Putuwá: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Patyegarang

I have written about the story of Patyegarang and William Dawes on this blog before. It’s a beautiful story about language, friendship, trust, heart, and sacrifice; it’s a story about building bridges, whether you realise it or not; how different things might be now had the understanding not been rudely interrupted in 1791. When Bangarra announced their major production for 2014, their twenty-fifth year, was to be based on this story, I added it to my list of must-see productions and eagerly held my breath. And here we are, nine months later; the same amount of time it took those eleven ships to sail from London to Sydney Cove, two-hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

Bangarra’s Patyegarang takes the notebooks William Dawes made of the Sydney language, and turns them into a haunting, elegant and powerfully fluid seventy minutes of dance theatre. If you’re familiar with Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, then you’re already thinking along the right track of this piece. Except there is a difference: where Grenville’s book is about the friendship from Dawes’ point of view, Bangarra’s Patyegarang is about the young woman, her culture, her land, her language, and her relationship with the white man to whom she taught her language. It is Patyegarang’s story; it is her show.

The dreaming of William Dawes

Last September, I read Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, a fictionalised account of William Dawes, Sydney’s first astronomer, and his friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang. There was something in it that caught me, made me want to find out more about the man, their friendship, the story. The only trouble is that such knowledge is rather scant.

As with Arthur Stace, the ‘Eternity man,’ (another of Sydney’s key dreamers), it seems no history of Sydney is complete without mentioning Dawes, his little observatory on the headland now buried beneath the southern pylons of the Bridge, his brief relationship with Patyegarang, the Aboriginal girl who taught him fragments of her language.

On Reading, Part One

Summer is book time. Like winter, it’s full of long days in which you can read yourself stupid, though I don’t suppose that comes as a surprise to anyone. In between working and catching up with friends, I generally unwind with a book; the best way to fall asleep on a warm summer night is to read, to immerse yourself into another world and just let yourself go. (Another thing that I’m quite fond of is drawing connections between books, making links – either implicit or explicit – and seeing what can be made of them. But I’ll save that for later.)