and interpreting other

aspects of the culture. Structured movement systems like social dance, theatre dance,

sport, and ritual help to articulate and create images of who people are and what their

lives are like, encoding and eliciting ideas and values; they are also part of

experience, of performance and actions by which people know themselves (qtd. in

Gilbert 70).

As one of the main features of colonialism has been the operation of European power

over non-white peoples, therefore emphasizing on race is widespread in post-colonial drama,

particularly when the projected audience includes a high proportion of white (or otherwise

dominant) viewers. Like many former colonial countries, Australia has a long legacy of

racism. This had greatly affected the Indigenous peoples in various ways. It is perhaps a

natural tendency for human to feel superior to other humans, and this belief of superiority of

one’s group and culture is termed ethnocentrism. However, this ethnocentrism often leads to

racism i.e. a prejudice that contains more than just a feeling of cultural superiority. Racism

occurs when two groups see themselves as being physically and racially different and when

one group claims the alleged inferiority of the other group is caused by the innate physical

differences of its members. This more extreme form of prejudice occurs when one group

seeks to dominate and exploit the other through invasion, economic control or slavery

(Broome 91).

According to Broome, the first Europeans in Australia were generally ethnocentric in

their attitudes to the Aborigines rather than racist, since most of them claimed a cultural
superiority over the Aborigines, and not a racial superiority. Most early colonial officials and

many others who were strongly ethnocentric still believed that the Aborigines had the ability

to be as capable as Europeans if given European education and culture. Therefore they tried

to change the Aborigines, but they also considered them theoretically as equal citizens. As

racist idea began to dominate the colonists’ thinking, they argued that no matter what

education and help the Aborigines were given, they could never equal the European. Thus

policy changed to protection and discrimination and the Aborigines lost even their theoretical

equality. This shift from a hopeful to a pessimistic view, from ethnocentrism to hard-line

racism, which began from the moment of first settlement, was finally completed well before

1900. Broome further states that there were multiplicity of factors which causes racism in

Australia, firstly, the cultural and physical differences between the Aborigines and the

Europeans. The Europeans viewed the Aborigines in terms of European values and thus saw

it negatively. They stressed that the Aborigines did not wear clothes, build houses, till the soil

or have recognizable religions, kings or forms of government. It never occurred to them that a

hunter-gatherer society in a warm climate had no use for clothes, permanent houses or

agriculture. The Europeans were also clearly wrong when they thought that the Aborigines

had no religion, law, leaders or forms of government. Seeing the world as they did, the

Europeans rated their own society as the highest on the scale of human development and

Aboriginal society as the lowest. Yet Aboriginal society was not ‘primitive’ as Europeans

claimed, but simply different. There is no doubt that the Aborigines in turn did not

understand why the Europeans wore heavy clothing in warm climate or bothered to build

homes and grow crops when there were hundreds of varieties of food in the bush for the

talking. Aboriginal philosophers would have rated European society low, and much European

activity as valueless. Also both groups were generally unimpressed by the physical

appearance of the other. The pale eyes, thin nose, fair hair and white skin of the Europeans
shocked the Aborigines, so much so that they at first thought them spirits of the dead. The

Europeans in turn were startled by the ritual ornamentation and the animal fat applied to

Aboriginal bodies, their flat noses, their black skin and their nakedness.

The second factor behind the growth of racism was the concept of ‘savagery’ and a

whole range of related so-called scientific theories. The word ‘savage’ conjured up the

mental image among Europeans of a wild, pagan and uncivilized person who practiced

murder, cannibalism and so on. The Aboriginal ‘savage’ was claimed to be dirty, lazy, fickle,

of low intelligence, and treacherous, murderous and aggressive at the same time as being

cowardly. The third factor was the need to rationalize the dispossession of the Aborigines’

lands and the exploitation of violence that had accompanied it. One way of achieving this

was to claim that the occupation of Australia was governed by higher laws than those of man.

In 1850 McCombie argued that it was right that the European should dispossess the

Aborigines ‘as it could never be intended by a wise providence that fine continents, capable

of maintaining millions of inhabitants in comfort, should be abandoned to the support of a

few savages without a habitation or a foot of land in cultivation’. Similarly reverend J.D.

Lang echoed this in 1856 by his argument that ‘God’s first command to man was “Be fruitful

– multiply and replenish the earth”. The European colonizers viewed the Aborigines as

useless savages and the Europeans were glorified as ‘pioneers’. In this way European

colonization was justified. The Europeans were not pioneers, because the Aborigines

preceded them by 50,000 years. The pessimistic and racist view of the Aborigines gradually

became predominant (Broome 92-94).

The reservoir of racial ideas held by a growing majority of Europeans in Australia

received new impetus when Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution in the plant and animal

worlds was applied by some people (but not Darwin himself) to mankind. Darwin had argued

in his The origin of Species (1859) that different species evolved through a mechanism of
‘natural selection’ or ‘survival of the fittest’, by which favorable variations survived and

developed to form new species. The previous form died out. Many who believed in the

superiority of the white race argued that Darwinian thought, when applied to human societies,

explained why the black races seemed to fade away in the face of European colonization.

Social Darwinism came to be widely accepted in Australia by the 1880s. After all, ‘survival

of the fittest’ seemed to explain what many others, and the weaker ones faded away, The Age

in January 1888 commenting on the decline of the Aborigines stated:

It seems a law of nature that where two races whose stages of progression differ

greatly are brought into contact, the inferior race is doomed to wither and

disappear…The process seems to be in accordance with a natural law which, however

it may clash with human benevolence, is clearly beneficial to mankind at large by

providing for the survival of the fittest…it may be doubted whether the Australian

Aborigine would ever have advanced much beyond the status of the neo-lithic races in

which we found him, and we need not therefore lament his disappearance (Broome

96).

Such fanciful theorizing was echoed around the colonies for at least another 50 years. For

instance, Vincent Lesina told the Queensland parliament in 1901 that ‘the law of evolution

says that the nigger shall disappear in the onward progress of the white man. There is no

really hope at all’. Evolutionary theory led to a world-wide interest in the Australian

Aborigines because it was believed that they were an exotic and ‘primitive’ race of man. The

Australasian Anthropological Journal in 1896 alleged that once Aborigines passed puberty

‘the sutures of the cranium begin to consolidate, and the forepart of the brain ceases to

develop as it does in other races’ (qtd. in Broome 97).

Scientific interest in the Aborigines led to worse things, including bizarre grave

robbery by scientists. Foreign and Australian museums collected row upon row of Aboriginal
skulls to indulge the fancies of anatomical theorists. Truganini1, who died in 1876, dead body

was stolen from her grave and placed in the Hobart museum, until given a decent burial in

1976. Jack Davis in Kullark enacts a relevant theme using the story of South Western

Australia Aboriginal legend, Yagan. The decapitated Aborigine in Davis’s Kullark highlights

the inhumanity of the invaders when they decapitate Yagan and skin him in order to remove

his tribal markings for a souvenir. Yagan was caught and hanged in 1833 by the white settlers

and his death led to the battle of Pinjarra in 1834. His body was decapitated and his head was

smoked and sent to England. In Kullark Act I Scene VII, Jack Davis reenacts the story of

Yagan’s death:

ALICE: Yagan is dead… He then hacked off Yagan’s head with a

knife and skinned the body to souvenir his tribal markings.

[She exits.

‘Rule Britannia’ plays softly, as an English scientist carrying a small

polished jarrah box enters through the revolving screen, again

revealing the Union Jack. He takes a letter from the box and reads.]

SCIENTIST: ‘To Mr T.J.Pettigrew, F.R.C.S. Dear sir. I am sending you the head of

an Aboriginal native of a tribe that frequents the recently formed Swan Colony.

Known as Yagan, he was believed to have been a leader of his people and ever

disposed to violent and criminal activity. His nature was sullen, implacable and ill-

tempered, in short a most complete and savage villain. This head was removed by his

killer in order to obtain a reward of some thirty pounds. It was then smoked in the

stump of a tree for three months, which has preserved the head, but caused the facial

features to shrink, and the hair become somewhat lank.

[He produces the head from the box.]

 I hope nevertheless that this piece will prove of phrenological interest and a

worthwhile addition to your collection (Kullark, 32-33).

The story of Yagan and the scene portray here clearly affirms the detrimental attitude of the

colonizers towards the Aborigines and the vandalism of the image of the Aborigines, calling

them ‘most complete and savage villain’. Yagan’s head was labeled ‘the Chief of the Swan

River, Australia’ and was presented to the Liverpool Royal Institute. In 1894 the head was

lent to the Liverpool City Museum where it was exhibited for over seventy years…it was

only after major campaigns by a number of indigenous people that Yagan’s head was finally

returned to Western Australia in 1997 (Casey 138-139). As a powerful sign of brutality, the

murdered or mutilated body features across a range of drama from various countries and

generally operates as part of a strategic critique of imperialism’s policies and practices. It was

the “science” of phrenology that influenced the Europeans’ views on other races in the 1840s

and 1850s. Those practicing this “science” believed that the shape of the head influences the

size of the brain and thus the intelligence itself (Broome 90). The feeling of superiority

became to be based on racial differences.

In portraying Yagan in Kullark, Davis suggests that the mutilated black body

functions within the colonizing culture as a fetishized object. His overall project is to

reinstate the corporeal presence of the Aborigines in history—and, on a metatheatrical level,

in theatre—at the same time as he details the colonizers’ attempts to annihilate all signs of

difference (Gilbert and Tompkins 210). The main aim of this is most fully developed during

Yagan’s ceremonial dance, as he chants and dances in Scene Two. The dance movement of

Aboriginal character, painted in ceremonial paint, intensifies ‘the body’s agency as a site of

resistance that unsettles the pageant of imperial history’ (Gilbert 68). Reference to such

atrocities does not mean, however, that Kullark simply stereotypes its characters according to

race, reassigning the connotations of ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the process; rather, this play, like
Davis’s other works, carefully stages the misunderstandings brought about by discourses of

racial otherness in a context where it is possible for conceptual gaps to be bridged (Gilbert

68). Davis main venture is to restore the bodily presence of the Aborigines in history.

According to Elizabeth Grosz, the body is never simply a passive object upon which regimes

of power are played out:

If the body is the strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and

constraint, it is also because the body and its energies and capacities exert an

uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, systematic mode of social

organization. As well as being the site of knowledge-power, the body is thus a site of

resistance, for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter

strategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in

alternative ways (Gilbert and Tompkins 203).

Jack Davis’s Kullark was written and designed in such a way that Davis could bring

out the stories he had heard from his family, witnessed and experienced juxtaposing with

documents from the historical record and intermingled with aural and visual presence of

traditional Aboriginal story- telling through dance and song. In performance the stage is

divided into a small interior space and a larger exterior space. The external world of Western

Australia was represented by a painting in neo-traditional style of Waargul the Rainbow

Serpent (the creator spirit of the peoples of south – west Western Australia) outlining a map

of the Swan River. Waargul was painted on a screen, which was opened and cut by sections

of the action. This helps shift in the framing of the past and the present. Kullark encompasses

an extensive amount of Noongar predicament and experiences in a single piece of work. The

result is a ‘panoramic reframing of history’, demonstrating the near annihilation of

Aboriginal peoples and cultures but emphasizing the survival of Noongar people in the
present (Casey 136). In Kullark, Davis focus was not primarily on reclaiming the past. It was

the present and the place for Indigenous people in the present that was Davis main concern.

Racist beliefs are myths and yet they have been extremely powerful in shaping human

affairs over the past few centuries. The racist claims that all the people of one race have

common characteristics and abilities. Therefore it is clearly convenient to stereotype people

like claiming all Australian Aborigines are lazy, uncivilized, dirty, low intelligence etc. This

kind of general prejudice avoids the tedious need to assess each individual on his or her

merits. However racism is also unscientific, because no satisfactory test has so far been

devised to prove that traits and abilities in people come from their racial heritage rather than

their own genetic, social and environmental background. As the UNESCO Declaration on

Race and Racial Prejudice of 27 November, 1978 stated:

All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common

stock… Any theory which involves the claim that racial or ethnic group are inherently

superior or inferior, thus implying that some would be entitled to dominate or

eliminate others, presumed to be inferior, or which bases value judgments on racial

differentiation, has no scientific foundation…(Broome 92).

The declaration added that such theories are ‘contrary to the moral and ethical principles of

humanity’. However, it came to dominate the thinking of most Australians by 1900 and

beyond.

Racism affects the oppressed groups in a number of negative ways. It led to the

development of low self-esteem, mistrust of the dominant culture, internalized racism, and

denial. Most black people, particularly those working in mixed-group or white settings, have

to cope with everyday racism whether they are conscious of racism or not. It becomes part of

the narrative of the community in an ‘us and them’ perspective. Racism at different levels is

seen as a natural part of life and repeated experiences of racism affect a person’s behavior
and understanding of life; one’s life expectations, perspectives of oneself and one’s groups

and the dominant group. In many ways racism contribute to the psychological reality of

people of color in coping with their life. Living with racism becomes a central and defining

element in the psychology of marginalized people and/or people of color. In many ways, life

is a struggle for people of color. Even for those who have ‘made it’ and have overcome

obstacles, different forms of racism emerge that need to be confronted. Racism is inescapable

in the white dominated society like Australia.

European ethnocentrism was inextricably a part of the colonizing project; the belief

that all things Western and non-Indigenous qualities were superior and all things Indigenous

were inferior was initially imposed since their first contacts. This kind of perception was

specifically constituted to control the lives of Indigenous people. In turn, it has had a

predominant influence on Indigenous Australians’ self-perceptions, and, therefore, it

becomes imperative for the oppressed people to reclaim a sense of pride, dignity and self-

worth as well as validating their own cultural histories and values. Despite the considerable

changes in Australian society, racism is still a reality for member of marginalized groups.

Racism is invasive, pervasive and unrelenting. Racism imposes itself on daily living for

people of color. The effects of racism cannot be underestimated. ‘Race is about everything—

historical, political, personal—and race is about nothing—a construct, an invention that has

changed dramatically over time and historical circumstance ... race has been and continues to

be, encoded in all our lives’ (Thompson and Tyagi ix).

As skin color is the marker for objectifying difference in the social construction of

race, the colonized subjects are concerned with rejecting the colonially determined markers

and descriptions of themselves. The Aboriginal playwrights are trying to portray their

predicaments in Australia through theatre of the racist attitudes they face because of their

skin color. As racial prejudice and racist onslaughts of the white Australians are found in
most of the Aboriginal plays, this chapter highlights the racial persecution portrayed in Jack

Davis’s In Our Town and Leah Purcell’s Box The Pony. Davis’s In Our Town is about

questions of location, ownership, identity and identification. The play is set in the immediate

aftermath of World War II, somewhere in small-town Western Australia. The play continues

Davis’s family saga, tracing the dilemmas of the Millimurras a decade after the era in which

his other play No Sugar was set. Now the family is living on the outskirts, but with the return

of their war-hero son David, they seem to have an opportunity to move into the town, where

the white townsfolk live. This kind of opportunity is very rare for the Aboriginal family and

their story traces the various problems faced by them with the progress of the play. The play

is about interracial friendship, romances and institutionalized racism. In the play one of the

Aboriginal characters David Millimurra and a white young man Larry Moss were best friends

during the war, David was a friend and a protector for Larry during their time in the army.

But, after the war when they returned to their town, though Larry is still very fond of David,

problems begin to arise due to their different status in their society as a “white man” and

“black man”. When Larry introduced David to his sister Sue Moss, there is mutual attraction

between the two, which gradually grow into romance. Everyone in the town is against their

relationship once it becomes public knowledge. In conversation between David and his father

Sam Millimurra:

SAM: Looks like the town’s gunning for you son.

DAVID: Yeah.

SAM: What are you gonna do about it?

DAVID: [laughing] They’re worse than the bloody Japs. (In Our Town, 49)

In the same conversation, Sam tells David about his conversation with Sue Moss’s father in

regard to their relationship, “He wants you to break off your friendship with Sue”. Sam

continues:
 SAM: They have a different outlook on life to us and sort of sly approach. You know

what I mean?

DAVID: Yeah, I know what you mean, Pop, seen it in the army. Yeah in the army…

SAM: In the army or not son, this town is after you (Davis, In Our Town, 50).

This line is a crucial one, for what Davis establishes clearly and consistently here is the fact

that the town itself – unnamed and repellent – is one of the main characters of the play. Here,

the town becomes doubly dangerous. It is not only a collective expression of the hatred of its

inhabitants but a target which seems too big for David to aim at, despite his military records

(Davis, In our town xi).

Larry who has been the best friend of David also begins to change his attitude as his

father Jim Moss says, “The town’s starting to talk” (Davis, In Our Town 47). Larry in his

conversation with David tells: “David, you got to understand things are different now we are

back in civilian life” (54). This line shows that though Larry considers David as a good

friend, he doesn’t want relation with him that the town is against, he is scared of the town as

he says, “I’ve lived here all my life and I know the character of this town and everybody in

it” (55). When David asked him whether their five years in the army together open his eyes,

Larry replies, “Those five are in the past.” (55) Larry is also caught up in the institutionalized

racism of the whites, and the skin color of David becomes a problem for him as he says,

“David you’re black. Sue is White, and the town was beginning to talk about her association

with you” (54). The significance of the town here also emphasizes Davis dramatic skill

because it illustrates the psychological ploys of denial and rationalization which occur in

situations of racial conflicts. In other words, he shows how bigotry operates: how people try

to mask individual acts through generalized reference to the community at large. There are

many relevant scenes and dialogue to validate the racial bigotry of the whites throughout the

play. The exchange between the Publican and Davis in Act two is also relevant:
 DAVID: Two bottles of Orlando please.

PUBLICAN: [shakes his head] Sorry.

DAVID: Sorry…what do you mean?

PUBLICAN: I’ve been told not to serve you any bottles.

DAVID: By whom?

PUBLICAN: The Sergeant.

DAVID: I want two bottles of Orlando.

PUBLICAN: I’m sorry, but I can’t serve you, right!

DAVID: Orlando…two bottles

PUBLICAN: Look, don’t blame me. I’m just following orders (Davis, In Our Town

40).

This scene suggests the real nature of Australian society dominated by white people. Though

David was given citizenship rights after returning from World War II with medals, and was

allowed to settle inside the town, this kind of institutionalized prejudiced still persists upon

him wherever he go.

David’s mother, Milly Millimurra and Sue’s mother, Mrs. Moss upon meeting, talks

about their children’s relationship, Mrs. Moss says: “My daughter is a strange person I some

ways. She’s always on the side of the underdog.” When Milly retorts back saying, “My son is

not an underdog”, Mrs. Moss replies, “But he’s black” (Davis, In Our Town 52). As Frantz

Fanon in his essay “The Fact of Blackness” states, “And then the occasion arose when I had

to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged

my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of

his bodily schema” (Ashcroft et. al. 1999:323). This is exactly the kind of condition David

and his family faces in the real world of white Australia. As Sue also accuses his brother and

the town people: “If David’s skin was white he could sit in this café as long as he likes. He
would be safe. He’s right, you’re all against him because he’s black…” (Davis, In Our Town

37).

This kind of institutionalizes prejudice, called by sociologists as caste barrier and

others may even call it naked racism is found in all the selected plays of the present thesis.

One of the themes touches by Leah Purcell in Box the Pony is also the institutionalized

prejudice of the whites, issue arising from the Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal coexistence in

Australia. Leah encounters racism when she first arrives in Sydney:

LEAH: …Good car. Straight to Sydney, Eastern Suburbs, real flash.

Had to live somewhere, right? So I go to a real estate agent.

‘G’day’…and true’s god, the woman behind the counter looks

at me and says, ‘We haven’t any money, we haven’t any

money, take whatever you want.’

So I took a one-bedroom flat.

See, blackfella not greedy (Purcell and Rankin, Box The Pony 33).

Leah describes Sydney as a racist city, but she presents her plight in the city with a tinge of

irony that she uses to mock the situation. She also dramatizes another encounter with a white

woman:

LEAH: …Another time, I’m walking down the street and this lady

comes out of her gate and, true’s god, it’s like a bloody cartoon.

She grabs her bag and goes…

As WHITE WOMAN frightened by seeing a blackfella up close, she clutches her

handbag to her chest and blinks, stopping in her tracks as if she fears Leah might hit

her.

Like I was going to hit her or something… (Box The Pony 36-37).
In Scene 7 “Doing Coffee in Sydney”, Leah again mocks the whole concept of racism and

laughs at the white people:

…In Woollahra, people do coffee on the footpath. Now this is hard for

a little myall black gin to understand. Because up’ome’der you drink

on the footpath because you’re not allowed into the pub.

These gubba fellas just don’t do coffee on the footpath, their dogs,

which they treat like children, do gunung!

Wiping feet as if having trodden in gunung.

That’s filthy. That’s stinkin’, thas dirty that! And they got a

cheek to say blackfella dirty!

One time I see this woman doing coffee and pancakes, and I recognize

her…she’s the woman who somersaulted in scene one. And I’m

thinking, white woman can’t be wandering around in my story! That’s

cultural imperialism! That’s bloody racist!

She recognizes me and sniffs like this…

Sniffing as snobby white woman.

Funny that because that gunung don’t seem to worry her. I go like this

[wave friendly] and she goes like this…

Scared, with her hands pulled up to her chin over her cup of coffee (Box The Pony

67).

Leah Purcell’s descriptions of the racist attitudes of the white women give an insight into

how the Aboriginal women perceives the black/white culture cohabitation in Australia.

Since the 1990s, theatres have increased the number of indigenous performers, even

though a ‘strictly color-blind approach to casting remains rare’(Gilbert 132). It means that

even though there are policies which claim that the Aborigines have similar access to
different kinds of roles as the white actors, it is difficult for theatre companies to offer non-

racial marked roles to Aboriginal actors. So when they cast Aboriginal actors in their play, it

is mostly on political grounds and issues. Even when Aborigines are ‘cast in non- indigenous

roles’ the purpose most of the time is ‘political or interpretative’ (Gilbert 133). Indeed there

are direct issues that link to the body in performance and the body of any actor cannot be

separate from the history in which it is placed. The Aboriginal body represents the marks of

past colonization and that is why it would be quite normal for this audience to ‘read marks of

indigineity into the overall stage picture’ (ibid.) and give the play a political interpretation

even though this would not be the intention of the play. The problem is that Aboriginal

performers find it difficult ‘to be recognized as simply artists with skills to match those of

their non-indigenous peers’ Indigenous bodies ‘signify’, they have a ‘degree of interpretive

mobility on the stage’ and have difficulty being seen as freely connotative bodies (ibid.).

According to Jon Erikson’s:

The problem of the body in performance’ is that ‘when the intention is to present

body itself […] it remains a sign nonetheless […] not enough of a pure corpus (ibid.).

This means that even when the playwrights have no intention of showing any kind of racial

implications in their play, the idea of race and cultural belonging still appears.

The stage settings, movements and costumes are techniques most effectively used by

Aboriginal theatre to expose the ways in which Aborigines have been suppressed by the

penalizing regimes of the empire. Davis’s Kullark parodies the “civilizing” gestures of

clothing the native is presented as a preposterous mockery when Fraser was forced by

Captain Stirling to offer his shirt and trousers to Yagan and Mijitjiroo on their first contact.

Also in No Sugar in a letter to Mr. N.S. Neal (Superintendent, Moore River Settlement) from

Mr. A.O. Neville (Chief Protector of the Aborigines) says, “ I was a little concerned to see so

many dirty little noses amongst the children. I’m a great believer that if you provide the
native the basic accoutrements of civilization you’re halfway civilizing him” (Davis, No

Sugar 24). These scenes shows the white colonizers believed in clothing the Aborigines with

their attire would “civilize” them. Both the texts’ emphasis on the mission as a place that uses

clothing to discipline and sanitize the indigene points to the intersecting oppressions of

Christianity, Western government, and imperial medicine (Gilbert 69). That the “body

politics” of the mission system are designed to effect the depopulation of the indigenous

peoples is clearly illustrated in Eva Johnson’s Murras (1988) through references to the

deliberate and systematic sterilization of pubescent Aboriginal girls, who now “carry the

scars from the wetjella’s medicine” (ibid.). In The Dreamers, one of the characters, uncle

Worru death seems to be evident from the moment he enters the corridors of the white

hospital. The white hospital is not only projected as an institution that is cursed, it the

“whites” themselves that is metaphorically projected as a cursed to the well being of the

Aboriginal culture. Resisting the existent and symbolic power of the colonizers’ clothes is a

continuing endeavor for many of the Aboriginal characters in theatre. The Aboriginal

playwrights have marked their field of representation by clothing the Aboriginal characters

with white men’s clothes such as the costumes of the black tracker, dressed in uniform given

by the white authorities. The theatrical costumes are used by the Aboriginal playwrights for

the purpose of deconstructing the white colonizers ideology of western clothes through

mimicry. The mimicry and mockery of whites and the humorous celebration of their lifestyle

has been one way in which blacks have opposed to the encroachments of European society,

and have asserted their own independence and capacity for endurance. Jack Davis has

succinctly stated that, historically, Aborigines “learnt to keep themselves alive by laughing”

(Shoemaker 233).

In colonialists’ historical accounts, Aboriginal dance has been encoded as the

expression of savage or exotic Otherness within a discourse that represents Blacks as objects
to be looked at rather than as self- constituting subjects (Gilbert 70). W. Robertson

constructs Aboriginal dance during a corroboree as the picturesque signifier of less than

human behavior. He wrote in 1928, “The whole programme was wonderful in its savage

simplicity. The weirdly painted natives, issuing from the dense blackness of bush to perform

the dances, looked more like wraiths than human beings”. He further stated that the spectacle

resembled “a picture that would have suited Dante’s Inferno, as with gleaming eyes and

frenzied movements they approached the fire” (ibid.). This was the kind of perception that

the white colonizers had during the process of their colonization i.e. characterizing tribal

dance as primitive. Robertson’s failure to acknowledge the dancers’ subjectivity prevents him

from discerning any functional aspects of the corroborree vis-à-vis Aboriginal culture and

certainly blinds him to the possibility of resistance politics. (Ashcroft et al. 1999:343) It is

this kind of representation of dance that is problematized in contemporary Aboriginal drama

if movement is seen as part of identity formation and reclamation. Therefore, these kinds of

categorizations and notions are exactly what the Aboriginal playwrights are trying to break.

In Jack Davis's No Sugar Billy Kimberly and Bluey, while working for the white

administrators as trackers for runaway Aborigines from the camp, dancing in corroboree

gives an opportunity to transgress their assigned role of tracker/informant. In Scene VI, while

Jimmy, Sam and Joe are painted for a corroboree, Bluey and Billy enters and join them. This

scene is the only scene in the play that these two trackers and the other encamped Aborigines

have harmony between them. During the corroboree, individual identity is both created by,

and subsumed in, group identity as culturally coded movement that gives valence to each

performer's dance, allowing participants to shed their everyday roles determined within white

hierarchies of power. In this sense, the dance acts as a shaman exorcizing evil. It is also an

occasion for the exchange of cultural capital between tribes, and for the contestation of white

dominated space (Gilbert 1992:140-141). Traditional enactments such as ritual and carnival
demonstrate that the performing body can help to regenerate and unify communities despite

the disabilities, disintegrations, and specific disconnections of the individual bodies involved

(Crow and Banfield 231). Thus in projecting peaceful corroboree-ing of the native policemen

and the encamped Aboriginal men, Davis is able to maintain that a whole or completed sense

of self is not characteristic of the colonized individual subject identity but also an Aboriginal

identity a whole.

Dance features in all the selected plays of Jack Davis. In The Dreamers, uncle Worru

links the past and present through his stories and physicalizes the alienation between the past

and the present when he loses touch with reality and locks into moments and events from the

past. A shadowy dancer and visuals of the past allow the audience to share his memories. In

many cases, transformations of the postcolonial body are theatricalized through rhythmic

movement such as dance, which brings into focus the performing body. For a description of

dance as a culturally coded activity Gilbert and Tompkins states:

Dance has a number of important functions in drama: not only does it concen-trate

the audience’s gaze on the performing body/bodies, but it also draws at-tention to

proxemic relations between characters, spectators, and features of the set. Splitting the

focus from other sorts of proxemic and kinesic – and potentially, linguistic – codes,

dance renegotiates dramatic action and dramatic activity, reinforcing the actor’s

corporeality, particularly when it is culturally laden. Dance is a form of spatial

inscription and thus a productive way of illustrating – and countering – the territorial

aspects of western imperialism. Dance’s patterned movement also offers the

opportunity to establish cultural context, particularly when the dance executed

challenges the norms of the colonizer. In this way, dance recuperates post-colonial

subjectivity by centralizing traditional, non-verbal forms of self-representation. (239)

The dancer in The Dreamers is like a spirit who is only visible to the audience and to Worru,

accompanied by clap sticks and the music of the didgeridoo, the dancer appears as a male. He

represents the pre-contact past (when traditions, laws, and taboos were observed without the

interference of white society) and functions dramatically to highlight the destruction of

Aboriginal culture that has ensued since European settlement. As a bridge to the ancestral

world, the dancer appears in front of a dying person back to the land of his or her individual

dreaming. Performatively, the dreamer embodies indigenous tradition since he is costumed,

adorned, and otherwise marked (usually with ceremonial paint) as a cultural icon that

signifies Aboriginality. The dancer appears three times in The Dreamers, he appears

whenever WORRU’s health is at a low point. In his last appearance he comments:

[…A narrow shaft of light reveals the DANCER sitting cross- legged on the

escarpment against a night sky. He sings sorrowfully.]

Nitja Wetjala, warrah, warrah!

Gnullarah dumbart noychwa.

Noychwa, noychwa, noychwa.

Wetjala kie-e-ny gnullarah dumbart.

Kie-e-ny, kie-e-ny, kie-e-ny,

Kie-e-ny.

[’The White man is evil, evil!

My people are dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

The white man kill my people.

Kill, kill, kill,

Kill.’] (Davis, The Dreamers 137)

Although in the spatial histories of the Aborigines, “the voice enjoys no special privileges”

however, “dancing and drawing are equally important means of spatial telling” (Gilbert 71).

The solo dancer in The Dreamers functions at structural, thematic, and mythic levels. The

dancer not only reconstitutes Aboriginality through a discourse of the body and its

performance but also recontextualizes the rest of the dramatic action (structured largely

according to European genres) within the temporal and spatial frames of an Aboriginal

metaphysics (ibid). So, when dance is incorporated in Aboriginal plays, it is used as a factor

for identity formation and to create space for themselves rather than just a medium for an

effect. Therefore, Aboriginal playwrights carefully incorporate dance intrinsically to show

the meaning and framework of their plays, instead of just a mere representation of their

stories. The performance of dance reinscribes the stage, and by implication, the land, as

shared space rather than merely the precinct of the white majority (Gilbert 75). The

performing of Aboriginal dance and body as an act of cultural reclamation creates a presence

that counteracts the historical removal of Aborigines according to white Australian historical

accounts. The dancer performs subversively as he claims all areas of the stage, his dance

reinforcing the tangible presence of the Aboriginal past in spite of western encroachment

upon indigenous time and space. Davis’s The Dreamers centralizes its spirit character for

precisely this purpose: while the derogated body of Uncle Worru is prominent at the level of

realistic action, the metamorphic body of the dreamer supplies a surrealistic frame that

stresses the persistence and resistance of Aboriginal culture (Gilbert and Tompkins 236).

Just as dance music and songs also play a significant role in the lives of the

Aboriginal people and enacted in the Aboriginal theatre. In The Dreamers, whenever Worru

health was at a low point, along with the dancer the sound of didgeridoo is playing in the

background, loud enough to be heard by the audience. The song “Run, Daisy, Run” also has a

significant importance in Box The Pony; it is played whenever Leah and Steff face problems
in their lives. The song is integral to the narrative of Box the Pony it complements the

storytelling. The song is composed by Leah Purcell, which became very famous in Australia.

As Leah states in her interview: “'Run, Daisy, Run' is my third song that I ever wrote and it's

about my grandmother's story. And it's sort of become the unofficial national anthem for the

stolen generation. I literally wrote the song in five to ten minutes. No sort of, even, drafts. At

that stage, my grandmother had died. She died when I was ten. And this song came out of me

and I believe that she wrote that song through me, because I don't remember writing it.” She

further states that:

I wasn't brought up in traditional culture, I wasn't brought up on my traditional lands,

and I wasn’t brought up with my language. I wasn't brought up with the ancient songs

and the dances that my ancestors before me have done from Dreamtime. So I think as

an urban, contemporary woman, I have to make my corroboree up about the day so

when I do 'Box the Pony', I'm corroboreeing. That's my corroboree, that's my story.

(Grasswil, “Queen Leah”)

Leah Purcell strongly believes in Aboriginality and she believed that her ancestors have given

her the ability to be a storyteller, a songwoman and a performer.

Post-colonial theatre addresses one of the most interesting techniques in the

presentation of a narrator who is simultaneously staged in the shape of a different actor. Even

though Box The Pony is a semi-autobiographical monodrama, Leah Purcell plays all the

sixteen roles and split the main character into two, the adult Leah and Steff, the younger alter

ego of Leah. The splitting subjectivity is able to suggests the various and often contending

underpinnings that the white colonizers had of post-colonial identity, whereas attempts to

achieve a subjective ‘wholeness’ may merely replicate the limited significations of the

colonizer/colonized binary through which imperialism maintains control over the apparently

unruly and uncivilized ‘masses’. Thus split subjectivity can be viewed, on a number of levels,
as potentially enabling rather than as disempowering (Gilbert and Tompkins 231). If

imperialism conventionally assigns the colonizer and the colonized to roles which determine

how power is exercised, the splitting of the colonial subject’s self into several varied entities

enables him/her to split from the general site of disempowerment. This separation removes

both the colonizer and the colonized from their assigned positions of power and impotence;

instead of being fixed and unitary, both subject positions are fragmented and dislocated. This

means that their interrelationships can be re-evaluated in the light of a shifted power dynamic

of negotiation rather than essentialism, opening up possibilities for new kinds of expression.

Working in opposition to exclusionary identity politics, split subjectivity enables the

recognition of several—even, potentially, all—of the factors and allegiances that determine

the syncretic colonized subject (Gilbert and Tompkins 232).

The monodrama is an important medium for exploring post- colonial subjectivity

because it is almost always biographical or autobiographical. Women in particular employ

this form as it befits the expression of an identity often fractured by multiple discourses.

Monodrama focuses solely on a single performing figure who expresses the ‘splits’ through

at least two distinct methods of subject deconstruction. First, a single actor might play one

character who usually adopts several different personae; or, second, the actor might perform

multiple characters who, in turn, may or may not present different selves to the audience. The

first kind of monodrama expresses the split subjectivity of one character—hence, the

transformations of the performing body are relatively subtle—while in the second kind, the

actor ‘splits’ into a number of subjects, a process which usually requires radical

metamorphoses, especially when the body shifts across categories such as race and gender

(Gilbert and Tompkins 233). Leah Purcell uses both the method in her play, Box The Pony.

Plays which use one actor to embody multiple characters usually aim for fluid action and role

changes in order to emphasize the performativity of the body and thus to frustrate viewers’
desire for a fixed and unitary subject, which is exactly what the playwrights are trying to

subvert.

In trying to break the white ideology of the “black” people as an object to be looked

as dirty, evil, lecherous, uncivilized etc., the Aboriginal playwrights are projecting and

stripping their physical, social and artistic bodies in theatre. The Aboriginal playwrights in

recognizing the fixed opinion of the white in regard to their skin color are challenging the

white construction of their bodies. They openly projected their dilemmas in the white

construction of race and body image because of their skin color. Frantz Fanon had rightly

states their quandaries in regard to his skin color, as he says, “As I begin to recognize that the

Negro is a symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a

Negro” (qtd. in Ashcroft et al. 1999:325). The unfortunate and helpless position of the black

skinned colonized subjects to continue hating themselves because of their skin color began to

deteriorate as they began to learn to accept themselves. As Fanon continues, “In order to

terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual

solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above

this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally

unacceptable, and, through human being to reach out for the universal.” Fanon further

concludes the feelings of the colonized subjects position when they learn to accept

themselves quoting Merleau Ponty:

There are times when the black man is locked into his body. Now, ‘for a being who

has acquired consciousness of himself and of his body, who has attained to the

dialectic of subject and object, the body is no longer a cause of the structure of

consciousness, it has become an object of consciousness (qtd. in Ashcroft et al.

1999:326).
The colonized subjects are now consciously questioning and challenge their subjected

position. David, one of the characters in Jack Davis’s In Our Town claims, “we are all the

same underneath” (Davis, In Our Town50) this could be an implication of Davis’s idea that

racial differences are only skin-deep.

Thus, with the above observation Aboriginal theatre has a highly political overtone,

which surfaces a complex questions such as what is the relationship of politics to culture?

How does social change result in cultural change – or can various cultural practices initiate or

precipitate change? And also there can be a question like how does theatre helps in changing

the perspectives of the dominant society? These kinds of questions have often been asked,

and many theories and writers have attempted to answer these questions. For instance, Terry

Eagleton offered some answers in his book Ideology: An Introduction, in this book Eagleton

states that “nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology”, and also

states his limitation in trying to define the term. However, in this book he offered a long list

of the definitions of ideology, which indicates a variety of meaning (1991: 1). In the

concluding part of his book he argues that ‘the rationalist view of ideologies as conscious,

well- articulated systems of belief is clearly inadequate’ (1991: 221), and therefore defines

ideology as ‘a matter of “discourse” rather than of “language” – of certain concrete discursive

effects, rather than of signification as such’ (1991: 223) Eagleton is interested in that place of

‘relational’ intersection where negotiation ceaselessly occurs for the human subject where

one is ‘always conflictively, precariously constituted’ (ibid.). Recognizing the ‘lethal grip’,

‘tenacity and pervasiveness of dominant ideologies’, Eagleton goes on to argue that:

There is one place above all where such forms of consciousness may be transformed

almost literally overnight, and that is in active political struggle. This is not a Left

piety but an empirical fact. When men and women engaged in quite modest, local

forms of political resistance find themselves brought by the inner momentum of such
 conflicts into direct confrontation with the power of the state, it is possible that their

political consciousness may be definitively, irreversibly altered. If a theory of

ideology has value at all, it is in helping to illuminate the processes by which such

liberation from death-dealing beliefs may be practically effected (1991: 223–4).

The Aboriginal plays studied in the present thesis are those that self-consciously attempt to

transform consciousness and initiate active political struggle. ‘Political theatre’, ‘theatres of

crisis’, ‘post-colonial theatre’, or theatre made for ‘social change’ are those publicly enacted

events that often take place during, and/or inspired by periods of social and political crisis

and/or revolution (B. Zarrilli, 221). Thus, in presenting their ‘black’ body on stage the

Aboriginal playwrights are able to voice their ideology and are able to produce their own

versions of their culture, history, identity, from that of invisibility to historicity.

 ENDNOTES
1
Truganini was born in 1812 on Bruny Island, south of the Tasmanian capital Hobart. She

was a daughter of Mangana, Chief of the Bruny Island people. In her youth she took part in

her people's traditional culture, but Aboriginal life was disrupted by European invasion. By

1873, Truganini was the sole survivor of the Oyster Cove group, and was again moved to

Hobart. She died three years later, having requested that her ashes be scattered in the

D’Entrecasteaux Channel; she was, however, buried at the former Female Factory at

Cascades, a suburb of Hobart. Within two years, her skeleton was exhumed by the Royal

Society of Tasmania and later placed on display. Only in April 1976, approaching the

centenary of her death, were Truganini's remains finally cremated and scattered according to

her wishes. Truganini is often considered to be the last full-blood speaker of a Tasmanian

language.
 WORKS CITED

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1999. Print.

B. Zarrilli, Phillip. “Introduction to Part Seven.” The Routledge Reader in Politics and

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Print.

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Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australian- Black Response to White Dominance 1788-

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Casey, Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1990,

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--- “Bold, Black, and Brilliant: Aboriginal Australian Drama.” A Companion to Australian

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Crow, Brian, and Chris Banfield. An Introduction to post-colonial theatre. University of

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Davis, Jack.Kullark /The Dreamers. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1984. Print.

--- No Sugar. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1986. Print.

--- In Our Town. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Ltd, 1992. Print.

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Merete Falck Borch et al. Rodipi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2008. Print.
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Gilbert, Helen. Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian

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--- “The Dance as Text in Contemporary Australian Drama: Movement and Resistance

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Print.

--- “DE-SCRIBING ORALITY: Performance and the recuperation of voice.”

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Moreton-Robinson, Aileen.Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and

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 CHAPTER – IV

PROBLEMS OF ASSIMILATION
 
 The process of assimilation policies carried out by the white Australian government

has been a major concern for most of the Aboriginal writers and playwrights. The Aboriginal

playwrights through performance have portrayed the nature and consequences of assimilation

policies. These assimilation policies have a number of negative consequences in the

Aboriginal society which successfully resulted in the loss of their culture, traditions,

languages etc., needless to say their land and rights to land. The concept of assimilation had a

long program, even politically blatant, in Australia. It showed its masks among the

missionaries and government officials in the early nineteenth century, and within the

protectionist regimes that were set up in the later. The concept was variously named as

merging, absorption and assimilation. These concepts of “absorption” or “mergeance” could

mean the genetic dissolution of Aboriginals into white “blood”, or, the “breeding out of

colour” (Moran 2). It could also mean the cultural absorption of Aborigines or part-

Aborigines into the white society and combination of both biological and cultural absorption.

In 1947, A.O. Neville, Commissioner of Native Affairs in the state of South Australia offered

a written solution to the “Aboriginal Problem”:

Scientific research had revealed that skin pigmentation could be bred out of

Aborigines in two or three generations. If I could only have the money and the

legislative power to start a selective breeding programme I could, in a matter of sixty

to seventy years, solve the “aboriginal problem” by breeding a race of white

Aborigines (McLaren vii).

The course of assimilation includes various objectives. While there was an important

reparative trend- doing something to “uplift” those who had been neglected at best, and

treated appalling at worst, by the Australian nation—there was also destructive trend,

responding, in some instances,to paranoid fears concerning the future of the white nation, and
in others to the perception of the incompatibility, or undesirability, of Aboriginality in the

modern Australian nation (Moran 2).

The process of assimilation has developed in Australia due to many factors. By the

middle of the nineteenth century the protectorate experiment had failed and the very survival

of Indigenous people was being questioned. The Indigenous people were forced off their land

to the edges of non-Indigenous settlement, dependent upon government rations if they could

not find work, suffering from malnutrition and disease, their presence was felt by non-

Indigenous people as unsettling and embarrassing. The white colonial governments viewed

Indigenous people as a nuisance. The violence and disease associated with colonization was

characterized, in the language of social Darwinism, as a natural process of ‘survival of the

fittest’. According to this analysis, the future of Aboriginal people was inevitably doomed;

what was needed from governments and missionaries was to ‘smooth the dying pillow’

(Bringing Them Home Report 4). Land was made available for reserves and missions for the

segregation of the Indigenous people and Chief Protector or Protection Board were assign

responsibility for their welfare. By 1911 the Northern Territory and every State except

Tasmania had ‘protectionist legislation’ giving the Chief Protector or Protection Board

extensive power to control Indigenous people (Moreton-Robinson 6). The shift in

government policy from one of extermination to protection, which some has argued was

brought about by the political activity of the anti-slavery and humanitarian movement in

Britain. This movement was influenced by the theory among the British scientist community

that Australian Indigenous peoples were a dying race in need of saving. The Indigenous

referred to were those classified as being of “full descent” or biologically pure(Moreton-

Robinson 6). In 1997, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Children from Their Families found that:

 By the late nineteenth century it had become apparent that although the full descent

Indigenous population was declining, the mixed descent population was increasing.

‘Most colonists saw them as being in a state of racial and cultural limbo’. In social

Darwinist terms they were not regarded as near extinction. The fact that they had

some European ‘blood’ meant that there was a place for them in non- Indigenous

society, albeit a very lowly one. Furthermore, the prospect that this mixed descent

population was growing made it imperative to governments that mixed descent people

be forced to join the workforce instead of relying on government rations. In that way

the mixed descent population would be both self-supporting and satisfy the needs of

the developing Australian economy for cheap labor (Bringing Them Home Report

24).

De Lepervanch argues that the change in Indigenous policy could be linked to the way in

which “economic expansion had provided the setting in which some political and social

reforms could be made sacrifice by or danger to the existing order” (qtd. in Moreton-

Robinson 7). Thus the hegemony of the white Australian society and social structures was

forcefully established and maintained. The Indigenous people were forced on to reserves and

missions under strict laws and repressive control.

In 1937, when it became obvious that the Indigenous population was not dying out

but continuing to increase due to white men either raping or having consensual sexual

relations with Indigenous women, the first joint State-commonwealth conference on Native

Welfare was held (Bringing Them Home Report 33). So, in April 1937, the first ever national

conference of the principal administrators of Aborigines met in Canberra, A.O. Neville,

Western Australian Protector of Aborigines, asked the conference, “Are we to have a

population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our

white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?”
(Notaras 1). The conference discussion was dominated by the Chief Protectors of Western

Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory: A.O. Neville, J.W. Bleakley and Dr. Cook

respectively. Each of them presented his own theory, developed over a long period in office,

of how people of mixed descent would eventually merge into the non-Indigenous population.

The conference was sufficiently impressed by Neville’s idea of ‘absorption’ to agree that:

... this conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not

of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth,

and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end (Bringing Them

Home Report 26).

Henceforth, the States began adopting policies designed to assimilate the Aboriginal people

in to mainstream Australia. Neville’s idea of merging or absorbing the so –called ‘half-caste’

Aborigines into the European population by a process of encouraged inter–breeding had won

the approval of all the delegates to the conference – who were more or less universally

alarmed by what they thought of as ‘the problem of the half –caste’ (Manne 210). Thus,

there was a change in policy from passive “protection” to a policy described as “assimilation”

at the 1937 Conference of commonwealth and State Aboriginal authorities. Protection Boards

became Welfare Boards (Prentis 84). One of the motivations for assimilation was related to

the nationalist message entailed initially in the quest for a “white Australia”: the need to

maintain national homogeneity. This urge for homogeneity was expressed in different ways

in different periods. Initially the concern was to preserve the link between white race, nation

and territory. As racism lost legitimacy after the Second World War, the emphasis turned to

the preservation of cultural homogeneity, as a source of national cohesion and national

progress (Moran 2).

In the name of protection Indigenous people were subject to near-total control. Their

entry to and exit from reserves was regulated, as was their everyday life on the reserves, their
right to marry and their employment. With a view to encouraging the conversion of the

children to Christianity and distancing them from their Indigenous lifestyle, children were

housed in dormitories and contact with their families strictly limited. It should be noted that

the missionaries were one of the major agents of assimilation. Since 1820s the missionaries

took up the Christianizing of the Aborigines. Most were sincere Christians who treated the

Aborigines like fellow human beings, even though they patronizingly believed that they were

uncivilized and pagan. The missionaries also protected the Aborigines from abuse and treated

their illnesses. They made an effort to learn the Aboriginal culture and languages, although

this was usually done with the aim of further undermining it (Broome 36). The methods of

the missionaries were quite similar with those of the government’s earlier efforts, although

they give more importance to Christianizing. By the 1920s more than 20 Christian missions

were established in the northern regions of Australia (Broome 105). The missionaries

confused the Aborigines as they did not carry guns with them and they even refused the

sexual advances of the Aboriginal women who were seeking to exchange companionship for

food and tobacco. The missionaries did not directly approach the Aborigines, they would

hang gifts and food on trees and at first those gifts would only be taken, but eventually the

Aborigines were persuaded to move their camps closer to the mission. The missionaries

would distribute food after the Aborigines had sat through strange rituals which they later

knew to be church service. The Aborigines soon realized that the missionaries claimed to

have powers similar to their own sorcerers. The missionaries revealed these ‘powers’ when

they applied some Western medicine to sores or diseases and when that worked; it appeared

to be a miraculous cures for the Aborigines. The missionaries used the language the other

understood speaking of invisible spirits, of gods, devils, angels and spiritual powers, and they

seemed ready at times to defy Aboriginal belief and knowledge. Whether it was the

missionaries’ food, their powers or presents persuaded the Aborigines to move closer the
mission which changes their semi-nomadic lifestyle to a more sedentary way of life.

However, the Aborigines at the missions experienced difficult conditions; they generally had

to suffer the ethnocentric and racist attitudes held by many missionaries who viewed

Aboriginal culture as pagan, uncivilized and inferior. Reverend E.R. Gribble, an Anglican

missionary all of his life, typically described the Aborigines as ‘children’ who belong to a

‘degraded and depraved race’ which must be uplifted. Some fundamentalist missionaries saw

the Aborigines as pagan enemies who, like forces of darkness, had to be triumph over. Even

favorable missionary views were paternalistic, rating the Aborigines ‘as good as any other

native’ (Broome 108).

The missionaries soon found out that the adult Aborigines had little interest in

Christianity so they concentrated on the children. They were segregated from their parents in

dormitories and were taught Christianity, about God, sin, goodness and salvation. The

missionaries were successful in convincing the Aboriginal parents to leave their children at

the missions. They achieved this by persuasion and by threatening withdrawal of rations. The

Aborigines were also often thankful to be able to leave their children at the dormitories to be

fed and cared for, as it was harder to obtain their traditional food since the European

encroachment on their land. On the other hand, there were also times when the Aboriginal

children were forcibly taken in the dormitories. “Reverend Watson of the Wellington mission

gained recruits by kidnapping. Aborigines in the area were forced to hide their children when

he was near” (Broome 37). Life in the dormitories was one of control and correction. The

missionaries interpreted their Christian ideas into rules and regulations in the hope that the

Aborigines would be Christians by simply following them. Children who were taken away

from their parents were put in Missions and at times they refused to obey discipline. Others

found a wide range of ways of refusing to cooperate, or fulfilling the European’s

expectations. The dormitory routine failed to break the ties of the children from traditional
life, but the considerable time absorbed in it succeeded in limiting the depth and richness of

their traditional knowledge. Many dormitory children were left between the Aboriginal and

European world. The Aboriginal people in the missions were made to depend on the food

handouts by the missionaries and this dependence was further increased by the loss of

hunting skills due to lack of practice and also the dormitory based children received

insufficient bush education.

As the missionaries were keenly dedicated to bringing about change in the Aborigines

and making them Christian, both Westernization and Christianity attacked the Aborigines.

However, in spite of all these situations there were very few Aboriginal Christian converts as

Bishop Gsell wrote of the Bathurst Island Mission in 1954: ‘even after thirty years of work

we still could not claim one single adult convert’ (Broome 118). Though the language barrier

between the Aborigines and the missionaries facilitated to the Aborigines efforts to remain

traditional, the Aborigines were not prepared to comprehend some Christian concepts. They

had no understanding of hell, no knowledge of geography to place the events of the Bible,

and no comprehension of the Christian parables about flocks and shepherds for they had

never seen sheep. When shown Biblical pictures, the Aborigines saw only a white God, a

white Jesus, white angels and a black devil, and were naturally alienated by this European

color symbolism of white as good and black as evil. The Bible stories to them were a story of

power and injustice. Therefore, the Christian message was either confused or was not

accepted as it was intended (Broome 117). According to Richard Broome, “If the European

missionaries all over Australia had been able to detach themselves from association with

European power and cultural dominance they might have gained more Aboriginal converts.

As it was, they remained colonial managers as well as men of God, and this mixture alienated

the Aborigines” (119). Thus, missionaries in colonial cultures are interesting and ambiguous

agents of empire. Although they were very well intentioned towards the indigenous people
they encountered, they have little regard for preserving the indigenous cultures. The

missionaries occupied a very ambivalent and ambiguous position within the Aboriginal

cultures. They were driven by the ideas that Christianity could bring a better tomorrow for

the ‘pagan Aborigines’. While most other Europeans in contact with the Aborigines did little

to change Aboriginal ways, the missionaries tried to strike at the heart of Aboriginal culture,

defeat it, and put Christianity and European customs in its place. Though the Aborigines

resisted this attack for a long while, but great changes have occurred and the battle has been

lost in some communities. The heartening thing is that a number of missionaries saw the

value of Aboriginal culture from the outset, and that others were flexible enough to change

their opinions. As pastor Albrecht of Hermannsburg mission in central Australia once

remarked: ‘When we first came here we thought we had found the only people in the world

without a religion. Now we have learnt that they are among the most religious people in the

world’ (qtd. in Broome 123). As Johannes Fabian has argued, not only ‘the crooks and brutal

exploiters, but honest and intelligent agents of colonialism need to be accounted for’ in order

to build up a nuanced, complicated vision of colonialism and its aftermath (qtd. in Johnston

105).

The impact of missionaries influence on the lives of the Aboriginal people may be

considered as mixed blessings. On the one hand, the missionaries protect the Aborigines from

the brutality of the other European settlers and used their position to stop the tradition of

initiation and polygamy practiced by the Aborigines. Initiation was condemned and most

missionaries opposed polygamy. However, it should be noted that, sometimes change came

to traditional culture not because of the pressure of the missionaries but their presence and

example caused a shift in community ideas. And therefore, though there were many

Aborigines who were adamant in trying to keep up their traditional way of life, there are

some who wanted to do away with some of their traditions like polygamy and initiation,
which the missionaries opposed and condemned. Thus, the Aborigines themselves who were

attracted by the missionaries’ ways took advantage of their presence to modify practices that

they found irksome (Broome 116).On the other hand, the paternalistic attitude and the

dormitory life in the missions had disabled the Aborigines in living their life outside the

missions. It was not easy for the Aborigines to take up new responsibilities, even if it means

their life, after so many years forced dependence and inadequate training. When the missions’

regimes came to an end, the Aboriginal people had to make far- reaching adjustments to their

way of life. The quandaries of the Aborigines caused by the impact of the missionaries is

succinctly sums by Uncle Herbie and Joe in In Our Town:

UNCLE HERBIE: Kia, wetjala cunning fella alright. When they come here they had

the Bible and we had the land..now –

JOE & UNCLE HERBIE: Now they’ve got the land and we’ve got the Bible! (Davis

44)

Here Davis highlight the similar quandaries shared by not only the Aborigines of Australia

but also all the indigenous people in different parts of the world in their encounter with the

missionaries which impacted their lives, religion, culture, customs, etc.

The Federal Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, actively pursued the policy of

assimilation in reference to Aboriginal people as a way of improving their way of life. He,

like many others before him, believed that they could improve their treatment and conditions,

if they could be encouraged to be more 'white'. Assimilation for Aboriginal people was seen

as a positive policy by many people - as were the policies of paternalism and protectionism.

In 1961 Hasluck, then Minister for Territories described this policy as follows:

The policy of assimilation means in the view of all Australian governments that all

aborigines and part-aborigines are expected eventually to attain the same manner of

living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community

 enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observ-

ing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other

Australians. Thus, any special measures taken for aborigines and part-aborigines are

regarded as temporary measures not based on color but intended to meet their need

for special care and assistance to protect them from any ill effects of sudden change

and to assist them to make the transition from one stage to another in such a way as

will be favorable to their future social, economic and political advancement (The

Policy of Assimilation).

He further revealed in another statement:

We do not want a submerged caste or any other social pariahs in our community but

want a homogenous society (Hasluck 35).

These statements substantiate that assimilation was about what white Australians want, i.e.

what they want first for themselves and what they want for the Aborigines. Since

colonization Aboriginal Affairs policy has been dominated by attempts to subjugate the

distinctness of the Aborigines. The white Australian Policy for assimilation of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander peoples has consistently asserted the dominance of the mainstream

discourse over the voices of Indigenous peoples. This approach is based on fear of the

differences, the unknown and the strange qualities of the Aborigines which unsettled the

white people’s perception of “civilized” living. It also reveals the white Australians inability

to embrace the differences of the Aboriginal culture, tradition and customs and be enriched

by it.

The economic depression of the 1890s (which is highlighted in Davis’s No Sugar) and

the collapse of the pastoral industry led to the displacement of the Aborigines from their land

to the Reserves. These Reserves were set up by the European authorities in order to adopt

greater control over the lives of Aboriginal people. The White Australia policy came about in
this era along with greater surveillance and restrictions on Aboriginal people. The segregation

of Aboriginal people on the Reserves that in part resulted from structural economic change

allowed the assertion of Australian identity as a white nation (Norman 73). Therefore the

setting up of reserves in Australia became a vital key to dispossess many indigenous people

of their traditional lands. Hence, it can be said that within a short period after the arrival of

the Europeans on the frontier, the Europeans put the Aborigines in what they called

Reserves/Camps/Missions. The white Europeans aimed at denying indigenous people self-

determination and the ability to control their future. After being dispossessed of their land

and their hunting grounds, the Aborigines found themselves under the control of newly

created supervisory authorities. These laws were never understood and never consented to by

the Aborigines at any point in history. They were never part of a system that self-certified

itself as benefactor. The fact is they were effectively sidelined, silenced and made invisible in

history. The Aboriginal playwrights thus seem to write their presence into history.

In his play No Sugar (1985), Jack Davis draws attention on the depression year. It was

a hard and difficult time even for the white European settlers, and it brought exceptional hard

times for the Aborigines. The state authorities round up the native population of Northam and

transfer them to Moore River Settlement. No Sugar is about the enforced relocation of the

Millimurra family to the Moore River Settlement, just like the Yorlah family of Kullark,

Davis first play, and the tribulations faced by the family. With No Sugar, Davis was

portraying life under the apartheid Acts of the 1930s and the 1940s to audiences conditioned

by the assimilation Acts of the 1960s and the 1970s and undergoing a transition towards

multiculturalism in the 1980s (Casey 152). Davis dramatized the words and behavior of real

historical figures such as A.O. Neville, the chief protector of the Aborigines, and Mr. Neal,

the superintendent of the Moore River Settlement. Davis relies heavily on oral literatures and

his stories were from the Aboriginal past as told to him by his family (Casey 136). His story
seems authentic as Davis himself spent several years of his youth in the Moore River

Settlement. The white authorities segregated the natives in the reserves from the whites in

order to prepare them for assimilation in the mainstream Australia, as A.O. Neville speech on

his Australia Day visit to the Moore River Settlement tells the encamped Aborigines:

…I was reminded that the world is in the grip of depression and that many people are

suffering from hunger and deprivation of many of the essential elements which make

for a contented existence. But you, in this small corner of the Empire, are fortunate in

being provided with adequate food and shelter… It doesn’t hurt to remind yourselves

that you are preparing yourselves here to take your place in the Australian society, to l

ive as other Australians live, and to live alongside other Australians; to learn to enjoy

the privileges and to shoulder the responsibilities of living like the white man, to be

treated equally, not worse, not better, under the law (Davis, No Sugar 97).

Neville, with his paternalistic attitude is proud of himself and the government in looking after

the Aborigines, providing them food and shelter. However, he is furious when the Aborigines

alter and modify the hymn ‘There is a Happy Land’ with a parody that sums up their

condition in the Settlement:

There is a happy land,

Far, far away.

No sugar in our tea,

Bread and butter we never see.

That’s why we’re gradually

Fading away. (Davis, No Sugar 98).

Neville is so angry and immediately tells them to stop singing, he is appalled by the

‘disgraceful demonstration of ingratitude’ and swears that the Aborigines ‘will live to rue this
day’. And as for the punishment he announces that ‘there will be no Christmas this year’

(ibid.).

The motive for these mission services was hardly pure philanthropy; it was one of the

schemes used by the white governments on the Aborigines so that they could assimilate them

into the white society. The missions were considered to be indispensable agents of

implementing the new policy of assimilation. As early as February 1947, A.P. Elkin had

informed a conference of mission officials that it was essential for their institutions to:

Have a positive economic and welfare policy. In addition to the spiritual… [they]

should set out to teach the native to meet the new era of civilization, which must, of

necessity, make its impact on him in the future (Shoemaker 68).

When Joe and his lover Mary (from No Sugar) and the Yorlah family (from Kullark)

eventually escape and are discharged from the Settlement, they are under strict surveillance

of the police and the white authorities. They are not allowed to move freely from one place to

another without prior permission from the white authorities. Under the Aboriginal Acts in

different parts of Australia; Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, New South Wales

Northern Territory and South Australia, the white governments established rigid control over

all Aborigines (unless exempted), which ensued to a loss of civil rights i.e. the right to move

freely from one place to another, the right to freedom of association and marriage, the right to

control one’s property and earnings, and the right to vote, drink, work, carry guns and own

dogs. Without the permission of the white authorities the Aborigines were not allowed to

work outside the reserves, they were confined to the settlements and they under total control

of the settlements managers who were ready and eager to use the powers given to them under

the Act. As Rowley remarked: ‘Aboriginal administration in these places became an issue as

remote as that of gaols or asylums’ (qtd. in Broome 31). These white European authorities

were given the responsibility of administrating and implementing to bring about coercive
assimilation. Eventually, these supervisory authorities assumed almost complete control over

every aspect of the indigenous peoples’ lives. Their aim in dispossessing the Aboriginal

people of their lands, along with controlling their lives, resulted in the native’s loss of self-

determination, identity, and culture. Eventually the Aborigines moved into the European

settlements. Many Aborigines came to the settlement to obtain European food well before the

traditional foods in their area were exhausted. As Annette Hamilton has stated:

When the news came that the whites had abundant, if strange, food, more than they

could possible eat, this was like news of Eden- or the super water hole, in Aboriginal

terms. Hence, just as they had always moved to the sources of food- the ripening figs,

the run of witchitties, so they moved to the whites, not in order to take part in white

society, not in order to experience social change, but in order to beg the food

(Broome 56).

In most areas this act of ‘coming-in’ was forced upon the Aborigines due to military

exhaustion, disease and starvation. Some of the Aborigines came to the settlements

voluntarily out of curiosity for the white intruders. However as time passed the desire for

food was the main reason why some of the Aborigines decided to stay in the settlements as

they were provided with food and shelter, because with the European settlements it was

harder for the Aborigines to live their semi-nomadic lifestyle as their lands were used and

cultivated by the Europeans which made it difficult for them to find food. The act of

‘coming-in’ whether forced or not, demanded a great deal from the Aborigines. Aboriginal

women had to form liaisons with European men; the Aborigines had to work in European

fashion and generally lose a great deal of control over their lives. Some of the young were

tempted by white culture and yet through it all, they were determined to retain their

Aboriginal culture. By ‘coming-in’ they were further decimated by disease, alcohol, and
inter-tribal fights. Even the European foods they sought were not particularly good for them

(Broome 58).

As mentioned earlier Davis relies on the oral histories of the Aborigines, in Kullark,

he reenacts the history where the entire population of the Northam camp, were rounded up by

police and dumped at the Moore River Settlement. A narrative of the Indigenous history thus

conceived becomes significant when the Euro-centric narratives are grossly suspect. As a

white actress on the stage retells:

WHITE ACTRESS: On January seventeenth, nineteen thirty-

three, eighty-nine Aborigines, the entire

population of the Northam Camp, were

rounded up by police and dumped in the

Moore River Settlement. The Northam Shire

Council said they had scabies and were a

health risk.

And a black actor continues:

BLACK ACTOR: At Moore River it was found that only four of

the eighty-one had the disease (Davis, Kullark 46).

Here Davis, depicted the first generation of the Yorlah family where Thomas Yorlah, his wife

Mary Yorlah and their two children were among the victims. We find the family’s resistance

of this enforced settlement and their helpless situation. When a policeman comes to arrest

Thomas Yorlah showing a warrant arrest to him, Thomas is dumbfounded, as he says:

THOMAS: Gawd almighty, what for?

POLICEMAN: You are being arrested under Section Twelve of the

Aborigines Act.
 THOMAS: I don’t even come under the Act. I’m only a quarter

native blood. I don’t live on the reserves and I never

took government blankets, rations or nothin’.

POLICEMAN:Well, I don’t know about that. I don’t decide these

things. All I know is you’re on my list so as far as I’m

concerned I’ve gotta put you on that train.

THOMAS: Train? You’re takin’ us to Moore River?

POLICEMAN: That’s the law. Any native under the Aborigines Act

can be moved from any area to any other area (Davis, Kullark 47).

Thomas Yorlah pleaded the authorities saying that he could very well take care of his family

without help or assistance from the government “protectors”. However, he and his family

could not avert themselves from the white authorities. While they were in Moore River

Settlement, Thomas persistently runs away from the settlements with his family but the black

tracker, Bluey, who ardently obeyed the whites, would always catch up with them and

brought them back to the settlement. When Thomas Yorlah continues to plead, the

Superintendent of the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement, Mr. Neale replies, “Only that

you’re wasting your time. You’ll never get an exemption, Yorlah, I promise you that. And I

don’t want you asking for permission to go down to Perth again, because I don’t intend to

give it. As far as I’m concerned you can stay here in Moore River and bloody well rot”

(Davis, Kullark 51). This encounter eloquently reveals the lacunae of the settlers’ laws and

the natives’ reasonable concerns.

Though the Yorlah’s family is so helpless in their situation, the father, Thomas Yorlah

is still persistent in getting out from the Settlement. He says to his wife:

We’re getting’ outta here. I got a plan. Mr. Neale says he’ll never let us go, but if we

keep runnin’ away he’s got to get sick of us and ’e’ll give in… (Davis, Kullark 53)
Every time they run away they are always caught and Thomas was put in prison and his

family are always sent back to the Settlement. After six months Thomas would get out of

prison and he would then planned again on escape from the Settlement. This escape and

imprisonment repeated several times for Thomas and his family as he says:

Well, I just got back from Fremantle. Not Fremantle town, Fremantle Gaol. Done six

months. [He laughs.] And tomorrow, we’re off again. It’ll take ’em e month to catch

us, an’ by that time I’ll have the kids lookin’ healthier and their sores all better. I

don’t know how many times I gotta run away, or haw may times they gonna put me

in gaol, but im gonna keep comin’ back for my family, you’ll see (Davis, Kullark,

54).

And when the Yorlah’s family is finally freed from the Moore River Settlement, Thomas

joyfully exclaims:

Well, we won, we won.

[He laughs.]

Me, Mum and the kids. Four times I run away and four times I got six months’ gaol.

That’s two years, twenty- four months, eh! But by Gawd it was worth it. Yeah, every

night in the boob was worth it, an’ if I had to I’d do it all over again. Yeah, I’d do it

all over again (Davis Kullark 54).

However, before they were finally released from the Settlement, they were warned, “not to

return to any of the following towns Northam, Toodyay, York or Beverly” and if they visit

any of these places again they will be brought back to the Settlement. They were further

ordered not to apply for assistance from the Aborigines Department and were not allowed in

any town after six in the evening (Davis, Kullark 55). The scene also shows how common

and usual it was for the Aboriginal people to be imprisoned, and how lightly they took on
being imprisoned by the whites authorities, never for a time consigning to death their natural

urge for freedom.

In Kullark, the action moves between different time frames and places in Western

Australia:

The action of the play moves from the kitchen of the Yorlah household in a country

town in the South West of Western Australia,1979, to a farm in the Pinjarra area

between 1829 and 1834, the Moore River Native Settlement in the 1930s, the

Yorlahs’ chaff-bag humpy in 1945 and other associated areas (Davis, Kullark 6).

Thus the play starts with the scene of the Yorlah family’s kitchen in Perth in 1979, and then

shifts to the first contact between Europeans and the Nyoongah people, the Moore river

settlement in the 1930s and the Yorlah family’s humpy in 1945. The action of the play

doesn’t move in chronological order and we are taken back and forth to the different time

frames. By using this technique Davis is able to reenact stories of the past intermingled with

the present, which give the audience and the reader good theatre- and collapse of the

historical progress that, the European privileges.

One of the most prominent methods of assimilation, which had a great impact on the

history of Australia directed toward the Aborigines, was educating the Aboriginal children. In

order for the natives to be assimilated into the Western culture, it was thought that they had to

be educated in the Western way. The white European administrators felt that the indigenous

peoples were completely incapable of educating their own children. In relation to Indigenous

children, the conference in April 1937, also resolved that,

... efforts of all State authorities should be directed towards the education of children

of mixed aboriginal blood at white standards, and their subsequent employment under

the same conditions as whites with a view to their taking their place in the white

community on an equal footing with the whites (Bringing Them Home Report 26).
Therefore in implementing this scheme many Aboriginal children were taken away from their

parents and were put up in institutions/missions set up especially for them. In relation to the

indigenous children, A.O. Neville the Chief Protector of the Aborigines, who headed the

Conference, says:

It is my opinion that these half-castes can be made into useful workmen and women,

but unfortunately they are most often found in communities whose influence is

towards laziness and vices, and I think it is our duty not to allow these half-castes,

whose blood is, after all, half British, to grow up as a vagrants and outcasts as their

mothers now are. A half- caste, who possesses few of the virtues and all of the vices

of whites, grows up to be a mischievous and criminal subject. It may appear to be a

cruel thing to take an Aboriginal child from its native mother, but it is necessary in

some cases to be cruel in order to be kind (Davis, Kullark 41-42).

The Indigenous children were forcibly and involuntarily taken from their natural parents to

institutions, which taught them to act in a “civilized” manner. One of the characters, Black

Actor, in Kullark, speaking over the music says:

The police would just arrive and take the child and put him on a reserve or a mission

where he could learn to live white, to assimilate. While the children played in the

Settlement compound – huge wire fences, concentration camp fence – the old women

would come up and call them over, hold their hands through the compound fence and

tell them who they were, who their mothers were, what their skin was, and what their

totems and dreamings were. The children were caught, belted by the authorities, and

told not to mix with those dirty blacks (Davis, Kullark 42).

The language of Kullark is mostly marked by gestures that speak eloquently of the

relationships now controlled by the aliens and of the powerlessness of the Aborigines who

suffer without ventilating their grievances. Sadly, many of these children never saw their
biological mothers again and never learned the ways their ancestors had lived for thousands

of years, as the Black Actor continues:

The child grew up and had to roam,

From the mission home, he loved so.

To find his mother he tried in vain,

Upon the earth they never met again (Davis, Kullark 43).

Poetry and pain combine to articulate the inarticulate sadness, here. Furthermore, this

western educational scheme required the complete desertion of the indigenous culture. The

most catastrophic aspect of the assimilation policy was that it led to many children being

taken away from their parents and families and placed in foster care or groups’ homes. These

children have come to be known as the 'Stolen Generations'. Carmel Bird aptly summarizes

the themes of removal across all regions of the country:

The children could be taken at any age, and many of them were taken from their

mothers at birth or in very early infancy. Most of the children so taken were put up

into institutions where the other children were mostly Aboriginal, of mixed race, and

where the staffs were non-Aboriginal. If a child was adopted or fostered out to a

family, the family usually was white. The objective of all this activity was to absorb

the Aboriginal children into white society, to force them to forget and deny their

Aboriginal heritage and blood, and to bring about, within few generations, a form of

breeding-out of all Aboriginal characteristics (Briskman 6).

The policies and practices of the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families

are seen through the voices of the Aboriginal people. Their accounts of these experiences are

highlighted in the writings of almost all the Aboriginal writers today. The forcible removal of

children from their families was one of the most inhumane methods of implementing

assimilation policies. The removal of Aboriginal children from their families was
systematically carried out, in an attempt to break down the social structure of Aboriginal

culture (Read 1998:13).

IIbijerri, one of the Indigenous theatre companies aimed to produce shows to bring

about community education for the Indigenous people. Jane Harrison, a descendent of the

Muruwari people of New South Wales, was commissioned to research and write a play about

the ‘lost children’, based on the experiences of members of the community. At first the

project was named The Lost Children, but it was later changed to Stolen and the script

development process began formally in 1992. In the course of writing Stolen, Jane Harrison

read thousands of oral transcripts and spoke with many members of the ‘Stolen Generations’.

Stolen is about the sufferings and the traumatic conditions of the Aboriginal children who

were removed from their families and it weaves common elements of the stories of many

Aborigines who were removed from their family at a young age. The play features five

protagonists Jimmy, Sandy, Shirley, Ruby and Anne, each character brings out the different

kinds of oppression faced by the Aboriginal children, the five characters become the

representative of the experience of all the children who were stolen from their families. As

Bridget Galton in her article “Aboriginal Sin of Australia Exposed” observes, “The scandal

of thousands of Aborigine children forcibly snatched from their ‘unfit’ parents by the

Australian government and placed into homes in the ‘50s and ‘60s is vividly realized in this

moving drama” (Galton 2001). While exposing ‘the aboriginal sin’ of white Australia,

Harrison has tried to weave a narrative to exploit the natural human sympathies and

successfully portrayed the human tragedy wrought by the ‘civilizing’ strategies of white

settlers even in the mid-twentieth century.

In Stolen, one of the character Shirley who is stolen as a child becomes a mother

whose children are again stolen, though Stolen is a fictional play, in the autobiography of

Sally Morgan, her grandmother, Daisy shares the same fate as Shirley, she was stolen as a
child and her children were also snatched away from her by the authorities as she says, “That

was the way of it, then. They took our children one way or another” (Morgan, My Place 340).

It is hard to distinguish fact from fiction in Harrison’s play. Their stories confirmed how

generations within a family were stolen. It was the government policy to take away the

children from their family in order to assimilate them into white society. “Near the beginning

of the last century, the then so-called protector of Aborigines declared that the policy of

removing their children caused family no distress. ‘The mothers soon forget.’ They didn’t,

and Stolen is here to make sure that we don’t either,” commented Lyn Gardner in her article

on Stolen (Gardner 2001). The white invaders could never forget symbolic mother, their

Crown Queen of Britain; but the irony is their Australian Government adopted the sinister

policy to force forgetfulness on Aboriginal children and mothers.

The ‘half- castes’ children were particularly targeted by the government officials and

taken away from their parents and put them in different institutions which is set up especially

for them so that they could be absorbed into white society. These children, it was hoped,

would then assimilate and intermarry into mainstream society. The Welfare officers were

removing children solely because they were Aboriginal, it was intended and arranged so that

they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home (Read 2002:57). In

Stolen, one of the characters, Sandy, whose birth was the result of his mother being raped by

a white man was always on the run from the Welfare, who tries to take him away from his

mother and community. In the scene “Hiding Sandy”, his cousin, aunt and uncle talks about

how they’ve tried hiding Sandy from the Welfare. As the Welfare was always after Sandy, he

was always hiding and running, this makes Sandy filled with anxiety and fear, as his uncle

says:

UNCLE: When I took the boy in he had nothing but the shirt on his back

and a wild look in his eye. He couldn’t sit still. I’d take him down to the river and
 slowly he’d start breathing again. We’d catch a few fish and have a yarn, and he’d

even crack a smile now and then. But then someone dobbed us in, and they took him.

Sad to see the boy go (Harrison, Stolen 4).

The tale moving on the borderline of raw reality unveils what is not said here; and a peep into

the unsaid uncovers the true savagery of the civilized man. The family and communal effort

to hide Sandy from the Welfare proved futile and he couldn’t understand why he was

targeted:

SANDY: Always on the run. But I don’t want to go. Can’t I stay

here? I haven’t done nothing wrong. I wannastay. I don’t wanna go (ibid.).

The Sandy story is one of the many Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their

families. Children were literally stolen from their families and communities and removed

from their traditional way of life. As Peter Read points out, “It is probably fair to say that

except for the remotest regions of the nation, there was not a single Aboriginal family which

had not been touched by the policy of removal. Everybody had lost someone” (Read 1998:9).

In the real sense, the wild, Aboriginal Australia was stolen from its inhabitants.

In Stolen, there are four scenes in which the children are make to line up “in the right

order of lightest to darkest” (Stolen5) In “Line-Up 1”, the children stand expectantly,

straightening their clothes and looking eager. Sandy doesn’t quite understand what was going

on. Shirley nudges him and explains in a whisper:

SHIRLEY: A lady and a man are coming.

RUBY: Matron said they’re gunna take one of us home.

SANDY: Back home…?

SHIRLEY: Not our home, Sandy, their homes.

SANDY: Oh. Do ya get to stay there forever?

ANNE: But why…?

 Anne is ignored as Jimmy answers over her to Sandy.

JIMMY: Nah, just for the weekend.

SANDY: Oh. Do ya get more to eat than the rotten food here?

JIMMY: Christ, anything’d be better –

SANDY: Do ya have to scrub the floors…?

JIMMY: Nah!

ANNE: But why…?

RUBY: Shhhh.

As the golden spotlight falls on each of them in turn, they sell

themselves in their own particular way. Shirley straightens her dress. Sandy flattens

his hair.

JIMMY: [stepping forward] I make my bed real good (Harrison, Stolen 6).

Jimmy is very hopeful of being chosen by the white couple, but Ruby is chosen because “in

the bright light she looks white”. Jimmy ends the scene with a hopeful note: “They’re gunna

choose me one day” (ibid.). The conditions faced by the children in the homes were so harsh

that they desire to be adopted or fostered to a white family. The food was poor and the menial

work in which they were trained become a heavy load for the children. The lighter skinned

ones were adopted into white homes, however, the children in some cases faced sexual

exploitation, like Ruby in Stolen. In the scenes, “Unspoken Abuse I” and “Unspoken Abused

II” of Stolen, we find Ruby returning from her weekend trip with her weekend parents, when

her friends asked her what she ate, she replied ‘fish and chips’, they asked what gift she got

she replied that ‘he’ gave her a doll and when they asked what else he give her, she softly

replied “I promised not to tell” (Stolen 8 and 15). These scenes clearly suggest that Ruby was

sexually abused which she feels too shameful to share with her friends. This kind of pain and

confusion, results in loss of identity, loss of confidence in an identity, and Ruby has become
crazy beyond reach when her black family finally finds her. She is the veritable witness to all

our hypocritically civilized missions that the homes boast of.

The children put in the institution were not allowed to speak their language and

practicing their ceremonies were forbidden. They were taught to deny their Aboriginality so

that they could assimilate into European society. The Aboriginal families were kept in the

dark about the whereabouts of their children and ensure that they could not trace them. As a

result the children grew up without any family ties and social and cultural identity. The

feeling of loneliness and emptiness let them consort to violence, delinquency, alcohol, drugs

etc. Some of them fell victims to low self- esteem and feelings of worthlessness like, Ruby,

or feeling of rage, powerlessness and hopelessness that leads to suicide like, Jimmy. The

problematic part of the assimilation policies is that as the white administrators were so intent

on the removal of the Aboriginal children from their family as Robert Donaldson, chief

inspector of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, addressed the Australian Catholic

Congress in 1909:

We have today, 3,200 children growing up in our midst, three-fourths of whom

range from half-castes to almost white, with no prospects ahead of the great

majority, under the present system, but lives of idleness and vice… under the evil

influences and bad examples of the adults, they almost invariably drift into an

aimless, useless life of idleness and immorality…. For adults we can only make their

track as smooth as possible – they will soon pass away, but the children require our

gravest consideration…. Amongst all those who have had a large experience with the

Aborigines, and who take deep interest in their welfare, there is no difference of

opinion as to the only solution of this great problem, - the removal of the children and

their complete isolation from the influence of the camps. Under no circumstances

whatever should the boys and girls be allowed to return to the camps, except on a
 short visit in an emergency, and then only by consent of the department. In the course

of a few years there will be for the camps and stations; the old people will have

passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the colony

(Read 1998:10).

The results of this rhetoric action lead far-reaching implications on the life of the children

who were stolen from their parents. It is not only the rape, sexual exploitation, the physical

and mental abuse, the feeling of being unloved by their families, the insanity, loneliness and

the hopelessness that results in suicide, but also the identity crisis faced by the children who

were adopted by the white families.

In Stolen, Anne is ‘chosen’ by the white family because of her skin color i.e. ‘her

milky white skin’ (Harrison, Stolen 16). It is obvious that it is the light skin of Anne that

weighs in her favor for adoption. She was adopted as an infant by white family and she never

knew about it until she was informed by her white parents that her real mother, an

“Aboriginal lady,” is dying and wants to see her. Anne is horrified to discover her Aboriginal

origins, she is confused and angry as she breaks down: Mum… Dad! Mum! Dad! Why? This

is a nightmare!” (14). Her white parents told her that she could go “to see her … once” and

that “no one need ever know”. Anne’s attitude is quite ambivalent after she had visited her

birth mother, her Aboriginal family had told her “Yeah, and you have to come back to us-it’s

where you belong, girl” “We lot have to stick together, you know” (28). On the other hand

she has her white family who told her “You’re one of us, Anne- we’ve brought you up as one

of our own,” “We’ve given you everything- a home, an education, a future,” and “Don’t you

appreciate all we’ve done?” (28). She is confused of where she truly belongs, she is fully

assimilated within white culture, but there is a pull of filial loyalty that surpasses the barrier

of space and absence. Anne’s case veritably projects the human dilemma which is

constructed by caring but unlovely systems. Harrison raises radical questions about one’s
indulgence resulting in another’s deprival and deprivation. In the scene, “Am I Black or

White?” (Harrison, Stolen 28) Anne’s mind is caught in crossfire, conflicting voices of her

adoptive parents and Aboriginal family close in on her asking, “Who do you think you are?”

(29). She is uncertain of her identity; this uncertainty of identity is what the white officials

had wanted, as Bridget Galton observes, “It is as if the children’s bewildered identities are the

desired outcome for a society that wants to rub out their people’s existence” (Galton 2001).

However, in the last part of the play in “Anne Scene”, Anne declares, “I don’t know where I

belong anymore…But hey, it’s Mother’s Day and I’ve got to make tracks. [She pulls out a

box of gift-wrapped chocolates.] I got Mum some milk chocolates. [She pauses, then pulls

out another box.] And I got my mother some dark chocolates. [She laughs and pops one in

her mouth.] Either way, I love them both” (Stolen 34). The scene here suggests that Anne is

able to reconcile and is accepting both the white and the Aboriginal world. However, there

can be many difficulties faced by an individual, as Peter Read observes, “I think that

returning to one’s Aboriginal family after a lifetime on the other side is the most difficult

journey one can undertake in the whole of modern Australia. But it can happen and it does

happen. Life will never be perfect but with courage, understanding from your two

communities and a bit of humor, most returning Aborigines make their own way back into

the communities” (Read 1998:12).This increasingly reestablishes the fact that the call of the

blood is not stifled by all super structural ivory dwellings. The natural bond of the blood

subverts the entire colonialist project of assimilation, which is bent on breeding a sense of

shame for being what is naturally one’s own, in the first place.

In My Place, when Sally Morgan finds out about her Aboriginal heritage, she is very

excited, however her own sister Jill, who did not share her excitement, says, “It’s a terrible

thing to be Aboriginal. Nobody wants to know you…You can be Indian, Dutch, Italian,

anything, but not Aboriginal!” For Sally mother and grandmother, their Aboriginal identity
was also something, which they were both ashamed of. Daisy admits that she ‘wanted to be

white’ (Morgan 336) and Gladys says that ‘she just doesn’t want be Aboriginal’ (229). As

Anne Brewster observes, “My Place is a testimony to the effects of the assimilation policy,

introduced in the late 1930s, which attempted to bring about the absorption of Aboriginal

people into white society, thereby erasing their cultural difference. During the 1940s and the

1950s both Daisy and Gladys felt ashamed and fearful of identifying as Aboriginal. They

denied their Aboriginality and attempted to repress their memories of the past” (Brewster 17).

Almost all of her life Daisy had attempted to conceal her Aboriginality. Morgan describes

Daisy’s attempts to identify as white during a visit by the rent man. In order to impress the

rent man, whose power she has always feared, believing that he might one day evict them,

rhapsodizes with him over the wonder of God, she says, ‘here are you and I, both white”,

Sally overheard their conversation and finds it ridiculously funny, but then she is overcome

with sadness and asks herself: “why did she want to be white? Did she really equate being

white with the power of God, or was it just a slip of the tongue? I realized, with sudden

insight, that there must have been times in her life when she’d looked around and the

evidence was right before her eyes. If you’re white, you can do anything” (Morgan 107).

This shows the powerlessness of the Aborigines against the white as Daisy feels the need to

pretend her Aboriginality and present herself as a white person despite her skin color. Daisy

was always frightened and suspicious of the government, when Sally mocked her for being

suspicious of the government she told Sally, “…You don’t know what’s the government’s

like, you’re too young. You’ll find out one day what they can do to people. You never trust

anybody who works for the government…” (Morgan 96).

There are many people who are part- Aboriginal but who prefer to remain unknown to

their family or community, or who doesn’t want to acknowledge their Aboriginality. Deborah
Mailman an Aboriginal actress, playwright and performer was denied of her Aboriginality, as

she says in an interview,

“I love my dad very much, my mum too, she’s my best mate, but my dad denied me

my Aboriginality. Denied maybe too strong of a word, but he didn’t encourage the

exploration of my Aboriginality…It was the whole sense of shame I guess... Dad

would tell us we were better than that. I think what he meant to say was that we could

do something with our lives. We have opportunities out there to improve our lifestyle

if we choose to take them. And choose them I did. But for a long time when I was a

teenager, Dad and I used to have huge arguments: he’d say, ‘No, you are not

Aboriginal.’ Knowing that we were, I was really confused about being a

‘Blackfella’…” (Purcell 2002:3-5).

When Deborah Mailman was awarded AFI awards for Best Actress, she was given the label

of being the ‘first Aboriginal’ to win an AFI award and that’s when one of her relatives called

up her Mum and Dad and said, “She’s got no right saying that, because she’s not Aboriginal.”

Mailman made a comment about them as she said, “For some reason they don’t acknowledge

their Aboriginality…I guess that family member is still in denial over their Aboriginality”

(Purcell 2002:4-16). Mailman also commented on why she thinks that her family didn’t want

her to acknowledge her Aboriginality with understanding as she said, “I look back now and

see that Dad and the family wanted the best out of life and what they were seeing around

them, in their time, from society in general, or what was being portrayed of black

communities in the media, was not positive” (Purcell 2002:17).

There are Aboriginal descendants like Deborah Mailman, who are actually proud of

their Aboriginality, like Anne from Stolen and Sally Morgan in My Place, who later found

out about it and claim their Aboriginality. However, the moment they acknowledge and

reveals their Aboriginality, they are questioned with, “What tribe?” “What language?”
“Where they came from?” “What they used to do?” etc. They are often faced with these

types of questions that they really find difficult to answer, as they know little about their

culture, heritage and background. Gladys Milroy, Sally’s mother had also inhabits a complex

and ambivalent identity, she married a white man Bill Milroy and told her children that her

mother Daisy had come out on a boat from India in the early days (Morgan 99) until Sally

began her quest for their family history. However, when Sally found out about their

Aboriginal identity she defends herself saying “it was only a little white lie” (Morgan 135)

and encouraged Sally to write about their family history and urged her mother Daisy to co-

operate with Sally in her quest. Gladys even accompany Sally and her family when they

travel to Pilbara to meet their Aboriginal relatives. Meeting her Aboriginal relatives made her

acknowledge her Aboriginal heritage and she finally realized as she says, “All my life, I’ve

only been half a person” (Morgan 233). The white policy of assimilation cannot address the

problem of ‘feeling’ and ‘value’ which remains ambivalent in the midst of all riches and

comforts and reasons provided by white Australian regimes. Peter Read in his book The Lost

Children suggests that, “Aboriginal identity is recoverable” (Read xvii). Though it can be

said that it is recoverable to an extent, the pain, the anguish and the dilemma is sometimes

hard to cast away by the victims of the separation. Charles Perkins, the most famous

separated child of all, puts it this way:

We’re gone. Taken away. My youth was taken from me by Australia,White Australia.

When Aboriginal children are separated it dies, it dies: Gone for ever. Never return.

The connection is never made again. You always stay a bit different. You may want

to look down on people, or may want to act differently, or you may have different

values, for good or for bad. But you are different. That’s the way it is and that’s the

way it will always remain (Read 1998:16).

However, there are more optimistic reflections in the writings of some individuals, who like

Sally Morgan feel complete in finding out about their Aboriginal heritage, Pauline McLeod

expresses in her poem “The Yearning of My Soul”:

There was another part of me,

Another part of my life.

My natural family taken from me;

Hidden throughout my life.

The feeling was becoming stronger,

I could no longer ignore the call.

Something was happening within me.

Breaking down my hidden wall,

To become a person complete;

A woman becoming whole.

Black and Beautiful,

For the first time I listen to the YEARNING OF MY SOUL (Read 1998:18).

The white Australian government actively and aggressively pursued the policy of

assimilation in reference to Aboriginal people as a way of improving their way of life. They

believed that they could improve their treatment and conditions, if they could be encouraged

to be more 'white'. Many people saw assimilation for Aboriginal people as a positive policy

as it was seen as a way of improving the Aborigines and merging them to white culture.

As assimilation became a key policy for the government, more and more Aboriginal

people were forced off the reserves and into the towns and cities. Many Aboriginal people

wanted to move to cities and find work - to get away from the control of the reserve manager

or to be self-determined. But when they came in the cities they faced racism and

discrimination, and instead of being assimilated into 'white' society, they were mistreated by
the white society. The Aborigines were prohibited to enter the white domains and were

forced to live on the fringes of society in poverty and unemployment. In many rural areas

segregation became widespread, and Aboriginal people were shunned from the hotels and

bars and other public places run by whites. Throughout Australian history a racist attitudes

towards Aboriginal people had been one of the major issues. When the Aboriginal men

worked under the white people they were lowly paid. Coercion, exploitation and wage

injustice persisted in the industry throughout the era of assimilation…For sixteen years

between 1933 and 1949, the Aboriginal minimum wage in the Northern Territory pastoral

industry was pegged at the lamentably low level of five shillings per week (along with some

allowance for food, tobacco, and clothing) (Shoemaker 1992:67). This condition is

highlighted in Davis’s No Sugar, when the sergeant who said that their men were too lazy to

work confronted Gran and Milly, they replied:

MILLY: Look, last week my Joe cut a hundred posts for Skinny Martin and you know

what he got? A pair of second hand boots and a piece of stag ram so tough

even dawg couldn’t eat it; skinnier than old Martin ‘imself.

GRAN: And we couldn’t eat the boots (Davis No sugar 23).

The working condition of the Aboriginal people was very poor and that sometimes they

would even receive their wage in used goods, which were of no use or goods to them.

Another example of wage exploitation of Black Australians was ubiquitous:

During 1954, rates of pay for Aboriginal workers in the … area were about half of

those demanded and received by white employees doing the same work… Frequently

Aboriginal employees were persuaded to take cheap wine (sweet sherry or muscat) in

lieu of part of the wage due to them (Shoemaker 1992:71).

Under this kind of condition the feeling of powerlessness permeated the minds of the male

Aborigines more than the female. The conception of this feeling of powerlessness in the face
of racial discrimination by the male Aborigines could be corroborated in the words of Brian

Crow and Chris Banfield in their introduction to An Introduction to Post- Colonial Theatre,

“What has happened, in the historical relations between whites and blacks, is that because of

its belief in its racial superiority, associated with the economic and military dominance of

colonialism, the white race has disrupted the reciprocity of this fundamental process of

recognition. The black person looks for the human recognition accorded him by the other; but

when the other is white, that acknowledgement is withheld, and the black is deprived of his

‘certainty of himself’. So the black man ‘makes himself abnormal’; and the white ‘is at once

the perpetrator and the victim of a delusion’” (Crow and Banfield 3).

Another characteristic of the assimilation policy was the lack of right to citizenship of

the Aborigines in Australia. The Indigenous peoples of Australia were not recognized as

citizens. The right to vote was finally granted in 1962 and the white Australians gave the seal

of approval in the 1967 Referendum, which required Aborigines to be counted in the census

and allowed the Commonwealth Government to make laws for the Aborigines anywhere in

Australia (Prentis 88). Before the 1940s, Aboriginal people could not become citizens, but

after the Second World War they could be counted as citizens if they applied for a certificate,

which is if the white authorities think that they are entitled. By having a certificate, however,

they had to give up all ties with the Indigenous community, including their families. In New

South Wales it was known as an 'exemption' certificate; it exempted someone from being a

person of Aboriginal descent. To be able to vote, to be able to move around with no

restrictions, to be able to buy alcohol; basically to be able to make any sort of decision about

their lives, Aboriginal people had to deny their heritage and their families. The government

saw citizenship as a lure to make Aboriginal people assimilate. They promoted the

certificates as a good thing and encouraged those who were 'civilized' enough to apply for

them. The majority of Aboriginal people who compared them to ‘dog licenses’ looked upon
these exemption certificates with contempt. Racial discrimination and segregation, and

expressions of racial difference more generally, were problems that could be ameliorated by

policies of assimilation (Prentis 88).

When World War II came to an end, for most of the Australians it was a time of relief

and celebration. However, the celebration was short lived for the Aboriginal Australians in

many parts of the nation. Many of the Aboriginal men took part in the war, and in the army

they were treated equally with the white Australians, which made them feel national integrity

towards Australia. But, when they returned home they were faced with the same treatment-

racial prejudice and discrimination. In Kullark, Alec, who served in the army for five years

during the war was discharged with citizenship rights. He was so happy to finally got

citizenship, in a moment of soliloquy he holds up his citizenship card and says, “Well do I

look any whiter to you? This certificate says I’m now white, so I gotta think white an’ act

white…But now it’s nineteen forty–five an’ I gotta make a new start.” He smiles wryly and

looks at his card and continue to say, “We already got a name for these things, we call

‘emdawg collars. You know so the police can just look at this and tell who we are…” (Davis,

Kullark 59). When Alec returned home to his parents in the reserves and told them that they

have now the permission to leave the reserves as he got himself the citizenship rights, his

mother replied, “Aw, that’ll be ‘ard. Wetjalas still the same in this town, still don’t like

Nyoongahs (60). However Alec was optimistic and replies, “Army life, tent. Home life, tent.

There’ll be some changes so don’t forget to look around for that house next week, Mum.”

(61) The next day when Alec met a policeman he was trying to prevent him, but the

policeman, who was already aware of his citizenship rights caught up with him any way and

told him to get off the reserves quickly. He also told Alec to make sure that the rest of their

relatives stay away from their house after they moved to town. He further told him to turn his

rights if they can’t keep the ‘standard’. After the policeman left, Alec in a soliloquy says,
“Well, did you hear him tellin’ me to keep on the straight and narrow? Can’t have no

‘lationsvisitin’, can’t live on the reserve. Citizenship don’t sound much like freedom to me. I

seen a lot of blokes die in the war for freedom. None of ‘em would call this freedom, none f

‘em.” (63) The story of Alec and his family in the play, Kullark, is just one example of the

predicaments of an Aboriginal family. There are thousands of families who shared the same

experiences in the real world of ‘white’ Australia. The play radically questioned the high

values proclaimed by the written rights and written laws, because the ground realities for the

Aborigines remained unchanged and discriminatory.

Most of the prominent Aboriginal writers today are half-castes, quarter-castes or

octoroons. So the complex questions such as, who is a ‘real’ Aboriginal? is often asked about

the Indigenous people and their works. In My Place, Sally Morgan talks about her

experienced during her studying in the University, she got the opportunity for getting

Aboriginal scholarship which she applied for, and got. But, her friends who had always

known them as Indians question it and the authorities confronted her for obtaining the

scholarship under false pretenses. However, she got out of it without any further trouble. This

may also be the reason that triggers her quest of belonging – her Aboriginal heritage. Her

stories in My Place became part of a process of reclaiming her Aboriginal identity. With the

success of her autobiographical book My Place, Sally Morgan has been challenged by a

number of critics about her Aboriginality. The charges are that My Place articulates a

‘bourgeois individualism’ and ‘an acceptance of middle-class values’, she is also said to be

lacking in authenticity when her work has been compared to that of ‘traditional Aboriginal

genres’. In general it can be said that Morgan’s novel was well received by the white

audience but not so well by some sections of the Indigenous community. For example

Mudrooroo has said with reference to Sally Morgan that, ‘it is considered ok to be Aboriginal

as long as you are young, gifted and not very black’ (qtd. in Brewster 14). Jackie Huggins in
her essay, “Always was always will be” has criticized My Place by saying that “I read the

first chapter three chapters and thought I was reading the life of a middle-class Anglo

woman. I could not identify anything that told me Morgan was an Aboriginal person except

the part about our common Aboriginal study grant.” She further commented, ‘Aboriginality

cannot be acquired overnight’ (Huggins 62-63). So it seems that according to Huggins,

Mudrooroo and some writers who critique Sally Morgan feel that My Place is well received

by white audiences because it is less threatening for the white Australian audiences.

Aboriginal writers like Mudrooroo and Jackie Huggins critiquing their own

Aboriginal counterparts further complicates the whole idea of being an Aboriginal person and

makes it more contentious. According to Jackie Huggins, “genetic inheritance does not only

determine identity in an Aboriginal society, as there are other inescapable and compounding

factors which influence ‘being’ Aboriginal.” She further states, “Solely swallowing the

genetical cocktail mixture does not constitute ‘being’ Aboriginal, as so many Johnny –come

–latelies would have whites believe” (Huggins 63). Huggins finds it difficult to accept those

Aboriginal people who had been living unaware of their Aboriginality and later claimed to be

an Aboriginal and especially those who had lived hiding their Aboriginality and passed

themselves to be non- Aboriginal in the first place. She strongly asserts that, “Most

Aboriginal people never ceded their identity, no matter how destructive, painful or bad the

situation was. We vindictively remember those who have passed and unlike whitefellas and,

largely, those who study us can never forget nor forgive these traitors. Their jumping-on-the-

bandwagon trips are questioned and usually not accepted by their staunchest critics, whom

they presume should now be their firmest allies and ‘family’. Instant coffee doesn’t mix

easily with pure spring water” (Huggins 62). However, with all the critiques and issues of

Sally Morgan’s Aboriginality, there are Aboriginal critic and writer such as Marcia Langton

who defends Morgan’s My Place. According to Marcia Langton, My Place, “recasts

‘Aboriginality’, so long suppressed, as acceptable, bringing it out into the open. The book is

catharsis. It gives release and relief, not so much to Aboriginal people oppressed by psychotic

racism, as to the whites who wittingly and unwittingly participated in it” (Langton 117). In

regard to the debates and issues of Aboriginality, Huggins is also aware and of an opinion

that Aboriginality is always being theorized, intellectualized and trivialized by those who

have never felt the passion, anger or the pain. And that when Aboriginal writers publicly

analyze and criticize each other it can be perceived as infighting and when non-Aboriginals

do the same it is considered as a healthy exercise in intellectual stimulation. Thus, she

encourage others, particularly Aboriginal people, to comment her work as she says, “to stifle

our own debates between each other denies the richness and diversity of our Aboriginal

lives” (Huggins 65).

Mudrooroo, who openly made statements about Sally Morgan, whom he excluded

from his definition of Aboriginality, was also later questioned about his Aboriginality. He

was born as Colin Thomas Johnson and later changed his named to Mudrooroo Nyoongah

and Mudooroo Narogin. In early 1996, a member of the Nyoongah community questioning

Mudrooroo’s Aboriginality approached journalist Victoria Laurie. Informed that Mudrooroo's

sister, Betty Polglaze, had conducted in 1992 that traced her family back five generations,

Laurie contacted Polglaze who told her that she could find no trace of Aboriginal ancestry in

the family. Laurie subsequently wrote an article for her newspaper titled Identity Crisis

sparking a scandal that received nationwide media coverage in 1996/97. A request by the

Nyoongah community to substantiate his claimed kinship to the Kickett family was not

acknowledged because he was overseas and then in the process of relocating interstate. On 27

July 1996 the Nyoongah elders released a public statement: "The Kickett family rejects Colin

Johnson's claim to his Aboriginality and any kinship ties to the family".Mudrooroo's writings

had placed emphasis on kinship and family links as key features of Aboriginal identity. His
rejection of his biological family deeply offended the Aboriginal community. The resulting

scandal and public debate over issues of authenticity and what constitutes Aboriginal identity

led to some subject coordinators removing Mudrooroo's books from academic courses and he

later said he was unable to find a publisher for a sequel to his previous novel. However, he

was to publish two further novels after the campaign to destroy his writing had pushed him

into a position where anything he said or did would be seized upon as somehow proof that he

was guilty. Mudrooroo's silence is mostly misinterpreted and used to promote other versions

of how this all happened. Initially, many people came to Mudrooroo's defence, some

claiming it was a "white conspiracy" or a racist attack on Aboriginality with some claiming

Polglaze's "amateur sleuthing" was being exploited. An Award winning Indigenous author

Graeme Dixon called on Mudrooroo to come forward and tell the truth, stressing that it was

important to "out" pretenders and reclaim Aboriginal culture. Several authors see evidence in

his writings that Mudrooroo deliberately assumed an Aboriginal identity to legitimize his

work when in his early twenties; although it remains possible he was unaware. Editor

Gerhard Fischer believes that it was Dame Mary Durack who "defined and determined" his

Aboriginal identity in an article published in 1997, Mudrooroo described Durack's foreword

to his first novel as the origin of the "re-writing of his body" as Aboriginal. Mudrooroo later

replied to his critics, stating that his dark skin meant he was always treated as Aboriginal by

society; therefore his life experience was that of an Aborigine (“Mudrooroo” Wikipedia).

It should be noted that Mudrooroo was one of the most prolific black Australian

authors and academicians. As writings cannot be totally separated from the author’s own

stories of the social conflicts and political realities of the discourses of representation and

ideology, or the textual space, from which they come. The writings of Mudrooroo also reflect

the mental and physical tensions and the complex narrative of identity and belonging, which

are inherent in the writings of the Aborigines in Australia. Mudrooroo was accused of not
being an Aboriginal in so many ways and also of the possibility that, as a young man of color

he may have consciously misappropriated an Aboriginal identity as a way of changing the

story of his own life and finding a place to belong. All these charges has emasculated his

authority as a spokesperson for Aboriginal peoples and overshadow his contributions as an

author towards the development of Australian Indigenous literature as for over thirty-five

years, Mudrooroo has represented himself as an Aboriginal man. In her essay, “‘What Matter

Who’s Speaking?’ Authenticity and Identity in Discourses of Aboriginality in Australia”,

Carolyn D’Cruz examines the complexities and cross-cultural protocols of speaking rights in

the light of a late 1992, early 1993 debate published in Oceania– a journal of the Asia-Pacific

region. Of the six debaters, just one claimed Aboriginal status, Colin Johnson i.e. Mudrooroo.

D’Cruz raises the question of Johnson’s discredited right to speak on behalf of Aboriginal

peoples. She demonstrates the complexities and stratifications informing the status of the

speaking subject within essentialist discourses of identity politics – the different contexts,

rules and procedures already in play before one even begin to speak. Her observation is that

“complexities are always at work when speaking positions are reduced to the [essentialist]

definition of an identity, regardless of whether the bearer of that identity can be

authenticated” (D’Cruz 2001).

D’Cruz is of the opinion that there is no doubt that narratives of (White) Australian

history are riddled with the exclusion and suppression of Aboriginal voices and that there is

also no doubt that constructions of Aboriginality in Australia are saturated with the legacy of

European invasion. She further states that this is clearly illustrated through tracing the

conception of Australian Aborigines in discourses of European colonial administrations in

which she quotes Hollinsworth quoting Atwood in ‘Discourses on Aboriginality’:

The concept 'the Aborigines' has been generally used as though such a self-

consciously identified group had existed at first contact with Europeans, but this is to
 prescribe, retrospectively, a definition to the aboriginal peoples at a period when they

had no such sense of themselves. Before 1788 or even much later, they did not

conceive of themselves as 'Aborigines' any more than the European invaders thought

of themselves as 'Australians' (D’Cruz 2001).

According to D’Cruz, the categorization of 'Aborigines' in this way produces two related

problems for current discourses concerning constructions of Aboriginal identities. First, such

categorization has had the effect of homogenizing the diversity of peoples articulated through

indigenous regional terms such as Nyoongahs, Kooris, Wongis, and Murris, to name a few.

Second, these diverse voices are forced to present themselves within Eurocentric discourses

(D’Cruz 2001).

Therefore, it is apparent that within the Aboriginal community there has been many

contestations, questions, problems and issues in regard Who is Aboriginal? What is

Aboriginal? There has been uncertainty and confusion in the characterization of Aboriginal

people because they are also categorized as ‘full blood’, ‘half-caste’, ‘quadroon’ ‘octoroon’

etc. and also whether or not an Aboriginal person lived in a ‘native’s camp’. After the land

rights and the momentous self-determination of the Aborigines in Australia, Aboriginality

becomes a source of pride rather than shame to many. However, as mentioned earlier there

has been many contestations in regard to who is the real Aboriginal? They are many people

who shared the same fate as Mudrooroo, who were accepted as Aboriginal but were later

accused as non-Aboriginal. Debbie Oakford, who was convinced of, and claimed her

Aboriginality, went on to study about indigenous culture and became deputy chair of an

indigenous sporting conference in Canberra in 1996 and later joined the regional council of

the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was also accused of being

fraud. In 1997, two Tasmanian Aboriginal women, Edwina Shaw and Joanne James, took

Oakford and ten other candidates for the ATSIC board to court, claiming they were not
Aboriginal. In April 1998, the judge ruled that Debbie Oakford was mistaken about being

Aboriginal. She was then forced to resign from ATSIC, yet four years later she continues to

identify herself as Aboriginal. “It doesn’t matter what the judge says,” she asserts. “I know

who I am and that’s all that really matters” (Guilliatt 18).

Since Australia’s colonization the Aboriginal life experiences have been defined by

non-indigenous constructions of race, the measuring of authenticity by blood, half-caste or

quarter-caste and even octoroon. This kind of categorization is also another scope of the

implementation of assimilation policy. Since 1981, Aboriginality has been defined for

government purposes, using United Nations criteria, as follows:

An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander descent, who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is

accepted as such in the community in which he or she lives (Birns and McNeer 26).

Aboriginal writer, health educator and practitioner Ian Anderson demonstrates the intricacies

of meaning in this way:

As I am an Aborigine, I inhabit an Aboriginal body, and not a combination of features

which may or may not cancel each other. Whatever language I speak, I speak an

Aboriginal language, because a lot of Aboriginal I know speak like me. How I speak,

act, and look are the outcomes of a colonial history, and not a particular combination

of traits from either side of the frontier. I agree with Deloria that representations

which describe Indigenous peoples (or any other people) as caught “between two

worlds” become “conceptual prison” (Birns and McNeer 25).

However, there are other Aborigines who argue that Aboriginality and Aboriginal are

colonial terms in their homogenizing and appropriating functions. Aboriginal writer Anita

Heiss said, “There weren’t any Aborigines in Australia before invasion. There were simply

people….”(Birns and McNeer 41). So, according to some people Aboriginality is a colonial
construct. This conception is again argued by some who believe that, “Aboriginality does

indeed mark the essence of being and belonging of the original Australian people in that the

term ‘Aboriginal’ has a specific historical usage and context that should not be forgotten”

(Birns and McNeer 26). So, according to some belief the challenge to remove or replace

Aboriginal is an attempt at erasure. With the contestations and debates about the term

“Aboriginality”, the Commonwealth definition relies on High Court opinion as mentioned

earlier. It is social more than racial: an Aboriginal is defined as a person who is a descendent

of an Indigenous inhabitants of Australia, identifies as Aboriginal and is recognized by

members of the community in which she or he lives as Aboriginal. The vast majority of

Aboriginal people preferred this definition over the racial definitions of the assimilation era.

Administration of the definition, at least by the commonwealth for the purposes of providing

grants or loans, requires that an applicant present a ‘certificate of “Aboriginality”’ issued by

an incorporated Aboriginal body under its common seal (Langton 116). With the issue of

authenticity being debated in the Aboriginal community, Nadine McDonald, in an interview

says that, a true Aboriginal is surely, “not a little fella on the hill with a spear and one leg

upon his knee!” He accepts that it is really hard to maintain a sense of culture while living in

the western environment, as he has no traditional links to where his people come from.

According to him, “…if you hold it in your heart and you live your life with your culture in

your heart, then it doesn’t matter what you wear on your feet” (Marshall and Beattie 65).

It is apparent that the Aboriginal life story has become the dominant form of story-

telling for many Indigenous writers. However, the success of earlier works by Indigenous

writers seems to have constrained the up-coming writers in their ideas of what represents

‘authentic’ Aboriginal literature. It should also be noted that there can a difficulty of writing

‘authentic’ Indigenous life story when they had been removed from their families, or grew up

separated from their communities if they had to write the all the experience faced by the
Aboriginal people since British colonization of Australia. The Aboriginal people faced

colonization in a different and diverse ways, while some may be very peculiar with the

stories of despair, devastation, loss, poverty, infant mortality, and high imprisonment etc.

there may be some who did not experienced all these. Therefore, who is it exactly who

determines what is ‘authentic’ in regard to Indigenous stories? Two relevant issues here need

answers which would subvert the Australian paradigms. First, are the white audience/authors

competent to define, even decide, what is to be traditional Aboriginality? Secondly, if

Aboriginality cannot be acquired overnight, well, can it be dissipated through hideous

programme deployed by the white Australian alternatively? Can the white-ness with all its

characteristics nuances be acquired overnight even through assimilation policies? It is true

that the white Australian construes these issues in the essentialist manner. Therefore, these

essentialist or logocentrist paradigms deployed to generate the white reproductions of

assimilation objectives are being critiqued and questioned by Aboriginal playwrights in no

uncertain terms. Therefore, Aboriginal literature deals mainly with identity- with the complex

of attitudes, beliefs and mores which constitute Aboriginality. It might seem that the

Aboriginal playwrights too moved in the direction of essentializing their identity. It is right to

argue, if the white remains white, unchanged and uncontaminated despite taking black wives,

why the black is designed to lose or waste black Aboriginality? This logical paradox too

indicates the white Australian as a conformed patriarchal mind which the Aboriginal is not in

spirit or in function. This is why Michael Dodson urges his fellow Aborigines and asserts that

what the Aboriginals need is to resist essentialism which confines them to be fixed

unchangeable, and the necessary characteristics that refuses them to allow for transformation

or variation (Dodson 39). As the Australian Indigenous community seeks to reclaim its voice

from the oppressor, notions of authenticity are being redefined. The term ‘freedom of

expression’ currently has little meaning in the contested arena of Aboriginal literature
(Kurtzer 118). Thus, assimilation policies carried out by the white Australian government

have far-reaching implications in the lives and writings of the Aborigines of Australia since

British colonization.
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Birns, Nicholas and Rebecca Mc Neer. A Companion to Australian Literature since 1900.

Rochester, New York; Woodbridge, Sufflok, U.K: Camden House, 2007.

Brewster, Anne. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography. Sydney: Sydney University

Press. 1996. Print.

Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, April 1997. Web. 25th March

2014.

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Briskman, Linda. The Black Grapevine- Aboriginal Activism and the Stolen Generation. The

Federation Press. 2003. Print.

Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australian- Black Response to White Dominance 1788-2001.

N.S.W. 2065 Australia: Allen & Unwin. 2002. Print.

Bunworth, Mick. “Indigenous playwright delves into dark memories.”Australian

Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast: 28/05/2002 Web 5th Sep 2014

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Casey, Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1990,

Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2004. Print.

“Choosing good Ground: A forum interview with KooembaJdarra artistic directors

LafeCharleton, Wesley Enoch and Nadine McDonald.” Sunsisters and Lighting

Brothers: Australia Aboriginal Performance. Ed. Marshall, Anne and Gordon

Beattie.Australian Drama Studies. No. 37. October 2000. 65. Print.

Crow, Brian, and Chris Banfield. An Introduction to post-colonial theatre.University of

Cambridge. Great Britain: Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow. 1996. Print.
Dodson, Michael. “The end in the beginning: re(de)fining Aboriginality.”Blacklines:

Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman.

Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

D’Cruz, Carolyn. 2001. ‘What Matter Who’s Speaking? Authenticity and identity in

discourses of Aboriginality in Australia’, Jouvert: A Journal of Post Colonial

Studies, 5(3) Web.6th Jan. 2015

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Galton, Bridget. “Aboriginal Sin of Australia Exposed,” The Ham & High (UK), May 3,

2001. Print.

Gardner, Lyn. “Stolen” The Guardian, 23 Nov. 2001. Print.

Guilliatt, Richard. “Shades of Truganini?: These people believe they’re Tasmanian

Aborigines, but they can’t prove it. Does that make them frauds? The bitter fight over

who’s black and who’s not.” The Age Magazine: GoodWeekend. June 15, 2002. Print.

Hasluck, Paul. "From Protection to welfare" in Native Welfare in Australia: Speeches

and Addresses. Perth: Paterson Brobensha, 1953. Print.

Horsburgh, Susan. “Truth Sadder Than Fiction.” Time Europe. July 10, 2000. Vol. 152 No.

2.

Huggins, Jackie. “Always was always will be”. Blacklines: Contemporary Critical

Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Victoria 3053 Australia:

Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

Johnston, Anna. “The Well-Intentioned Imperialists: Missionary Textuality and (Post)

Colonial Politics.” Resistance and Reconcilaition: Writing in the Common Wealth.

Edited by Bruce Bennett, Susan Cowan, Jacqueline Lo, Satendra Nandan and Jennifer

Webb. The Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

(ACLALS) Canberra. 2003. Print.

Kurtzer, Sonja. “Wandering Girl: who defines ‘authenticity’ in Aboriginal literature?”

Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed.

Michele Grossman. Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003.

Print.

Langton, Marcia. “Aboriginal art and film: the politics of representation” Blacklines:

Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman.

Victoria 3053 Australia: Melbourne University Press. 2003. Print.

Manne, Robert, “My Country: A Personal Journey.” The Barren Years: John Howard and

Australian Political Culture. The Text Publishing Co., Melbourne, Australia. 2001.

Print.

McLaren, Philip. Sweet Water- Stolen Land University of Queensland Press Box 42, St.

Lucia, Queensland 4067, Australia, 1993. Print.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen.Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and

Feminism. Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2000. Print.

Moran, Anthony. “White Australia, settler nationalism and aboriginal assimilation.” The

Australian Journal of Politics and History. 51.2 (June 2005): 168 (26). Expanded

Academic ASAP. Gale. University of New South Wales Library. 2007. Print.

Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Arts CentrePress . 1987. Print.

“Mudrooroo.”Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc.,

Mar. 2015.Web. 26 Mar. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudrooroo>)

Norman, Heidi. “From Assimilation to Self-determination: The Report of the Select

Committee Upon ‘Aborigines”. Journal of Indigenous Policy. Issue 7. University of

Technology Sydney, Australia, 2007. Print

Notaras, Gabriela. The tragedy of the “stolen generation”, WSWS: Arts Review: Theatre

and Dance. 25 July 2000. Print.

Prentis, Malcolm D. A Study in Black and White: The Aborigines in Australian History.

Sydney: Hicks Smith & Sons. 1978. Print.

Read, Peter. “The Return of The Stolen Generation”. Who Will Look After the Children?

Steal Away, Hide Away. Journal of Australian Studies. No. 59. Ed. Richard Nile.

University of Queensland Press. 1998. Print.

--- Introduction, The Lost Children, Ed Read, Peter and Coral Edwards, Sydney:

Doubleday

--- “Clio or Janus? Historians and the Stolen Generations”, Australian Historical Studies,

33, 118, 2002

Shoemaker, Adam. Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988.

Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press.1992. Print.

The Policy of Assimilation: Decisions of Commonwealth and State Ministers at Native

Welfare Conference, Canberra, January 26th and 27th. Web. 19 Dec. 2014

<www.aiatsis.gov.au/-files/archive/referendum/18801.pdf.>

Thomson, Helen. “Windshuttling The Right: Some Australian Literary and Historical

Adaptations for the Stage.” Web. 21 Sep 2014.

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 CHAPTER – V

 
 
CONTESTING REPRESENTATION OF ABORIGINAL

FEMALE EXPERIENCES AND IMAGES

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Australia’s colonial history which entailed the forced removal of Indigenous people

from their land and culture; their subsequent experiences of alienation and the loss of power

and control over their lives has been well documented (Reynolds 1981:2). In these

documents, we find that the political struggles of Indigenous men and women have occupied

Australia since colonization. Subordinated people have experienced their domination

differently even within the same society; so, in general, the predicaments and experiences of

male and female under colonization differ. Therefore, the experiences, the traumatic

conditions and the struggles of the Indigenous male and female in Australia differ, although

there are a number of similar aspects to their sufferings and struggles. The present chapter

focuses on these different perspectives of both male and female under the white dominance

which are highlighted in their respective works. But, it should be noted that their major

concern is the native experience born out of the policy of colonization that was adopted by

successive white Australian governments. However, the selected playwrights, Jack Davis,

Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell had written their plays, like many of their contemporary

writers, in a less ideologically charged tone as the political scene gradually changed for the

Indigenous people. Jack Davis in his interview with Adam Shoemaker 1982, when talking

about Indigenous demonstration and other political activism says:

They've had their usefulness, but that's gone now... you could put up a tent today and

people would laugh at it... now it's time for the people with the pen to take over. I

always believe that the old axiom, 'the pen is mightier than the sword' is really true.

And, I always like to modernize that phrase by saying, 'the biro is far, far better than

the gun'! (Shoemaker1982:155).

So as Jack Davis mentioned in his interview it has become more appropriate for the

Aboriginal people to voice their experiences and opinions in writing rather than carrying out

political demonstrations and activism in asserting their right in Australia.

 In The Dreamers, Jack Davis takes up the theme of the sordid and the

meaninglessness of some of the contemporary Aboriginal living, combined with nostalgia for

a traditional Aboriginal past. This play tells a story of contemporary Western Aboriginal

family, the Wallitch family living in a city in the present time (The exact year when the

events of the play take place is not given, however ‘the time is the present’ is stated at the

beginning of the script). The family experiences the obscurity of being an Aboriginal family

living in a place and time dominated by the white European cultural beliefs. In this play

Davis shows how the Aboriginal characters’ lives are influenced by the combination of both

cultures i.e. the white European culture and the Aboriginal culture. The Dreamers shows the

effects of dispossession in the Wallitch household, which speaks for the whole lot of

Aboriginal family living in urban Australia at the time. Even though the Wallitch family lives

in urban area, their housing is of a very low standard. Dolly, the only adult female in the

family, comments on that:

DOLLY: ...Oh Gawd, I wish we ‘ad a decent place to live in. No

hot water, no locks on the doors, worse than livin’ in

a bloody camp (Davis, 75- 76).

They do not have locks on their doors and when the family members want to have hot water

for washing themselves, they have to warm the water in a saucepan on the stove. This

presents a case for arguing, mainly between the children -Meena and Shane:

DOLLY: Come on, you kids. Hurry up, water’s ready.

MEENA: I’m having it first.

[MEENA and SHANE enter arguing.]

SHANE: No, you’re not, I am.

MEENA: I am! You can have it after (Davis, The Dreamers 74).
This quarrel leads to a small fight, which leads the kids to spilling the hot water and have to

wash in cold water. Eli, a cousin living with them, compares their home to a prison:

ELI: [shouting] Freeo? What’s wrong with Fremantle

Gaol?

PETER: What’s wrong with it?

ELI: You git three meals a day and a hot shower. Not like this place (Davis, The

Dreamers 83).

Their situation is really bad that even prison seems a better place to live than their own home.

In The Dreamers Dolly’s yearn for a better and decent house to bring up her family is

also seen in her judgement on her husband Roy when she says:

DOLLY: [to Roy] You? If you weren’t so bloody bone tired

we’d get a good ’ouse an’ good furniture (76).

In most of Davis’s plays the male characters are depicted as fond of sitting around drinking

rather than finding work. When Dolly leaves the house to collect uncle Worru from the

hospital the adult males in the house Roy, Eli and Peter even spend the children’s lunch

money to buy alcohol. Their fondness of alcohol leads to insobriety and their indulgence in

petty crime and imprisonment. Some Aboriginal men who could not cope with the problems

of being poor and without hope sank into alcohol oblivion. The impact of the European

intrusion had generally affected the role and status of men more than that of women, and thus

many Aboriginal men, especially the unemployed, slipped into aimlessness (Broome 156).

One of the characters Eli even deceived people by creating himself as a disabled one-eyed

man and begs on the street, it helps him scrounge money from passers-by in front of a

shopping center:
 ELI: [pointing to his eyepatch] Yeah, me and old patchy

had a good day, Pop. [He takes it off and puts it in his

pocket.]

WORRU: Patchy?

ELI: Yeah, we were doin’ all right outside the shopping

centre today, yeah, getting’ fifty cents a bite. One

wetjala bloke, hippy, he gave me two dollars (Davis, 105).

He later shows how he begs in Scene Two:

ELI: Ten dollars and eighty one cents! Not bad, old Hawkeye, not bad at all.

[He pulls his eye patch down and addresses an imaginary passer-by.]

Got bad eyes, boss, this one got catarac’, this one goin’ fast. Can you

spare forty cents, boss? God bless you, sir, God bless you, missus. [Gesturing

skywards]

Hey! Big boss! You up there! You listenin’? Hope you been givin’ out

some of them blessin’s I been promisin’ them wetjalas (Davis, The Dreamers 120).

Eli’s main source of income is by begging, and the money is usually spent on alcohol.

Superficially, many Aborigines who saw the play interpreted it as ‘It is too close to home,’

some remarked, ‘Won’t this simply reinforce the stereotype Europeans have of urban

Aborigines?’ Davis’s message, however, is less shortsighted (M. Berndt xiv). In The

Dreamers, Davis portrays the damaging Australian Aboriginal communities with the

pervasive alcoholism, violence, petty crime and imprisonment, incessant unemployment and

dependence on welfare, and a feeling of estrangement and hopelessness that slowly eat away

the desire for individual, family and communal progress and development. Davis’s realistic

documenting of these ills, without false nostalgia or romanticism, is an admirable feature of

his drama, requiring a great deal of courage and integrity when writing about and on behalf of
a people as oppressed and historically despised as black Australians to be prepared to depict

so uncompromisingly the negative features of their way of life (Crow and Banfield 65). Jack

Davis admitted that The Dreamers has political overtones less than his previous play Kullark.

He further commented that:

The Dreamers is a very cruel play, with a psychological twist which I think very body

can grasp, and everybody can suffer from: and that's the degree to which we sink

because of our feelings. We can't rise above them-our frustrations which we face

every day-and the degree to which we can sink in terms of alcoholism and drugs and

all that type of thing (Shoemaker 1982:112).

As most of the Aboriginal writings emphasize the importance of their family,

extended family and the close bond shared by their entire community, Jack Davis’s drama

also mostly stages the family living space in the bush encampment or a modern suburban

house. In notes to performances of his play in Australia, ‘Aborigines in the audience were

always deeply moved to see themselves in the characters up on stage’ (Crow and Banfield

66). To see the representations of the ordinary everyday lives of themselves and to depict the

minute details of their social relationship with the whites occurred side by side; and their

environment on theatre is in a way therapeutic for the Aborigines, as they are able to see their

dispossessed position and experience self-recognition which has never existed before for

them. Davis has been able to critique the white representations of the Aborigines by

presenting the quandaries, positions, feelings and values of his people in his characters that

sound authentic to the Aboriginal audiences. In depicting the harsh realities of everyday

Aboriginal existence and the pathos of an individual, family and communal life without any

design to embellish the Aboriginal people, Davis is able to strongly protest the extreme

injustice and deprivation of his people, whose lives have been so devastated by the colonial

subjugation. In his autobiography, he observes that he began working in theatre already

firmly convinced that ‘writing was the best means of influencing public opinion and bringing

about an improvement in the Aboriginal situation’ (Crow and Banfield 68). Davis’s

pioneering work as a playwright, poet, actor and all round social activist on behalf of

Aboriginal rights made him one of the most prominent man in his community and an

inspiration for younger Aboriginal writers and performers. Ronald M. Berndt in his

introduction to Kullark (Home) The Dreamers rightly sums up Jack Davis and his works as,

“Jack Davis dream is of an Aboriginal heritage – not in terms of the past as such, but as a

symbolic anchorage for the present, a sure refuge within which people can be positively

identified, providing emotional security, a sense of belonging, and a meaning to life. Pride in

being Aboriginal is indelibly inscribed in his writing, indicating firm roots which go deeply

within the total Australian scene, far beyond the recent past, into its very beginnings” (M.

Berndt xiv).

Though Jack Davis touches on themes, which are inherently important in the

Aboriginal writings, but as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, there are certain

themes in which he differs from the female playwrights. Indigenous women playwrights are

working and writing about themes in order to bring Indigenous Australian women’s

experiences, history and topics to the fore. They express their identities as mothers, sisters,

grandmothers, aunties, and convey pride in being women, and highlight the important roles

of Indigenous Australian women in their communities throughout Australian history. For the

Aboriginal women the white European colonization meant invasion, dispossession,

destruction of culture, abduction, rape, exploitation of labor and murder. Dr. Aileen Moreton-

Robinson writes that Indigenous Australian women experienced the colonization process

differently than men – ‘their sexuality was policed and contained and their children removed

from the influence of kin and community, their bodies were used by white men as sexual

objects and many were forced to become domestic servants’ (Moreton-Robinson 8).
Indigenous women have started to talk about their histories through autobiography, novel and

poetry. One of the predominant genres or forms of Aboriginal literature today is the

autobiographical narrative or life story (Brewster 7). Although Aboriginal male writers have

also continued to produce autobiographical narratives, the Aboriginal women playwrights are

able to candidly produce their experiences and social conditions under the white European

colonizer as seen and experienced by them. Dramatic narratives of women are critiques of the

white European history and Aboriginal male works remaining silent about Aboriginal

women’s particular situations. As Helen Thomson quoted Joy Hooton in her essay Aboriginal

Women Staged Autobiography, “No document has a greater chance of challenging the cult of

forgetfulness than a black woman’s autobiography” (Thomson 25). Here the ‘cult of

forgetfulness’ is what the white Australians deliberately forgotten in matters relating to the

indigenous people- the invasion, the violence, the stolen generation etc. Aboriginal

autobiography such as Box The Pony, The 7 Stages of Grieving, My Place etc. takes the

reader and audience on a journey through the other Australia. Thus these texts function on

many levels: a personal recollective narrative acts, as historical correctives, and as

repositories of traditional lore and folk wisdom (S. Nelson 32).

Jennifer Sabbioni, in her essay, Aboriginal Women’s Narratives: Reconstructing

Identities states:

The role of Aboriginal women has been shaped to fit the theoretical and ethnographic

frameworks employed by scholars and we have been the malleable subjects made to

fit the mould…White male historians prior to the 1980’s, were more concerned with

the formulation of attitudes and values of the dominant society and, in the pursuit of

innovative interpretations, they can be accused of taking part in a national ‘cult of

forgetfulness’ in terms of Aboriginal people generally. Moreover they can be accused

of recreating a world of the past where only Indigenous male existed. Aboriginal
 women became faded figures on the backdrop on the historical stage of Australian

history (Sabbioni 74).

She further charged white historians Reece, Stanner and Broome in particular. According to

her, these historians have used the collective and white- constructed term “Aborigines” to

connote maleness and have prevented female imagery from emerging out of their writings.

She criticized Broome for excluding women in his writing of Aboriginal Australian history

and quotes Joyce Belfarge, who states, “Broome maintains the chain of gendered dichotomies

of public/private, culture/nature and mind/body in its construction and depiction of the

privilege voiced masculine and the disappeared silent feminine” (ibid.). Aboriginal women

are colonized in ways that differ from their men. So in their writings Aboriginal women

playwrights differ from their male counterparts based on their own experiences and opinions

rather than the historical facts created by the white Australian historians who have ignored

gender and racial issues.

Bill Ashcroft, et al. in their introduction to Feminism and Post-colonialism states, “In

many different societies, women, like colonized subjects, have been relegated to the position

of ‘Other’, ‘colonized’ by various forms of patriarchal domination. They thus share with

colonized races and cultures an intimate experience of the politics of oppression and

repression” (Ashcroft et.al 1999:249). This statement is true to a number of extents in

different parts of the world where societies are mainly patriarchal. But it seems evident that

in the Aboriginal Australian society, women seem to enjoy equal status in almost all spheres

of their life except in their religious rites. Women seemed to have endorsed the ritual division

of labor more easily, accepting their formal subordination in the religious sphere, because in

other sphere they were not so subordinated (H. Berndt 75). Karen Jennings quoted Annette

Hamilton in her essay Ways of Seeing and Speaking About Aboriginal Women in Black

Women and Documentary Film, “white observers have substantially misunderstood the
position of Aboriginal women in traditional society because they have attempted to use a

western model of male- female relationships which is inapplicable” (Jennings 113).

Traditional Aboriginal women were regarded as in no way socially inferior to men. In the

different spheres of life the traditional Aboriginal men and women though they have

succumbed many changes they seem to share almost equal status in their society. However,

in certain spheres of life their social duties and obligations differ. In regard to religion,

Aboriginal and outside views agree that the initiated men take the dominant role and that

women play a subordinated part. However, women are responsible, as much as men and in

some areas carry the major responsibility (H. Berndt 66-67). In relations between the husband

and wife also, in most instances the husband is formally dominant. However, in actuality, the

balance is likely to be fairly even depending on their conditions in the family.

In the ancient times, where there was no modern weapon to hunt and gather food, the

male Aborigines used spears for hunting food. A spear carries a symbol of maleness while a

basket or a wooden food-carrying dish could be a symbol of femaleness. A digging stick used

by the female Aborigines, which is very similar in form and structure to a spear, is also a

female symbol. The female Aborigines carry a digging stick, a domestic tool that indicates

that they have contribution in food gathering. In the food quest, the digging stick and the

spear complement and supplement each other in a conventionally accepted division of labor.

A woman’s digging stick can serve double duty as a fighting stick (H. Berndt 72). In Kullark

in the scene where the white European and the Aborigines meet for the first time, the female

character Moyarahn casts a death wish on Stirling and Fraser, and she marks the ground in

front of them with her wahna (digging stick), and gestures to the sky and then exit (Davis

15). The scene indicates the women used of their digging stick to show her resistance to the

white invaders.
 Women play important role in the Aboriginal family, this is seen in their writings. In

all the selected plays of Jack Davis the adult female characters are the ones that hold the

family together. For instance, we find Gran and Milly in No Sugar, Dolly in The Dreamers,

Millie Millimurra in In Our Town, and in Kullark we find three families; two generations of

the Yorlah family in different time frames and places and one family in the Pinjarra region in

1827-34 when the white Europeans first set their foot on the Swan river (Western Australia).

In Kullark itself we find the changes in the role of female characters in Aboriginal family. In

the scene where the Aboriginal family first come in contact with the white Europeans, the

female character Moyarahn (wife and mother) was so frightened and suspicious of the whites

and calls them ‘devils, devils’ and do not want to have anything to do with them. But, her

husband Mitjitjiroo and son Yagan were curious to find out about the white invaders which

eventually led to the death of the son Yagan. Moyarahn is seen only in this scene which may

indicate that at these times, women role is quite invisible in the family and didn’t have much

say in the family. With the progress of time in the play, women roles are changing, during

1930-1945 though it is the male character, Thomas who runs the family, the female character

Mary became visible in the family with decision making; and when the time shifts to 1979

(present time when the play was written) the adult female character Rosie is the one who

holds her family together.

According to Catherine H. Berndt in her essay Digging Sticks and Spears, or, the two-

sex Model states that women seems more capable of adjusting to colonial subjugation than

men as she says:

The contact situation has reinforced this domestic-centred orientation, emphasizing

either individual interests and welfare or, at best, the well-being of the nuclear family

rather than the ‘community’ as a whole. And perhaps because women did not have the

same corporate commitment to their traditional heritage as men did, they appear to
 have taken more readily to the new life of mission and government and pastoral

stations…In that new kind of life, a wider range of choices was open to Aboriginal

women than to Aboriginal men. Depending on the context, their new roles could

include sexual as well as domestic relations. They were admitted more readily into the

central living quarters of these stations, to undertake various domestic tasks, including

the care of young children. They were regarded generally as more biddable, more

submissive, easier to keep under control…Also, and again according to circumstance,

it was often easier for women than for men to continue to bring in more or less

regular, though small, supplies of traditional food: in arid areas, particularly, they ere

not obliged to move so far from the homestead or the settlement. On the whole, then,

outside contact enhanced woman’s already strong domestic and economic status and

at the same time decreased the extent of her formal subordination vis-à-vis men (H.

Berndt71-72).

This statement can cause disputes and could be debated in many ways; however Berndt also

states that ‘this is something that needs more discussion’ (72). It should also be noted that

what the white European colonizers aimed was to destroy the culture and tradition of the

Aborigines, and in doing so they overthrow the whole concept of the religion, domestic and

economic situations of the Aborigines. They segregated the Aborigines in Settlements or

Reserves and they provided them their basic needs, and the Aboriginal people were not

allowed to move away from these Reserves. Domestic dependency was born out of

colonialism and was consolidated with oppressive and trenchant government policies

designed to sever the physical and spiritual cohesion of Aboriginal people (Sabbioni 12).

With the progress of time, we find the importance of women in the family under the white

colonization; they play a vital role in the family. Patsy Cohen, an Aboriginal woman explains

the rise to power of women in her book Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs:
 I think after the contact with white people came in and destroyed the cultural kinship

system and the way that blackfellers lived, they upset everything. They stripped the

men of all their pride and respect and I think it was these, the likes of these old

matriarchs that sort of kept the men goin’. They were really strong for the men, these

old women, ’cause just imagine in them times the hardship and the pressure that’s put

on them (109).

While women were strong and carried the family through crisis after crisis, others, like some

of their husbands, submitted to despair (Broome 155). Sally Morgan in her interview has also

said, “In a lot of Aboriginal families, actually, the women are very strong. In many families I

know they carry the weight of the family…in most Aboriginal families there is always at

least one strong female character with a grandma or auntie or somebody like that who holds

everything together” (Brewster 10).

As Aboriginal women have come to occupy a focal position in Aboriginal family and

communal life, the family becomes a woman-centered arena and a site of women’s

knowledge and practices. So the autobiography of women has come to be an important

source of history. According to Helen Thomson, “These autobiographical works constitutes a

strong challenge to official versions of Australian history. They create a counter discourse

that contests not only the content of conventional histories, but the so-called objective basis

of their methodology, underpinned by humanist assumptions that are hostile to the challenges

of otherness and difference” (Thomson 29). Aboriginal memory preserves the unwritten

black history of colonization, which has been emerging in the public arena in the form of life

stories of Aboriginal women (Brewster 6). In contrast to Jack Davis the two selected female

playwrights, Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell touches themes of the stolen generation,

violence, rape, gender issues in depth, though Davis also highlights these themes in his plays,

these are but highlighted in subtlety.

 In attempting to assimilate Indigenous women as domestic servants, the government

was constructing and defining who they were and how they should behave (Moreton-

Robinson 11). When Auber Octavius Neville became the chief Protector of Aborigines in

May 1915, he learnt about the shortage of domestic workers for the middle class settlers. He

was able to meet the demands by establishing special institutions that trained young

Aboriginal women as domestic servants thereby creating a pool of readily available workers.

Between 1931 and 1940, about 523 Aboriginal women were engaged in domestic service.

And between 1920 and 1950, a number of Aboriginal women from the Moore River Native

Settlement in Western Australia were employed as domestic servants (Sabbioni 8-10). This

kind of situation is highlighted briefly in Jack Davis’s No Sugar, the girls were trained to

become domestic servant in the Moore River settlement. They were separated from their

family and trained in an institution, and were trained by the white people who were in-

charged to look after them. In a scene where the two young Aboriginal love birds Joe and

Mary met in secrecy:

JOE: Them wetjalas treat you all right?

MARY: Gudeeahs? Matron and Sister Eileen are all right.

They try to be nice, but I don’t like Mr. Neal. He

scares me.

JOE: He don’t scare me.

MARY: I don’t like the way he looks at me.

JOE: Well, you got me now, for what I’m worth.

(He laughs)

MARY: He’s always hangin’ around where the girls are

workin’; in the cookhouse, in the sewin’ room. And

 he’s always carryin’ that cat-o’-nine tails and he’ll use

it, too.

JOE: Bastard, better not use it on you or any of my lot.

MARY: He reckoned he was gunna belt me once.

JOE: What for?

MARY: ’Coz I said I wasn’t gunna go and work for guddeeah

on a farm.

JOE: Why not? Be better than this place.

MARY: No! [with shame] Some of them guddeeahs real bad.

My friend went last Christmas and then she came

back boodjarri. She reckons the boss sons used to belt

her up and, you know, force her. Then they kicked her

out. And when she had that baby them trackers choked

it dead and buried it in the pine plantation (Davis, No Sugar, 62).

This scene clearly shows the condition of Aboriginal girls in the white institution. The first

part of the conversation shows that the white women are a little bit nicer to the young girls

and are unaware of the cruelty and sexual harassment of the white man towards the

Aboriginal girls. But there is also a slight suggestion that the Matron, Mrs. Neal is aware of

her husband’s Mr. Neal (Superintendent of Moore River Settlement) behavior in their

conversation on Scene V. When Matron asks Mr. Neal about his whereabouts the previous

day she interrupted him while he was replying her question saying, “To spend a day in the

hotel drinking. Don’t imagine no one sees you come in, the condition you were in- fine

example” (Davis, No Sugar 63). This scene implies that the Matron also knows about her

husband’s misdemeanor but doesn’t care enough to report him to higher authority. The

conversation between Joe and Mary also shows the helplessness of the male Aborigines in
the situation faced by the female Aborigines. The last part of the conversation shows the

predicament of the young Aboriginal girls who were sent out to white Australian houses for

domestic servants. They were forced by their male employers and eventually got pregnant by

them and their babies were either killed or taken away from them.

In 1931, A.O. Neville in his annual report disclosed that “in the previous year thirty

one women had been returned pregnant, the majority to white men” (Sabbioni 8-10).

Aboriginal women were exploited physically, sexually and emotionally while they worked as

a domestic servant in the white household. Daisy Corunna epitomizes the position of the

sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women:

We had no protection when we was in service. I know a lot of native servants had

kids to white men because that was forced. Makes you want to cry to think how black

women have been treated in this country (Morgan, My Place 337).

The fate of the young Aboriginal girls was not only susceptible to sexual exploitation in the

domestic service; they were not safe in the Settlement itself. The so-called Protectors were

also the ones who were a threat to them and there is a slight suggestion in the above-

mentioned conversation between Joe and Mary in Scene IV of No Sugar. In conversation

between the same people in Act II Scene II, Mary begins to cry and Joe coaxes her to tell him

what is the matter and Mary reply:

MARY: Mr. Neal.

JOE: Yeah, what about him?

MARY: He’s trying to make me go and work at the hospital.

JOE: Well, what’s wrong with that?

MARY: Everything.

JOE: You get better tucker.

MARY: It’s more than that, Joe.

 JOE: What d’ya mean?

MARY: When Mr. Neal sends a girl to work at the hospital, it

usually means…

JOE: Means what?

MARY: That he wants that girl … for himself (Davis, No Sugar 69).

This conversation between the Joe and Mary discloses how the Aboriginal girls in the

institution were susceptible to sexual harassment even by the ‘protectors’ of the settlement.

These protectors were employed by the white government to look after them. The lives of

young women were governed by suppression and strict discipline, and if they run away or

take a leave from the institution where they were trained or from their employers without the

permission of the authorities, the black trackers or police hunted them down and returned

them to the Settlements where they were severely punished. They were not allowed to

disobey orders or back-answer the white staffs. One woman recalls being reported to the

office because she back-answered the sewing teacher. She recalls:

The tracker came for me and I had to go over to have all my hair cut off, bald. I used

to wear a hat: it growed again though. You used to get your punishment of ’em, all

right (Sabbioni 17).

In No Sugar, when Joe and Mary run away from the Moore River Settlement a black tracker

Billy is ordered to capture them but when he catches up with them Joe fights him back and he

returned empty handed to the Settlement. Joe and Mary try to settle at Northam but Mr. Neal

put out a warrant to capture them and while Joe is away in his work the police took her back

to the Settlement and Mary returns in a very pregnant state:

MATRON: She’s here.

NEAL: Dargurru?

MATRON: Yes.
 NEAL: Oh, good. Aren’t you needed down the hospital?

MATRON: Just remember, the girl is pregnant and unwell.

NEAL: Don’t worry, I won’t touch her (Davis, No Sugar 92).

When the Matron exits, Mary was brought inside Mr. Neal office. Mr. Neal told Mary to stay

in the nurse’s quarters and work at the hospital. Mary refuses to comply, as she very well

knows that Mr. Neal had a hidden agenda, which is the reason why she ran away with Joe in

the first place. Mary back answering and refusal to work in the hospital makes Mr. Neal very

angry as he says:

NEAL: Millimurra seems to have learnt her well. Well, I’m going to

unlearn you.

[NEAL grabs her. BILLY holds her outstretched over a pile of flour bags. NEAL

raises a cat-o’-nine tails. Blackout. A scream.] (Davis No Sugar 93).

The scene is horrifying and it displays the whites unscrupulous nature in their dealing with

the Aborigines. Mary is in a very pregnant state, but it does not keep Mr. Neal from belting

her. The white Australian government claimed that putting the Aborigines in Settlements was

a way to improve and civilize the Aboriginal people. However, the scene undoubtedly

indicates the barbaric nature of the white authorities in their treatment of the Aborigines. The

‘docility’ of the Aboriginal women was achieved through oppressive training, punishment,

rewards, and enforced dependency upon the white bureaucracy which placed them in

employment, determined their European employer, and administered their finances as well as

their purchases. The Aboriginal domestics become complaint to their exploiters (Sabbioni 9).

Daisy, the grandmother of Sally Morgan in her autobiography My Place also shares

the same fate as Ruby from Stolen; they were both employed as domestic servants and were

abused sexually by their employers. Ruby, who is abused as a young girl could not cope with

her condition; hers is a story of deprivation, racial persecution, sexual exploitation, nervous
breakdown and descent into mental derangement. She is so totally shattered by life abrasive

experiences that all sense of belonging and identity is lost and she has come to identify

herself with domestic labor for which she was trained by the welfare, as she keep on saying,

“Don’t need no home of me own. Got enough to do”(“Adult Flashes” Stolen, 1). This kind of

pain and confusion, results in loss of identity, loss of confidence in an identity. Ruby has

become crazy beyond reach when her black family finally finds her. Daisy, though she did

not lose her mind, carried the child of her employer, Howden Drake- Brockman, whom she

considered to be her own father, as she says, “I …think…my father was…Howden Drake-

Brockman’ (Morgan, My Place 162). Here is the suggestion of incest, though she never

admitted the father of her daughter, Gladys, in her story there is a slight suggestion in which

she says, “…Everyone knew who the father was, but they all pretended they didn’t know.

Aah, they knew, they knew. You didn’t talk about things, then. You hid the truth…Howden

died not long before she was born. When I came home from hospital, he said, ‘Bring her

here, let me hold her’. He wanted to nurse Gladdie before he died” (Morgan 340). Ruby and

Daisy kept a secret that they never share with anyone. Daisy told Sally and Gladys, “I’m

taking my secrets to the grave” (Morgan, My Place 162) even when she finally agreed to tell

her story Gladys told Sally, “… she says she’s still going to keep her secrets, but anything is

better than nothing” (Morgan, My Place 320). In the scenes, “Unspoken Abuse I” and

“Unspoken Abused II” of Stolen, we find Ruby returning from her weekend trip with her

weekend parents, when her friends asked her what she ate, she replied ‘fish and chips’, they

asked what gift she got she replied that ‘he’ gave her a doll and when they asked what else he

give her, she softly replied “I promised not to tell” (Stolen 8 and 15). These scenes clearly

suggest that Ruby was sexually abused which she feels too shameful to share with her

friends. Daisy and Ruby were both shamed by their experiences that they refused to share
their stories with anyone. They felt so ashamed of themselves that they find it difficult to

attend church services, as Daisy in her story reveals:

I ’member the minister at Christ Church started… he went on and on, tellin’ us how

we must safe ourselves for marriage. It was very embarrassing, we couldn’t look at

him. Most of us had already been taken by white men. We felt really ’shamed…I

never went back there, I was too ’shamed to say why (Morgan, My Place 337).

Stephen Muecke suggests that Daisy Corunna’s refusal to reveal her ‘secrets’ to Sally

Morgan is an act of resistance to the demand to speak (Muecke 25). Knowledge is power, and

the revealing and imparting of knowledge is always an act of power, as is keeping secrets

(Brewster 24). Therefore by resisting the demand to speak and reveal information can be seen

as a way of the Aboriginal people asserting ownership of their lives and their culture thus,

establishing their power, just as the white colonizers had silenced them and were silent about

the “real” histories of Australia. However at the same time the act of telling about the past is

also a kind of resistance against the lies of the white oppressors and has a therapeutic effect

and gives a sense of liberation. This is exactly what the playwrights have been doing by

utilizing the oral narratives in order to assert their presence in Australian history.

Rape of Aboriginal women was very common. Sandy one of the characters in Stolen

was born as a result of his mother being raped by a white man in the desert. In “Desert

Sands”, Sandy narrates his story in a manner of traditional story telling. He talks about his

people, his home and his mother. He narrates stories his mother told him:

…The land where my people come from is covered in red sand and in the old days,

the women, to try and stop the white man from rapping them, would shove sand

inside themselves. Anything to stop the men from raping them, anything. [He

becomes quieter.] And that’s what my mother did, but it didn’t stop them so I came
 along. My mother she loved me, but she called me Sandy anyway. She sure had a

sense of humor that one (Harrison Stolen 22-23).

Sandy’s story highlights the sexual violence of the white men towards the Aboriginal women.

The women were so helpless in their situation; they would do anything they could to avoid

rape but as Sandy’s mother, their struggle against the white men ended futile and many ‘half

caste’ children were born out as a result of rape. The whites again took these children away

from their Aboriginal mother which created trauma and psychological problem for many of

the mothers as well as their child.

In Stolen one of the character Shirley who is stolen as a child becomes a mother

whose children are again stolen, though Stolen is a fictional play Sally Morgan’s

grandmother Daisy in her autobiography My Place shares the same fate as Shirley, she was

stolen as a child and her children were also snatched away from her by the authorities as she

says, “That was the way of it, then. They took our children one way or another” (Morgan

340). In Stolen, in the first scene, “It Rained The Day” Shirley, as a child peeps out from

under the bedspread and talks about how she was taken away from her mother. She describes

her looking out from the back of a car as she is being driven farther away from her mother. In

the second scene of “It Rained The Day”, Shirley, as a mother talks about her helpless

situation:

It rained the day they took my son. I stood there getting soaked to the skin and

watched the back of that big black car and his little face, so little. It only took a few

moments, they didn’t say anything to me. They just came and this woman picked him

up and put him in the car. Someone went and fetched my husband and he ran after the

car, and he ran and yelled at them to stop- and I stood there in the rain and couldn’t

talk (Harrison, Stolen 9).

Shirley stands speechless and her grief cannot be expressed in words. The stories Daisy and

Shirley confirm how generations within a family were stolen. It was the government policy to

take away the children from their family in order to assimilate them into white society. “Near

the beginning of the last century, the then so-called protector of Aborigines declared that the

policy of removing their children caused family no distress.’ The mothers soon forget.’ They

didn’t, and Stolen is here to make sure that we don’t either,” commented Lyn Gardner in her

article on Stolen (Gardner 2001).

Leah Purcell’s Box The Pony also touches theme that depicts the constraints placed on

women and the unequal opportunity of male and female in a family. As Leah in Scene I

expresses:

I come from a long line of champions.

My brothers…Patrick and Rodney Purcell, both Queensland champs.

My nephews…Darren and Nathan Purcell, Billy-jo Angus, all Australian,

Queensland, Wide Bay, South Burnett, golden Gloves champions. But Nathan,

he’ll be our Olympic hopeful!

She combination punches on bag.

And then you got…Leah Purcell – Australian Champion…

Leah punches the bag. It swings out and in, and collects her. She falls to the mat.

…baby sitter.

I wasn’t allowed to box, because I was a girl. Up’ome’der, all the girls got to do was

cook, clean and look after the kids.

The boys got all the deadly things, the trophies, the

Golden Gloves…

The brain damage.

Combination punches on the bag.

 Fighting was big up’ome’der…people would fight like hell.

But the men and women would fight differently… (Purcell, Box The Pony 29).

The play also highlights the sexual and domestic violence faced by Steff, an alter ego used by

Leah. In re-telling her life she follows ‘Steff’ from a difficult upbringing in Murgon, to a

nearly disastrous young adulthood, and then to a triumphant later life as Leah, an acclaimed

performer (Box The Pony127-128). She is often abused by her brothers and in a scene “Steff

Goes Wild”, her brother after hearing that Steff is pregnant, grabs her by the hair and pulls

her:

BROTHER: Myall little black bitch!

STEFF: Don’t touch me, what are you looking at? (Purcell, Box The Pony85).

This kind of incident is familiar in the life of Steff. The male characters in her life are often

abusive and violent. In Scene 13 “FACE”, Steff’s boyfriend bashes her during a party for no

reason:

BOYFRIEND: Come ’ere bitch!

Her BOYFRIEND (represented by a punching bag) pulls her towards him, she pushes

him off

STEFF: Don’t!

STEFF pulls away.

BOYFRIEND: I said come here!

He pulls her again.

STEFF: Stop it!

Again she pulls away pushing him off.

BOYFRIEND: Come here.

The bag is pushed, swinging a long way out.

STEFF: Piss off, leave me alone, don’t you ever…

 The bag swings back and hits her, lifting her. The bag has become the boyfriend.

STEFF holds herself in close to the bag. She is being punched by the BOYFRIEND, between

each line.

BOYFRIEND: You being a smart bitch [punch], big notin’ yourself

[punch], little pretty bitch [punch], pretty bitch [punch].

The BOYFRIEND hits her, knocks her to the ground. As he yells he tries to get to her

face. She hides it from him, protecting herself.

BOYFRIEND: Give us your face…give us your face…I said give us

you face…give us your face!

It dies down, he has obviously left. STEFF lies there, and then slowly sits up. The bag

is swinging menacingly nearby (Purcell, Box The Pony109-111).

The scene is horrific as it clearly highlights the domestic violence faced by Aboriginal

women in their own family and community. As the scene progresses, we find Steff’s little

daughter Jess, crying in the hallway, who thinks her mummy is dead.

STEFF: Jess…ssshhh…Jess…Jess, come here bub.

Don’t cry baby…have a story eh? Just you and me…

Jess ssshhh. He’s gone now. Oh Jess, Mummy’s so tired.

You’re gonna have to help me, bub. Help me, Jess, please (Box The Pony 111).

Here, Steff is clinging to her little daughter for comfort just as her own mother Florence did

to her. She is finding herself in the same cycling destructive life as her mother, as she says to

her daughter:

I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Do you forgive Mummy? It’s happening all over again. Me

and Mum. There’s no way out (Box The Pony 113).

Steff is scared that she and her daughter are going to be like her and her mother Florence. She

is so afraid that she briefly contemplated killing herself and her daughter however, she fight

to free herself from a seemingly prescribed future.

All the male characters have a very little role to play in Box The Pony, as the

characters central to the play are all women and it deals with women’s issues. The male

characters are presented with their patriarchal dogmas which completely ignore the feelings

of women. They are violent and often take women for granted. Steff’s father is mentioned as

a matter of fact in the first scene and briefly mentioned again when Leah recalls her life as

Steff:

Steff’d box. Like a boy, in silks. Great techniques, her dad’d say, ‘If only you were a

boy, Australian champion.’ But she didn’t want trophies, she wanted protection…

(Box The Pony 109).

The brief mentioned of her father here again only suggest his male chauvinistic attitude and

his neglect of his own daughter’s needs. Thus, it can safe to say that in the Aboriginal

writing, “Women’s stories often concentrate on the domestic sphere and on relationships

rather than on events or achievements” (Bright 135). Therefore, in regard to the selected

playwrights of the present thesis also, it is true to say that Leah Purcell and Jane Harrison are

dealing more with the physical and sexual violence in the domestic sphere and also

relationships within the Aboriginal community while Jack Davis’s plays gives us more

insights into the historical part. Although, it should be remembered that all these playwrights

touches themes that are inherently important to the Aboriginal experience which vehemently

presents their historicity.

Though the writings of the Aboriginal women touches themes like domestic and

sexual violence, gender issues etc., they further challenge mainstream feminism. The basic

premise of the Indigenous critique of white feminism is expressed in Moreton-Robinson’s

influential study Talkin’ Up To the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, in

which she claims, “An Indigenous woman’s standpoint is informed by social worlds imbued

with meaning grounded in knowledge of different realities from those of white women. And

we have become extremely knowledgeable in ways that are unknown to them” (Moreton-

Robinson 11). She uses the term “white’ in her book because according to her skin is the

marker for objectifying difference in the social construction of “race”. She further states that,

“In Australia, blackness was, and is congruent with Indigenous subjugation and

subordination” (Moreton-Robinson xx). Moreton-Robinson also argues that her personal

experience as an Indigenous feminist academic led her to challenge white feminism’s subject

position of dominance and seek alternative discourses among African American, Latin

American and lesbian feminists. It is precisely these discourses, according to Moreton-

Robinson, that contest the representation of the universal “woman” as a white middle class

woman and propose models of diversity and heterogeneity, stressing cultural differences and

specific particularities (xvii). She further states that:

All Indigenous women share the common experience of living in a society that

deprecates us. An Indigenous woman’s standpoint is shaped by the following themes.

They include sharing an inalienable connection to land; a legacy of dispossession,

racism and sexism; resisting and replacing disparaging image of ourselves within self-

defined images; continuing our activism as mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters,

grandmothers and community leaders, as well as negotiating sexual politics across

and within cultures. Such a standpoint does not deny the diversity of Indigenous

women’s experiences. Indigenous women will have different concrete experiences

that shape our relations to core themes (Moreton-Robinson xvi).

Moreton-Robinson further claims that Indigenous women’s life writing, which foregrounds

the Indigenous women’s self- presentation, actually reveals that their realities and life
experiences are grounded in different histories from those experienced by white women.

These experiences include, for example, government-imposed, sometimes unpaid, work as

domestic servants, which more often than not went hand in hand with sexual abuse from the

white “masters” and work exploitation from the white “mistresses.” Other suppressed

experiences concern state-controlled family life policies, such as separating children from

their families and forced sterilizations. In this way, Moreton-Robinson argues, Indigenous

women’s life writing “unmasks the complicity of white women in gendered racial oppression.

They reveal the imperative to negotiate Indigenous subjectivity in relations with white

women”. She further comments:

We are conscious of a dominant subject position that we actively resist through the

deployment of a variety of subject positions. Our resistances are therefore not

reducible to overtly defiant behaviours. They are multifaceted. Our resistances can be

visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, explicit and covert, partial and

incomplete and intentional and unintentional. They are profoundly political acts that

are neither one dimensional or fixed and they do not always lead to conflict and self-

destruction (Moreton-Robinson xxiii).

Moreton-Robinson points out that the history of white feminists’ relations with Indigenous

women in Australia actually demonstrates the way the Western feminists normalized

themselves and positioned themselves as the knowing subjects, constructing Indigenous

women as the Other (Moreton-Robinson xxiv). As Jayda and Ruby in Murras mentions:

JAYDA: Mum, come here. Remember when Granny said wudjella woman got

different way to gadjeri woman? They don’t have woman’s dreaming,

special dance, Inma. Then she said, ‘Jayda, you not forget your stories

now, you keep them sacred for your children, not wudjella’. Granny

call them nothing people, got no spirit.

 RUBY: They all nothing people. Granny and I teach you your own

women’s business. And that Sister, she take everything away

from us (Johnson, Murras101-102).

The scene clearly signifies the ignorance, misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the

white women in their treatment of the Aboriginal women.

With the growing of feminism, non-Indigenous women began to find interest in the

Indigenous oppression in the Australian society and they began to look at Indigenous women

as victims in Australian society and victims of patriarchal institutions. Jennifer Sabbioni

remarks, “The misrepresentation of Aboriginal women entered a new phase when feminists

belonging to the dominant culture chose to speak for all their sisters, black and white

constituting all women as the oppressed” (Sabbioni 1996:75). They preferred to look at

Indigenous women as victims of male domination. However, in their attempt to illustrate

male domination, they have allowed their subjectivity as white sisters to enter the debate and

have failed to recognize the history of non-Indigenous women as oppressors and exploiters of

Aboriginal women (Sabbioni 1996:75). The life writings of Indigenous women show the

attitudes of white mistresses towards their Indigenous female servants, as Margaret Tucker’s

recollection of having to continue with chores, even though she was ill, reveals:

My mistress asked me why I was limping. I had to show her the leg. She gave a gasp

and ran out of the room to the telephone. She called the doctor. I was sitting on the

garden seat near the kitchen door when he came. I don’t know what she told him, but

she said later that if the wound had gone a fraction deeper it would have reached the

bone, and I would have had to have my leg off. She also said the doctor said the

Aborigines had no feeling, we were like animals, and our wounds just heal without

any trouble. It didn’t worry me. Things could not have been any worse anyhow. I had

to sit everyday for nearly a week under the trees out the back on that garden seat with
 my leg up. She brought dishes to me to wash up. I cleaned the silver and peeled the

vegetables, all because the doctor said I had to sit down and I was not to use the leg.

She grudgingly gave me food such as broth, because the doctor said I was to have it. I

never told her how the sore started. I suppose it would not have made much

difference. One morning I was washing up outside with my legs up. I did not do

something properly. She was in a bad mood and I copped it as the saying is. She

boxed my ears as she held me by the hair. She slapped my face I cried, “Don’t, you

are hurting me” (Tucker 199-200).

The life story of Margaret Tucker clearly shows that white mistresses were also agents of

colonization and racial imperialism. As Marnie Kennedy says, “[w]e Aboriginals are a good

example of white exploitation. We were slaves, to be worked long hours and as long as we

could stand for little pay and most times with no time off” (Moreton-Robinson 11).

With the rise of nationalism in the 1880s, concerns over the nature and future of

Australia was growing and pronatalism was part of the agenda as interests of defense and

race came together in the desire for both to increase the number of white Australians and to

exclude ‘others’ (Farrell 122). Here the ‘others’ meant the Aborigines. As the white women

were seen as superior to the Aboriginal women so, white mothers were assumed to have the

ability to reproduce superior class future citizens. Thus, in order to free the white European

women from everyday incessant tasks so that they could pursue biological reproduction or

activities which would enhance their social status, the Aboriginal women and young girls

were used to carry out the domestic tasks. The Aboriginal women and girls were used by the

ruling white Europeans as a material always ready for exploitation. Protective measures for

women workers were generated as part of the Australian settlement. Concepts of motherhood

and maternalism played a central role in these restrictions. The Factories Act 1904 prohibited

women from working between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. or for four weeks after confinement. The
Piddington Royal Commission (1911-12) was persuasively pronatalist. In addition to

recommending restrictions on night work, overtime and the lifting of weights, Piddington

suggested that married women be allowed to work if they were sole breadwinners, and that

they be issued work permits only after judicial scrutiny. His report noted that factory work

for married women was ‘obviously inconsistent with the normal duties of a married woman’s

life’, and that it discouraged reproduction which could lead to ‘race suicide’ (Farrell 148).

The Piddington Royal Commission was only interested in the procreation of ‘white’ race.

Thus, protectionism did not include Aboriginal women in domestic service. Instead,

they were expected to work for up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, often for

nothing but their keep. Moreover, Aboriginal women were labeled as unfit mother and their

children were taken away from them due to the ideology that childcare was the responsibility

of white women. White mothers were to be saviors of the race; all the ills of the world would

be brought under control, claimed Maybanke Anderson in 1919, ‘if only mothers would

understand their duty and learn how to do it’ (qtd. in Farrell 150). Driven by pro-natalism,

early twentieth century governments enacted laws to ensure that white women bore even the

children they did not want. The WA Criminal Code Act 1902 punished abortion with up to

fourteen years imprisonment, and outlawed infanticide and abandoned of children. Although

few Australian women had access to safe abortion until the 1970s, the social misery of the

great depression of the 1930s helped some hospitals to ignore the legislation. During the

1970s the women’s movement championed a small group of doctors fighting for more liberal

abortion laws. Although none of the states decriminalized abortion, paradoxically, most

subsequently allowed the establishment of abortion clinics in hospitals and private practice.

When arguing for abortion and fertility control, Anglo-Australian feminists of the 1970s

relied on the concept of the self-owning citizen, asserting that doing women the right to legal

abortion denied them the right to own and control their own bodies (Farrell 152).
 For Aboriginal women of the same period, however, abortion campaigns

demonstrated feminism’s racial blindness, because for the Indigenous women their sexuality

and maternity were controlled by a series of laws and policies by the white government.

These policies and laws were represented in the life-writings of the Indigenous women. Eva

Johnson highlighted the hidden sterilization of Aboriginal women, practiced under

Aboriginal Protection Board in her play Murras (1988).1 At a routine medical check-up,

Jayda is informed of these experiments and that she, after receiving injections to make her

infertile, won’t be able to have her own children. In her conversation with her mother, Jayda

tells her mother about her condition, when her mother talks to her about having babies. She

replies:

JAYDA: I can’t have children, Mum.

RUBY: What? What you saying, Jayda? Who told you that?

JAYDA: Doctor at the hospital, I had a medical, a test, he told me.

RUBY: Medical? Test? What for?

JAYDA: It was a routine check-up. The doctor told me in one day. He

had some special papers there, he said they were from the

government, said that I was part of a programme or something,

long time ago. Had to do with those injections that Sister use to

give me and Jessie.

RUBY: Injections? You didn’t tell me about any injections.

JAYDA: Mum, she said it was alright. I thought you knew, she said she

explained it to you. She told me it was to stop diseases.

RUBY: She lied. Injections to stop disease, injections to stop babies.

They lied to us, who they think they are? Boss over you, boss

over me – your mother?

 JAYDA: Mum, it was an experiment. We can’t do anything about it

now. Mum, I’m alright, it’s alright.

RUBY: No, it’s not alright! Jayda, you was only fourteen years old, still

my baby. What kind of law they got? They mess around with

our women’s business, they bring death to our land, shame to

our children…

JAYDA: I saw a woman from Welfare, she said there’s nothing I can do.

But I thought of being a nurse, Mum, and going back to make

sure they still not doing this.

RUBY: Those filthy wudjella dogs, they knew who had those

injections. That’s why the chased you and Jessie.

JAYDA: How would they know, Mum? We never spoke to them.

RUBY: I remember, I remember that sister coming around mustering

time. She use to drink with them in the pub, that’s how they

knew (Johnson Murras, 101-102).

The different predicament of white women and Indigenous women was that while white

women were expected to bear children whether they like it or not, the Indigenous women

were denied of bearing children and were considered unfit for the role of mothers.

Therefore, while demanding the full rights of the self-owned citizen, Aboriginal

women radically disagreed with how those claims for bodily ownership to be presented. The

first recorded major conference in which Indigenous women participated was the Women and

Politics Conference in Canberra in 1975. At this conference Indigenous women called for an

end to forced sterilization, instead of supporting the white feminists’ demand for the right to

abortion. While white women were seeking the right to say “yes” to their sexual freedom, the

Indigenous women wanted the right to say “no” to sexual harassment (Moreton-Robinson
155). Pat O’Shane and Roberta Sykes pointed out that many Indigenous women had faced

compulsory sterilization or compulsory abortion. Their goal, therefore, was the right to bear

and keep their children, at a time when some were still dying from malnutrition and untreated

disease. Since Australian governments had historically denied both motherhood and

citizenship to Aboriginal women, O’Shane and Sykes continued, if White feminists believed

in sisterhood they should argue for women’s control over reproductive rights and children’s

health, not just for abortion (qtd. in Farrell 152). Therefore, while white feminists claimed

legal abortion, Indigenous women want stricter control over abortions and sterilization

because they have been practiced on their bodies without their consent or even without them

knowing, just as Ruby and Jayda from Murras.

The history of white government attitudes to Aboriginal women’s fertility was very

different from that of white women. Aboriginal protection Acts assumed Aboriginal women

as characteristically unfit as mothers. Therefore, children of mixed descent were often taken

away from their mothers. Since the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 did not define

‘Aboriginal native of Australia’, the states used their own definitions, and their officers used

their discretion. Peggy Brock writes, “The children who looked white had to be removed

from an Aboriginal environment to prevent them growing-up Aboriginal” (Farrell 153). Thus,

it seems evident that the Aboriginal Protectors either forced Aboriginal women to enforced

sterilization or abortions or encouraged them to produce whiter children into breeding out

their color. The state sought to control Aboriginal women’s sexuality in relation to both

Aboriginal, and non-Aboriginal, men, sometimes encouraging liaison with the latter in order

to ‘breed out’ Aboriginality. Under Western Australia’s Aborigines Act 1905, the Chief

Protector controlled the general care, protection and management of the property, income and

employment of any ‘full-blood’ or mixed descent Aboriginal. The Protector’s permission was

required for an Aboriginal woman to marry a non-Aboriginal man. Although the Act made
‘cohabitation’ illegal, it also stipulated paternity as grounds for financial support. However,

paternity was virtually impossible for Aboriginal women to prove in court, since their word

was disregarded if it conflicted with that of White men (Farrell 153-154).White men deceived

many Aboriginal women and this happens to Florence, Leah Purcell’s mother in her

autobiographical play Box The Pony. As Leah mentions him in the beginning of the play,

“Now my father, he’s white. Two wives, two families, one white, one black and that was my

mum. He and her had six kids together. I was the youngest” (Purcell, Box the Pony 25).

Leah’s father was a boxing trainer and though he fathered six children to Leah’s mother, he

did not provide any comfort to her. Florence gets into the habit of drinking because of her

failure in life. She has no money and what she gets on the pension day is spent on alcohol.

Here Florence represents the meaningless and hopelessness living of some Aborigines who

use alcohol to abusive levels. However, though alcohol creates problem for her and family,

she dies with her pride intact: ‘And I don’t want them bastards throwin’ dirt on my coffin

either, they been doing that all my life” (Purcell 107). The plight of Leah’s mother Florence

is understandable to an extent because, “In an era when Aboriginality was a recipe for

dispossession of land, self and economic resources, sexual relations with white men was for

many Aboriginal women necessary for physical survival, while the birth of mixed-descent

children became for some a hybridized form of cultural survival” (Farrell 174).

By the early 1970s new feminist groups had emerged. From 1972 white feminists

began to influence the Australian bureaucracies. Many of these early ‘femocrats’- a term

derived from combining bureaucrat with feminist- sought women’s equality with men at

work and the eradication of sexism in workplaces, media, the arts, politics and domestic life.

Australian femocrats of the 1970s put domestic violence, child care and women’s health on

the mainstream political agenda, and ensured fund for a range of other programs, including

women’s refuges, rape crisis centers, educational and training initiatives, and equal
opportunity schemes. They became more powerful policy makers and femocrats directed

both the Federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the Affirmative Action Act 1986. With the

femocrats at the driving force, there was a radical reform and subsequently passed the

Supporting Mothers Benefit, legislation for paid maternity leave in the Commonwealth

public service, and for a health insurance scheme- Medicare- in which abortion was free

(although still technically illegal). However, by the early 1990s, there were only a handful of

Aboriginal women in government departments and so Aboriginal women’s interests were at

best marginal to the concerns of white femocrats. For example, while white feminists sought

round-the-clock availability of childcare, Indigenous women, with the wounds of the ‘stolen

generation’ still traumatizing their lives, argued that the quest was misplaced and insulting.

Since family separation had already done untold damages, Aboriginal women argued,

feminists should fights to re-unite Aboriginal families, not just more child care for white

children (Farrell 159-160). Therefore Aboriginal women demonstrated the ethnocentricity of

white women’s feminism and considered that they paid insufficient attention to the needs and

welfare of the Aboriginal women. As Jackie Huggins points out, “femocrats have not opened

up areas where Indigenous demands are respected and the politics of difference is

understood.” She further comments that, “White women were and still are a major force in

the implementation of government policies of assimilation and cultural genocide…Racism in

the welfare and education systems continues to be a major focus of Aboriginal women’s

political struggles today. These are the issues which Aboriginal women activists often see as

priorities rather than those taken up by white feminists” (Huggins 75).

Aboriginal Women’s narratives have made a significant contribution to the

understanding of the diversity that exists amongst the Indigenous peoples of Australia. Their

discourses are embedded in Aboriginal cultures and societies, which reflect a ‘homeland’

identity as well as national identity (Sabbioni 1996:72). White feminists have challenge the
nation-state on basis of, and about, their rights as white female citizens. Indigenous women

give priority to the collective rights of Indigenous people rather than the individual rights of

citizenship. This does not mean that they are unconcerned with the rights of citizenship or

women’s representation and advocacy in society. What Indigenous women embrace is a

politics of Indigenous rights which encompasses the collective rights as citizens (Moreton-

Robinson 160). Feminists exercise their white race privilege in the women’s movement

because, according to Larissa Behrendt, “issues of importance to Indigenous women such as

the preservation of culture are not part of the political agenda for white women” (Behrendt

35).

Mudrooroo Narogin also known as Colin Johnson, in his book Writing From the

Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (1990), argues that Indigenous women

writings are not political because white editing of these texts makes their message one of

understanding and tolerance. However, Indigenous women writers do not share his opinion,

Aileen Moreton Robinson calls his critique ‘spurious’ as he separates Indigenous women’s

lives from Indigenous struggle. She said that he relies on a white patriarchal definition of

what is to be political, thus denying subjectivity as a site of resistance, and he is overly

concerned with how the text is written- its form, rather than what is written. Aileen Moreton

Robinson claims that Indigenous women’s life writings make visible dimensions of the

hidden history and colonial legacy through their gaze as subjects. She further comments,

“Indigenous women’s life writings challenge and disrupt both Narogin’s claims and

anthropological representations of ‘Indigenous woman’ because self-presentation by

Indigenous women is a political act” (Moreton-Robinson 3). As Larissa Beherndt remarks:

The failure of feminist movement to meet the needs of minority women shows that

just as men in our society will never know what it is like to be a woman, a white woman will

never know the reality of living as a black woman (Behrendt 43).

Therefore from the writings of the male and female Aboriginal playwrights we find their

different predicaments under the white colonization. How they interpret and resist the white

colonization differs as much as their experiences and sufferings. As Jennifer Sabbioni in her

essay rightly puts it, “An Aboriginal women’s narratives have been the catalyst for the

reconstruction of our identities. Indigenous Australian authors have framed their narratives

outside the sado-masochistic ideology imposed by white colonizers. It is interesting to note

that Aboriginal men’s writings have made limited contributions to the reconstruction of the

women’s identity” (Sabbioni 76).

 ENDNOTES
1
Murras is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a period in Australian Aboriginal history

“which saw the beginning of changes to laws relating to Aborigines, including the abolition

of the Aborigines Protection Board” (Murras 84). The play deals with one Native family

who, under restrictive White housing policy, is resettled from a rural area and a traditional

life into an urban neighborhood and their resulting “struggle to come to grips with white

Australia” (Murras 84). It also and in particular focuses on “three generations of women”

(Saunders, Introduction x), providing a unique perspective on the lives of Indigenous women.

Murras was first performed during the Adelaide Festival in March in 1988 at the Fringe

Festival Centre and was directed by Eva Johnson herself.

 WORKS CITED

Ashcroft, Bill. et al. The Post- Colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge.

1999. Print.

Behrendt, Larissa. (1993) “Aboriginal Women and the White Lies of Feminist Movement:

Implications for Aboriginal Women in Rights Discourse”. The Australian Feminist

Journal. Vol. 1. 9 pp 27-44. Print

Brewster, Anne. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography. Sydney University Press.

1996. Print.

Bright, Robyn Sheahan. “Notes to the Play”.Box The Pony, Scott Rankin and Leah

Purcell. HodderHeadline Australia Pty Ltd, Sydney NSW 2000. Print.

Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australian- Black Response to White Dominance 1788-2001.

N.S.W. 2065 Australia: Allen & Unwin. 2002. Print.

Cohen, Patsy. Margaret Somerville. Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs. Sydney: Allen &

Unwin, 1990. Print.

Crow, Brian, and Chris Banfield. An Introduction to post-colonial theatre.University of

Cambridge. Great Britain: Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow. 1996. Print.

Farrell, Rita. “Women and citizenship in colonial Australia”.Women As Australian

Citizens: Underlying Histories. Ed. Patricia Crawford and Philipa Maddern.

Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia, 2001. Print.

Gardner, Lyn. “Stolen” The Guardian, 23 Nov. 2001. Print.

H. Berndt, Catherine. “Digging Sticks and Spears, or, the two-sex Model.” Woman’s Role in

Aboriginal Society, Ed. Fay Gale, ANZAAS, 3rd Edition, Australian Institute of

Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. 1970. Print.

Huggins, Jackie. “A Contemporary View of Aboriginal Women’s relationship to the White

Women’s Movement”.Australian women Contemporary Feminist Thought.

Eds. Grieve, N and A. Burns.Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Jennings, Karen. Ways of Seeing and Speaking About Aboriginal Women i. Black Women

and Documentary Film, HECATE, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1987/1988. Print.

Johnson, Eva. “Murras”. Plays From Black Australia. Jack Davis, Eva Johnson, Richard

Walley and Bob Maza. CURRENCY PLAYS General Ed.Katharine Brisbane.

Currency Press Pty. Ltd. 452 Paddington, N.S.W. 2021. Australia. 1997

M. Berndt, Ronald. “The Aboriginal Heritage”, Introduction to Jack Davis’s Kullark

(Home) The Dreamers (1984) Ed. Katharine Brisbane. Currency Press Pty Ltd.

Sydney. Print.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen.Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and

Feminism. Queensland 4067 Australia: University of Queensland Press. 2000. Print.

Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Arts CentrePress . 1987. Print.

Muecke, Stephen. Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies. Sydney: New South

Wales University Press. 1992. Print.

Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier.James Cook University Press,

Townsville.1981. Print.

Sabbioni, Jennifer. “Aboriginal Women’s Narratives: Reconstructing Identities.”

Australian Historical Studies. Vol. 27, No. 106, April 1996. Ed. Judith Smart.

University of Melbourne. Print.

--- “I Hate Working For White People”. Academia Journal Article, HECATE, Vol. 19, No.2 .

1993. Print.

Shoemaker, Adam. An Interview with Jack Davis. WESTERLY Imprint: 1982, Volume 27,

No. 4, DECEMBER, 1982, Pages 111 – 116.

Thomson, Helen. “Aboriginal Women Staged Autobiography”, Siting The Other: Re-visions

Marginality in Australian and English Canadian Drama, Maufort, Marc and Bellarsi,

Franca, 2001. Print.

Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared: Autobiography of Margaret Tucker. Grosvenor,

Melbourne. 1983. Print.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER – VI

CONCLUSION

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This thesis deals with the issues and problems faced by the Aboriginal people in

Australia with the help of selected plays by contemporary playwrights such as Jack Davis,

Jane Harrison and Leah Purcell. The thesis argues that the current situation of the Aboriginal

people is a consequence of the white Europeans invasion and settlement in Australia.

Chapter-I of this thesis examines the emergence of British colonization in different parts of

the world and its subsequent colonization of Australia. The British colonizers considered

Australia as ‘terra nullius’ i.e. a land free to be taken and took over it without asking the

native Australians. The chapter also examines the life and works of the selected Australian

Aboriginal playwrights.

The Aborigines were at first segregated from the “white” Australians by being

displaced from their natural habitats and moved onto large reserves. Later, the policy of

assimilation was adopted, in an effort to eliminate Aboriginality. Children of mixed descent

i.e. from white father and Aborigine mother were removed from their parents and put in

Native settlements or foster in to white families, where they would be educated in “white”

manners. These removals continued until the early 1970s and affected many generations of

“half-caste” children, who are called the Stolen Generations today. The general perspective

of society has changed since 1967 with the citizenship rights given to the Aborigines and the

policy of self-determination is recognized today. Thus, the Aboriginal people have better

controls of their own matters but, given the years of targeted oppression and violence against

them, there are still on-going tensions challenging their distinctive cultural identities and

social and economic equality with the majority of the Australian society. As of today, for the

Aboriginal people, radical resistance to white oppression has become sometimes illogical due

to the gradual change in the social and political scene. They have found a new strategy of

fighting against the injustices and oppression in the social arena by writing. Literature

becomes an important medium used by the Aborigines to bring out their stories of personal or
historical experience of Indigenous life in Australia. Aboriginal writing as indigenous writing

has a certain objective: the self for cultural identity and self-definition. The attempts of the

Australian Aboriginal playwrights and writers to redeem their past fall into four general

categories; recording Aboriginal legends and myths in order to ensure their survival; writing

revisionist historical narratives; producing autobiographical texts and collating testimonies of

Aboriginal survivors and subverting white historical discourses through imaginative literature

(S. Nelson 31). All these four categories are deeply strengthen in all of the selected plays by

the three playwrights.

Chapter-II of the thesis examines how contemporary Aboriginal drama helps in

expressing a counter discourse against the hegemony of white Australians. First the issue

about the oral tradition of narrating and storytelling is highlighted using the New Historicists

perspectives which believe that the writing of history is a matter of interpretation, not

objective display of facts. For them, the literary text and the historical situation from which it

emerged are equally important because text and context create each other (Tyson 183). The

dramatized stories of the Aboriginal playwrights have the power to resist the lies perpetrated

by the government and at the same time they serve the purpose of passing on the stories to

their children, ensuring the preservation of their history and culture. There are two main

sources for a narrative about the history of theatre production by Australian indigenous

artists- one is the text-based reviews of productions. The other is indigenous community

knowledge, and is largely a series of individual oral records. They worked to bring out the

historical perspectives by turning to oral sources in the form of interviews with Aboriginal

people. The main concern of the Aboriginal plays is to create national and international

awareness about the problem of the Aborigines in Australia.

This chapter also highlights important and crucial aspects of postcolonial literatures.

Though some writers even the Aboriginal writers themselves refused to acknowledge their
writings under the post-colonial umbrella. This chapter highlights the possibilities of studying

the Aboriginal literature using the theories framed by the post-colonial critics. Aboriginality

is seen as a counter discourse to the European or Western discourse of representing the

Aboriginal people. It tries to prove wrong the traditional European belief that the Aboriginal

people were not able to represent themselves, and as such it succeeds by showing that there

are substantial numbers of Indigenous authors, playwrights or film writers who represent

their people from their point of view. Aboriginal drama in particular is presented as a

powerful medium in Aboriginal self- representation and most of the plays share certain

characteristics. The content of their play even when it is an individual life story is shared by

the entire community; the disruption of their culture, tradition and customs, the displacement

of Aboriginal children, racism, sexual and psychological exploitation etc. Their plays address

the issues of alcoholism, domestic violence, as well as the issues of displacement and loss of

identity with direct reference to the Stolen Generations. The imprisonment of Aborigines is

quite common and the playwrights criticize the issues of Aboriginal deaths in custody,

mainly in the plays.

In Aboriginal drama time is often reflected by a non-chronological order of events.

Many of the places are set in a number of locations between which the characters travel

throughout the play, for example Davis’s play No Sugar is set in almost ten different

locations. In Stolen Harrison projected both a child version and an adult version of Shirley

and in Box The Pony, Leah Purcell is able to produce her whole life story from her childhood

to adulthood. The unity of action is denied by incorporating many subplots, such as the two

storylines in Purcell’s Box the Pony. Although none of the plays studied can be termed a

comedy, the use of humor is fundamental in the majority of them. Aboriginal plays describe

scenes of hardship, misery, oppression, poverty or deaths and humor is used to temper the

seriousness of the plays and also shows that Aborigines laugh simply to stay afloat. In the
plays, humor is also used to undermine the white authority and assert the agency of

Aboriginal subjects through non-confrontational modes of resistance.

Chapter-III of the thesis deals with the Aboriginal body as a site of Aboriginal

ideology and identity. As in theatre, the actor’s body is one of the most prominent symbols;

the physical body is prominent from other symbols because of its ability to suggest diverse

meanings. The ‘difference’ of the post-colonial subject by which he or she can be ‘othered’ is

felt most directly and immediately in the way in which the superficial differences of the

body; skin color, eye shape, hair texture and body shape, are read as indelible signs of the

‘natural’ inferiority of their possessors (Ashcroft et al. 1999:321). As skin color is the marker

for objectifying difference in the social construction of race, the colonized subjects are

concerned with rejecting the colonially determined markers and descriptions of themselves.

The Aboriginal playwrights are portraying their predicaments in Australia through theatre of

the racist attitudes they face because of their skin color. Racial prejudice and racist

onslaughts of the white Australians are found in most of the Aboriginal plays.

In Aboriginal theatre, the body itself is the site of greatest potential resistance to white

Australians conceptualization of the Aborigines in Australia. Performance as the verbal and

visual articulation of the body is seen as a logical medium for enacting such resistance, as it

enables to defy the imperialists’ scrutiny, which strives to subjugate the indigenous people in

constructing their being as inferior being. Performance allows the colonized subjects to

position themselves as a speaking, moving subject rather than manipulated objects. And as

the culture of the Aborigines is a preliterate culture it does not privilege the written word,

thus performance offers them spaces in theatre in which their versions of history might be

represented. And giving importance to the body can sometimes be very advantageous on the

part of the indigenous playwrights in reconstructing post-colonial subjectivity, because

European colonizers conceptualization of the Aborigines has been both deceptive and

convincing in their construction of the colonized subject as an inscribed object of knowledge.

Chapter IV of the thesis presents the problems of the assimilation policies carried out

by the white Australian government and its far-reaching implications in the lives of the

Aboriginal people. The assimilation policy did not work - Aboriginal people did not want to

lose their traditional way of life or become white. “This policy was doomed to failure

because it presumed that Aborigines had to absorb a white lifestyle totally in European

terms” (Shoemaker 66). The white community did not want to accept Aboriginal people into

their society - racism was predominant in Australia. There were many people who still have a

feeling of superiority against them and they did not want to have an equal status in the society

with them. The Aborigines were looked down upon with distrust and contempt. Though

assimilation policy that was implemented as being 'for the good' of the Indigenous people by

the government it turned out to be just another way of destroying Aboriginal culture. It turned

out to fail from the very beginning itself because the Aboriginal people were always being

told they had to be more 'white' but they were never given the liberty to change, it was

enforced upon them. In order for them to adopt and follow the ‘white standards’ they spent

their lives being controlled by reserve managers or white authorities. When some Aboriginal

people did try to assimilate they were supervised and scrutinized by the white police. The

police monitored their every move and when something when wrong they were readily put in

jail. So the white Australian government policy of assimilation never gave the Aboriginal

people the same rights as the white Australians, even though they were assumed to fit in the

white community and act like the white people.

The chapter also explores the plight of the “Stolen Generations” i.e. the mixed descent

children who were forcibly removed from their parents by the government, which is widely

believed to have begun in 1910 till the 1970s. In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission in Australia was set up, the report, Bringing Them Home, makes

horrific reading. It contains the stories told by 535 Aborigines of mixed race who were

removed. Modern activists have described child removal as cultural genocide, Sir Walter

Wilson, HREOC Commissioner, like indigenous writer Kevin Gilbert and other Stolen

Generation narrators before him, called the victims’ experiences of forced removal,

geographic, linguistic and cultural dispossession a form of genocide (Schaffer 47). Many

hard-hitting submissions were made to the Inquiry into ‘the stolen generations’, the dramatic

term coined in 1981 by historian Peter Read of Link-Up (New South Wales) Aboriginal

Corporation, whose submission was liberally sprinkled with allegations of ‘holocaust,

atrocities, ethnic cleansing and genocide’ (Flood 233). Bringing Them Home Report also

suggested, ‘The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other

groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and

people could properly be labeled “genocidal”’ (Bringing Them Home Report 275).

The chapter also examines the complexity of the term Aboriginality itself, the idea of

what it means to be Aboriginal. Throughout the history there were many different ways of

classifying people as Aboriginal. The prevailing definition of the 19th century considered the

degree of Aboriginal blood, so called Blood-quantum classification, which was nothing more

than paying attention to the skin color (Gardiner-Garden 3). The three-part definition

concerning descent, self- identification and community recognition was adopted in the 1980s.

This simply means that to be considered Aboriginal, a person needs to be of Aboriginal

descent, identify as an Aboriginal and be accepted by the Aboriginal community as being part

of it. This definition is not specific judicially and as such has been challenged many times,

but it is the first time the spiritual side of being Aboriginal is mentioned. This means that a

person can identify him or herself as an Aboriginal even if he/she does not have any apparent
physical features, which is typical for Aboriginal people from mixed families (Australian

Indigenous Law Reporter).

It became clear that assimilation was not working as the white officials had

anticipated. In 1965 the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission approved equal pay for

Aborigines; a 1965 Conference modified “assimilation” to voluntary “integration” (Prentis

88). In an era of freedom and liberalization all over the world, assimilation no longer seemed

to be the suitable policy to pursue for the white Australian government in regard to the

indigenous population. With the increase of Indigenous protest movement in the 1960s many

people became more conscious of the discrimination that was being perpetrated against the

Indigenous people in the white society. Regardless of the official governmental policy of

assimilation, the unofficial policy- that is, the reality of caste prejudice- worked to drive a

wedge between the two races and militated against any more than token assimilation, this

period saw just as much distancing of Aboriginal and white Australians as the “protection”

era of the 1930s (Shoemaker 70). Therefore many people came to see 'integration' as a better

way to move forward towards the national integrity of Australia. The Federal Government

began to be more open in letting Aboriginal people integrate rather than assimilate. The

Aboriginal people were still expected to adjust and embrace 'white' Australian culture, but

they were given more freedom to practice the traditional aspects of what were left of their

own culture.

Chapter V of the thesis examines the differences in the writings of the male and

female Aboriginal writers. Though Jack Davis touches on themes, which are inherently

important in the Aboriginal writings, there are certain themes in which he differs from the

female playwrights. Indigenous women playwrights are working and writing about themes in

order to bring Indigenous Australian women’s experiences, history and topics to the fore.

They express their identities as mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunties, and convey pride in
being women, and highlight the important roles of Indigenous Australian women in their

communities throughout Australian history. For the Aboriginal women the white European

colonization meant invasion, dispossession, destruction of culture, abduction, rape,

exploitation of labor and murder. Dr. Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes that Indigenous

Australian women experienced the colonization process differently than men – ‘their

sexuality was policed and contained and their children removed from the influence of kin and

community, their bodies were used by white men as sexual objects and many were forced to

become domestic servants’ (Moreton-Robinson 8). Indigenous women have started to talk

about their histories through autobiography, novel and poetry. One of the predominant genres

or forms of Aboriginal literature today is the autobiographical narrative or life story

(Brewster 7). Although Aboriginal male writers have also continued to produce

autobiographical narratives, the Aboriginal women playwrights are able to candidly produce

their experiences and social conditions under the white European colonizer as seen and

experienced by them. Dramatic narratives of women are critiques of the white European

history and Aboriginal male works remaining silent about Aboriginal women’s particular

situations. As mentioned earlier, “No document has a greater chance of challenging the cult

of forgetfulness than a black woman’s autobiography” (Thomson 25). Here the ‘cult of

forgetfulness’ is what the white Australians deliberately forgot in matters relating to the

indigenous people- the invasion, the violence, the stolen generation etc.

The chapter also examines the Aboriginal women standpoint in resisting white

feminism. Though the writing of the Aboriginal women touches themes like domestic and

sexual violence, gender issues etc., they further challenge mainstream feminism. Dr. Aileen

Moreton-Robinson an Australian indigenous feminist claims that Indigenous women’s life

writing, which foregrounds the Indigenous women’s self- presentation, actually reveals that

their realities and life experiences are grounded in different histories from those experienced
by white women. She further points out that the history of white feminists’ relations with

Indigenous women in Australia actually demonstrates the way the Western feminists

normalized themselves and positioned themselves as the knowing subjects, constructing

Indigenous women as the Other (Moreton-Robinson xxiv). Therefore from the writings of the

male and female Aboriginal playwrights we find their different predicaments under the white

colonization. How they interpret and resist the white colonization differs as much as their

experiences and sufferings. As Jennifer Sabbioni in her essay rightly puts it, “An Aboriginal

women’s narratives have been the catalyst for the reconstruction of our identities. Indigenous

Australian authors have framed their narratives outside the sado-masochistic ideology

imposed by white colonizers. It is interesting to note that Aboriginal men’s writings have

made limited contributions to the reconstruction of the women’s identity” (Sabbioni 76).

The present thesis highlights all misunderstanding of the complex issues of

contemporary Aboriginal society. The laws and policies of past Federal Governments

inflicted these issues and as it was the “white” people who promoted and fostered the

implementation of them. The Bringing Them Home Report concluded that ‘all Australian

parliaments’ should make a formal apology, ‘there is an international legal obligation’ to

make reparation, ‘this obligation passes from the violating government to its successors until

satisfaction has been made’, and that ‘reparation be made to all who suffered because of

forcible removal policies’. All state premiers have apologized. In May 1997, Prime Minister

of that time John Howard expressed his personal ‘deep sorrow for those of my fellow

Australians who suffered injustices under the practices of past generations towards

indigenous peoples’, though he has consistently refused to make a formal apology, despite

considerable public pressure. The minister for Aboriginal Affairs explained, ‘The

government does not support an official national apology. Such an apology could imply that

present generations are in some way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier
generations, actions that were sanctioned by the laws of the time, and that were believed to be

in the best interests of the children concerned’ (Flood 232-233).

Though the past governments had refused to apologize to the Aborigines, in the

present political scenario, the then Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd made his famous

apology in 2008. In his apology speech from February 13th 2008, the Prime Minister Kevin

Rudd acknowledged the responsibility and culpability of the non-Indigenous people for the

mistreatment of the Indigenous people. He apologized for the laws and policies of successive

Parliaments and governments that had inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on the

Indigenous Australians. He especially apologized for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait islander children from their families, their community and their country. For the pain,

suffering and hurt of the Stolen Generation children, their descendants and for their families

left behind. He further stated that the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that the

apology was received in the spirit which it was offered as part of the healing of the nation. He

acknowledged the gap that lies between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous in health issues,

life expectancy, educational achievement, and economic opportunity. He proposed a future

based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility where all Australians are

truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with equal stake in shaping their future in

Australia (Rudd “Apology”). The messages presented a positive outlook for the future of the

Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relationships and hopes in better understanding and cooperation

of these two cultures within Australia. However, with the consequences of two centuries and

decades of European rule over Australia, Aboriginal communities were disrupted and

severely damaged. It seems that it will take many more years to overcome the consequences

of the past Governmental policies, the aftermath of the Stolen Generations or to raise the

health and social standards of Aboriginal people to a significant level. When and if this will

ever happen is still a question without any definite answer.

 The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was created way back in 1990 and

was given a decade to achieve reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous

Australians. However in the light of the political situations it seems that real reconciliation

between the indigenous people and the white Australian has a long way to go. Michael

Dodson sees the way forward as resting in human understanding:

It is my belief that when the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story of Australia is

heard and understood then there will be a true reconciliation. The abstract language of

human rights and justice will settle down on the realities of the lives and aspirations

of individual men, women and children who wish simply to have their humanity

respected and their distinctive identity recognized (qtd. in Flood 249).

In the light of all the issues and complexities of the relationship between the Indigenous

Australians and the white colonizers, it is undoubtedly true to say that the ‘real’ histories

came to be known only through the writings of the Aboriginal people. The works of these

writers resist the histories written by the white historians, in doing so they confront, examine,

understand, accept and affirm their past, though their past must be that of defeat and

dispossession. Such a meaningful connection with the past is essential for racial self-retrieval,

for forging a valid and liberating sense of personal and cultural wholeness. It is indispensable

for healing the cultural fracture caused by the catastrophic impact of colonial intrusion; it is a

prerequisite for cultural reclamation, for continued resistance (S. Nelson 30). Reconstructing

the self in history inevitably leads to restructuring of national identity. As Bhabha asserts,

“Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries –

both actual and conceptual – disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined

communities’ are given essentialist identities’ (Bhabha 1999:300).

The Australian Aboriginal people and the white Australians shared little common

ground in ways of describing their past and there cannot be any literary medium or mode that
can proof that Aboriginal retelling and representation of their version is authentic. However,

it can construct a new cross-cultural story. With all the consequences of what colonization

has done to their lives and culture, there is no way that the Aborigines could return to their

oral culture and tradition. So these playwrights and writers play an important role in

exploiting the apparatus of European literary communication, not in the hope of recovering or

preserving a vanishing culture, but with purposes of mediating between the cultures and

gradually constructing new histories. Thus in doing so, the Aboriginal playwrights and

writers create their own version of history. Emmanuel S. Nelson had rightly states in his

essay:

…the ongoing transformation of Aboriginal culture from an oral to an increasingly

written base – from tribal culture to print culture – has radically redefined the terms of

Australia racial politics. The cultural representatives of contemporary black

Australians, its writers and artists, no longer have to rely only on oral forms of

cultural expression to counter the European textual onslaught; they can now

appropriate and press into service the very tools from their enemy’s arsenal: written

text and English language itself. If European texts had functioned as instruments of

cultural destruction of the blacks, the Aboriginal texts can now serve as means of

cultural regeneration. Those tools that were used to distort Aboriginal history can now

be deployed to redeem the Aboriginal past and to construct revisionist versions of

history (S. Nelson 31).

This is exactly what the selected playwrights have been doing; they are reclaiming their

history through their texts and performance in order to assert their status of invisibility to

historicity.
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 APPENDICES

Name of Candidate : M.C. Lalthazuali

Degree : Ph.D

Title of Thesis : From Invisibility to Historicity:

A Study of Selected Plays of
Jack Davis, Jane Harrison and
Leah Purcell.

Department : English

Date of payment of Admission Fee : No. 3088, Dt. 26. 09. 2007

Registration No. : MZU/Ph.D/282 of 30. 03. 2009

Extended up to : 29. 03. 2016

Date of Submission : 11th May, 2015

Publication (1) in ISSN Journal : “Unlearning to Live White:

Some Aboriginal Plays
Vis-à-vis the Australian
Assimilation”, in Labyrinth, An
International Refereed Journal
of Postmodern Studies,
Vol. 5/No. 4 – October 2014.
ISSN 0976-0814.

( Prof. Sarangadhar Baral )

Head

Department of English

 
 
 
 BIO –DATA

Name : M.C. Lalthazuali

Father’s Name : M.C. Thanchhuma (L)

Mother’s Name : Chawngthluaii

Address : H/No. J -30

Republic Venglai

Aizawl, Mizoram

Phone : (0389)2325018, 9862555656 (M)

Educational Qualification

Examination Board/University Div/Grade Percentage Year

Mizoram Board of
HSLC School Education II 52.9% 1997
Meghalaya Board of
HSSLC School Education II 52.8% 2000
Mizoram
B.A. (Eng) II 54.33% 2003
University
University of
M.A. (Eng) I 71.55% 2005
Madras
Pre –Ph.D Mizoram
‘B’ 5.87 2011
Course Work University

(M.C. LALTHAZUALI)
Aizawl, Mizoram
 
 
 
 
 
 OTHER RELEVANT INFORMATION

1. Participated in the Regional Seminar on “Rewriting Oral Narratives of North –East

India”, organized by the Department of English, Mizoram University and sponsored
by Sahitya Akedemi, on November, 18th – 19th, 2008.

2. Participated in the National Seminar on “The Dynamics of Culture, Society and

Identity: Emerging Literatures of Northeast India”, organized by the Department
of English, Mizoram University in collaboration with Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, Shimla on March 10th -11th, 2009.

3. Attended Pre –Ph.D Course work from August – December 2011 in the Department
of English, Mizoram University.

4. Participated in the National Seminar on “Narrativizing Trauma in North Eastern

India and Beyond”, organized by the Department of English on 5th – 6th November,
2012.

5. Participated in the National Seminar on “Writers from here and Beyond”,

organized by Department of English DRS/SAP, Mizoram University on 26th March,
2013.

6. Participated and Presented a Paper in the UGC sponsored National Seminar titled
“Globalization and Ethnic Identity”, organized by English and Philosophy
Departments of Pachhunga University College, on 23rd and 24th May, 2013.

7. Published an article titled “Reclaiming Identity: Narratives by Sally Morgan and

Jane Harrison”, in Globalization and Ethnic Identity. Ed. Henry Lalmawizuala and
V. Lalmalsawmi. Scientific Book Centre. 2014. ISBN: 978-81-287-0004-0.

8. Participated in Regional Seminar on “Creative Writers of North East India: Their

Voices and Views”, organized by Department of English, Mizoram University in
collaboration with UGC/SAP (DRS I) on 15th March, 2014.

9. Published an article titled, “Unlearning to Live White: Some Aboriginal Plays

Vis-à-vis the Australian Assimilation”, in Labyrinth, An International Refereed
Journal of Postmodern Studies, Vol.5/No.4 – October 2014. ISSN 0976-0814.