The cast of Natives Go Wild. Photo credit: Anna Kucera

“I wish I knew more [about the First Nations women who performed in Barnum’s shows] and I am looking forward to embodying them.”

Seini Taumoepeau AKA SistaNative, Deadly Voices From the House | Natives Go Wild podcast, 30 September 2019

Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point

Friday 24 October 2019

Created by Rhoda Roberts, directed by Chelsea McGuffin

Natives Go Wild and Me

What Am I Doing Here? This is the same question I asked myself when I was at the National Theatre, by the Thames, to see the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Secret River. Now here I am at Bennelong Point on Sydney Harbour in the Opera House Studio, to see Natives Go Wild. 

Why am I here?

I landed in Sydney less than 48 hours ago. I’m jet-lagged, slighty drunk and very excited. I am experiencing everything deeply, passionately and holistically – which is the best way I can think of to describe how each moment made me think and breathe and react. 

The show is dedicated to Ningali Lawford-Wolf – who sadly passed away too young at the Edinburgh Festival during The Secret River tour. Thus the connection to the long history of Indigenous Australian performers abroad is acknowledged. ‘Merge the stories of the old with today’s world’ says Rhoda Roberts, the show’s creator. She describes how the performers are ‘often off Country’, both then and now as ‘our artists still travel around this world’.  She says that the show aims to express these stories in ‘a way that reflects our ancestors’, to try and show ‘how they carried their baggage’ of identity, talent and displacement. This is the alternative story of Barnum.

Immediately I thought of Tambo. I was on edge as I knew his story had to be in there so I was afraid of what I would be experiencing in the lead up to it.  I also thought of performers Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz whose work examines perceptions of disability and sexuality through their recreations of circus sideshow entertainments (and how lucky I was to work with them and many others in my theatre career.)

SistaNative, Josephine Mailisi and Waangenga Blanco Photo credit: Anna Kucera

I want to know more about these performers… the ones I am watching and the ones they are embodying. I want everyone to know more about them.

Cabaret has many forms. This one is a hybrid of political statement, storytelling and circus spectacle. But I also recommend you experience it with the digital programme and the Deadly Voices from the House podcast series about the show – because one viewing of the show is not enough. The idea is to tell the stories of the extraordinary First Nations performers in Barnum’s shows. We are asked to imagine the unimaginable: a life in circus might have brought wealth and fame, but at what cost when you have to leave country, disguise your ethnicity and were likely to meet an early death? And what if running away to join the circus was your only option and not a choice, a form of slavery?

The white European Australian in me felt awkward and uncomfortable while watching the show, the seasoned cabaret viewer and theatre person in me was in the mood to be entertained and I was thrilled with the skills of the performers and their confidence in making people like me feel uncomfortable. They had the room by the you-know-whats. Mika Haka is unforgettable as the ringmaster, or rather, house mother.  Embodying their ancestor performers are Josephine Mailisi (contortionist, Feejee Woman),  Waangenga Blanco, (Con Colleano),  Seini Taumoepeau (Songwoman), Beau James (‘Little Nugget’, Clown) and Samuela Taujave (Warrior, Savage Native).

Where the f*** is everyone else?

Natives Go Wild was packed, but it was a big night at Bennelong Point. They were next door at Much Ado About Nothing on one side, and at a Tom Stoppard play on the other. It felt to me symbolic of how the literary canon endures and diversity adapts to it, rather than the other way round. The audience at Natives Go Wild might feel a bit uncomfortable but they are being entertained by and are learning just a little bit more about First Nations performers. I know where I would rather be.

For in Natives Go Wild we have not just a great show but something very unique: a historical drama with non-white actors actually playing non-white characters who are based on real people. In our day and age this remains a rarity. It is rare in British theatre and even rarer in Australian theatre.

Postscript

Meanwhile the scholar in me continues to process the whole thing in terms of how it relates to my research interests and methodology.  These are the things I will be talking about in my conference papers at the upcoming AAWP conference at UTS and at Sightlines at RMIT, and previously at EASA in Toulon, France: ‘Colour blind casting’ and diversity policies of publicly funded theatre and film, indigenous invisibility as theorised by feminist legal scholars and writers Larissa Behrendt, Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Irene Watson, and what can a creative writer do about it, and about challenging national narratives. (And I had some thoughts on Barnum, Hollywood actors and inclusion riders too).  

Samuela Taujave Photo credit: Anna Kucera

The European Association of Studies in Australia (EASA) 2019 Conference starts today at the Universite de Toulon, France. I have convened this multidisciplinary panel with art historian and curator Helen Idle, historian Meg Foster and creative writer - me! Our abstracts and blogs are below.

ALTER/NATIVE APPROACHES TO INDIGENOUS HISTORIES, REPRESENTATION AND CREATIVE PRACTICE

The Menzies Australia Institute Early Career Researcher Panel

EASA 2019, Universite de Toulon, France

Sheridan Humphreys, PhD Candidate, Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London (Convenor)

Dr Helen Idle, Associate Fellow, Menzies Australian Institute, King’s College London

Meg Foster, PhD Candidate, UNSW and Visiting Researcher, Cambridge

ABSTRACTS

Helen Idle    

Helen.idle@kcl.ac.uk | hidle@mac.com

THEORY INTO PRACTICE: OUTSIDE IN

In a Manchester library a story of James Cook is locked behind glass; it is a first edition of Hawkesworth’s 1777 account of the voyage that came to shore at what is now Australia. The journal recounts the British voyage outwith the Pillars of Hercules and is held within the collection of The Portico Library, a purpose-built independent library established in 1806.

This paper outlines an intervention staged in that library to propose possible connections between ideas that led to Cook’s voyage and ideas encountered on that voyage, to challenge dominant narratives about James Cook’s voyages of ‘discovery’. 

Ideas were exchanged locally, brought back to Europe and incorporated into existing knowledge systems. Or were overwritten or ignored. 

The methodology of the intervention was cast as a decolonising manoeuvre to promote multiple knowledges that could be found in The Library. Holdings were linked to accounts of the voyage to trouble epistemological assumptions and so encourage alternative understandings of what knowledges were abroad at this time. Here we may approach and acknowledge indigenous knowledge systems that are beyond the edges of Europe but came to inform new meaning-making and ideas. 

This contributes to the discourses generated by Brook Andrew’s upcoming Sydney Biennale 2020 Nirin (Wiradjuri word translates as ‘edges’) that places Indigenous languages and ontologies central to meaning-making within an established mode of exhibition. In both situations new space is created in an existing space whereby the dominant ecology can be challenged physically and intellectually.

Helen Idle

Dr Helen Idle: PhD (Australian Studies) King’s College London 2017; MA Visual Culture, University of Westminster 2005. Helen is a Project Curator and Research Associate at Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. Helen produced Entwined: Knowledge and Power in the Age of Cook (2018) for The Portico Library. She contributed a chapter to Castejon, etal, Ngapartji, Ngapartji. In turn, In turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (ANU Press, 2014); published in Meanjin (73:3, 2014) and was co-editor of Australian Studies Journal on Australian Art (7, 2015). She ison the Editorial Advisory Board for Australian Studies Journal (Zeitschrift für Australienstudien).

Meg Foster | meg.foster@unsw.edu.au

MARY ANN BUGG: AN INTERSECTIONAL LIFE

In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial Australians were presented with a problem in the form of Mary Ann Bugg. The Aboriginal ‘wife’ of famous bushranger Captain Thunderbolt threatened white properties and lives when she helped her spouse in his daring escapades. She rode and dressed like a man, butchered cattle and undertook strenuous physical labour, but no one could deny that she was still very much a woman. Her feminine beauty did not escape the attention of contemporaries, her children accompanied her and Thunderbolt through the bush and colonial newspapers referred to Mary Ann the way that she described herself; as ‘the Captain’s Lady’.  

How then, did white Australians deal with such a troublesome woman? How did they approach a person who challenged, conformed and complicated their beliefs about race, womanhood and masculinity in almost equal measure?  

These are the questions that this paper will answer. In doing so, it will reveal the messy, complex, yet very real way that action and imagination worked together to shape Aboriginal women’s lives in the nineteenth century. 

Meg Foster

Meg is a PhD candidate in History at the University of New South Wales, Australia and is currently a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Professor Grace Karskens and Professor Lisa Ford, Meg is investigating the ‘other’ bushrangers (Australian outlaws who were not white men) in history and memory. After completing her honours-thesis on Indigenous-bushrangers-in-2013, Meg worked-as a researcher with the Australian Centre of Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, such as the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of NSW and a King’s College Bicentennial Scholarship in 2017. She was also the inaugural winner of the Deen De Bortoli Award in Applied History for her article, ‘Online and Plugged In?: Public history and historians in the digital age’ featured in the Public History Review (2014). As well as her PhD, Meg works as an historical consultant and has a particular interest in making connections between history and the contemporary world. 

Sheridan Humphreys | sheridan.humphreys@kcl.ac.uk

 “TWO WEALTHY EUROPEAN WOMEN TRAVEL FROM ENGLAND TO AUSTRALIA WITH THEIR YOUNG ABORIGINAL SERVANT SEATED ON THE GROUND BESIDE THEM IN THIS 19TH CENTURY ILLUSTRATION”

This paper will detail how research inspired by one picture impacted a multi-disciplinary approach to screenwriting scholarship, a historiographical and creative process that is also a way of confronting indigenous invisibility, and doing something about it.

In 2019, a beautifully illustrated book was published: Women: Our History, with a foreword by none other than Lucy Worsley and a few pages by Sheridan Humphreys (ie, me). On page 193, in the section about women emigrants to Australia and New Zealand during the settler colonial period, there was an intriguing picture with the above caption.

As a starting point to inspire a fictional story, this is a perfect image. The source is mysterious, the artist unknown, there is a huge question over the location and the destination, and the identities are unconfirmed or obscured. One woman is Black, two women are White. Perhaps it is 1888, perhaps not. 

I wrote and researched these pages for Women: Our History, where the image with this caption appeared, but I did not choose the image. It became a starting point to develop a fictional story. Perhaps the image chose me.

Because it also revealed something troubling to my practice-led research: in my aim to try to write Indigenous Australian protagonists in a fictional historical drama set in Britain, in my obsession to write leading roles in historical drama for actors of colour, I forgot something. I made my character a young man. I forgot all about gender. This paper will explore how and why that mattered.

Sheridan Humphreys 

I grew up in Sydney, Australia and Kundiawa, Papua New Guinea. Now I live on the edge of a farm in Surrey, England with my dog Shaz, a retired greyhound. I am a creative writer and researcher and my work includes plays and screenplays.  I am currently a Visiting Lecturer in Screenwriting at the University of Greenwich and at Royal Holloway,University of London and working on a practice-led PhD in Screenwriting at the Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. 

www.sheridanhumphreys.com

Meg Foster, Helen Idle and Sheridan Humphreys

This is the Reading List and Watch List I prepared for our National Theatre/Menzies Australia Institute talk, The Secret River: Contemporary Responses to Indigenous History, at the National Theatre last week. On the panel were Ian Henderson (Director, Menzies Australia Institute, KCL), Jared Michael Field (Chevening and Charlie Perkins Scholar, Oxford) and Sheridan Humphreys (Menzies Australia Institute, KCL).

To read my essay, The Secret River and Me, click here.

The Sydney Theatre Company Production of The Secret River runs until 6 September 2019 at the National Theatre, London.

Selected Reading List and Watch List

Novels

Want to read more novels that challenge the narratives about race and colonialsm? Here are six of my favourites, there are many many more. 

·      The Yield by Tara June Winch, (2019), Australia, is next on my list to read. Currently available in Australia only.

·       Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, (2018), USA

·       Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar, (2015), Australia

·       Wanting by Richard Flanagan, (2008), Australia

·       English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, (2000), UK

·       This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, (2005), UK

·       Incomparable World by SI Martin, (1996), UK

Theatre

How about comparing The Secret River with other recent theatre productions that engage with Australia’s colonial experiences? SIX suggestions here from the UK and Australia. You can read the production notes and reviews online:

·       Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker, National Theatre, London, 2015

·      Hot Brown Honey, premiered in Australia and then in the UK for Edinburgh Fringe 2017 & 2018, and Southbank Centre 2018.

·       The Drover’s Wife by Leah Purcell, Australian premiere in 2016. Read the play! It’s also in development for the screen.  

·       Bennelong by Bangarra Dance Theatre. Australian national tours in 2017 and 2018, and also touring in 2019

·       Posts in the Paddock by My Darling Patricia in Association with Moogahlin Performing Arts, 2011 

·       Beautiful One Day, ILBIJERRI Theatre Company, 2015. I saw this show on tour in London, by the Thames at the Southbank Centre.

Movies: Australian historical dramas with Indigenous protagonists

·       Sweet Country (2017)

·       Bran Nue Dae (2009)

·       Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)

·       The Sapphires (2012)

·       The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) 

British Movies and TV

·       British-set historical drama with a protagonist of colour: Belle (2013)

·       TV: [N/A. Insert title when something is actually made, do not include programmes with minority sidekicks, colourblind casting, costumed villagers in 1700s/1800s/1900s staring open mouthed at a black person… ]

Podcasts

I prepared the Reading List and Watch List in advance, but after the panel, I think it might also be useful to share my favourite podcasts by and about Indigenous Australians. All are available from most podcast apps, the links are for the show’s websites.

Curtain The Podcast

Wrong Skin

Unravel Season 1: Blood on the Tracks

Tiddas 4 Tiddas - I recommend starting with the interview with June Oscar or novelist Tara June Winch.

 And a couple of podcasts about the Indigenous people of North America:

This Land

Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo

Contemporary Responses to Indigenous History

National Theatre in Association with the Menzies Australia Institute, 29 August 2019

This is the text of the presentation I gave at the National Theatre in London last week at our National Theatre/Menzies Australia Institute talk, The Secret River: Contemporary Responses to Indigenous History. On the panel were Ian Henderson (Director, Menzies Australia Institute, KCL), Jared Michael Field (Chevening and Charlie Perkins Scholar, Oxford) and Sheridan Humphreys (Menzies Australia Institute, KCL).

For my Reading List and Watch List inspired by this show, click here.

The Sydney Theatre Company Production of The Secret River runs until 6 September 2019 at the National Theatre, London.

Dubs Yunupingu in The Secret River. Photo by Ryan Buchanan

THE SECRET RIVER AND ME

‘…so close to the flowing waters of the Thames, the gateway to the murky ocean road that set in motion a course of events that saw our distant worlds collide, and in many respects unite.’
June Oscar AO, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, King’s College London, 29 April 2015

What am I doing here? An Australian in England, watching a show at THE National Theatre about the place where I am from. Who am I, where am I, and how am I in the audience for this show? And what was the last show I saw here. Small Island, just a few weeks ago. And before that it was Our Country’s Good in 2015.  So here I am. 

I grew up in Sydney and in Papua New Guinea. For our holidays we would drive north to the Central Coast, crossing the Hawkesbury, where The Secret River is set. These days I take the train and it is a spectacularly beautiful, watery journey. I moved to London in 1996 and now I live on a farm near the Devil’s Punchbowl in Surrey, about halfway between London and Portsmouth, the Portsmouth Road still roughly follows the route of the Roman road connecting the naval town to London.  Naval town, sailing to New South Wales, geddit? I studied theatre at the Australian Theatre for Young People, and later I appeared in many shows directed by the pioneering Australian director Leisa Shelton. I worked in UK theatre for many years before returning to academia to study screenwriting. And I am a carer of a disabled young adult, carers being the most invisible people in academia, if not all industries.  All these things define me. Place and people. I’m also an academic researcher and a creative writer, I teach screenwriting at two universities here in London – the University of Greenwich based in the Old Naval College on the Thames here in London, and at Royal Holloway at Egham, by Runnymede, at the other end of the Thames – and I am writing a historical drama with Indigenous characters.  Most Australians are concerned when I say that – some of the responses I get are: are you aware of protocols, what about consultation, you shouldn’t be doing that, are you allowed to do that, and most often they say ‘I don’t feel comfortable doing that’. It’s not supposed to be comfortable. 

Whose responsibility is it to tell diverse stories? It’s everybody’s responsibility, isn’t it? So what’s the problem.

My current project is about writing leading roles in historical drama for actors of colour. Black roles for black people, to coin a technical term! Britain is not very good at this in its costume dramas. Britain prefers what is called ‘colourblind casting’. (I have another technical term for this: I call it, ‘Black dudes playing white dudes’.) In this method, Race and ethnicity and ability are considered during the production process. My research argues that these should be considered during the writing process. 

My work is inspired by the first Australians to live in England – the indigenous Australians who lived here during the period 1800-1860, even during the period when The Secret River was set. Did you know that Indigenous Australians were living in England at this time too? As far as I know they were not stealing the land and killing people. But they were the first to take this journey and make a new life, and it is a journey that so many of us from Australia continue to do. However, most Australians know about the First Aboriginal Australian to visit England – Bennelong in 1790 – and then they think the next person to come here was Germaine Greer in the 1960s. And I say this to remind us just how we – and we means the Australians and the British – just how much we think we know our history. We don’t know our history. So for me, watching this show, why am I here, there is a continuing thematic connection, perhaps a songline, that started with Bennelong and continued with Germaine Greer and with June Oscar by the Thames. Possibly the next Indigenous Australian to spend time in England after Bennelong was a man called Daniel Moowattin, from the Parramatta district, where I went to school. Thematic connections. 

The National Theatre has some responsibility for this. The last show I saw here about Australia was a revival of Our Country’s Good in 2015. 

I was really excited about that production of Our Country’s Good and I wanted my teenage son to see it too. He’s not a reader, not bookish, but is proud of being Australian. But after the show I had to tell him that that was not how I wanted him to think of the convicts and of the Aborigines. The main reasons for that was the imagery surrounding the solitary indigenous character, and the casting - which I believe further confused British audiences about their relationship to their colonial past. (Despite the best intentions of the National Theatre’s diversity aims.)

The way I felt about that production of Our Country’s Good is how the Australian director Rachel Maza feels about The Secret River: ‘That’s not the story I want to be telling my kids’. And when you see something like this on stage at no less than THE National Theatre, then you think you’re seeing more than a story. You think you are seeing your history. A play about history has the authority of the historian, with greater emotional impact. 

The Secret River is a story that I do want to be telling my kid. It’s the start of the stories I want him to know and the questions I want him to ask and to keep asking. What am I doing here.

Georgia Adamson, Dubs Yunupingu and Elma Kris in The Secret River. Photo by Ryan Buchanan

What they are saying about it in Australia… or rather, what one person is saying about it in Australia.

Rachel Maza on The Secret River at a panel discussion at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre, as reported in The Guardian Australian edition:

The artistic director of Ilbijerri Theatre Company said the work played on worn-out tropes, such as the mythologised extinction of Indigenous Australians. “That’s not the story I want to be telling my kids,” she said at a panel discussion on Indigenous theatre, hosted by Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney.

I absolutely believe that non-Indigenous people have a role to play in the telling of our story and how we start to reframe our story, because now that we are wiser as a country there’s a sense of we can’t keep pretending [colonialism] didn’t happen,” Maza said. 

“We do need to find a way forward and it’s going to be awkward and it’s going to be uncomfortable and it’s going to involve asking a lot of dumb questions, and that’s a great place to be because it’s the only way through.”

What next for The Secret River?

I see that the play text is for sale. Where will the next production be? Who will be in it? Look at Our Country’s Good and who performs it in the UK. And look at the casting. 

Is this play text entering theatre’s literary canon? Who will play the indigenous characters in the future productions that I hope will take place in England?  

What next for you, the audience and the readers?

I prepared a Reading List and Watch List in advance, but after the panel and in response to the questions from the audience, I think it might also be useful to share my favourite podcasts by about Indigenous Australians. These are not fictional podcasts, these are real lives.

Backbone

Gravity and Other Myths

14-19 August 2018, Southbank Centre, London

A show from Australia that is easy to love

The light dawns slowly on bodies and what appear to be scaffold poles strewn across the stage. There’s also a rail of clothes. Have they fallen asleep in rehearsal?  And why is one of the guys wearing a dress? And then they bring out the buckets of dirt…

But then... wow! Amazing acrobatics that take your breath away with the precision, timing and strength. Geoff Cobham's extraordinary lighting design creates intimate spaces including circles and squares and corridors, while at other times there is a golden, unmistakeably Australian light. And the live music responds to the tension of the human structures on the stage, or is it the other way around?  Very soon I am even enjoying the dirt – is it really dirt or is it some sort of high performance magic theatrical dust that allows for superior traction? I want to sneak down to the stage after the show and touch it.

There are seven male performers to three women (and the two musicians are also male), yet this never feels like a macho display of stunts. It is always playful. In one scene, performers are skidding through the dirt into a handstand, wow. Then they take turns to run towards another and kick them, martial arts style with both feet, into the dirt. And they swap clothes. Always playful. 

My favourite scene is when they take the woman with white hair and intense gaze and shift and rotate her, limb by limb, element by element. While this happens to her, she contorts and readjusts so that she never looses sight of us, the audience. Her body must resolve itself so that she is still watching, her gaze is fixed. 

I never did work out why the guy was wearing a dress at the beginning, nor why two of them were wearing dresses later in the show. It just seemed… natural. Naturally playful, like the entire show. I loved all of it. Even the buckets of dirt.

The Australian rugby team like you have never seen them before?

Photo credit: Carnival Cinema

Corridors of light and southern hemisphere warmth

Photo credit: Carnival Cinema

The Court Must Have a Queen

by Ade Solanke

Spora Stories and Hampton Court Palace

I definitely need to know more about the Black Tudors. 

Henry VIII (Siôn Tudor Owen) steals the show in this thoughtful play that takes place in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. There is something so playfully exciting about seeing a real-life Henry, in his very own home! And there is a brilliant Cromwell too (Royce Cronin). He oozes a lawyer’s pragmatism and good sense, it contrasts with Henry’s larger than life presence and behaviour that becomes more erratic as the play proceeds. 

I was touched by the diplomat Henry Olisleger, the German diplomat representing Anne of Cleves. Like a child needing approval, he demanded he be honoured with a feast. Olisleger was played with great charm by Wesley Charles in the performance that I saw.

But it is two other characters that intrigue me. The Black trumpeter, John Blanke (Jack Benjamin) and his mother Maria, played beautifully by Marcia Lecky. Her declaration of faith and her conviction that Aragon, not England, is the place for people like them is a powerful moment. Although these are minor, perhaps hidden characters from history, the narrative of the Spanish Empire and the later British Empire emerges from their personal anxieties about faith and belonging. And these are legacies that we grapple with today. 

The Court Must Have a Queen runs from the 29 June to 02 September 2018, Thursday to Monday at Hampton Court Palace. Performances take place in the Great Hall at 11:30, 12:30 and 15:30 and last approximately 30 minutes.