Lest we forget: Sydney Festival’s Black Diggers

Every so often a theatre production stands head and shoulders above everything else, a production that stands out as a landmark event because of its social and cultural significance, because of it’s bearing on the shaping of Australia’s national psyche. Sydney Theatre Company’s The Secret River was perhaps such a production. Now, a year later, Sydney Festival and Queensland Theatre Company, in association with the Balnaves Foundation, present Black Diggers, an ambitious and monumentally affecting production which shines a long-overdue light on the contribution of Aboriginal soldiers in the Great War.

Like The Secret River, Black Diggers comes at a time when we, as a nation, must face the past and learn from it, when we must acknowledge the contribution people have played in the shaping of the country we know today. Directed by Wesley Enoch, we follow the stories of several archetypal figures as they travel from their homelands to the battlefields of Gallipoli, the Middle East, and the Western Front. Far from being jingoistic or representative, the result is an engrossing, harrowing and emotionally charged one-hundred minutes of unavoidably powerful theatre that does not shy away from the ugly truths of war and its legacy.

This is now: Belvoir’s Coranderrk

A man walks onto a blank stage, a possum-skin cloak wrapped around his slight body. His hair and beard frame his face. He speaks, first to the space, then to us. And with a simple gesture, a few chairs, and the drop of a screen, we are in a Victorian parliamentary enquiry from 130-odd years ago. Yet we’re in a small theatre in Surry Hills, watching an important (albeit unapologetically forgotten) piece of our nation’s indigenous history presented to us by indigenous actors; it is their own story as much as the people of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve on the 1880s. Drawn from the official transcript of minutes from the enquiry, Coranderrk is more than just a re-enactment or a piece of verbatim theatre; it’s a story about people, about the land – their land, and about a collective dreaming, a connection that you cannot replace. It’s about belonging, about home. It’s a story that takes place in the 1880s while simultaneously occurring here, now; today.

Originally performed in 2011 by Melbourne-based indigenous theatre company ILBIJERRI, in a piece comprised entirely of official transcripts, it was presented in 2012 at the Sydney Opera House, before being presented with Belvoir in its current incarnation. What is alarming, though, is how similar many of the attitudes of the white European people depicted in the piece are to the current way of thinking; how little things have changed in a century and a half, in over two hundred years of white settlement in Australia. What Coranderrk gives us, is a glimpse into how it could be, how it should be.

Food for thought: Belvoir's The Cake Man

Set against a backdrop of an old tarpauline, a ring of old packing boxes and crates, jerry cans and metal drums are set around the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space. As items are bought on – a cardboard box, an iron, a chair, table cloth, blanket – we see the beginnings of a house emerge. It could be a stage anywhere, a makeshift space made from whatever is at hand, and it seems perfectly suited to the warmth and intimacy inherent in the space. The first scene – a clever and sly depiction of a pre-invasion culture – soon gives way to a heated and politically-charged vision of Christian missionaries in Aboriginal communities, and we are thrust into the middle of The Cake Man’s grist, its political and social backdrop writ large upon its face.

A co-production between Belvoir and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, The Cake Man was written by Robert J. Merritt in the 1970s, and was the first full-length play staged by the National Black Theatre in Redfern. In the intervening forty years, we are ashamed to realise perhaps how little has changed, how racism and intolerance is still ingrained in our way of thinking no matter how much we’d like to think to the contrary, and The Cake Man becomes a sly indigenous perspective on white paternalism.