Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, 1967-1990

Maryrose Casey, Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre, 1967-1990 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004) Maryrose Casey's Creating Frames is a worthy addition to theatre history in Australia, a field bedeviled by the ephemeral nature of its subject and the sensitivities of race politics in Australia. Casey chronologically documents with appropriate attention to postcolonial issues a difficult topic, Indigenous theatre in Australia. As always in dealing with Indigenous artifacts, category and genre definitions are problematic, and Casey illustrates this in pointing to the theatrical dimensions of various Indigenous interventions in mainstream politics. These interventions include the creative protests in response to the sesquicentenary of settlement in 1938 and again in 1988 for the bicentenary, and in an earlier era the more quotidian theatrics of Indigenous circus and variety show performers and boxing troupes. Casey's narrative does not begin at the usual starting point of Kevin Gilbert's The Cherry Pickers (1968) - written on toilet paper and smuggled out of gaol - but much earlier with New Theatre in Melbourne in the 1930s and 1940s. New Theatre's Soviet-inspired agit-prop style of educative, issues-based community theatre, made collaboration with Indigenous dancers and artists possible. The rich mix of Indigenous dance performance and contemporary race politics in White Justice (circa 1940), about a strike in the Kimberleys, was visionary and prescient, and a foretaste of what was to come many decades later in shows like Bran Nue Dae, billed - perhaps opportunistically - as the first Aboriginal musical in 1990. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, not surprisingly, also wrote for theatre, though this was not her main form of giving voice to her culture and traditions. In whatever genre she wrote, her prophetic and politicised voice, and those of her Indigenous peers, was in the 1970s easily dismissed by mainstream critics whose concerns were narrowly aesthetic and awaited the postcolonial turn in literary criticism to be fully appreciated in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges from this history is a tribute to little theatre and the space made for alternative voices and experimental staging - the Wayside Theatre and Mews Theatre in Sydney, and in Melbourne New Theatre, the Australian Performing Group and Pram Factory. Such institutions fostered two-way collaborations with Indigenous performers and writers, and this history charts how important these were to the subsequent attempts to form exclusively Indigenous theatres, and also, interestingly, how inclusive these dominant culture institutions sought to be. Another important way forward was the exposure of key figures like Bob Maza and Jack Charles to First Nations Theatre in Canada and the United States. It was the dirty realism of the socio-political issues that most impressed the Australians and transformed their sense of what an Indigenous theatre might become, and did subsequently in such enterprises as Nindethana, a company which had several incarnations, and the National Black Theatre based in Redfern. The struggle to form Indigenous-only theatres was an heroic one that faced battles with funding (theatre is expensive), lack of education, internalisation of the mainstream's low expectations of Indigenous capacity, and the need to create utterly new and unimagined genres expressive of Indigenous cultural capital and difference. They had to train up not only Indigenous audiences, but also European Australian ones. Add to those potent difficulties the tensions within the community about what it is to be Aboriginal, and the variety and difference of cultures that comprise Indigenous Australia, and the challenges were immense. Despite this, and casey documents the strategies devised to meet them well, an Aboriginal theatre slowly and unevenly evolved in different parts of the country. …

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