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
