Origins of Modern Australian Indigenous Drama

Indigenous Drama and Representational of Indigene in the 18th and 19th Century

"... the white sails of the English ships were a symbol of a gale which in the next hundred years would slowly drift across the continent, blowing out the flames of countless campfires... silencing the sounds of hundreds of languages and stripping the ancient names from nearly every valley and headland." (Blainey 1975:22)

(Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this document/blog may contain images or names of people who have since passed away)

It has been estimated that when British colonisation of Australia started in 1788 that between 350,000 and 1 million Indigenous people lived on the Australian mainland. Within half a century of colonial settlement, epidemic diseases such as smallpox had killed off about 50% of the population. By 1900, it is estimated that their had been about a 90% reduction in indigenous numbers. It is a testament to the Indigenous peoples of Australia that they survived physically and culturally.  Indigenous drama in the form of mime, stories told in dance and song during this period not only maintained the traditions and stories of the past, but also became a way of telling of the horrors of the new stories as they unfolded.

Many written accounts from English authorities attest to the richness of the singing, dancing, mime and drama presentations in the Indigenous communities of Port Jackson and other areas of Australia during the initial years of occupation. The Governor (and part time artist) John Hunter, in 1796, claimed that Indigenous women would sing all day, particularly while fishing, keeping time with a song while they paddled. He and others also noted that the actions and the songs and stories which accompanied these actions, changed and seem to encompass recent events such as encounters with the Europeans. Indigenous culture had always been rich and while some stories and ceremonies were embedded in tradition, others seemed to move like a river embracing the new stories, events and histories. The almost anthropological view of indigenous culture being primitive and fixed, disregards the fact that indigenous nations had interacted with one another and with sailors and traders from Malaya and Indonesia for generations.

Many Australian Indigenous ceremonies have always had a didactic element and indigenous nations used songs, dances, mime and drama to pass on knowledge for generations and it is likely that ways of dealing with the new problems arising with the white colonialists such as smallpox, venereal disease, opium and tobacco and alcohol abuse, also became part of ceremonies.

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, songs, dances and mimes performed at ceremonies and corroborees told of the deep knowledge of the dreaming, told stories of hunting, fighting, knowledge of lore and male/female relationships but also encompassed stories of the new horrors and the new challenges faced. Corroborees, also called by Europeans "bush operas", took place at night at sacred sights at Bennelong Point in Sydney (the present site of the Sydney Opera House). This site has become a significant site for cultural ceremonies for many years and some tribes claim that ceremonies and meetings of tribes and clans have happened at this site for hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans.

Other ceremonies were recorded early in what is modern day Redfern in Sydney, near the site where indigenous playwright, screenwriter and director Robert Merritt set up the Eora Centre in 1984. The Eora Centre was named after the Eora peoples who lived and still live there and the Eora peoples have long history of rich cultural ceremonies. The site has taken on a new significance as a centre for indigenous culture and peoples from all over Australia since the late 1960’s. Likewise the site of modern day Fitzroy in Melbourne has been the hub for ceremonies for hundreds of years. At West End in Brisbane on the banks of the Brisbane River, early European settlers and officials have recorded a number of ceremonies and performances (Buchanan 2000).

In 1836, amongst the gum and wattle forest, a special inter-clan ceremony to welcome Europeans took place at the place where present day Parliament House Hill stands in Melbourne. It was performed by the Kulin (the collective name for the local custodian tribes of the Watha wurrung, the Taung wurrung, the Woi wurrung including the Wurundjeri clans and the Boon wurrung). The writer of the Chronicles of Early Melbourne Edmund Finn (aka Garryowen) described the events, possibly the first European written account of a corroborree.

“The anniversary of the Regal Nativity [the birthday of King William IV] was 21st August, and on that day…after dark, the Aborigines had the good manners to treat the whites to a[n]…entertainment further away on the hill, where the Parliament Houses were opened just twenty years after. The blackfellows (sic)…treated their guests – for the first time performed before white men– their great national dance, known as the “ngargee”. Semi-circling a huge bonfire, they pirouetted…around the flames, which leaping up to the sky, illumined the then houseless surrounding country. “ (Garryowen 1888:4). This ceremony is often seen as a special welcome and it would have involved special dances, stories and rituals given as a gift to the Europeans. William Barak (1824-1903) was a member of the Wurundjeri-William clan and he painted this painting (see picture) of a inter-clan ceremony he witnessed as a child (possibly the corroboree described by Garryowen (Edmund Finn).

A photo of William Barak painting a ‘Ngargee’.

The explorer Edward John Eyre (1815-1901) who crossed the Southern coast of Australia from present day Adelaide to King George Sound, describes many ceremonies, songs, dances and "amusements" that he was privileged to witness. Eyre devotes many pages to his descriptions of the performances he saw including a detailed description of the Kangaroo Dance of King Georges Sound.

Above: "Kangaroo Dance of King Georges Sound", in Eyre 1845

A number of similar ceremonies were witnessed by non-Indigenous people. Parsons (2002) argues that some ceremonies performed by indigenous peoples in the 19th century for European settlers could be seen as a early form of cultural tourism. In a earlier, 1997 article entitled 'The Tourist Corroboree in South Australia', Parsons argues that because of the frequent monetary transactions which took place at ceremonies held on the South Australian settlements and the Victorian goldfields, corroborees can be seen in terms of 'tourist framing' and this aligns with Hinch and Butler's (Parsons 1997:9) definition of Indigenous tourism. From a performance point of view, this seems like evidence of the versatility and adaptability of indigenous people because their ‘corroboree’ performances began to morph, adapt and integrate traditions from various indigenous nations and traditions. An 1860 description of a Djadjawurring performance at the Lamplough mining settlement describes where two indigenous men decorated in white chalk, kill another man painted in red and bury him under a stage trapdoor and later this third man suddenly reappeared painted in white chalk having now become a 'jumped up whitefellow'  (Mount Ararat & Pleasant Creek Advertiser 22 May 1860). This shows the great ability of indigenous drama to adapt traditional forms and conventions to the non-indigenous staging and performance conventions.

Ceremonies done for or between indigenous tribes were a way that individual tribes could teach and maintain the values, lessons and culture of their own identity but they were also dynamic interactions of indigenous nations and a way to share the new tragic challenges which were being faced.

The attempted genocide of tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples was enacted and recalled in ceremonies, songs, dances and drama. In Perth, Western Australia in 1833, the indigenous leader Yagan was beheaded soon after a corroboree over which he presided. The conflict and slaughters continued, in Myall Creek in 1838, twenty eight indigenous people were killed (some of the guilty convict settlers were hung for this massacre), at Battle Mountain in 1884, two hundred indigenous people were slaughtered and in 1928 between 31 and 170 indigenous people on Coniston cattle station in the Northern Territory were killed in what is often referred to as the Coniston Station Massacre. The Warlpiri and Kayteye people recorded these events in stories and mimed dances which gave a sense of the violence of the slaughter (Strehlow 1959:320).  

While indigenous people were starting to witness the telling of both new and traditional stories and histories in ceremonies, the dominant perspectives presented to most colonial Australians was embedded deeply in the stereotypes of the barbarian, the exotic native and the comic slave. The first appearance of an Australian indigenous character in a Western drama was, strangely, not on the Australian stage. David Burn's The Bushrangers, which was performed at the Caledonian Theatre in Edinburgh in 1829 (Borchardt 1966:181), probably showed a Western audience, the first appearance of an Australian indigenous character on in a Western drama. In this piece by Burn (who eventually settled in Tasmania), indigenous people are portrayed as sinful and barbaric. The play itself gives no insight into indigenous societies and is an indictment on the attitudes of Colonial Australia and the refusal of the colonists to engage with a society and cultures older and richer than they wished to acknowledge. W.T. Moncrieff's Van Dieman's Land (1831) emphasised another absurd view of indigenous peoples by portraying them as exotic and Polynesian-like taming animals who sing and dance their way through life. Blatantly racist attitudes and perspectives on indigenous people are shown in plays like Geoghegan’s 1844-45 ballad opera The Currency Lass.

Indigenous characters start to make their way into a number of colonial dramas in the 19^th Century. The roots of the colonial drama were predominately melodrama so the character portrayals of indigenous characters were gross caricatures where white actors played indigenous characters which lacked realism. MacLachlan’s 1845 melodrama Arabin – Or The Adventures of a Settler is an example of such a piece. Sometimes these stereotypes were more poeticly romanticized as in one of the first poems to be written about Australian Indigenous culture Henry Kendall’s The Last of his Tribe (1864):

Uloola, behold him!  The thunder that breaks

   On the tops of the rocks with the rain,

And the wind which drives up with the salt of the lakes,

   Have made him a hunter again --

   A hunter and fisher again.

Yet Kendall also mocks indigenous people and culture in other works like Black Lizzie by phrases such as:

What best would suit a dame like you

Was worn by Eve before the fall…

Eventually, melodrama gave way to the music hall and vaudeville traditions of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century. Blatantly racist attitudes still prevailed and a tradition of the American style Black and White Minstrel show was popular where white actors put on make up to portray indigenous characters or sing as an indigenous character. The end of the 19^th century saw two dominant caricatures prevail in the representation of indigenous characters – the comic sidekick and the loyal companion. These representations are easily identifiable in Dampier and Walch’s Robbery Under Arms (1890), Rignold’s 1893 stage adaptation of the book The Mystery of the Hansom Cab, the 1893 melodrama It’s Too Late To Change and Leigh and Clare’s 1896 play The Duchess of Coolgardie.

An interesting twist to these portrayals comes from an early film documentary, probably the first anthropological film made. In 1898, Alfred Cort Haddon (non-indigenous director/anthropologist) made a short film entitled Torres Strait Islanders. This short documentary (four and a half minutes of the 35 mm footage remain) by English Anthropologist A.C. Haddon was made on his 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait and was filmed on Murray Island. It is the first known use of an ethnographic record and helped establish the moving image as a primary tool for ethnographical and cultural research and documentation. The Malu-Bomai ceremony shows dance sequences used in longer ceremonies or storytelling sequences. Traditional costumes and headdresses are shown. This almost Rouseau-like view of indigenous culture ends the view of the 19^th century and perhaps pre-empts some of what the 20^th century will bring.

Image from Haddon’s 1898 film ‘Torres Strait Islanders’.

Further Readings and Resources on Indigenous Drama and Indigenous Representations in the 18^th and 19^th Century 

Blainey, G. 1975. Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia. Macmillan, South Melbourne.

French, J, 2006. The Goat Who Sailed the World. Harper Collins. Sydney.

French, J. 2006. Fair Dinkum Histories: Shipwreck, Sailors and 60,000 Years. Scholastic Press. Gosford NSW.

Garryowen. 1888. The Chronicles of Early Melbourne. (State Library of Victoria Archives).

Haddon, A.C. 1898. Torres Strait Islanders (short film). Australian Government Film Archives. http://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/torres-strait-islanders

Isaacs, J (Ed). 2005. Australian Dreaming: 40,000 Years of Aboriginal History. New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd. Sydney.

McClish, B. 2003. Australian Library: Ancient Australia. Reed International Books. Port Melbourne, Victoria.

Nicholson, J. 1997. The First Fleet. Allen and Unwin. Melbourne, Australia.

Sheppard, A. 2005. Timeline Australia: Book 1 58,000BCE-1854. Echidna Books. Port Melbourne, Victoria.

Websites and Videos

ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission TV Documentaries Unit. Frontier Stories from White Australia’s Forgotten War. Bruce Belsham [Dir.] Video (1997) DVD (2007). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQE75wmRgZo

ABC Australian Broadcasting Commission. 2005. Buried Alive: Sydney 1788-1792 Eyewitness Accounts of the Making of a Nation. ABC Sydney. Sydney. (DVD)

Australian Children’s Television Foundation. 2009. My Place for Teachers. ACTF. Sydney. (Website). http://www.myplace.edu.au/home.html

NSW AECG Aboriginal Education Unit. 1987. A Lesson in History: 1788-1988. Sydney. (Video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cydE-O-CJT8

Yarra Healing. 2012. ‘Unit 7 Changing Lives Changing Ways’ on Teaching and Learning page (Website). CEO Melbourne (Catholic Education Organisation, Melbourne). Melbourne. 

http://www.yarrahealing.catholic.edu.au/teaching-learning/index.cfm?loadref=108

Discussion

1.    In what sense is using drama and dance to retell historical events such as Coniston Station Massacre a powerful way to chronicle history keeping community and individual accounts alive?

2.    What seem to be the dominant stereotypes/archetypes which 19^th Century Australian theatre used to characterize indigenous peoples. In what sense can these be seen to be reinforcing values that encourage and further prejudice?