Kate Grenville’s The
Secret River is not an easy book to digest. I wrote about it last
year, saying that it was an angry book though Grenville does her best to disguise it
at times; angry at the way white Australia has treated the original
inhabitants of the continent, their stubborn iron-willed settlers who made
little or no attempt to learn how to live in their new home. When The
Secret River was published in 2005, historians jumped at Grenville’s
‘claims’ that her book was history (Grenville, however, never actually made
such comments). Now, eight years later, the Sydney Theatre Company is staging a
theatrical reimagining of Grenville’s The
Secret River, under the pen of Andrew Bovell and the direction of Neil
Armfield.
Coming at a time when we, as a nation, can no
longer ignore the past, where we can no longer pretend these events didn’t
happen; when there is an “inheritance of rage” at the treatment of indigenous
people by white people, and a saturation point is reached, The Secret River then – as both book and theatrical event – are but
two facilitators to help us as a society to look at the issues contained within
them, to look to the past to find how we must [not] progress in the future. And
it takes its audience to “a pretty confronting place,” to quote Bovell.
When Grenville’s
book was published in 2005, “Keith Windschuttle and the massacre denialists were in full throat, the people who said, ‘nothing
happened, they all just died of measles, isn’t it sad’.” The Secret River then, (and, later, The Lieutenant, its companion) is about the idea of Australian
history and the secrets it hides, the dark shadows that have been hidden under
a carpet of nation-building and the point of view of the white settlers’
experience, the episodes that have regrettably been forgotten to the annals of
dusty archives, “the secret rivers of blood in Australian history,” to quote W. H. Stanner.
I’ve long admired Neil Armfield’s directing style, the way he draws
out a shared human experience within every piece he directs, his gentle probing
of what it means to be human, the essence of humankind’s experience in any
given moment. In his own
words, he has always aimed to “reveal ‘the truth of the text’, the ambiguities
and contradictions inherent in the drama…I like it to be complicated and rich,
but to know where I am being led ...” And so it is with The Secret River, except underneath its humanness is a harshness,
an unavoidable blight which besmears the actions of the good William Thornhill,
the Everyman figure. In his Director’s Note in the production’s program, Armfield
writes how the story “takes us back to a moment in our country’s narrative when
a different outcome, a different history was… at least imaginable, where those
who came might have listened and learnt from those who were already here, might
have found a way of living here on this land with respect and humility.
Instead, enabled by gunpowder and fed by ignorance, greed and fear, a terrible
choice was made, [a] choice that has formed the present… Nine generations
later, [the] lucky country is blighted by an inheritance of rag and of guilt,
denial and silence.”
Bearing all this in mind then, all this tumult and turmoil and anger
and fear and denial, the resulting production is, in a word, poetic. The set,
designed by Stephen Curtis, is a towering grey-white cathedral of a gumtree, a
skirt, a cliff-like riverbank undulating across the rear of the stage. Eucalypt
branches encroach from around the proscenium arch, and the floor curves out into
the audience; to one side sit a piano and a cello, the key components of Iain
Grandage’s score, performed live. Set against this backdrop of the Hawkesbury,
Armfield’s use of the space is ingenious, resourceful, at times all too simple,
yet again consolidating his place as one of Australia
The cast are uniformly excellent, as you would expect in a Neil
Armfield production; he has a way of allowing every member of the production to
do their best work, yet at the same time as being allowed to continually
explore and test out new ideas, ways of telling the story. Nathaniel Dean as
the Everyman William Thornhill, and Anita Hegh as his wife, Sal, are but two
people caught in the middle of this collision of cultures, their two sons,
Willie and Dick, witnesses and perpetuators of their actions. Mirroring the
Thornhill family is the Dharug family, typified by an earthy spiritedness, a
deep-set connection to the land, a connection the white settlers do not
understand. And then there are the two settlers who have deviated from the
cultural majority, to different ends of the spectrum: ‘Smasher’ Sullivan
(Jeremy Sims), a brutish man who reminds me of Dickens’ Bill Sykes, is willing
to use whip, gun or dogs on every and any blackfella who approaches his land,
whereas Thomas Blackwood (Colin Moody), is an enigma of a man, a man who has an
indigenous wife and children, who speaks their language, who understands the
process by which they live – “ain’t
nothing in this world just for the taking. A man got to pay a fair price for
taking. Matter of give a little, take a little… That’s the only way.”
There are some beautiful moments throughout the
production, not least the opening to Act II, with young Dick Thornhill playing
with his indigenous counterparts, Garraway and Narabi; the same three boys
having a water fight, soaking the stage; the Thornhill’s voyage up the
Hawkesbury; the corroboree, the occasions with the Dharug family together; the
passing of the days and seasons on Thornhill’s Point. All of this is
underscored by Iain Grandage’s gentle, subtle, unobtrusive score, performed
live by Grandage from the side of the stage; it is at times percussive and
discordant, at others hauntingly elegant, almost elegiac, hymn-like, capable of
evoking the playfulness and dramatic, the raucous and intimate. A high point of
the score is the end of Act I, a raucous pub-song sung by the settlers, as the
Dharug family circle them, chanting and singing in counterpoint. It is both
beautiful at the same time as being a reminder that no matter what the settlers
can do or the damage they can inflict upon the land and its indigenous tenants,
they are ultimately intruders, obstacles, visitors.
The dramatic crux of the play comes late in the second act, with the
massacre at Blackwood’s camp. Fuelled by indignation and rage, ‘Smasher’
Sullivan urges his fellow settlers to band together to ‘solve’ the ‘black
problem’ as it is crudely called. Thornhill is caught in moral tumult – he sees
the Dharug’s connection to the land, sees how they live, and has no reason to
hurt them, but he knows that if his fellow settlers are to ‘solve’ their
problem and get their ‘revenge’ on the blacks for spearing fellow settler
Sagitty, they are going to need his boat. In the following deeply unsettling
scene, the five white men take a handful of powder and walk in a line to the
front of the line, singing ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ at the top of their
lungs, changing key with each verse. As they fire their guns, they blow a
portion of their powder from their hands in a small white cloud, a muzzle
flash, and keep walking, keep singing. Five minutes later, once Thornhill has
returned home to Sal and their boys, we see the result of the massacre, the
effect on the Dharug people. It is not easy viewing, seeing the members of the
Dharug family walk from the side of the stage, and collapse as they throw their
handful of powder behind them. You could have heard a pin drop amongst the
auditorium throughout much of the production’s nearly three-hour running time,
and it is a testament to Armfield’s direction, Bovell’s adaptation of
Grenville’s story and the entire cast and crew, that it was thus. But the
uneasy shifting of seats at that scene’s conclusion let you know that the
moment had worked, its power and horror was not lost on any of us.
Throughout the whole production, scenes are strung together and
brief exposition is provided through an indigenous narrator-figure, Dhirrumbin,
played by Ursula Yovich. Reminiscent of a device in another of Armfield’s
landmark pieces of theatre, Cloudstreet,
she is both a part of the action and outside of it, an omniscient narrator
whose connection to the land is only all-too-apparent. It is interesting to
note that ‘Dhirrumbin’ is one of the earliest recorded words for the
Hawkesbury, thus making Yovich’s character a physical corporeal manifestation
of the spirit of the land, the Dharug’s centuries-old connection to the land. halfway
through Act I, Dhirrumbin’s words cut to the very heart of the play (and
book’s) central theme: “Thornhill was waiting for them to leave. What he
couldn’t know was they were waiting for him.” Yet she is also timeless, of our
time, an echo of the past, reverberating through the two-hundred-odd years
between Thornhill’s time and ours, a manifestation of the cultural shame and
sadness of the memory of events that took place on our shores. Back in 2006,
Neil Armfield also commented
on this, saying that “if you read Kate Grenville’s [The] Secret River , you understand… you can never see Sydney Australia
Perhaps more so than the book itself, the play (literally) gives
voice to the indigenous people, lets them talk in their own words, in their own
language, and lets their voice be heard. And because of that, the acts brought
against them by the white settlers are even more horrific and visceral, more unsettling
and disturbing than they are in Grenville’s printed words. And because of this,
this production of The Secret River
is well-deserving of its description as a “landmark theatre event,” of this
year, this decade, perhaps even this generation. As a novel, The Secret River heralded a new way of
approaching indigenous relations and thinking, as a play it demands it; it
sticks in your gut and twists, gripping you, making you think, making you
squirm, making you pay attention, shutupandlisten. It demands an end to the
“Great Australian silence;” it demands action.
It isn’t what you did in
the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that
will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
– Paulo Coelho
Theatre
playlist: 4. The
Landing, Elena Kats-Chernin
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