Unsettling Space Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre
Joanne Tompkins
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Unsettling Space
10.1057/9780230286245 - Unsettling Space, Joanne Tompkins
Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research
Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Christopher Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre Forthcoming titles: Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (editors) PERFORMING GLOBAL FEMINISMS Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT
Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–4435–0 (hardback) 1–4039–4436–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
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General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton
Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre Joanne Tompkins
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Unsettling Space
© Joanne Tompkins 2006
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403985620 hardback ISBN-10: 1403985626 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
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This book is dedicated to my mother, Mary Tompkins, and to the memory of my father, Kevin Joseph Tompkins (1932–2003)
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List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgements
x
Series Editors’ Preface
xii
Introduction: Spatial Coordinates Contested space Surveying space Unsettling Space
1 5 13 15
1 Mapping Australian Space in Theatre Establishing a landscape Terra nullius, native title and ‘disremembering’ The practicalities of ‘settling’ in Australia
19 20 23 28
2 Monuments Constructing monuments Rethinking monuments: counter-monuments Australia’s Bicentenary Aboriginal monuments Janis Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy Performing on monuments
43 44 47 55 65 75 83
3 Contamination Contagion and degeneracy Maralinga Nuclear contamination plays Woomera Asylum-seeker plays
87 88 91 94 109 115
4 The Borders of Identity The poetics of displacement and the politics of location Psychic places Staging the geographies of identity Mythic places
127 128 132 140 155
vii
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Contents
Conclusion: Haunted Pasts and Methektic Futures
162
Notes
168
Works Cited
181
Index
197
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viii Contents
1 Perspective of Various Designs for Public and Private Buildings Executed by John Soane Between 1780 and 1815, Shown as if they were Models in a Gallery 2 The impressionistic ‘bush’ set for Holy Day in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Andrew Bovell’s play 3 Whiteread’s 2001 Untitled Monument creates a counter-monument that focuses attention on spatiality itself 4 Laurence Clifford (Norman in Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1988) being engulfed by ‘The Wet’ 5 Josie Ningali Lawford in Ningali 6 Deborah Mailman explains the effects of settlement on indigenous culture in The 7 Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman 7 The second play in the trilogy, No Going Back, Melbourne Theatre Company, 1992 8 Legs on the Wall’s production of Homeland on the AMP Building, Sydney, 1988 9 The actor in the cage awaits an uncertain future in The Waiting Room, Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, 2002 10 The three Angelas stand in front of an image of the desert in Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, 2002 11 William Yang stands before his own projected images in Sadness, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1992
ix
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2 37
48 63 69
74 76 83 119 135 148
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Illustrations
This book could not have been written without the financial assistance of: a Large Australian Research Council grant; a small ARC grant that helped with the Maralinga and Woomera research; the UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award that assisted with research into spatiality more generally; and a small EMSAH research grant. I am very grateful for the assistance that these organizations have provided. As usual, the staff at the University of Queensland library have been very helpful in securing a variety of documents. Thanks to the companies, playwrights, designers, and photographers who granted me permission to use their images to illustrate my arguments, and to Marc Richards and Mel Maclean for help in securing photos. A project like this is only possible with my excellent research assistants who have completed many different tasks, from compiling reading lists from large database files to finding relevant documents, helping to secure photos and images, photocopying numerous files, and tidying up the manuscript. They include Fleur Barlow, Emily Bitto, Kate Douglas, Neal Harvey, Margaret Henderson, Sarah Holland-Batt, Mary Ann Hunter, Leah Mercer, Peta Mitchell, and Sean Rintel (several of whom are now colleagues). I am particularly grateful for Emily and Neal’s feedback. Many colleagues – including Maryrose Casey, Christy Collis, Helena Grehan, Julie Holledge, and Kim Solga – have been invaluable in helping me distil some of my ideas. In particular, Maryrose kept asking me how the project was going, so that it was impossible to let it slide even when other events/activities kept trying to take over; Helena read my drafts with lightning speed and amazing insight; and Julie provided incredibly helpful suggestions in exactly the way I need to hear them to appreciate their usefulness. The contributions of all these people have been astute and extremely helpful. In several cases, the readers of my drafts have been postgraduate students under my supervision (including Neal Harvey and Stephen Carleton). It has been fascinating to watch the advice that I have offered them in a supervisory capacity be returned to me. I hope they have found the process as helpful to the act of writing their own work as I have found their detailed engagement with mine. Not only has this x
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Acknowledgements
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exchange helped my writing, it has also made me think more carefully about my practice as a supervisor. A number of other colleagues are owed thanks: Ric Knowles and Bill Worthen, my co-editors at Modern Drama, where I had the opportunity to edit a special issue, Space and the Geographies of Theatre. The Ortelia group has been supportive of the time that it has taken to complete this book. My drama colleagues at the University of Queensland have put up with my absence from the teaching roster while I have been on various types of teaching and administrative leave. The series editors, Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, have made the project a stronger one than it was originally: I was overwhelmed by the depth of their critical engagement with my project. Not all the assistance I’ve had has been intellectual: Stace Callaghan and Jeff Pittam do their best to de-stress me. Finally, heartfelt thanks to Alan Lawson who read drafts under less than ideal conditions, when his own workload was extremely demanding. He also put up with what was at times my complete absorption in spatial matters. His intellectual engagement with my work continues to be as valuable to me as his steadfast personal support.
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Acknowledgements
In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President, Janelle Reinelt, pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice-President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies in International Performance.’ Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to an everchanging project of knowledge creation.
International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale
xii
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Series Editors’ Preface
How we represent space and time in theory matters, because it affects how we and others interpret and then act with respect to the world. (Harvey, 1989: 205) [N]one of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. (Said, 1993: 7) This book examines spatiality on the contemporary Australian stage, but one of the sources of my interest in spatiality is a long way from Australia: it is a celebration of spatial organization in an 1818 painting honouring the architectural legacy of Sir John Soane, by Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843). In the painting (see Figure 1), numerous examples of Soane’s work are depicted in one room. Some appear to be shrunk, although they are more lifelike than maquettes. Others are depicted in paintings (within this painting), while still others are presented as architectural plans and drawings, books and notes. A tiny, shadowy image of Soane in the bottom right corner becomes evident only on a closer look. The painting’s carefully assembled architectural achievements are an artistic reflection of Soane’s work that is itself well known for its surprising use of space.1 The painting suggests the possibility of relocating or resituating ‘space’, regardless of the scale of the items depicted. It can also act as a metaphor for theatre’s manipulation of space on stage, for the opportunity to compare monumental and spatial arrangements of any dimension, and for the ability to foreground space as an object. Like Gandy’s painting, my project extracts and analyses examples of space 1
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates
Figure 1 Perspective of Various Designs for Public and Private Buildings Executed by John Soane Between 1780 and 1815, Shown as if they were Models in a Gallery, by Joseph Michael Gandy, 1818. Reprinted with permission of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
and spatial representation, focusing on the materiality of space. This painting, like the art form of theatre, plays with space and connects interior space(s) to exterior events. In the same way, Unsettling Space combines a study of Australian theatre with the spatial politics outside the theatre that also determine – and are determined by – the events that take place inside a venue. Gandy’s painting also toys with one of the central difficulties in exploring spatial terminology and spatial manifestations: we can never step outside of space to conduct a ‘scientific’ study of space. The remainder of this section outlines some elements crucial to an investigation of space in the theatre, remembering that we inevitably analyse space from the perspective of being always already involved in and incorporated by it. This paradox is, for Henri Lefebvre, the essence of space: his three-part definition of the production and operation of space in society, what he calls ‘social space’, informs my work.2 In brief, Lefebvre, who addresses both the politics and abstractness of space, breaks down social space into three interrelated components: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space. Spatial practice orders specific locations, and ‘ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 33). In more detail, spatial practice could be defined as getting from ‘a’ to ‘b’, or the means by which we citizens navigate
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2 Unsettling Space
through our communities: it is the paths outside our houses, the roads between home and work, and the shopping malls or subway systems we negotiate. Throughout our experience of spatial practice, we will likely encounter representations of space which tend to dominate in the cultural landscape. Representations of space are where a culture’s social power and authority are located and reinforced (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–9). They may be buildings (banks or government edifices), commemorative town squares, or columns. Representational space, meanwhile, is more oppositional than either spatial practice or representations of space. It is ‘linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 33). Representational space ‘overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 39). Examples of representational space might be the graffiti on a government building, or the Aboriginal tent embassy erected in Canberra in 1972 (and still extant today) to protest government failure to address land rights issues. Such representational space need not be concrete: for Kevin Hetherington, representational space extends to ‘temporal situations, events, which occur in particular places that open up the possibilities of resistance within society to certain marginal groups’ (1997: 22). My investigation focuses primarily on representational spaces, but I also address (particularly in Chapter 1) the operation of spatial practice and representations of space in the production of ‘Australia’.3 Lefebvre’s influential work addresses spatiality at large, but it barely mentions the obstacles and opportunities that shape the art form of theatre. Space is theatre’s medium of articulation and thus an essential element in theatre’s analysis, but there have been fewer critical considerations of theatrical space than one might expect, perhaps because it is an obvious theatrical element.4 Theatre buildings are colloquially considered to be vacuums that require filling by actors, properties and audience. The popularity of Peter Brook’s phrase, ‘the empty space’, has suggested by inference that the theatre building is empty (although Brook does not actually say that). Yet, as if reflecting the complexity of the production of space that Lefebvre describes, a theatre venue is always ‘full’ of more than a current production, or even plans for the next: more than merely a receptacle for the current production, theatre is always about space, but it is always already a multifaceted space. The ‘space’ in the theatre refracts to encompass several dimensions, including the building which houses bodies in real space, in addition to the imagined (and performed) space(s) that those bodies occupy. The venue (simultaneously no place and all places) frames that which is on stage, so that the staged locations intersect with the world off stage. Or, as Anne Ubersfeld
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 3
explains, ‘the stage symbolically represents sociocultural spaces . In one way, theatrical space is the place of history’ (1998: 97). The theatre building carries with it traces of past performances, and even past lives of the building or site.5 Theatre space accrues such a multitude of possible meanings that it is challenging to characterize even what might be meant by ‘space’ in theatre. At its most elemental, the study of actual venues directly affects how spatiality is interpreted on stage: ‘To say that a show is conditioned by the space it chooses is an understatement. There is no artistic choice which is not fundamentally transformed by the physical environment in which it must be realised. Venues do not house theatre productions; they create them’ (Meyrick, 2000: 169). An ideal study of spatiality on stage would focus its discussion on relevant venue(s), in addition to sociocultural spaces.6 To that end, Patrice Pavis and Gay McAuley have each considered how to analyse space in theatre. Pavis isolates six elements: dramatic, stage, theatre, gestural, textual, and inner spaces (1998: 344–5). McAuley develops Pavis’s definition, providing a useful taxonomy of the extensive spaces and spatial functions that shape a theatrical production. She distinguishes theatre space (the architectural building and its context) from theatrical space (the fiction or illusion that is created on stage by the action) (McAuley, 1999: 24-32). She further segments theatrical space into nine stage locations that contribute to the world of the performance illusion, before she turns to textual and thematic locations, providing a systematic method for itemizing the complexity of space in theatre. My approach is necessarily less structuralist than either McAuley’s or Pavis’s. I value the potential offered by a close analysis of the different aspects of spatiality within a theatre building or a production, but since my study seeks to demonstrate the effects of an unsettled spatiality in a broad range of Australian plays, I cannot provide such systematic detail. While I remain mindful of the extent of McAuley’s taxonomy, Una Chaudhuri’s concept of geopathology has become more directly relevant to this project. Geopathology, which characterizes modern theatre in the west, is ‘the double-edged problem of place and place as problem’ (Chaudhuri, 2002: 53). The geopathology that constitutes Australian theatre requires an awareness of what lies beyond the theatre’s site, in addition to what takes place within it. In response to geopathology, Chaudhuri coins the term ‘polytopianism’, which is ‘placelessness not as the absence or erasure of place but as the combination and layering, one on top of another, of many different places, many distinct orders of spatiality’ (2002: 138). Placelessness does, however, apply differently
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4 Unsettling Space
in many of my examples: in Australian theatre, placelessness means a material absence or erasure, as well as a layering of many places. Place and space are, in Australia, more heavily contested at a basic level of ownership and interpretation. The range of definitions and contexts for ‘space’ reinforces the need for me to be specific in my use of terminology. Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs reserve one word – landscape – for most of their analysis: ‘space is too unfeatured, [while] place is overly particular’ (2000: 3; original emphasis). I believe greater precision is possible: I use ‘landscape’ to signify locations that correlate with matters of national identity; ‘place’ for locations with specific geographical coordinates; and ‘space’ to indicate the more generic concept, as outlined above.7 ‘Cultural landscape’ refers to landscape in a broader sense: it takes account that land is altered by the people who engage with it. Landscape, then, cannot be severed from human interaction (Blair and Truscott, 1989: 3). Finally, ‘landscape’ differs from the Aboriginal concept, ‘country’, which, like cultural landscape, looks beyond place to incorporate additional factors that contribute to understanding the place and space in question. My investigation of a broad selection of contemporary geopathological Australian theatre since 1979 deploys polytopianism in the way that Gandy paints Soane’s oeuvre: bringing disparate locations together in dialogue.8 Unsettling Space explores the polytopic representational space that emerges from the layering of such disparate places. Representational space performed in Australian theatre not only contests conventional Australian history and culture; it also stages alternative means of managing the production of space in a spatially unstable nation.
Contested space The struggle over geography is also a conflict between competing images and imaginings, a contest of power and resistance that involves not only struggles to represent the materiality of physical geographic objects and boundaries but also the equally powerful and, in a different manner, the equally material force of discursive borders between an idealized Self and a demonized Other, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Viewed from the colonial frontier, geography is not just a battle of cartographic technologies and regimes of truth; it is also a contest between different ways of envisioning the world. (Ó Tuathail, 1996: 14–15)
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 5
Unsettling Space takes up Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s investigation of space and geography in terms of competing ‘ways of envisioning the world’. While the competing ways of envisioning Australia may be defined variously, two recurring perspectives tend to be contrasted: an open, empty, productive paradisaical space, and an open, empty vulnerable or hostile space. An example of the first is expressed by the French theatre director, Philip Genty: he comments that, after France, he and his company have toured Australia most frequently because, he says, ‘I like the feeling of space here’ (quoted in Quah, 2004). Genty’s ambiguous use of ‘space’ likely refers to a large, sparsely populated nation which compares favourably against a more claustrophobic ‘Europe’. The second perspective reveals an underlying instability in spatiality that remains a chief concern in Australian politics. Debates over land rights, anxieties regarding nationalism, settlement, reconciliation, traces of what was known as the yellow peril and subsequent invasion scares are preoccupied with space. These debates have resulted in the paradoxical depiction of Australia as an unlimited, empty land, at the same time as it is said to be too ‘full’ to accommodate outsiders, such as asylum seekers. These depictions converge in the historical context of settlement, but settlement – which tends to overlook the killing, ‘taming’, or ignoring of indigenous peoples and the redistribution of their lands among European settlers – gives way to moments of what I call ‘unsettlement’ in Australian theatre. My use of the term unsettlement recognizes that the history of settlement in Australia is both profoundly unstable and the cause of cultural anxiety. At times the unease of unsettlement is clearly articulated in order to destabilize particular political, social, and historical views, but at other times, it emerges to indicate a general spatial anxiety that lurks beneath the surface of Australian culture. ‘Unsettlement’, then, refers to the disruptive process by which ‘settlement’ took place; it also refers to the more contemporary traces of instability that recur throughout Australian cultural production. While moments of unsettlement recur in the sociopolitical arena, such contestations actively take place in theatre. Frequently, the plays that I discuss overtly ‘unsettle’ the perceptions of the history and spatiality that formulate Australian culture and identity, while in others, the latent unease with the concept of ‘settlement’ emerges more covertly. My discussion of the forms of unsettlement in Australian theatre extends theatre’s own role of renegotiating how competing views might be articulated and performed in a community forum.
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6 Unsettling Space
A key part of theatre’s potential social significance is the public performance of theatrical events in a context that facilitates a dialogue with ideas, but performance alone is not enough: theatre needs to be historicized as well. A useful strategy for historicizing theatre is Elin Diamond’s theory of unmaking mimesis that underpins much of my analysis. The remainder of this section is an overview of Diamond’s model which resists a dominant world-view to underscore theatre’s potential as a radical site. Using Bertolt Brecht’s conceptualization of ‘not but’ (or, to put it algebraically, ‘not x but y’), Diamond develops a theory of ‘unmaking’ mimesis, a model she establishes to interpret feminist theatre. The relationship between the theatre and its social context is complicated by the opposition of the ‘real’ and the ‘not real’ that constitutes theatre. While theatre engages most general audiences through the relatively standard mimetic reflection of ‘real’ events on stage, it also presents the ‘not real’ when it distances itself from the ‘real’ through its ostensibly fictional frame and/or other non-representational techniques. A rigid mimetic reflection is boring in its reproduction of life off stage; it also limits the potential for the audience to read the details of performance as signifying (historically and politically) beyond the narrative of a particular production. The effect of the ‘not but’ is that it ‘ruins classical mimesis: the truth-modelling that produces selfidentical subjects in coherent plots gives way utterly to the pleasure and significance of contradiction – and of contradictions that, at any given moment, are emerging but unseeable’ (Diamond, 1997: 49). The ‘not but’ thus ‘invites the participatory play of the spectator, and the possibility – for Brecht a crucial possibility – that signification (the production of meaning) continue[s] beyond the play’s end, even as it congeals into action and choice after the spectator leaves the theater’ (Diamond, 1997: 49). The ‘not but’ provides an opportunity to historicize and politicize more broadly, whereas classical mimetic identification prohibits the distance required to engage in this historicization. A production may unmake mimesis, or a particular play text may embed historicizing effects. Most of the plays I address unmake mimesis with the intention of politicizing the space between mimetic and non-mimetic representation. Diamond’s unmaking mimesis is helpful in introducing the potential for historicizing staged space generally, but two other theoretical tools are more relevant to the specificities of staging Australian space: the discursive lenses of the uncanny and methexis help me read the specific contestations of spatiality in Australian theatre.
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 7
8 Unsettling Space
The first means for staging a contested spatiality is a development of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, that familiar entity which is ‘established in the mind [but] that has been estranged only by the process of repression’ (1950: 394). Before I outline a particular Australian interpretation of this concept, I review the traditional perception of the uncanny, since this concept is not insignificant in Australian theatre and culture. The uncanny is what is experienced when the repressed threatens to return. Freud connects anxiety with the return of a dreaded commodity thought to have been rendered safely absent (1950: 394). In Australia, the repressed usually signals knowledge of what was done to places and the people in them; a key theatrical response to this knowledge is the staging of issues of presence and absence particularly locating Aboriginal people in Australian history. Countless plays stage an Aboriginal ‘presence’ in light of the legalistic practice of ‘absence’ generated by terra nullius (which established that the landscape could be considered to be empty of human habitation and therefore available for sale and settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, discussed in Chapter 1). But the anxiety that is expressed in terms of spatiality on Australian stages extends well beyond this absence (significant though it might be), reinforcing a fundamental discomfort with the process of settlement and the establishment of nationhood. Unsettling Space investigates the nature of that anxiety and the relationship between what has been rendered absent and what remains present. This repeated staging of absence and presence informs current contestations of the nature of the Australian nation. The uncanny is not specifically knowable, since in order for it to be known, an aspect of the unconscious would need to enter into the realm of the conscious; instead, the return of the repressed suggests an uncanny feeling or a manifestation, but the uncanny itself does not – cannot – ‘appear.’ For Freud, ‘[a]s soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny’ (1950: 402).9 Not only is the uncanny a useful tool for reading absence and anxiety in Australian spatiality, it also is productive for studying theatre: even the most naturalistic theatrical renderings of landscape are inherently communicated through the resonant staging of absence and presence. Plays have always staged different locations on top of one another: to take just one example, the setting for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which performs Alexandria and Rome on the same stage space,
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The uncanny
implies a sudden shift from one to the other, and back again: the stage is both places – and more – at the same time. Moreover, landscape on stage may be metonymic: a small patch of grass in front of the audience might signify a huge field in a distant time and place. A particular location may also be staged metaphorically, a large cloth manipulated by actors and a wind machine convincingly becoming a roiling ocean. Those items that do appear on stage stand in for more than themselves. In the same way, traces or other suggestions of what might be absent may become perceptible, and are thus made ‘present’. Audiences learn to interpret both absences (supplying detail where necessary) and the additional meaning (extra ‘presences’, as it were) generated by the intensification (and/or aggregation) of space on stage. When those absences cause anxiety and dread, they may evoke the uncanny. In a variation of Freud’s uncanny that has been developed in response to the Australian context, Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs investigate the metaphysical relationship between Aboriginal people and the land, and add to that the fraught political relationship that exists between Aboriginal groups and white Australians. Their reinterpretation of Freud’s uncanny is predicated on a modern Australian condition where what is ‘ours’ may also be ‘theirs’, and vice versa: where difference and ‘reconciliation’ co-exist uneasily. In an uncanny Australia, one’s place is always already another’s place and the issue of possession is never complete, never entirely settled. The conventional colonial distinctions between self and other, here and there, mine and yours, are now by no means totally determinable . So one can never be completely in possession of place: one is always (dis)possessed, in the sense that neither possession nor dispossession is a fully realisable category. (Gelder and Jacobs, 1998: 138) Gelder and Jacobs’s reconception of the uncanny brings the unconscious into the realm of the conscious, thereby reducing anxiety; in other words, Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny, which would seem to follow the emergence and ‘settling’ of the repressed anxiety, is somewhat removed from Freudian psychoanalysis.10 Whereas Freud’s uncanny suggests dread, a recognition of something from the past, Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny is more productive, seeking to contain multiple interpretations of the past and present in the future within one place and, potentially, at the same time. The manifestation of Freud’s uncanny in
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 9
Unsettling Space
theatre is usually by means of a type of violence to person or place, and certainly confusion and ambiguity. Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny seeks alternative ways of interpreting spatiality in the Australian context; as such, the exposition of their uncanny is more balanced, narratively and spatially. If Freud’s uncanny clarifies the symptom of anxiety and the nature of the return of the repressed, Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny provides a means of accommodating – metaphorically if not literally – manifestations of spatial anxiety in Australia. Methexis Like the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, Paul Carter’s theory of methexis is predicated on the possibility of interpreting spatiality in multiple ways. Methexis, which is the opposite of mimesis, complements Diamond’s argument for the historicizing act of ‘unmaking’ of mimesis. Carter insists that mimesis is an inappropriate model for literal and metaphoric mapping exercises, and even for understanding space itself. Carter is not a theatre scholar and he uses ‘mimesis’ more colloquially than Diamond does. His theory of methexis (which finds its origin in Aboriginal spatial figurations and perceptions of the Australian landscape) requires participation with, rather than representation of, the land. Carter advocates engagement with the landscape that follows the flows of land and space, rather than retaining the imposed linearity by which it has been mapped and settled. A mimetic response to landscape means that We do not align our lives with its inclines, folds and pockets. We glide over it [the surface]; and to do this, to render what is rough smooth, passive, passable, we linearize it, conceptualizing the ground, indeed the civilized world, as an ideally flat space, whose billiard-table surface can be skated over in any direction without hindrance. (Carter, 1996: 2) The mimetic, linear approach to land encloses that which it controls and attempts to reproduce on it the topography of (the colonizer’s) home. Methexis, on the other hand, follows a fluid interpretation that is most clearly understood in terms of – but not limited to – traditional Aboriginal uses of space and land management, and to the topography of the land itself. A consequence of the methektic response to the landscape is to disclose the political effect of enclosing land and place (Carter, 1996: 357). Carter does not advocate the destruction of fences, highways, and maps, but he does assert the value in exploring landscape methektically
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 11
To avoid compacting the ground, rendering it another stable point of departure, we need to tread it lightly, circumspectly. The approach must be poetic rather than philosophical. For restoration of the ground does not mean treading it down more firmly or replacing it; it means releasing it for movement – in the same way that metre or speech pattern releases language for movement. We must recover the earth’s metrical properties, seeing that its topographies are first and foremost systems of metricalizing movement. (Carter, 1996: 5) Methexis activates space by making room for alternative understandings of landscape. ‘The challenge that confronts us is to move differently and to find instead a different, more measured, more diplomatic means of moving about’ (Carter, 1996: 5). In some literal contexts, methexis refers to marking the ground lightly and impermanently, taking account of the history of a particular landscape, and considering the needs of its other users. In its more metaphoric manifestation, methexis suggests alternative approaches to interpreting landscape. It offers a means by which the contested and anxiety-provoking spatiality of contemporary Australian theatre can be rethought. Australian theatre may be haunted by Freudian repression, as many examples herein demonstrate, but Carter, Gelder and Jacobs do more than merely recognize the unstable and unsettling effects of the uncanny. Both concepts provide spatial strategies that interrogate the anxiety associated with the uncanny and its repressions by attempting to construct a (literal and discursive) location in which it is possible to rethink the role of space and landscape in Australia. They are variations on Diamond’s historicizing project in that they provide a specifically spatial means of historicizing Australian landscape and of offering suggestions for its reinterpretation. Both seek to read landscape in a manner that does not reinscribe a singular, foreign, mimetic linearity. The Gelder/Jacobs uncanny suggests that many places in Australia always already have multiple users and multiple interpretations, however anxious coexistence may be. Such places are effectively already split to provide at least two different functions and readings, whether officially or not (1998: 138). Gelder and Jacobs intend to
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by ‘walking it’ rather than driving over it (1996: 2).11 Methexis is both actual and metaphoric:
Unsettling Space
contemplate the possibility of producing a postcolonial narrative which, rather than falling into a binary that either distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’ or brings us all together as the same, would instead think through the uncanny implications of being in place and ‘out of place’ at precisely the same time. (1998: 139) Such intentions are not always achievable, though, as some of the theatre examples in this study demonstrate. Yet even a modest performance of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny can be productive politically. Methexis, in which space is mobile rather than fixed, helps split singular constructions of spatiality. Landscape can be interpreted by means of the standard, mimetic method that imposes linearity on a landscape, regardless of its topography; in addition, when the flows of the landscape help determine its meaning and function, the landscape’s methektic nature can foreground the potential for reinterpretation and even reuse. Methexis adds to – rather than overlooks – mimetic responses already in place. Carter takes his lead from Aboriginal cultures in the Western Desert for whom ‘the landscape is not seen, it is narrated; it is not static, but endlessly mobile’ (1996: 352). Theatre enables these two spatial concepts to be potentially potent. Both are discursive methods that point to the possibility of critical dialogue to rethink the self, the other, and the relationship to space in Australia. While discursive methods can be productive in their own right, it is on stage that their possibilities come to be realized, played out for an audience in a decidedly spatial context. Theatre’s live, three-dimensional activation of the theories demonstrates how the discursive potential of these reading strategies may generate tangible results. The performance of potential worlds (uncanny, methektic, or otherwise) on stage engages the theories more fully than discursive alternatives. Yet such reconfigured worlds need not be staged in detail just on stage because the construction of spatialized worlds in theatre (whether mimetic or not) intersects with ‘spatialized worlds’ off stage as well. The performance of cultural and political events connects theatre to the spatial context outside the theatre, even when the narrative on stage may suggest a less-productive conclusion. In other words, the generation of imagined worlds on stage encourages audiences to compare such worlds with the ‘real’ world outside the venue. As such, the realization of the uncanny or methexis as spatial strategies may take place in the connection between the staged world(s) and the ‘real’ world; it may also take place in a gap between what is staged and what audiences know to be true outside.
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In most cases, the plays lend themselves to either an uncanny or a methektic reading, although some accommodate both; given the splitting of interpretational frames that is part of methexis and a precondition for the uncanny, it is rare that methexis takes place without some semblance of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny also being possible, even if the two do not operate together in the same text. Even though these reading strategies narrow the field, the study of space is still broad, as the next section outlines.
Surveying space [I]t is the relations between space and otherness that should be addressed and analyzed today if we are to point up some of the contradictions of our modernity. (Augé, 1998: 96–7) The complexity in articulating Australia’s contested space(s) is rendered even more difficult by three main obstacles to the analysis of space. The complexity of space itself (arguably matched only by ‘time’) is first. ‘Space’ describes innumerable locations, some actual places and others abstract (such as outer space or space labelled as ‘empty’ or ‘wasteland’). It even applies to states of being (the colloquial ‘spaced out’ or ‘not in a good space’). Space thus suffers from being conveniently useful in infinite (often vague) contexts. For Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, the ‘apparent familiarity of space, the givenness of space, its fixity and inertness make a spatial grammar so fertile for metaphoric appropriation’ (quoted in Morley, 2000: 78). Attempts to narrow the parameters of spatial description inevitably encounter the map, and space is perhaps most frequently framed in cartographic terms. In addition to the pragmatics of monitoring borders and calculating the dimensions of land mass, metaphoric depictions of place in a map are rich with the possibility of so many countries sitting side by side on one page (see Binding, 2003: 6), augmented by the ‘interplay between past and present’ (Binding, 2003: 45). The power that supposedly rests in the map often overwhelms and replaces other types of spatial representation, even though, as Trevor Barnes and James Duncan point out, ‘the purpose of maps is not mimetic (to mirror in summary form an objective world beyond the map), but to communicate ideas within a cultural and political context’ (1992: xii). The discursive dimension to the map is essential in delineating spatiality, but the map is only part of a depiction of space.
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 13
14
Unsettling Space
‘Space’ is constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations. If you really were to take a slice through time it would be full of holes, of disconnections, of tentative halfformed first encounters, littered with a myriad of loose ends, a geological map (if you must) of fault-lines and discontinuities, bringing different temporalities hard up against each other. A discourse of closure it ain’t. (1997: 222; original emphasis) While natural disasters, like earthquakes or mudslides, may confirm Massey’s literal point (which is not, admittedly, about such occurrences), even events such as these tend not to shift the certainty with which an essentially unstable space is rendered stable in and by contemporary culture.12 The instability of space makes its presence felt, in spite of assertions of solidity. In fact, a nation’s management of its literal and metaphoric ‘space’ reveals its anxieties more than almost any other feature of nationhood. The management of space affects other aspects of a culture as well. Spatial instability affects the stability – or otherwise – of bodies in cultures. For example, most theories of the body confirm the body’s susceptibility to being ‘leaky’ or ‘insecure’ but they rely, surprisingly, on an assumption of space’s fixity, which provides some necessary rigidity for the unstable body. The potential for space – as well as the body – to be ‘unsettled’ makes the anxiety of the body even more confronting because the vulnerability of the body relies on a spatial sovereignty that cannot be guaranteed. A firm grounding in theories of the body – on stage or otherwise – depends on a careful awareness of the stabilities and instabilities of spatiality in any social context. Not only does the performing body activate theatrical space but, as Augé makes clear, ‘the individual body itself can be a space’ (1998: 103). Edward Casey maintains that Body and landscape present themselves as coeval epicentres around which particular places pivot and radiate. They are, at the very least, the bounds of places. Between the two boundaries [body and landscape] – and very much as a function of their differential interplay – implacement occurs. (1993: 29)
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A second obstacle to the study of space is the assumption that space is settled (in the sense of stable and secure), but as Doreen Massey argues:
The performing body should be read in terms of place, just as place ought to be read in terms of the bodies that inhabit it. In other words, the performer and setting intersect, enlivening that landscape and invigorating the body, but the role of space and place needs to be understood in its various forms, not merely made to stand in for stability.13 A final obstacle regarding the study of space is that space does not exist on its own: it interacts with social conditions and with supporting discourses including cultural nationalism, self/other, and time, among many. A culture’s memory is shaped by space, and, for Hetherington, so is identity: Identity, as well as being about identification and organization is also about spatiality. In part, this means that identity involves an identification with particular places, whether local or national. It also means that certain spaces act as sites for the performance of identity. (1998: 105) Other commodities like identity or subjectivity contribute to the study of spatiality, just as they find their context(s) in space. Marc Augé insists that the expression ‘identity crisis’ is actually ‘a crisis of space – how is it possible to think simultaneously of the planet as a canton and my canton as a world? – and a crisis of otherness. It was the other’s stability that made identity conceivable and easy’ (1998: 109). Alterity is firmly bound up in spatiality to the extent that an exploration of the nature of spatiality provides a means of understanding a nation’s preoccupations with, and repression of, otherness.
Unsettling Space Because we humans are intrinsically embedded in space, then, logically, we ourselves must reflect our conceptions of the wider spatial scheme. In this sense a history of space also becomes an enquiry into our changing conceptions of humanity. (Wertheim, 1999: 37) This book connects spatiality with interactions that take place between cultures as they occupy the same literal and discursive places and spaces within Australia. Australian theatre’s ‘space’ communicates the anxieties that suffuse its history, whether those anxieties stem from difficulties in settling the landscape, Aboriginal dispossession, or fears of invasion. As a means of exploring these anxieties, theatre renders absent
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 15
Unsettling Space
spaces (and figures) present. It is in the theatre that these issues take three-dimensional shape so that they may be properly debated: this study of theatre’s spatial politics also reinforces the role theatre plays in social and cultural formation. Unsettling Space investigates the broad landscape of the Australian stage but rather than accounting for the topography of the nation, it examines the anxieties that emerge from contestations related to spatiality in performance. In scrutinizing spatiality in Australian theatre, I address the culture’s depictions of territorial ‘settlement’ and the creative reinterpretations that reveal the ‘unsettlement’ that more accurately characterizes the nation. That is, the plays contribute to an unsettlement of the nation’s historical and/or spatial identity; my project uncovers the implications of the anxiety associated with such unsettlement. I have chosen three topoi – monuments, contamination, and borders – to structure Chapters 2, 3, and 4. These topoi are not geographical ‘places’ in their own right, but the ways in which they emerge from conceptualizations of, and adjustments to, specific spatial geographies have shaped key formations of Australia and Australian theatre. Each chapter’s topos provides additional perspectives on the distinctive Freudian repressions in Australian spatial culture. Some are actual physical marks in the landscape, whereas others are effects of what Carter reads as inevitable in settlement landscape: ‘[t]he act of settling was not a matter of marking out pre-existing boundaries, but one of establishing symbolic enclosures’ (1987: 168). Before I explore these topoi, I illustrate the environment in which contemporary theatre operates. Lefebvre maintains that ‘every society produces a space, its own space its own – appropriated – space’ (1991: 31); Chapter 1, ‘Mapping Australian Space in Theatre’, outlines the parameters for Australian spatial representation. Chapter 1 contextualizes landscape and land rights, recounting how the politics of dispossession, terra nullius, and ‘unsettlement’ are staged in the theatrical imaginary. It establishes how the uncanny and methexis operate in Australian theatre. Chapter 2, ‘Monuments’, focuses on ‘concrete’ attempts to fix historical space and time. Monuments provide placeholders for sanctioned history, marking and attempting to stabilize a culture’s symbolic memory. Yet while monuments stand in for people, landscape, and culture, they also symbolize absence and an inability to contain signification; in addition, they are repositories of what is not remembered, as well as what is officially celebrated. This chapter concentrates on theatrical interpretations of war and Australia’s Bicentenary (1988),
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Aboriginal perspectives on monuments, and – through Janis Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy – the monumentalizing of history itself. A study of monuments (and the more recent cultural phenomenon of the countermonument) reveals that the construction which appears to limit cultural expression to a particular sanctioned and official history has, in theatre, the potential to reinterpret cultural memory across cultural boundaries. Chapter 3, ‘Contamination’, turns to plays that deal with nuclear testing at Maralinga in the 1950s and the rocket launch tests at Woomera, both in South Australia. It addresses the ways in which contamination status has been applied to communities and cultures within Australia: the fear of contamination facilitates the making of increasingly arbitrary decisions about who – individuals and cultural groups – qualifies as ‘safe’ and who is deemed to be a source of ‘contamination’. The general ‘contamination’ associated with the ‘yellow peril’ recalls a fear (recurring throughout white Australia’s history) of Asian migration; this chapter concludes with an analysis of the fear of contamination associated with refugees at Woomera detention centre. As Chapter 3 outlines, concerns about terrorism and asylum seekers have focused new attention on Australia’s literal and figurative borders. Chapter 4, ‘The Borders of Identity’, investigates how the specific borders of identity are rendered spatially. I analyse the alternative (and imagined) spaces constructed as a response to the difficulty in negotiating concrete and literal space(s). Such spaces correspond with discussions of intersecting and multiple subject positions, both of which proliferate the possible ways in which a subject might take up space. The crucial nexus between space and subjectivity connects contested space and compromised personal subjectivity. Unsettling Space explores Australian theatre since approximately 1979, the era before that being well-rehearsed critically (although I do briefly discuss some earlier texts when additional context is necessary). It uses as its primary source dramatic texts (scripts that concentrate on dramatic space and that usually suggest staged theatre space) and theatre texts (live performances or the records of live performances). I begin with the setting that is outlined by the playwright, incorporating, when possible, the setting augmented by the designer of a particular production, to elicit the ways in which a play’s spatial arrangements speak to, and about, social and political space. Some plays receive very full attention, while others are mentioned only in passing; readers will be able to enumerate additional plays that might have been included. I concentrate on how the plays illuminate spatiality, how spatiality makes
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Introduction: Spatial Coordinates 17
Unsettling Space
and remakes meaning, and how spatiality helps define contemporary Australian theatre. Spatiality’s meaning in Australia is, of course, affected by time: space changes through time so displays of space must be historicized (see Grosz, 2004: 5–6). One of the pleasures of theatre is the fixing of time and space for the duration of the performance. Yet theatre’s narrative or plot, that which freezes time and space, is usually associated with character, not place. I argue that Australian theatre is predicated on place, more than on character or narrative. For Ross Gibson, ‘[t]he landscape itself has a memory, and the storyteller activates it so that the community can know its place in the world of time and space’ (2002: 68). The landscape in Australian theatre frequently takes on a role much larger than setting or background, as I explain in Chapter 1. My discussions in the subsequent chapters do, in effect, explore how the narratives of theatre characterize ‘space’ and how ‘space’ becomes narrativized. In surveying place, landscape, and culture in theatre (as Gandy’s painting of Sir John Soane’s spatial achievements does in architecture), Unsettling Space investigates the nature of space as a structuring concept in Australia. It attempts to unravel theatrical examples of representational space and the interpretational strategies that have shaped spatial contestation in the country. It provides a basis for analysing space in sociopolitical and theatrical contexts; I hope it will facilitate more contextualized studies of theatre, of active bodies located in space, and, since space directly affects the construction of identity, of cultural identity as clarified through space and place.
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Mapping Australian Space in Theatre
The landscape, present both as a material entity and as subjective images in the individual consciousness, becomes a theatrum mundi, a stage on which the self seeks to orient itself towards a fragmented material world and to resolve its own internal crises. (Dunstone, 1985: 69; original emphasis) Australia’s history has been determined by its geography to a greater degree than most nations: long before it was ‘discovered’ by Europeans, Australia was imagined to exist, its antipodean land mass an ostensibly necessary counterweight for land masses at the ‘top’ of the globe (see Cerwonka, 2004: 40–4). Later, the transportation of British convicts to Australia marked it socially as the end of the earth. This chapter suggests two ways in which Australian culture has been defined in terms of space: the discursive ‘clearing’ of the landscape, and the practical realities of settling (in) the Australian landscape. Other factors help shape the nation (including a recurring fear of the yellow peril or invasion from outside the nation’s borders, discussed in Chapter 3), but these two are essential for understanding the anxiety of spatiality that remains a significant undercurrent in the nation’s theatre, and in cultural representation generally.1 The identification of these national spatial anxieties here is not an end in itself: rather, it contextualizes the exploration in subsequent chapters of methektically inflected and uncannily influenced activations of theatrical landscape. The issue of ‘settlement’ is at the core of the two components, since the nation continues to generate – and to experience the effects of – ‘unsettled’ spatial, historical, political, and social realities. As a former ‘settler’ colony of Britain, Australia – like Canada, New Zealand, and, in some contexts, South Africa and the United States – was established and 19
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Unsettling Space
populated mostly by people of European heritages (as opposed to the imperial occupation of most African, Indian, and West Indian colonies).2 The convenient noun, ‘settlement’, highlights the nation’s difficult relationship with the landscape and its history: Europeans settled in Australia only by unsettling the indigenous inhabitants who were already there. Fundamental to understanding the concept of landscape in Australia is the relationship between indigenous land use, and settler appropriation and use of the same land. Many versions of Australian history on this topic have been largely characterized by ‘a form of forgetting or disremembering’ (Attwood, 2005: 243), an act which might be thought of as producing the repressed. Unsettling Space analyses the ways in which theatre resists the practice of disremembering. While the ‘foundational historical narratives that settler communities previously took for granted have been discredited by new national histories’ (Attwood, 2005: 243), theatre’s performance of a rejection of disremembering rethinks the past and the future in a communal forum. In some theatrical examples that I address, rejecting disremembering can help to establish representational space, but in others, the anxieties of unsettlement still overwhelm the action and the characters. To establish the basis for performing this rejection of disremembering, I turn to landscape generally to contextualize the signifiers of spatiality that define Australia. The theatrical examples lay the groundwork for the study of theatre’s interventions in the production of space in Chapters 2 to 4. Many of the plays chosen for this section illustrate the dominance of spatiality in Australia, even if they are not all as productive in their responses to it as the plays in the subsequent chapters.
Establishing a landscape [L]andscapes still remain compelling icons of national identity. (Lowenthal, 1997: 186; original emphasis) I could find this countryside almost charming if only there were something here. (Louisa in Tiger Country, Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 36)
David Lowenthal’s statement points to one curiously persistent function of landscape, that which encapsulates identity, both regional and national. Like the concept of nation, landscape needs to be constructed: it is ‘not a naturally occurring, empirical reality’ (Makeham, 1993: 121). Nor does it signify uniformly in each culture or geography: whereas
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Australians tend to think of UK landscape as cultivated parks, gardens, and vistas, the Australian landscape is associated with large expanses of territory that will not necessarily submit to shaping. In the second epigraph above, Louisa, who arrives in Australia in the early nineteenth century, is unable to articulate what surrounds her new home: there are no paths, buildings, or copses to orient her. She exemplifies the basic difficulty that white settlers in Australia had in describing the landscape around them: its difference from Europe was so great that, in many cases, words literally failed them.3 The inarticulacy about one’s surroundings is eventually transformed, as space is rendered into landscape by ‘people [who] engage with it, re-work it, appropriate it and contest it’ (Bender, 1993: 3). Such is its engagement in Australia that, for Paul Makeham, landscape ‘remains the most complex figurative system deployed in constructions of Australianness’ (2001: 144). Australian landscape is almost always defined with reference to a multiply defined ‘bush’, whose terms of signification are numerous (including the outback, desert, and frontier). This bush is located in the continent’s ostensibly barren centre, and is even sometimes figured as ‘dead’. Yet metaphorically, the centre suggests more than just absence or emptiness. It encapsulates all the anxieties of place – from Eden to exile – a phenomenon of landscape depiction that the poet Judith Wright described in 1966: in Australian writing the landscape has, it almost seems, its own life, hostile to its human inhabitants; it forces its way into the foreground, it takes up an immense amount of room, or sometimes it is so firmly pushed away that its obvious absence haunts us as much as its presence could do. (xi) Paul Kane’s characterization of landscape as ‘absence that can function as a presence’ (1996: 31) resonates with Wright’s multivalent description foreshadowing dread. In theatre (and other cultural representations), the bush has historically been more popular as a site of actual and symbolic location than the coast, but the vast extent of both landscapes sometimes overwhelms the action and the characters, such that landscape not only governs the events that take place, but even stands in for the individual and history. It can even take over a specific place to depict generic ‘location’. Louisa’s perception of the Australian landscape in Tiger Country as somehow ‘absent’ is no longer the immediate response, now that settlers have learned, for instance, the economic value (especially mining) associated
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with that landscape. Nevertheless, Kane’s comment suggests that the absence to which Louisa alludes – and the difficulty in articulating a relationship with landscape that it figures – recur in depictions of Australian space and place. Makeham outlines four ways in which Australian landscape has been staged, suggesting the various roles that landscape plays in theatre. In the first, the frame play, one landscape is framed by another: such a play typically situates ‘the landscape partially visible through a window’ (1993: 122). In the second model, the landscape is literally brought onto the stage, with grass, trees, or earth adding a form of authenticity to the setting. Increasingly, this literal depiction is achieved with the help of multimedia video projection (or, in an earlier era, the painted backdrop). In the third option, the room play, the tension between the interior (the domestic, and occasionally the psychological) and the exterior (the outside, and often the ‘untamed’) are played out. In such plays, the landscape ‘is not scenically rendered at all; rather, it is communicated exclusively through dialogue, spoken by characters immured within a domestic interior as offstage space’ (Makeham, 1993: 122). A variation on this model is the compromise of the veranda, balcony, or some form of architectural feature to bridge inside and outside. A veranda offers a hint of the outside, even providing some semblance of the bush landscape that extends to off-stage space, while retaining the option of the relative safety of a retreat to an interior room. The veranda suggests an attempt to tame the landscape, while also being ambivalently out of place. As Bill Ashcroft argues, ‘[t]he veranda is that penumbral space in which articulation takes form, where representation is contested’ (1994: 42). A fourth model, characteristic of contemporary plays, is a non-realist rendering of landscape, that ‘make[s] available a wider range of readings than the more fixed meanings attached to the early realist stage landscapes’ (Makeham, 1993: 133). This is the most relevant to the plays discussed here, given its opportunity for presenting allusive depictions of landscape. In theatre, the partial depiction of landscape can imbue ‘absence’ with strategic relevance, even signalling the emergence of anxiety. The relative tidiness of these four models is somewhat misleading because landscape’s function is greater than mere scenic backdrop. Two additional factors dominate in staging landscape in contemporary Australian theatre. First, landscape in Australian theatre is frequently rendered as larger than life, even if that expanse and any accompanying ferocity do not appear directly on stage. It is often depicted with anthropomorphic qualities, as if it is attempting to uproot or shake off
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the characters settling it. Second, it usually incorporates other cultural associations, from images of searing heat, to the child lost in the disorienting bush, to the speed of a bushfire’s devastation. As such, landscape on stage comes to perform a metonymic function, sometimes identifying a specific location, and often standing in for numerous possible and comparable places, feelings, senses, and emotions. It is difficult to generate either of these factors from a detailed naturalistic set or in a set that relies heavily on projected images of ‘real’ landscape and locations. In the first case, naturalistic sets tend not to be able to evoke the scale of the landscape and its effects, limited as they are by the architectural realities of the theatre building.4 In the second, extensive use of video footage of the ‘real’ landscape can remove the effect of the liveness of the theatre experience while compromising (rather than necessarily extending) the spatial context for the actors and audience. Productions that successfully incorporate video projection tend to do so in conjunction with an imagistic stage set. Australian theatre tends to rely on evocative props, variously defined locations that suggest the required landscape while adding complex symbolic meaning, and careful lighting because of its capacity to extend theatrical representation. Theatre, then, tends to evoke the experience of Australian landscape in metonymic, metaphoric, and even emotional ways, rather than naturalistically. The remainder of this chapter broadens to explore the two chief ways in which the absences associated with the Australian landscape come to be unsettling for both individual and national identities. The first addresses the internal anxieties of the dispossession of Aboriginal people following settlement. The second deals with the anxieties of finding a way to ‘settle’ in a landscape that seems to defy European experience. These groundings in the Australian spatial context are background to the investigations of the uncanny and methektic spatiality in subsequent chapters.
Terra nullius, native title and ‘disremembering’ [W]e used to plead with the old aunties to tell us things, to teach us language, but they couldn’t. They taught us as much as they could – all that walks with me every day – but a lot of stories they couldn’t tell. Because there are stories that can only be told on country. Because our language is lined up with place, with events that happen there. And the things we want to pass onto our kids now are in those places. On that country. The old aunties, they’d ache, their eyes would fill with tears because they couldn’t go there. And they’d pat us on the
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Unsettling Space
The experience of unsettlement that continues to generate the most catastrophic implications for indigenous people and for settlers is the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples to make way for white settlement. The discourse that offered the excuse for white settlers to take over the land is terra nullius. The anxiety inherent in this spatial formation is the fear that maybe the empty land was not as empty of other inhabitants as settlers wished to believe. This anxiety arises from a ‘will to forget’ what is actually known. The perception of an unseen – but present – other haunts Australian (un)settlement history, of which terra nullius is just one manifestation. I outline the effects of settlement on indigenous history and spatiality, concluding with a brief discussion of Wonderlands (Thomson: 2004), a play that addresses the ambiguities of both terra nullius and native title in settlement history.5 Before contact, Aboriginal peoples had been living in Australia for between 40,000 and 120,000 years.6 Their methektic relationship with the land was not appreciated by most Europeans as the remarkable feat of geological, zoological, botanical, and meteorological knowledge and management that it was. Aboriginal interaction with the landscape was mistakenly interpreted as a sign of inferiority because, for instance, Aboriginal people did not regularly cultivate crops, preferring to travel to where food was abundant and in season. The version of history that depicts Aboriginal land management as a ‘failure’ of social development also tends to ‘disremember’ the role that Aboriginal people played in assisting whites to settle the land. From the first moments of settlement when Aboriginal people led whites to water and food sources, cooperative relationships were forged between the cultures. Henry Reynolds cites agreements that took place between Aboriginal groups and early pastoralists before the introduction of the concept of terra nullius: ‘[s]uch negotiations often led to highly successful resolutions of the problem of providing for the mutual use of the same country for both stock raising and huntergathering’ (1996: 8). Yet the full settlement of the nation required a system for complete and absolute ownership and control of the land and the landscape, necessitating a convenient forgetting of the cooperative basis that had characterized many – though certainly not all – black/white interactions. In this paradox lies the basis for the uncanny relationship to land and space in Australia: Aboriginal people who helped European settlers
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head and say maybe one day, and they’d try to forget. We never forgot. (Edie in Wonderlands, Thomson, 2004: 50)
were subsequently ‘absented’ from the land, literally and discursively (see Lawson, 1995: 25). Such absenting of Aboriginal people from the landscape assisted in establishing in it an almost entirely mimetic relationship. The institution of a system of land ownership attempted to remove any opportunity for a system of coexistence that Gelder and Jacobs would later term the uncanny. The unsettlement of Australian land is encapsulated in two complicated legal concepts, briefly sketched here: terra nullius and native title. Terra nullius was a retrospective land management policy devised in the mid-nineteenth century. It assisted squatters to claim uninterrupted access to large tracts of land for grazing, particularly after 1846 when land tenure in various areas was legislated. The policy helped many squatters gain ownership of land that they had, to that point, only secured by ‘squatters’ rights’ by extra-legal occupation (Reynolds, 1996: 8). Settlers at the time knew that the land was neither empty nor uninhabited, but to ‘prove’ the case, large numbers of Aboriginal people were forcibly removed: pushed further inland, taken to mission-based settlements far from their ancestral lands, or even massacred, the reminders of their presence erased. The policy offered a way to overlook (and oversee) indigenous peoples while ensuring that (white) squatters and leaseholders could formalize the legal ownership of their pastoral holdings. The retrospectivity of this policy makes the agenda clear: terra nullius is now recognized to have been guided by self-interest among powerful settlers rather than having any basis in fact, but this admission comes too late for the Aboriginal groups who were displaced, dispossessed, and killed under its authoritative sign. The dispossession of indigenous peoples through terra nullius has had far-reaching consequences: it is associated with the breakdown of social bonds and traditional ways of life and has a direct effect on Aboriginal groups being able to achieve native title to their lands.7 Native title is the second aspect of indigenous unsettlement. In a legal move that contrasts the self-interest of the terra nullius practice over a century earlier, native land title was deemed to be possible in Australia, subject to strict conditions: Aboriginal groups must demonstrate that they have continuously occupied the land that they wish to claim, at least since settlement. Under this legislation, breaks in occupation at any point since 1788 can sever the claim, even if those ties were restored shortly thereafter. The legislation appears to overlook the forced removal of indigenous people from their lands and the massacres of large groups of indigenous people, atrocities that have compromised connection with ancestral lands. There have been some successful claims
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Unsettling Space
for land rights: the best known is the 1992 legal decision that Eddie Koiki Mabo did have a claim to parts of Murray Island in the Torres Strait (an island his people call ‘Mer’). This decision also questioned the extent of terra nullius and made room for native title as a constituent part of common law. A second famous claim, on behalf of the Wik and Thayorre people of the Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, found that since continuous occupation of the land could be proved, the Wik people could be permitted to use the land as required for ceremonies, as long as they did not interfere with the legal title owners’ legitimate use of the land. This decision that land could have multiple uses, even simultaneously, exemplifies the Gelder/Jacobs version of the uncanny. Legislated coexistence does give precedence to the holders of the deeds to the land, but it goes some way to giving the Wik and Thayorre people access to their ancestral lands and the possibility of continuing their way of life, in their country.8 The Wik case was a turning point in Australia, but not all claims have been successful: in 1992, the Yorta Yorta people’s High Court actions failed to prove continuous occupation of their land along the Murray River and they were therefore unable to secure native title. The opportunity for achieving at least a symbolic possession may be an important modification in Australian history. The possibility of achieving actual possession, however, remains elusive for most groups, who must plead their cases in the context of the nation’s settlement history which pays little regard to methods of indigenous sovereignty. The anxiety associated with the political and historical effects of occupation is staged in Katherine Thomson’s play, Wonderlands, which epitomizes the political and emotional effects of battles regarding native title on both sides, overtly staging the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny. Set simultaneously in 1931 and the present on the pastoral lease of Ambertrue, vaguely located in central Queensland, Wonderlands’ set for its first production (by HotHouse Theatre in regional Albury/Wodonga on the Victoria/New South Wales border) ‘was a packed red-earth floor, with a gumleaf-encrusted curtain snaking across the space, used to define acting areas’ (Thomson, 2004: xiv). Its ‘snaking’ path suggested the irregularity of a rocky landscape. At the end of this production, the events on stage were directly linked to the off-stage world: ‘the rear doors of the theatre opened, and Edie and Cathy walked out together into the night, towards the (actual) trees and the river beyond’ (Thomson, 2004: xiv). The play maps the anxiety surrounding native title for two different families. One family is Aboriginal and one white; both are emotionally attached to ‘their’ land. In the contemporary narrative, Lon Andrews
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fears that the land claim made by Edie Jordan on behalf of the Yirralong people will evict him from his cattle station and all that he has built over the years. Edie’s explanations about what native title actually means for pastoral leases fall on deaf ears. Unbeknownst to both Edie and Lon, the 1931 narrative establishes that the land was intended to have been passed back to Yirralong hands: Lon’s ancestor, Alice, decided to leave the land to her Yirralong station manager, Jim, now an elderly relative of Edie’s. Alice’s family had lived on the land with the Yirralong people, but Alice’s attempt to restore Yirralong ownership is thwarted: an accidental fall from a horse early in the play causes her untimely death before she can change her will to reflect her wishes.9 Edie knows that even if she succeeds in the native title action, it will mean little, as she explains in a ‘chat’ to her ancestors: sweet bugger-all we’ll get, but it’s the spirit of the thing over legal carry-on, and the pastoralists’ll realise that. Give the kids back some knowledge before it’s too late. But it’ll be in writing. Recognised as Yirralong country, it’ll say so in the whitefella law. This is the country your ancestors looked after. (Thomson, 2004: 12–13) The pastoralists do have difficulty with this concept, though. Lon attempts to quash a native title claim by first invoking a form of terra nullius. He insists that no Aboriginal person ever lived – even walked – on his land, although he knows that a well-preserved and all-but-forgotten painting under a rock outcrop in a remote corner of his land contradicts his assertion. In an attempt to prevent Edie’s legal action, he dynamites the outcrop, which damages his already failing health and forces him to move to town to be nearer to medical assistance. The blast also severs the hand of his prospective son-in-law. It is unclear how much of the outcrop is destroyed in the off-stage action, but the injuries to the two men suggest that the landscape has not escaped significant alteration. Setting this action at an off stage location leaves the audience to imagine the scale of damage. Lon’s desecration of the land – whoever owns it – underscores his desperation. Lon’s strategy for compromising the claim includes preventing Edie from completing the ‘connection report’ (Thomson, 2004: 65) that would prove the Yirralong peoples’ continuous occupation of (or connection to) the land. His desperate attempts are blocked by his wife, Cathy, who gives Edie Alice’s documents that recount the full relationship between the Yirralong people and Ambertrue’s early owners. The detailed journals provide Edie with the necessary evidence to finish the connection report. The merging of
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Unsettling Space
Wonderlands’ two narratives, in spite of Lon’s refusal to cooperate with Edie, demonstrates the way in which Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny operates, with two different stakeholders occupying – in whatever uncomfortable way – the same land at the same time, while not denying the complexity of the negotiations required to make coexistence possible. The play’s performance of the 1931 narrative in the same stage space as the contemporary narrative augments the argument for co-existence while also providing a glimpse of how a methektic relationship might work. Alice’s attempts to manage the station according to her knowledge of Yirralong customs are recorded in her family’s detailed journals, and her plan to return the land to Yirralong hands reinforces her interest in a non-mimetic relationship with the land that she loves. The failure for this event to take place does not diminish its significance, particularly since the audience takes out of the theatre (and directly into the landscape) a better understanding that co-tenancy need not be threatening. While many plays addressed later in this study exhibit an anxiety predicated on the absence of Aboriginal people in the cultural and actual landscape, Lon’s anxiety in Wonderlands is fostered by Aboriginal presence. This presence of undeniable, long-term occupation at Ambertrue results in physical and psychological damage for Lon, in addition to the destruction of the historic landform. Lon’s reaction to the Freudian uncanny may be extreme, but it illustrates the depth of the fear of unsettlement that leaves its trace throughout Australia’s cultural landscape.
The practicalities of ‘settling’ in Australia [Australia’s] source of national romantic paranoia [is] the tyrannous landscape. (Brisbane, 1976: 289) Following the anxiety of sharing this ‘settled’ land with Aboriginal people, the second source of spatial anxiety is a concerted effort to exert control over – even mastery of – the landscape. The practical realities of settling the land, turning space into landscape, and the fear that neither the space nor even the landscape is susceptible to management are illustrated in theatre by a larger-than-life landscape that has the capacity to envelop those who venture into it. At times this landscape has a gothic feel to it.10 I briefly address several ways in which the landscape – defined by its very unfamiliarity to early settlers and the meteorological challenges of fires, floods, and droughts – has figured in Australian cultural representation: the beach, the bush, and ‘located’ places such as cities.
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Mapping Australian Space in Theatre 29
While the borders of the nation mark the point where invasion might occur, the borders are also the location of the beaches – symbolic of relaxation – for which Australia is famous. Jonathan Bollen comments that Australia has ‘no genre of beach plays to compare with those of the bush and the backyard’, but the beach warrants comment given its prominence in other forms of cultural imaginary such as tourism, popular culture, advertising, art, and photography. Most plays that do take place at the beach are set in flats and holiday homes that often have beach glimpses, views that the audience may or may not also see. The actual staging of beach plays is generally realized by careful lighting rather than sand, to suggest the idea of the beach, mixing, in this case, the potential for relaxation with at least a hint of danger. That is not to say that sandy stages are unusual: the La Boite production of Nick Enright’s Blackrock (1995) in Brisbane, to name just one, played among sand dunes and beach-side showers. Perth’s Black Swan production of Blackrock saw ‘Richard Robert’s stunningly simple set – a rock set on silver sand, so evocative that you know the surf is breaking just out of sight’ (Farmer, 1996). An evocation of the beach, rather than naturalism, is usually the goal. The following sample of beach plays illustrates the range of responses to this cultural landscape. After glossing several types of beach plays, I turn to Louis Nowra’s Radiance (1993) in more depth. In cultural representation, the beach usually connotes holidays and/or some semblance of freedom from regular urban existence: in David Williamson’s play, Travelling North (1979), the seaside is differentiated from the cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Frank and Frances seek warmth, the sea, companionship, and, to some extent, escape from their adult children, and they live in various coastal locations until Frank’s death. Frances’s plan to travel further north releases her from the sense of capture that she felt in the city, living too near her family. While the beach in Travelling North is an object of desire rather than an active agent, the relative escape it depicts is unusual; other beaches perform greater roles. In Nick Enright and Justin Monjo’s Cloudstreet (1998; an adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel of the same name), the beach is a redemptive zone, but Cloudstreet and Travelling North seem to be exceptions. In most beach plays, the liberating potential of the beach is somehow thwarted, whether narratively or spatially. Michael Gow’s Away (1986) stages the association between beaches and storms. The storm in this play, set in 1968, is partly regenerative for most of the characters, as it is in The Tempest, one of several Shakespeare
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The beach
Unsettling Space
plays on which it draws, but it also continues to be a surprise, as if its force was unexpected. The 1987 Sydney Theatre Company production had an almost bare stage, the desolation of the beach (Barnes, 1987) corresponding with the feelings of grief and loss in the characters. While the three families go on different types of summer holidays (in a modest tent pitched beside a car, in a caravan, and in a hotel), they meet following the devastating storm. In a later STC production (1992), the convergence of the narratives took place on a large rectangle of sand that became the deserted and even disappointing beach (Payne, 1992). In both productions, the deliberately meagre beaches that are staged foreground loss. Yet in the recurring dread of a landscape that cannot be tamed, the characters, particularly the teenaged Tom who is dying of leukaemia, find a way to interpret the beach and its wild storm as somewhat regenerative. Even though the storm destroys camper vans and tents, it also washes away the illusions that had inadequately sustained many of the characters. The short play-within-a-play that Tom devises after the storm, about spiritual relief found in the ocean, forms a brief respite in the troubles that each of the characters faces. Enright’s Blackrock shatters the idyllic beach life when the murder of a young girl devastates a community. A revision of his earlier play, A Property of the Clan (1992), Blackrock takes place on the northern beaches of Newcastle, New South Wales, and stages the often glorified surf culture of ocean, alcohol, and sex. The play recounts the events surrounding the rape and murder of Tracy Warner, following a beach party. Based on actual events, the teenage boys in Enright’s play disavow responsibility for their actions, since a narrative trope is available to them to attribute blame to the girl. The ostensible freedom of the beach location in Blackrock results in imprisonment for some of the boys, death for Tracy and one of the boys, and a completely altered relationship with their surroundings for the remaining characters: the beach location that had defined individual and collective identities for the community’s young men in particular is all but abandoned. While the significance of the beach landscape shifts for the characters in these plays, the next play, which modifies the use of the beach somewhat, clarifies the potential for an uncanny relationship. Nowra’s Radiance explores both the freedom and storm potential of the beach, near Yeppoon, central Queensland. While Act 1 comprises the three sisters’ reunion for their mother’s funeral, Act 2 follows the funeral, taking place mostly on the mud-flat beach when the tide is out. The sisters plan to walk to the nearby island that is now a Japanese resort, and which also holds the vestiges of their barely retained Aboriginal
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heritage. The excursion reveals various family secrets that change their relationships forever. The sisters learn that their mother’s house overlooking the beach is owned by her lover, a white cane farmer who demands the house back immediately after the funeral. While he burns his sugar-cane fields, they burn down the ramshackle house.11 The sisters’ retreat to the water is partly to carry out the plan to reach the island and partly to watch the house burn. They mistime their return and the tide comes in, flooding the stage. In the 1993 production at Belvoir Street, Sydney, designer Brian Thomson pumped hundreds of litres of water onto the stage to suggest the tide’s quick approach, and to capture the reflection of the lights of the house fire and the surrounding cane fields being burned off. The water served some naturalistic purpose but in also providing a reflective surface for the house fire, the water’s ‘capture’ of the fire combined elemental forces of nature with regeneration and with the anger the sisters share about the circumstances that follow their mother’s death. Whereas the plays mentioned above tend to stage glimpses of the beach created with careful lighting and suggestive sets, Radiance focuses on creating the compromised freedom that characterizes beach landscapes on stage. But this beach is mud, not the white sand of tourist destinations: this muddy location complicates the expectations of the beach landscape and of the sisters’ own actions. They symbolically burn the house and retreat from the land to the beach but this action reinforces their lack of attachment to any stable place. Even their house is literally no longer their house, its memories destroyed for the youngest sister, Nona, who learns that she is the product of a rape perpetrated on a woman she had thought was her sister. This beach’s retreat is, like the other plays, dystopian (see Kelly, 1996: 124). There is, however, another aspect to the beach in Radiance. On the one hand, Radiance is a relatively standard beach play, since the anticipation of freedom and relaxation is unmet, its redemptive potential only even ambivalently realized by the sisters, Cressy and Mae. On the other hand, Radiance also unites the beach with the bush in the form of the established cane farm. The beach serves the same function as a veranda, intersecting with the bush, which is probably the most important historical signifier of cultural identity in Australia. This play brings together the anxiety of the bush landscape, the apparently liberating ocean, and the nation’s unsettling history: there is no opportunity for a Gelder/Jacobs uncanny on the stage here. The women are left locating themselves – metaphorically, if not literally – in the precariousness of a tidal beach, having no place on the island that was once their
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ancestral home, nor on the mainland, and having been evicted from their mother’s house, which now is as burnt as the cane readied for the annual crush. The anxiety of landscape manifests as placelessness for these women, the tidal beach marking the instability of their place in at least their community, if not in the country generally. The idyllic escape of the beach retreats further into history. But the possibility of the play opening up a dialogue with the audience and their relationship with the world outside the theatre takes shape. Radiance cannot present an uncanny landscape on stage, but it can suggest to the audience the gap between what can be presented and what ought to be possible. Even if the uncanny and methexis are not enacted on stage, as in Radiance, the plays can nevertheless productively unsettle history as they elicit a connection between imagined space on stage and its intersections (or disconnections) with space and place off stage. Compared with other locations, the beach may be less frequently and prominently depicted on stage, but its liminality connects it with the edges of the nation and with what is beyond the nation. Each of these plays enacts some form of liminal (and usually non-naturalistic) participation with land, ocean, and the symbolic strip in between, expressing the uncertainty that continues to emerge from depictions of the nation’s cultural landscapes. In the same way, theatre also becomes a liminal zone between the imaginative world and the ‘real’ world off stage wherein the effects of the imaginative world might be realizable in the outside world. The bush The anxiety of the tyrannous landscape to which Katharine Brisbane refers above (1976: 289) is perhaps most widely explored in depictions of the bush, across genres and art forms, particularly that landscape which ostensibly defies settlement. The difficulty in pinning down a specific definition for this cultural landscape is part of its appeal: it is both place (located in geography) and landscape (connected to the national identity).12 It is often configured in terms of a frontier site, a space that carries even more cultural weight: The frontier signifies the decisive exclusion of all that is not culturally familiar: and it excludes it even when it incorporates it. For the act of incorporation involves the complete silencing and obliteration of whatever it was that made the frontier necessary in the first place. The rhetorical significance of the frontier is that it empties the beyond of any cultural significance even before it is subdued. (Carter, 1987: 158)
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The frontier signals the anxiety of absence, even as it tries to suppress it. The fear of not succeeding in the powerful bush landscape has produced a series of spatial metaphors in Australian theatre that attempt to deal with the anxiety of how to interpret – and live in – Australia, but I draw attention to just two here. In the first, an isolated landscape stands in for the nation. In Louis Esson’s 1923 one act play, The Drovers, which takes place on the edge of the remote Barkly Tablelands in the Northern Territory, settlers carve out a landscape and a nation from the ‘untamed’ land. The tragedy of the death of Briglow is mitigated by his metonymic reabsorption into the landscape that is depicted pictorially and by means of the Aboriginal boy, Pidgeon, whose mere presence is less as human agent than as signifier of ‘landscape’.13 Briglow’s life and death – integrally connected to the landscape – is heroic in its own terms, as well as in its establishment of a nation and a future. In the second, the bush becomes a character in its own right, sometimes aiding the human characters and frequently obstructing them. Sumner Locke-Elliott’s 1948 play Rusty Bugles takes place at ‘an Ordnance Depot about seventy miles south of Katherine, in the Northern Territory’ in 1944 (1980: 4). The bush ‘character’ is not depicted through an expanse of landscape (since the action takes place in the barracks) but rather through climate and through the depot’s isolation, culminating at the end with the loud onset of the wet season’s rain.14 By the 1960s, the shift in Australian demographics meant that the bush landscape no longer functioned metonymically for the whole nation. While the bush continues to be staged as an ambivalent character, it now tends to stand in for history, rather than the nation per se. The bush increasingly acts as a site for rethinking national landscape and identity: the four plays described below draw out some of the anxiety-provoking absences that national landscape and identity situate in the bush. The possible ways of interpreting landscape have expanded substantially in the latter part of the twentieth century with the significant increase in plays by Aboriginal writers. Once landscape was discharged from its responsibility for signifying ‘nation’, it could explore different dimensions of spatiality and landscape, and Aboriginal theatre especially stages cultural landscape in the context of the spirit world and the past, as well as literal place(s). In addition to performing additional dimensions of spatiality, it also draws specific attention to the absences of particular places, a result of settlement. The plays of Jack Davis – one of the most influential early Aboriginal playwrights – closely layer landscape with history, both Aboriginal and post-contact history,
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performing a methektic reconsideration of landscape, settlement, and history. Kullark (1979) and The Dreamers (1982) combine the landscape of the distant past with that of the present for the Nyoongah people (south-western Australian Aboriginal people) and for white Australians, in an evocation of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny that is always evident in indigenous theatre. In The Dreamers, when the elderly Worru remembers old times, it is possible to speculate that he is losing his grasp on reality, but his conversations with figures that the rest of the family cannot see are his attempts to reinforce the reality of his tribal past. For him, the past is not a separate location: it is as present with him as the painted dancer whom the audience also sees. The dancer, part of Worru’s dreaming connection to his ancestors who are themselves embedded in the country that they share, introduces to the stage specific land and history, places that are all too absent from the lives of many of Worru’s family. The Dreamers extends the parameters of the space and place of the past to accommodate an old man’s youth as well as his dreaming past that operates outside the western calendar. These polytopic spaces accommodate different geographical places and temporal dimensions, all within the naturalistic rendering of Worru’s niece’s house in suburban Perth. In an enactment of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny in practice, the borders of the naturalistic set are, in effect, exploded by Davis’s extension of the dimensions of space. Worru lives out the last days of his life by connecting with his youth, remote from white settlement, while younger members of his family establish their own tenuous relationships with their surroundings and their heritage. Davis’s plays typically layer many dimensions of space but, more significantly, they demonstrate how a character like Worru maps onto a naturalistic (mimetic) set a methektic way of interacting with his dreaming past: the dancer need not have a cleared space. In spite of the kitchen table and living-room furniture, he can communicate with Worru by means of his dance, which carries with it explicit connections to Worru’s tribal country. While Worru’s numerous ‘spaces’ disturb conventional unities of place (and time), Kullark extends the performance of space and place to stage the literal unsettlement of indigenous people. Kullark, which means ‘home’ in the Nyoongah language (Davis, 1984b: 6), stages landscape somewhat differently, contrasting white versions of the settlement of the Swan River colony (present day Perth) with the Nyoongah version of the events. The landscapes associated with the settlers and the original inhabitants vie for attention theatrically as the two populations come into conflict. Comparing Aboriginal people who were pushed off their
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lands in the 1830s and again in the 1930s (Davis, 1984b: 47), Kullark illustrates the centrality of landscape for Aboriginal people. Its account also diverges from conventional historical records of the time. This play deploys a specific but multifaceted cultural landscape: the Swan River is depicted as a rainbow serpent on a series of segmented flats, the rainbow serpent being sacred to the Nyoongah people (and many other Aboriginal groups). This landscape is claimed by colonial settlers, who then mark it with a flag. The Nyoongah people and the early settlers coexist for some time, in a relatively cooperative demonstration of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, but as the Swan River settlement grows and more of the land is taken over by settlers, the segmented flats rotate and the rainbow serpent changes to a Union Jack flag, leaving little room (literally and metaphorically) for the Nyoongah. Its presence is not obliterated, but it is muted. Kullark performs the potential for the dominant western landscape to coexist with Nyoongah country, in a version of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny. There are moments where a methektic relationship might also be reached: while indigenous land was taken away in the 1830s and the 1930s, in the theatre of the late twentieth century, the reclamation of the river as a methektic rainbow serpent in the play’s mobile backdrop performs spatial resistance to a partial history and encourages the reactivation of a non-mimetic history outside the theatre. Davis’s plays contextualize settlement in light of indigenous unsettlement: they articulate the difficulty in inhabiting this ‘settled’ landscape that takes little notice of places of significance to indigenous people. By reasserting indigenous presence as well, they also perform representational space for indigenous people through which they can realize access to (lost) country, at least metaphorically. The following two plays remember a ‘disremembered’ past and acknowledge what is under the landscape’s surface, bringing its absences to light, along with staging the difficulty of settling the landscape. By renegotiating a de-romanticized landscape, they demonstrate the concerted attempts to repress the history of settlement.15 In forcing the display of absented commodities, these plays work towards staging an uncanny landscape, even if their main success is in contrasting a conventional historical record with a repressed one. The plays illustrate that at the same time and in the same place as a romanticised history of Australia, other versions of historical landscape exist. Humphrey Bower’s Natural Life (1998) recounts some key scenes from Marcus Clarke’s 1870–74 (serial) narrative, For the Term of his Natural Life, which details the horrors of penal colonies in Tasmania and Norfolk
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Island at the beginning of Australia’s settlement. Assuming its audience is familiar with the story of the wrongly convicted and transported Rufus Dawes, the play abandons the romantic qualities of the novel, staging only its convict punishment, and, more importantly, the ways in which the landscape associated with prisons adopts nightmarish associations. Natural Life recalls the isolation of the prison, the bush wilderness, and the islands on which it is set, staging the ways in which these locations have contributed to the construction of the Australian nation. Natural Life explores not just convictism but also its legacy and the traces of other aspects of colonialism that are often overlooked. In a display of the effects of Freud’s uncanny, Bower’s play presents images of a blighted landscape through 1936 film footage of the last-known thylacine (the now extinct ‘Tasmanian tiger’), slides recalling the environmentally disastrous importation of rabbits, images of cannibalism among escaped convicts, and the haunting of ghosts. Such images are juxtaposed with the ostensibly civilizing influence of cricket, designed to regulate a haunted landscape and its peoples. These disturbing images serve as backdrop to Dawes’s inhuman trials, ensuring that the production takes place beyond the immediate narrative of entrapment suffered by the convict, Dawes, and by the commandant’s daughter, Dora. In the 1998 Adelaide Festival and Playbox co-production, Dora was played by an Aboriginal performer, Urshula Yovich, a casting decision that reinforced the intersection between white convicts and settler on the one hand, and the equally inhuman treatment of Aboriginal people on the other. Natural Life stages an unnatural history of nightmares: moments from the past that are typically overlooked literally pop up repeatedly and suddenly through trap doors in the stage. This landscape appears to rebel against the history that has taken place on/in it. In other words, the stage space is not stable, its past returning frequently to haunt the characters and the audience. By placing numerous types of absence in relation to one another, the play maps a cultural landscape that contests the official one; its horrific representational space performs an unsettling settlement history for audiences to acknowledge. A more recent examination of the nightmarish features of Australian landscape and history is Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day which is set in the ‘white frontier [in] the mid-nineteenth century’ (2001: vi). The play redresses the typical absence of women in historically focused bush landscape plays. The landscape appears to be alive, threatening Nora who says, ‘Endless fucking plain. Soon a thousand flowers will bloom. It’s a bastard to trick us like that. To make us forget what easy death lies out
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there’ (Bovell, 2001: 12). Holy Day portrays the genesis of contemporary anxieties by merging the exploits of settlers who failed to understand the country with the plight of Aboriginal people who, removed from their own country to other places, were also unable to negotiate the literally unfamiliar landscape, but who suffer differently because they do recognize in it the spiritual points of other people. Like Natural Life, Holy Day stages a landscape in which the anxiety of the Freudian uncanny continues to leave traces. Both catalogue the many nightmares of settlement history, leaving the audience with the implications of such actions in the present. Adrienne Chisholm’s design for the Sydney Theatre Company staged two revolving platforms (see Figure 2) which created, with the help of lighting, a set ‘full of revolving secret spaces that are fleetingly revealed, as if we were ourselves lost and frightened in the bush’ (McCallum, 2003). For Alanna Maclean, this set held ‘a menacing sense’ of the fears that remain in the Australian psyche regarding the bush, fears made more apparent by the relative emptiness of the set: ‘[t]here’s a sense that this play may sit on the frontier but that frontier is still with us’ (2003).
Figure 2 The impressionistic ‘bush’ set for Holy Day in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Andrew Bovell’s play, directed by Ariette Taylor, designed by Adrienne Chisholm, 2003. Photo: Tracey Schramm. By permission of Sydney Theatre Company
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At the core of the play is a classic Australian example of anxietyproducing absence, the disappearance of the daughter of the missionary couple, thought to have been kidnapped by Aboriginal people. While a suspect is found, the child is not, and it appears at first that the landscape has swallowed her. Finally, it becomes apparent that the child has been killed by her mother, but numerous deaths nevertheless ensue, including the Aboriginal woman who has been imprisoned for the kidnapping, and many Aboriginal people who are massacred in apparent retaliation: for the kidnapping, collusion in kidnapping, or attempting to maintain control of their land. The complicity of the white characters in these murderous assaults is clear, as are the connections to the present. As Obedience, an Aboriginal girl kidnapped from her mother by Nora who has raised her, provocatively says, ‘This is our history’ (Bovell, 2001: 64). While the lost white child appears to be the focus of the narrative, Nora’s stealing of Obedience from her mother links the nineteenth-century cultural landscape with the twentieth-century stolen generations (removing indigenous children from their families).16 Holy Day focuses on various types of otherness, including Epstein the Jew, Goundry who is sexually abusing the young boy he travels with, and several Aboriginal women who are displaced from their people. The play’s landscape remains out of range from the ‘civilized’ people who are, in a reverse construction, absent from Holy Day. Epstein reasons, ‘Some of us are more foreign than others. And the blacks are the most foreign of all’ (Bovell: 30). Even when they are present, Aboriginal people are effectively rendered foreign in their own land or even absented altogether, to the extent that the voices of the two Aboriginal women are all but removed from the historical record. In spite of Obedience’s claim that she is witnessing history, that history fails to be officially – or even unofficially – recorded. The white squatter, Wakefield, does write an account of life in this ‘white’ frontier for his descendents (the audience?), but he tears out many of the pages in an effort to hide the reality of the massacre. Holy Day’s complex account of the romanticization of history and the bush attempts to show coexistence, however awkwardly realized, although it culminates in a confronting collapse of history and contemporary Australia. In a final ‘twist’ of the revolve, the audience realizes that instead of the gulf likely anticipated between the nineteenth century and the present, the events of the narrative allegorically describes contemporary Australia quite accurately: the stolen generations; the silencing of the voices of indigenous people; and the repressing of events that cloud a positive view of history. The value in staging the
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Gelder/Jacobs uncanny is that it can reproduce the doubled space of coexistence elsewhere on stage to complicate the initial spatial relationships. Much like the doubled revolve in the STC production of Holy Day, theatre facilitates a visual interrogation of coexistence in several contexts at the same time. Holy Day elicits the absences and presences that may take ‘place’ simultaneously in a landscape already split into at least two, but it also performs a second level of doubling between the space of the historical narrative and the contemporary world outside the theatre. Here, this relationship between the historical landscape and the contemporary one demonstrates that some landscapes are more similar than they are dissimilar: Holy Day’s nineteenth-century map leaves significant traces on the cultural map of twenty-first-century Australia. The difficulties in settling and managing the landscape have given way in contemporary theatre to remembering a forgetful (‘disremembering’) nation. The metaphoric meanings of the bush landscape continue to be rethought, but the dominating influence of the bush in the early part of settlement history still exerts traces of cultural anxieties that are apparent today. Contemporary staging of the bush landscape establishes Lefebvre’s oppositional representational space in an almost ironic manner: they attempt to face the anxiety that is revealed by the absences they track. Plays like Natural Life and Holy Day explore the anxieties that characterize the nation by unearthing those commodities that have been absented. While the historical significance of the bush continues to generate anxiety in cultural representation, other locations also figure prominently on contemporary Australian stages. Naming locations into existence If the bush is no longer as relevant demographically, and the beach is only of limited liminal significance, it remains to address urban centres. Managing the discursive space of mapped locations is a different project from controlling the landscape, but it remains critical to contemporary cultural and spatial management. Perhaps the most noteworthy staging of the city in early contemporary Australian theatre is Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955). The Doll takes two itinerant sugarcane cutters out of their northern Queensland comfort zone and locates them in a Melbourne suburb in the 1950s, where they have spent their off-season (‘the lay-off’) for the past 17 years: bush ways rub shoulders with city values. Yet at The Doll’s catastrophic conclusion, the city seems as far away from the bush as possible. Rather than describing The Doll as the beginning of contemporary theatre in Australia (as the play is usually declared), John McCallum interprets the play as rethinking landscape
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and place on stage and in the national psyche: it is ‘a romantic elegy for the death of the bush legend, against which it is the city, not the bush, which appears truly inadequate [ and] the triumph of the city is a spiritually hollow one’ (1983: 37). The Doll also marks a major demographic shift from the bush to cities, a reality that comes to be reflected in theatrical narratives. Yet while the cities and towns had long been established in municipal terms, they needed to be mapped in contemporary cultural representation, and, in particular, on stage to reflect demographic shifts. After The Doll, plays struggle with the ‘hollowness’ of urban depictions, among other issues of settlement. Whereas the vastness of the bush is often deliberately ill-defined on a map, cities are readily locatable in terms of geographical coordinates, but their location on the stage is less precise. The contemporary Australian theatre renaissance that followed Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was based substantially in and on the cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Peter Fitzpatrick discusses the significance of an ‘iconography of place’ (1995: 203) in Australian theatre, singling out David Williamson’s play, Emerald City as a prime example at one end of the urban spectrum. In this 1987 play, Colin and Kate move from Melbourne to Sydney, its nickname taken from the Hollywood movie, The Wizard of Oz. Emerald City depicts Sydney as the glitzy seat of economic and political power. Sydney’s harbour, the requisite harbour view, and the often-superficial behaviour that corresponds to it are almost more important than the characters themselves, factors that contrast Sydney with its rival, Melbourne.17 Productions of Emerald City capitalize on the harbour and slick, reflective surfaces (whether water, glass, marble, or other layers), creating in it a setting that is, like the bush setting before it, larger than life, a caricature of Sydney.18 At the other end of the spectrum, representational space within urban areas also receives theatrical attention: detailed investigations of the ambivalent space of cities were popular in the 1990s, particularly with plays that deployed gritty urban realism, including Daniel Keene’s Low (1991), Who’s Afraid of the Working Class by Andrew Bovell Patricia Cornelius Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas (1998), and Michael Gurr’s Crazy Brave (2000). Signifiers of (somewhat generic) public urban space have been mobilized to contrast cartographically identified places. While Who’s Afraid and Crazy Brave both refer to specific Melbourne politicians and locations, their stage space is, like that of Low, the world of convenience stores and dim lighting that could characterize the underbelly of any urban centre. The La Boite production of Low (1994) concentrated on staging a shadowy world of alleys, gutters, and dimly lit
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concrete. All three plays contrast such locations to the unstaged public signifiers of ‘city’: the tourist destinations, office blocks, and recognizable government buildings are conspicuously ‘present’ in their absence. No longer does the urban location counter the distant bush landscape in cultural representation. Between these poles, the larger cities have been generally less wellevoked in terms of theatrical spatiality. In fact, urban locations outside the major centres are better mapped in Australian theatre, as part of cultural identity formation in the 1970s and 1980s. From the 1970s, attempts to establish the place of small towns and regional locations on the Australian stage contributed to differing interpretations of the ‘local’. To take just one example, Katherine Thomson’s Diving for Pearls (1991) stages economic depression in the industrial city of Wollongong. About a couple who try to improve their skill base because the steel industry which currently employs them is not viable, the play contrasts the ocean-side beauty of Wollongong with an industrial set. The ocean views that Wollongong boasts do not figure here, however: as Ken Healy writes of the Belvoir Street production, ‘[t]his is a Wollongong play set in a drab bunker of dark grey space with heaps of anthracite coal piled in corners’ (1991). The site of the State Engineering Works which occupies the set is to be replaced by an upmarket resort, but the coal dust which continues to blow on the actors suggests that the characters will be found unsuitable for jobs in hospitality: they struggle to escape from the limitations of the steel plant that identifies Wollongong, even once it is closed. Like countless examples of the ‘local’, Diving for Pearls explores the social particularities of local Australian landscapes, in the context of – and in contrast to – better-known, national cultural significations. Cultural landscape requires, of course, more complex consideration than just cartographic coordinates, as Tes Lyssiotis’s Forty Lounge Cafe (1990) illustrates. The staging of the ‘local’ also needs to be able to incorporate somewhat abstracted cultural space as well. This final play complicates its identifiable location by matching it with equally significant locations abroad: Forty Lounge Cafe is set in Horsham, a town in country Victoria, but many of its scenes take place in Greece, where the main character was born and lived her childhood. Eleftheria Tavlidis’s first name means freedom, but she initially finds herself trapped by two cultures: she effectively establishes a cultural landscape so that two significantly different geographical locations form the intricately defined place in which she lives. The uneasy coexistence between the two is partly the point of the play, its anxiety particularly acute for Eleftheria’s daughter who has much less interest in her Greek heritage.
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In this context, cultural landscape takes on other elements beyond the strictly spatial, including a combination of the use of Greek and English languages. The play begins and ends with an evocation of Greek patriotism, a poem called ‘The Flag’, which shapes an Australia that is not just defined by Anglo-Australians. Set in a Horsham sandwich shop, the play’s structuring device is the glory box or hope chest that means so much to Eleftheria, who was sent to an orphanage in Greece and eventually sent further, to Australia to marry a man she had not met. In an unromanticized performance of both Greece and Australia, Forty Lounge Cafe layers the past with the present, and pieces together Eleftheria’s memories slowly and gradually as they traverse through two countries. As scenes are played and replayed around the glory box, they overlap to accrue meaning, the crossing of borders from one ‘world’ to another happening effortlessly, even though traces remain of each ‘location’. There is no ‘Greek’ location or ‘Australian’ stage space, precisely because the play points to the numerous ways in which the sometimes-awkward intersection of the two cultural locations takes place. The deliberate ‘mismatching’ of space and/or time and/or history that is characteristic of Forty Lounge Cafe not only enhances Australia’s cultural landscape; it also constructs representational space that resists a disremembered history that takes little account of the many cultures that constitute contemporary Australia. The practical realities of settling in Australia no longer entail the physical labour experienced by the characters in, say, Holy Day. But to ‘settle’ in Australia one must also merge with the ‘other’ (cultural) landscapes in which one may reside. The spatial anxieties of this negotiation cope with the remnants of a larger-than-life landscape as well as the shifting nature of Australian cultural identity. Howitt suggests that an ‘exploration of new spatial metaphors needs to displace the naïve spatial certainties suggested by the notions of frontiers and boundaries that have so dominated the geographical imaginaries of many Australians’ (2001: 242), but the uncertainties of Australian spatiality dominate on the stage. Traces of disremembered history, dispossession, and dealing with the complexities of the landscape continue to structure Australian theatre. It stages various responses to the anxiety which suffuses Australian cultural identity. I narrow the scope of analysis in the next three chapters to the three topoi that cross the historical place of landscape in Australian theatre: monuments, contamination, and the borders of identity.
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2
Monuments are microcosmic summations of entire cultures. (North, 1985: 30) The monumentality of the places we create is an attempt to arrest the ground, to prevent it slipping away from under our feet. We build in order to stabilize the ground, to provide ourselves with a secure place where we can stand and watch. (Carter, 1996: 2)
Whereas Chapter 1 surveyed spatiality’s role in the formation of Australian (theatre) culture, Chapter 2 addresses a specific, microcosmic marker in the cultural landscape: the monument. A complex locus of memory, power, and identity, the monument is a semi-permanent, symbolic site that resonates with history, even if it is not unanimously appreciated or if its function changes over time. The monument stands in for landscape, a Lefebvrian representation of space reinforcing a dominant ideology. Like theatre, it is metonymic of a cultural landscape that is much larger than any individual statue or plaque. Monuments on stage carry more significance than most stage properties because they also perform location (mediated by time).1 The staging of a recognizable monument can, at the very least, quickly locate for the audience the geographical coordinates, but also the particularity of a political or historical significance associated with place. Monuments are generally physical, concrete objects, but they can also be abstract concepts (Lefebvre, 1991: 223–4), and even plays can take on the qualities of a monument.2 Monuments are a particularly attractive staging device for a study of unsettled space: they stand in for geographic specificity and metonymically symbolize land and landscape. In their 43
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capacity as stage props, they also ‘motivate the stage action’ (Sofer, 2003: 23). Finally, monuments encapsulate complicated (and even contradictory) constructions of memory, culture and history. In other words, while monuments suggest and reinforce a plenitude of cultural signification, they frequently identify a substantial cultural absence. They may be designed to reduce the anxiety associated with Australian space and place by commemorating an official national history, but many monuments, especially those that appear on stage, serve a different function: marking the traces of spatial anxiety in the landscape of ‘settlement’. The chapter’s first section addresses the role of monuments in ‘war plays’. The second recalls the larger scale official, performative ‘monument’ of Australia’s bicentenary in 1988. Settler monuments inevitably differ from those of Aboriginal culture, so the subsequent section explores the distinctiveness of Aboriginal memorialization. The final section analyses Janis Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy, which challenges the function of monuments in its staging of history, space and place. Monuments on stage frequently contribute to a performance of Lefebvrian representational space even though the concept of the monument is usually more closely allied with official (Lefebvrian) representations of space.3 As Carter explains in the epigraph above, monuments are designed to fix landscape to the ground, but the staging of Australian monuments recalls the anxiety of unsettlement, an anxiety that is associated with the spatial factors outlined in Chapter 1. Before I investigate the function of monuments in the Australian cultural landscape and in theatre, I address the function of monuments themselves.
Constructing monuments [T]he most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument. (Robert Musil, quoted in Lingwood, 1995: 11) While Musil’s observation may be true in public life, it is seldom so in the theatre, where the staging of a monument focuses metonymic attention on it. If monuments in ‘real’ space are often rendered invisible, monuments in theatre are (likely) immediately noticed, since all items on stage come to have a semiotic meaning at least within the context of the performance. Nevertheless, in the wider cultural sphere, the power of these ostensibly ‘invisible’ objects to communicate lies precisely in their appearance as part of the (cultural) landscape or, in Lefebvre’s terms, representations of space. Monuments – even abstract ones – are
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located in a place and landscape; they are designed to help define and historicize that place, at least officially. Their ‘invisibility’ only enhances their role as a repository of culture. Once a monument has been fixed into place, it becomes absorbed into the nation’s imaginary, but it also literally marks the landscape in a way that, despite Musil’s claim, is generally not methektic. Monuments symbolize a settlement, war, or crisis, recording how history has remembered and valued certain aspects of the land and the past while selectively forgetting others. Monuments memorialize something or someone – most often war dead – to fix time in space. World War I introduced the standard war memorial that marked – even named – the contribution of each soldier who failed to return home, although the Boer War is responsible for the widespread monumentalizing of a general group of war dead (Mosse, 1990: 99). The personalizing of the monument by listing the names of the World War I dead shaped the construction of Australian memorials for the next 50 years. Monuments do vary from culture to culture: in Australia, the bravery of the ANZAC diggers is recognized, whereas American monuments tend to commemorate freedom.4 Germany focuses on the Holocaust and its victims, while Italy celebrates the nations that contributed to its liberation.5 Australia has erected more war memorials than any other country (over 4000), possibly because most of the wars (and the dead) were so far away (Inglis, 1998: 485).6 It is also conceivable that Australia’s numerous war monuments signal a dread not about wars on foreign soil, but those fought on local soil: the landscape has absorbed indigenous blood but white settlers deflect the memory of that knowledge by claiming back the position of sacrifice and memorializing themselves.7 As such, monuments produce echoes of Freud’s uncanny, even when they act as Lefebvrian representations of space, for they illustrate how selective monumentalizing is, and how that selection process takes place. Monuments function as surrogation, wherein a cultural void is replaced or covered by a ‘substitute [which] either cannot fulfil expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus’ (Roach, 1996: 2). In the case of monuments, surrogation can substitute for a profound absence. Lauren Berlant discusses the ‘pilgrimage’ Americans make to monuments in Washington, DC, to ‘play at being American’ (1996: 495), noting that ‘the social contract that makes Puritan and American society intelligible requires persons to relinquish personal memory for collective identity. That collective identity is equivalent to collective amnesia: patriotism is constituted by the desire to overcome political and historical memory’ (1991: 199). The patriotic gravity of the US monument seems to remove any agency from what the visitor to the monument
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performs: the role is set, the costumes ‘traditional’. As room to manoeuvre in the role disappears, so does the opportunity for analysing what the monument symbolizes. Monuments, then, can cease to stand in for articulation and memory, and come to stand in their way or in place of them. The convenience of a stated, national memory prevents the need to remember what else may be repressed by the monument. While personal evocations of the loss of loved ones to war may vary, monuments as a cultural sign try to standardize and formalize loss as national. They may carry geographical associations with their location, or they may be more abstractly connected to political, cultural, and historical events. Like any cultural expression, monuments can vary in size, texture, or composition. They can communicate through scale, integration with the landscape, design, emotional resonance that they signify, and even, at times, sheer ordinariness. Both monuments and theatre can reveal the Freudian uncanny, the repressed alterity generating an anxiety that may be surprising and confronting. Although monuments occupy physical space, they can be metaphorically shifted from their plinths, whether through forgetting, decay, or deliberate attempts to change their signification: for instance, war memorials to ‘old’ wars take their place in a culture’s background (providing a place to sit, or even dismantled) when they are replaced by new wars or leaders. If, as Carter notes above, monuments attempt to stabilize the ground underneath our feet to secure our position(s) literally and metaphorically, a methektic interpretation of landscape would argue the need to rethink monuments rather than redoubling efforts to fix them to the ground. The historicization of the relatively uniform national ideology which monuments stand in for can illustrate traces of the repression associated with Freud’s uncanny, as well as a doubled way to interpret the monument and the land on which it rests. This chapter addresses the anxieties with which monuments of settlement resonate to consider how history and spatiality might be remembered in a way that unravels – rather than suppresses – absence. In demonstrating the multi-layered spaces of history in Australia, the theatrical performance of monuments has the capacity to channel absence into a productive format. It is at such moments when ‘absence’ becomes the overriding ‘presence’, that the potential in the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny can be enacted. Some enactments of productive coexistence also elicit a methektic relationship with landscape. Reconceptualizing contemporary monuments through the counter-monument is one such method by which the interrogation of absence takes place.
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The countermonument accomplishes what all monuments must: it reflects back to the people – and thus codifies – their own memorial projections and preoccupations. (Young, 1993: 36) Monuments – whether explorers’ cairns, notches in trees, or ANZAC statues – have marked the land of Australia symbolically as settlers aimed to own and tame the ‘new’ landscape. While monuments signify settlement, a nation that celebrates the exploits of the nineteenthcentury outlaw bushranger, Ned Kelly, should appreciate the countermonument as a means of facilitating a dialogic interpretation of history. The counter-monument ‘aim[s] not to console but to provoke, not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification’ (Young, 1993: 30). The counter-monument – a term coined by the German conceptual artists, Jochen and Esther Gerz – may be designed to literally disappear or at least to challenge the conventional and ceremonial ‘king-on-horse’ depictions of history.8 The counter-monument functions to ‘reanimate amnesiac sites’ (Young, 1997: 869). If monuments are the keepers of national fictions, countermonuments help manage history’s excess. While the anxiety that monuments produce evokes some sort of absence, counter-monuments play more overtly with that absence. Counter-monuments reveal the absences that monuments tend to hide in their rhetoric of patriotism and historic pride. They operate methektically since most are designed to disappear or to be dismantled, thus marking the landscape lightly and impermanently. The work of the contemporary British sculptor Rachel Whiteread exemplifies the counter-monument. Typically, she explores the space in and around an object, rather than the object itself. For House, she filled a soon-to-be demolished house with concrete and removed the walls, leaving only the concrete shape of a house – or the space that the house enclosed – before it too was demolished. House articulated ‘the solid shape of an intangible absence – of a gap in a nation’s identity, and a hollow at a city’s heart’ (Storrs quoted in Young, 1997: 869). Untitled Monument (also known as Plinth, on display on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2001) is a large resin cast of the platform for a statue, mounted, in reverse image, above a traditional granite plinth (Figure 3).9 Some of Whiteread’s sculpture is designed
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to disappear, marking the ground for only a short time in what can be seen as a methektic act that works with the landscape and facilitates a rethinking of spatial relations. She empties meaning from a landscape or place, encouraging observers to replace it with different, more relevant meanings that force them to view the landscape differently. Her work resonates with the methektic counter-monuments that I discuss in Australian theatre: like a Whiteread sculpture, the literal, metaphoric, and even imaginary ‘space’ around the staged monuments becomes as important – if not more so – than the object itself.
Figure 3 Whiteread’s 2001 Untitled Monument creates a counter-monument that focuses attention on spatiality itself. Reprinted with the permission of Rachel Whiteread and the Cass Sculpture Foundation: www.sculpture.org.uk
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The counter-monument is a useful analogy for theatre, particularly those plays that interrogate history and the commemorative marking of space and place. While concrete or bronze statues do figure in this chapter’s analysis, I follow Whiteread’s lead to discuss constructions that physicalize the metaphoric and literal presences and absences that comprise the cultural landscape. In some plays, this examination of monuments results in the production of the anxious coexistence of Gelder/Jacobs’s uncanny spaces. In others, counter-monuments provide a model for methektically redefining space, time and history. In still others, the main counter-monument is theatre itself: after all, at one level all theatre is counter-monumental, for when the set is struck, the impermanent marking of the cultural landscape is replaced by another. Neither counter-monuments nor theatre mark the landscape forever, but theatre’s alternative worlds can generate a different type of uncanny/methektic relationship when contrasted with the ‘real’ world outside the theatre. Even when the narrative does not itself explicitly support a rethinking of landscape, the counter-monumental potential of theatre can create a significant effect in the (cultural) landscape. That effect may disrupt traditional representations of space or it may generate a specifically oppositional representational space that can intervene in the production of social space. I turn to two plays that address war, the pretext upon which most monuments are erected: in these plays, the performance of memory and spatiality suggests a history of settlement that differs from the standard Australian historical record. War monuments No one really wants to be reminded of the war any more. (Peter in The Golden Age, Nowra, 1989: 71) The locals are only interested in talking about their victorious war. They have forgotten that behind the medals of the War Hero lie countless sufferings. (An in Meat Party, Le Quy, 2000: 12) Contrary to Peter’s assertions in Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age (1985), reminders of war mark Australia’s cultural landscape, the ANZAC statue is a familiar sight in almost every town. A well-known staging of the ANZAC myth is Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1960). Seymour’s play illustrates the divergent ways in which successive generations address memories and responsibility; however, I focus on The
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Golden Age and Duong Le Quy’s Meat Party (2000), plays that remind amnesiac audiences of the place of war in the Australian imaginary beyond the conventional national mode. These two plays critically engage with monuments of war to outline how ‘absence’ might be spatialized. War is seldom methektic: it involves laying waste to a landscape rather than understanding its drift lanes. While they may not perform methexis, the plays reconceive the literal and metaphoric space of landscape and history by engaging with the anxieties of the Freudian and the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny that monuments elicit. In order to engage in a greater historicization of war, The Golden Age and Meat Party explore the space that lies behind official versions of war. They address the absences and alterity that the conventional role of monuments as cultural repository cannot address. They act as counter-monuments, investigating the cultural landscape and resisting traditional representations of space. The Golden Age explores suppressed loss associated with World War II by equating it with anxieties of other wars and events in Australia, and by comparing a variety of different monuments to war.10 It explores what (or, in this case, who) is buried under the spatial and symbolic ‘sign’ of monument. While the play begins in Tasmania and calls attention to the backdrop of convict settlement, the monuments to war move much further back in time, as characters perform Iphegenia in Tauris about Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his own daughter for the sake of victory in war. The Golden Age is framed by members of the Archer family re-enacting Euripides’ play in a crumbling Greek temple that was built to invoke past civilizations. The temple replica is an attempt to bring classical civilizations to Tasmania, a rejection of methektic interaction with the landscape there. An additional crumbling civilization is linked to both Australian history and Greek civilization: Germany’s destruction, signified by the ruin of centuries-old monuments in Berlin during World War II. A statue of Frederick the Great appears, on its side with bullet holes in its head (Nowra, 1989: 63). The state of this monument metonymizes the loss of people, culture, and the past, in Germany and beyond. The various monuments (whether actual, like the German statue, or less concrete, like Euripides’ play) accrue symbolic function: a classic German monument, an ancient temple, and Greek tragedy are juxtaposed on stage. For some Australian characters, these monuments represent the epitome of civilization, yet they are staged as already inadequate, damaged, inappropriate for Australia. Two young men bushwalking in a remote corner of Tasmania uncover a family that has developed its own language and culture as
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a consequence of its exile from the rest of the state/world. They live in a dense landscape that all but hides their presence. Their monuments to the dead are a methektic blend of local flowers and fools’ gold (iron pyrites), but these monuments are being assembled too frequently: recognizing that her family is at risk of dying out, the matriarch, Ayre, permits Francis and Peter to bring them back to Hobart’s ‘civilization’. Peter’s father, William Archer, establishes that the family’s origins date to the Tasmanian gold rush, approximately one hundred years earlier: One group moved much further into the South West looking for gold than anyone else. Most of them were ex-convicts, escaped convicts, failed colonists, general scum even a travelling actor tired of doing bad shows for stupid colonists . So what we have before us is the true Australian culture. (Nowra, 1989: 36) This family is an Australian version of the past, countermonumentalizing the assumed historical record. While the family has a function in the action of the play, they also perform as an antimonument to Australian history in the way their presence – almost invisible in the landscape – challenges established accounts of the past. Against this backdrop Australia is at war. Yet instead of appealing to patriotism, the play’s major achievement is in its startling connection of events in World War II with Australia’s own history, notably the genocide of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people. The play adds to the inadequacy of European or ancient models by focusing on absence in the historical record of accounts of wars in Australia. Absence in this play is realized on stage more palpably than in many plays, as the forgotten history of colonial Australia returns in bodily and spatial form. In other words, deliberately obscured behind the monument of Australian history are actual humans whose existence (even in history) threatens to destabilize conventional monuments here too. The family confounds most who meet them. For Peter’s mother, Elizabeth, they are ‘[g]hosts from the nether world of an Australian childhood. [T]hey are a poor contaminated people’ (Nowra, 1989: 42–3). To her, this family that renders the past present would be better forgotten, a strategic repression of history that her family has practised for generations. The brief celebration of this family is halted by the wartime discourse of eugenics which provides a(nother) convenient excuse for ‘disremembering’ them. The family reveals more than the rest of the nation can bear, their existence too confronting for citizens who have come to believe in the surrogation of conventional monuments.
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Deemed to represent a shameful, inferior past, the existence of which would support Hitler’s eugenics policy, the family is removed from ‘civilization’ once more: they are locked away in an asylum for the duration of the war in an act that becomes itself genocidal. All but one die during this time, and the final member, Betsheb, is virtually incapacitated. The experiences of incarceration (whether in missions, reserves, or in an asylum) and deaths in custody compare the family with the destruction of Aboriginal cultures in the aggressive act of settling Tasmania. At the play’s end, Francis recalls his time in Berlin, declaring that ‘[w]e obliterated a group of people, not through deliberate cruelty, but through plain stupidity and indifference’ (Nowra, 1989: 75). Francis’s words refer to his anxiety about his participation in the conventional war, but they also apply to the once-outcast family who, symbolic of Aboriginal genocide, must be obliterated from history again. The Golden Age makes present this usually repressed dimension of Australian history, locating the family in a distinctive place in western Tasmania to which at least Betsheb can return at the end of the play. When Peter and Francis first met her, she exhibited a telepathic connection with her landscape. It is uncertain whether or not she will be able to recapture this methektic relationship once she returns. It is clear that outside the family, only the audience is aware of the existence of this fleeting glimpse of an engagement with landscape that is not based on the construction of mimetic (and inadequate) monuments. Betsheb’s homecoming is a form of limited representational space, given the uncertainty of her sanity following incarceration. The cultural amnesia played out is all the more powerful for occurring in Tasmania, where Aboriginal people were once thought to have ‘died out’.11 The opportunity to investigate what surrogation in Tasmanian history conceals (and compared, on another level, with monumental monuments from other civilizations) provides a chance to witness a brief performance of the Gelder and Jacobs version of the uncanny: Betsheb and her family are material presences of a different history coexisting with Elizabeth’s model, even if Elizabeth would rather that they were repressed. The conventional monuments to war and to Australian settlement are overturned, a replacement in the form of Ayre’s family marking the past and performing ‘absence’. The Golden Age counters the emerging nation’s attempts to construct a tidy, grand, and heroic Australian settlement by commemorating unsettling aspects of Australian history, between the shadows of World War II memorializing and the conventional Australian historical record. Inevitably, the performance of various moments in European and Australian history encourages audiences to consider
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how (poorly) the contemporary record tallies with matters of ‘heroic settlement’. Duong Le Quy’s Meat Party (2000) also examines heroism and tidy narratives associated with a more recent war. Meat Party takes place in Vietnam today, but responds to the effects of Australia’s participation in what the Vietnamese call the ‘American’ War.12 The Vietnam War is easy to forget in Australia: the amnesia associated with it attempted to erase (discursively) the nation’s participation, national protests against Australia’s presence in the war, the eventual withdrawing of troops, and the West’s failure to achieve its goals there. Meat Party recontextualizes the Vietnam War and its effects on both sides beyond the official mythologies and memories. The play is set in the White Sand Desert in Vietnam, where the war cannot be overlooked. The site is an old battleground marked only by a burned tank, a tree on which is posted a sign warning of landmines, barbed wire fences, and seemingly endless sand dunes which featured in Playbox’s production. Mary travels there to find the resting place of her father, who was killed in action. The tank, the ‘Castle of the Dead Souls’ (Le Quy, 2000: 1), is home to the elderly crone, who preserves the old human bones she pulls out of the dunes. Mary eventually discovers that her father’s remains have been buried under the tree, together with the remains of Mai, a young Vietnamese woman who was killed with him. The tree was planted to mark their graves, and as such, it is a more organic marker than any official cairn. In fact it is the only thing that appears to be alive (Le Quy, 2000: 2) in a landscape that still smells of death (Le Quy, 2000: 1), and where the sounds of war can, strangely, sometimes still be heard. In this landscape, the tree acts as a simple counter-monument that stands in for a sanctioned monument. Mary is grateful that she is able to find the tree that marks her father’s remains, but while she is in the desert, other unconventional reminders of the war emerge, and these appearances further disturb the amnesia associated with the war. Meat Party commemorates an end of heroism, but not the end of personal losses, some of which are still raw, decades later. The loss of life and the futility of violence that took place in the White Sand Desert are dramatized by the ghostly characters who fill the stage at various intervals. Like The Golden Age, the most profound counter-monumental response to conventional monuments is one that has bodily form, performing an active distinction from a passive acceptance of history. The souls of Mary’s father, Mai, and other fighters become palpably present, even to Mary, as they threaten to take over the stage space. Bones come to life as the spirits of dead soldiers – from
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both sides – make their presences felt. All these fighters are the same in death except, as the crone comments, whether their bones are long (belonging to an American or Australian) or short (Vietnamese). An, a former soldier, explains that ‘in war every soldier is the same. A gun, a country and an interrupted dream’ (Le Quy, 2000: 26). This spirit memorial is the most effective monument that Meat Party constructs: its transitory location on stage is clearly counter-monumental, but its effects in the psyche are much longer lasting. The representational space of the spirit world comes to be realized, effectively altering the parameters of the ‘real’ world. The presence of the souls on stage embeds in the landscape a different type of monument that celebrates humanity rather than any type of victory. In Meat Party, the equality of all who have died and their descendents’ shared loss is made manifest; as former soldier and decorated war hero, Lam, comments, ‘Everyone at a meat party will get scraps stuck in their teeth. It’s inevitable’ (Le Quy, 2000: 18). The absence of those people who were lost in the war remains, but as their ghostly forms occupy some physical semblance of space, they shift memory space from the realm of the public hero to the realm of numerous individual memories. The ghosts dislocate memory from public monuments to the individual memories of the audience. The collection of physicalized memories made present from both sides of battle qualifies official accounts of war, and, combined with Mary’s presence, forces an interaction between the generation who fought in the war and those who came later. The younger generation of Vietnamese did not question the past, but Mary’s arrival permits some open dialogue. The results are catastrophic: with the exception of the crone, all members of the old generation die, some suiciding in the minefields, their views of war and betrayal turned upside down. Not only does heroism no longer appear to matter, the basis on which it was decided is undermined when Lam’s valour is found to be based on a lie. The deaths of the final members of the older generation release the literal hold that war history has had in the landscape: the final landmines are exploded and the last departing soul announces, ‘Let the children free to fly kites, to play and to sing on the dunes of this White Sand Desert!’ (Le Quy, 2000: 44). The desert alters from an extremely dangerous place to a location that heralds the potential for a more productive future. The burning on stage of hundreds of incense sticks in the sand reinforces that the dead will not be forgotten. The transience of the incense sticks, like the play itself, does, however, shift emphasis from conventional perceptions of war to alternative narratives. Meat Party suggests that monuments – whether in Vietnam
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or in Australia and whether to Vietnamese war dead or Australian – must accommodate changing interpretations of personal loss and history. In both Meat Party and The Golden Age, the space of one group, culture, and/or generation comes to be seen to belong to another at the same time. In their attempts to make absence present, the plays uncover traces of repression that have been blocked by conventional monumentalizing. In these two plays, those traces are performed bodily. The plays in the next section continue to counter the traditional model of monumentalizing by tackling the larger scale history of the nation in the 1988 Bicentenary, where the uncanny takes a more conventional, spatial form.
Australia’s Bicentenary [H]ow [could anyone] put together a program which spoke to the 200 years of white Australian history and yet which took seriously the contemporary circumstances which have rendered unequivocal nationalism problematic. The Bicentenary was not a naturally occurring event. A decision had to be made that 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet was an event worth celebrating, and then the event itself had to be invented. (Cochrane and Goodman, 1992: 176) The official celebrations to mark the bicentenary of Australia’s 1788 ‘settling’ are a revealing ‘institutional’ monument (rather than a marker of history cast in concrete or bronze). The Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) developed a 16-month-long commemoration that, after almost a decade in the planning (Thompson, 2005: 19), seemed designed to highlight aspects of national good fortune and wealth. Shaped by positive interpretations of the past and a unifying discourse for the future, the ABA’s somewhat conservative arts programme catered to every genre and strived to present a unified celebration of history. ‘For an estimated audience of 5.3 million, more than 6500 artists participated in 120 productions, exhibitions, developmental projects, publications and events’ (Sarah, 1989a: 7). Australian art forms and community events of all types were showcased, and regional centres were particularly wellserved. Other events such as a recreation of the voyage of three tall ships, video links around the country, Brisbane’s international Exposition (Expo), and numerous community events characterized the celebrations, while major works from overseas were also brought to the
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country, including Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata. The ABA sponsored performance of all types, designed to develop and foster art in Australia. In a year of unprecedented artistic offerings, some artists chose to focus on specifically Australian history and identity, while others took the opportunity to pursue wider interests. Inevitably, in a year with such a broad focus, many events were read through a hyper-nationalistic Australian identity reading frame, but Peter Sarah notes that ‘the presence of Authority funding did not, as so many initially feared, cause artists to move into the middle of the road to avoid appearing too radical’ (1989b: 6). Not all performance in Australia in 1988 was sponsored by the ABA, but the increased number of events generally augured well for art in the nation.13 It is inevitable that such a brief would be criticized. For George Shaw, the ABA overtly failed in capitalizing on the richness and diversity of Australian culture: Not knowing how to handle Australia’s convict origins, or its racism, or its working-class origins, or its socialist-utopianism, or the record of conflict between settler and Aborigine, [the ABA] ignored them. This allowed those in an anti-Bicentenary mood to fill in the gaps with anti-celebratory images. (Sarah, 1989b: 3) Yet in his analysis of the Bicentenary, Graeme Turner comments that ‘[t]he survival of contradictions, of cracks in the official discourses of nation, is the encouraging sign of other possibilities, other explanations, successfully competing for representation’ (1994: 77). Rather than critiquing the Bicentenary, I follow Turner’s lead to focus on the unsettling and uncanny spaces that emerged from the official celebrations: some such moments of unsettlement were anticipated and programmed, whereas others revealed traces of the dread of the uncanny in the form of the anxieties behind the event.14 The plays explored here tend to counter-monumentalize the anniversary of settlement. The celebrations focused on a heightened ‘presence’ of Australia, whereas most of the plays addressed numerous types of absence that had been overlooked. Michael Gow’s 1841 (1988) responds to the excesses of celebrating 1788 by attempting to explore Australian history at its most ordinary, towards the end of convict transportation. 1841 stages the beginning of a second phase of settler Australia: actual settlement in which all romanticism about early settler life is removed. The play is said by Gow to be about a year in which nothing happened (Thomas, 1989), in ironic distinction to 1788 when ‘everything’ supposedly happened.
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In addition to the illusion of an ahistorical setting, 1841 does not appear to have any connection to real places: no towns are named, no regions defined. Instead, the setting is described only in general terms as ‘on board a vessel bound for Australia; outside the town; in a large house overlooking the harbour; the theatre; a public house; in the bush’ (Gow, 1988: iii). These nondescript places point to the whole of Australia, the space and place that is supposed to be celebrated, while they also attempt to shift emphasis from such an already overly represented entity. While Gow’s ironic consideration of absence in both history and geography gives rise to a metaphysical investigation of what settlement and unsettlement might mean, the plays discussed here more fully – Sarah Cathcart and Andrea Lemon’s The Serpent’s Fall (1987), Jack Davis’s Barungin (1988), Louis Nowra’s Capricornia (1988), and Stephen Sewell’s Hate (1988) – demonstrate the uneasy relationship with literal and metaphoric Australian space and place. Naturally, I have been selective, choosing plays that address more overtly the absences lurking behind the monument of the bicentenary. Most of these plays turn to conventional history to confront a somewhat amnesiac anniversary. In doing so, some successfully stage representational space, whereas most expose what is behind representations of space, leaving to the audience the crucial role of establishing an oppositional response that may have a material effect outside the theatre. Cathcart and Lemon’s The Serpent’s Fall, performed at the 1988 Edinburgh Festival, was part of the ABA’s export package (in which Australian performance was sent overseas during 1988 to promote Australian culture internationally). This play exemplifies the ABA’s (limited) attempt to broaden the nation’s history. The Serpent’s Fall incorporates a version of history that is only briefly addressed elsewhere in 1988 theatre: the histories of women, including Aboriginal and GreekAustralian women. This monodrama tells the stories of five women: Sarah, the narrator; Bernice, an archaeologist; Sula, a Greek migrant; Kelly, an urban Aboriginal woman; and Isobel, Sarah’s retired school headmistress. By mapping their experiences on stage, The Serpent’s Fall sets up a context for rethinking official history in Australia. The women’s narratives suggest the efficacy of reading across the grain of history to discover a story that suits the searcher. That search may also entail a reading of Australian history that spills over national and temporal borders. For instance, the play uncovers evidence within archaeological and memorial debris that has already been ‘discovered’ but it points to a very different way of reading the past. It matters little that Bernice’s archaeological exploits remain undocumented in
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the annals of history, because her narrative provides the metaphor for rethinking the past. The monuments that have served as defining features of Western culture, including ancient civilizations and Christianity, are reinterpreted through images of the serpent. Staged with just a chair and a slightly curved Doric column, The Serpent’s Fall enumerates a variety of serpents: the one that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, the rainbow serpent that becomes a symbol of dislocation for an urban Aboriginal woman like Kelly, memories of the snake-infested Greek island where Sula was born, and the suppressed matriarchal cult of the goddess Ishtar that Bernice unearths in ancient Babylon. By adding the possibilities of these histories to conventional history, the play enables the women to tap into additional reserves of strength required to survive in an often-violent patriarchal world. Sula’s depiction of Australia refers as often to Greece as to her neighbourhood in Melbourne. This doubled focus on two homes is common among migrant communities in Australia.15 Sula works out a way of accommodating both geographical contexts, each of which represents a strong cultural heritage for herself and her children. The young Koori woman, Kelly, on the other hand, must negotiate a space in a world where, she explains, Aboriginal women are likely to be raped more than once in their lives. Having limited cultural support, she and other Koori women rely on their own physical strength and determination: ‘It’s the women who now have to lead the Aboriginal struggle, and they are. Because the women are strong’ (Cathcart and Lemon, 1987: 41). To reinforce this statement, she picks up the curved column, shaped like a (rainbow) serpent, and carries it off stage: it is now a counter-monument that speaks to Kelly’s intention to reshape her world safely and securely. Kelly’s world exists on top of and next to Sula’s world: the women coexist in both the same theatre space (even the same performer’s body) and the same room on the map of a historicized Australia. The Serpent’s Fall stages different cultural and personal histories, culminating in a visit to Uluru, the rock that could be seen to be a spiritual (not to mention advertising) centre of the nation, and the location of the final serpent in the play. Sarah scales Uluru, and despite the ‘steel poles’ that penetrate the rock, ‘right up the back of the serpent’, she recalls that ‘I could still feel it breathing’ (Cathcart and Lemon, 1987: 43).16 Sarah had thought the landscape dead, but she comes to see its living potential. In reading their landscapes, the women engage in a methektic interpretation of how to live in their surroundings without disturbing the serpent, and, in some cases, they benefit from what the serpent teaches them. In The Serpent’s Fall, the women find a productive answer to the ‘problem of
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place’ that prefigures Chaudhuri’s geopathology (2002: 15) by exploring geographical, historical and memory spaces. The power in polytopic layering of these places is in the women’s ability to read against and around the traditional version of history and space as the play performs Lefebvrian representational space. The women can interact and intersect – even clash – with each other’s sense of spatiality. Each reinterprets the role of the serpent counter to conventional history to expand the parameters of Australian cultural references. For the next play, Barungin, the absences around monuments are not only made present, but they also have urgent consequences. While the ABA sought a strong Aboriginal presence in the celebrations, many Aboriginal organizations instead staged ‘a year-long programme of nonparticipation and protest that proved by far and away the most significant source of opposition to the Bicentenary’ (Bennett, 1992: xviii). Reading the anniversary as ‘Invasion Day’, many Aboriginal people cited slogans such as ‘40,000 years don’t make a bicentenary’ (quoted in Bennett, 1992: xviii) to reject participation in the celebrations of an often-brutal history. Although partly funded by the ABA, Jack Davis’s counter-monumental Barungin (Smell the Wind) had been planned before the ABA programme was devised, and it embraces the issues raised by Aboriginal protestors. His first play, Kullark, was written in response to indigenous work not even being considered for the 1979 Western Australia sesquicentenary celebrations. Davis, then the country’s highest profile Aboriginal playwright, characteristically incorporated versions of Nyoongah history and white history in all his plays, outlining the numerous conflicts between them, but also reinforcing the ways in which both cultures have coexisted. Barungin stages concrete, spiritual, and metaphoric locations, blurring the edges and overlaying one with another, in the same way that it equates a variety of historical forms. Barungin is the third in a trilogy about the Wallitch family; the other two are The Dreamers (1982) and No Sugar (1985). Set in Perth, the naturalistic location of the Wallitches’s suburban life is superimposed with histories that destabilize the harmony characteristic of the 1988 celebrations. Such spatial histories layered over the top of this initial Perth setting include nearby Fremantle, in addition to the land from which one character’s didgeridoo came, and the older family members’ memories of life at the Moore River reserve to which they were removed by white officials several generations before, and the land of the ancestors. These histories are sometimes told from one family member to another, and at other times relayed through Robert’s speech to the Rotary Club
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about the atrocities committed on Aboriginal people during settlement. These various landscapes overlap throughout the play in a Gelder/Jacobs version of the uncanny, as Barungin provides an extensive array of documents and locations to read in conjunction with the accepted settler history of demarcated space. The fluid, methektic movement from one Nyoongah location to another contrasts the clash with which Nyoongah country meets settlers and settled landscapes. Davis layers the versions of history and the various types of space to which the Wallitch family can lay claim, effectively locating their stories in multiple spatial, temporal, and historical dimensions. Barungin culminates in the death in custody of one of the family, Peter. Aboriginal deaths in custody, a long-standing social and political tragedy, continued to occur while the nation celebrated its achievements. The play’s final scene, Peter’s funeral, mirrors the first scene’s funeral that honoured an elderly member of the extended family. The play focuses not only on such scandalous events that continue to take place throughout Australia, but also enacts the simple chain of events by which Peter happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, ending up dead. In addition to this staging of multiple recognizable places, Barungin performs a powerful counter-monument to Aboriginal deaths in custody when Meena reads out the names of real indigenous people who have died in custody, including the names of 11 men who died in 1987 alone. The list has a dynamic stage presence in a year which celebrated Australian achievement: as cast members place wreaths on Peter’s grave, they create a record, a monument of sorts, in the Aboriginal tradition of oral history. The dramatization of the grief associated with such loss moves beyond the devastated Wallitch family to contextualize Peter’s death among those Aboriginal people who have died in custody, across the country, documented since 1833. The Perth funeral becomes a funeral for all Aboriginal people who have died in such a way: the celebration of 1988 is thus removed from centre stage. The wealth of interpretational potential in landscape and stagescape in the first part of the play contrasts with the absences that the deaths represent. This relationship was made visual in the 1988 West Australian Theatre Company production at The Playhouse in Perth: Mardy Amos’s review explains, ‘[t]here is a backdrop of scene paintings from [Aboriginal artist from the Kimberley] Jimmy Pike and also blowups of old photographs showing Aboriginal full-bloods chained together’ (1989: 182). The powerful spatial images in Barungin do not permit the amnesia that deaths in custody and settlement frequently produce. The play
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unsettles Lefebvre’s representations of space, but it stops short of performing representational space. The repeated return of the repressed takes over in theatrical and political terms so that there is no opportunity to construct an oppositional location. The play leaves its challenge with audiences to generate such representational spaces outside the theatre. While Barungin explores Aboriginal deaths in custody as a legacy of the settlement of place, Capricornia grounds racism in place. Based on Xavier Herbert’s 1938 (sesquicentenary) novel of the same name, Capricornia is characterized by racial divisions, as the ‘half-caste’ Norman tries to find a space among and around his white and Aboriginal fellows. Somewhat constrained by the parameters of the classic novel, Nowra’s play nevertheless explores how Herbert’s examination of race and place apply to 1988 audiences. Capricornia is almost a battle of wills between two aspects of the central character, Norman and Nawnim (or ‘no-name’, his default ‘name’ when he was abandoned as a child). Norman is forced to come to terms with his Aboriginality and the differing treatment that this identity brings. The play, which stages many ways in which Aboriginal people (and others who do not identify as ‘white’) are treated, asks how the nation as a whole intends to deal with the fact that Aboriginality is not going to ‘go away’. White settlers have themselves created the ‘problem’ of the half-caste that so many characters in this narrative wish to overlook. The play hinges on the disparities generated by racial classification. Absence is played out in Capricornia through the concealment of identity that comes to be associated with Australia’s north. Not only does Norman’s father take on a different identity to escape the law, the sexual relationships between white men and Aboriginal women produce children who are disowned and whose privileges as human beings are severely curtailed. In this landscape, there is little room for performing the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny: this landscape even robs its inhabitants of identity. The anxieties of the miscegenation associated with landscape are a manifestation of the less productive Freudian uncanny. The landscape – which confuses almost all the characters, particularly the ones who have not learned how to read it – is directly connected with the social turmoil of the play’s racial relations. This land can swallow people up: ‘the land has defeated him’, Oscar Shillingsworth says of Tobias, meaning that he’s ‘gone native’ (Nowra, 1988: 36). It is equated with miscegenation, as Norman accuses his father of conceiving him in the same terms that white squatters grabbed the land they settled (Nowra, 1988: 101). These relationships with the nation’s space and place cannot be ignored since, as Bob Evans’s review outlines, the play
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‘grounds us as a people in this land and tells us our story, showing us the basis of the relationship that we Europeans have made with this country and its original inhabitants’ (1989, 240). The scale of the play’s geographical landscape, defined by a latitude rather than the limits of a city or a station, locates this relationship between settlers and Aboriginal people in a national context, as opposed to interpreting it as a regional matter that can be more easily concealed. The power of this landscape was realized in Jennie Tate’s set for the 1988 Belvoir Street production in Sydney. Although the design was trimmed back for the production’s national tour, the original set incorporated representations of both the wet and the dry seasons: the deep red earth could be lit to suggest parched conditions and could be drenched to make mud (Figure 4). The set’s capacity to transform from wet to dry, and from representational theatrical space to the presentational space of video projection on the cyclorama that backed the set, meant that at least some of the play’s landscapes would have resonated with the audience. The play’s success relies on the audience also learning to read the settlement landscape through its associated history of unsettlement.17 If the play cannot enact a Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, the set attempts to reconstruct a version of the north that permits intersections and interactions between the races. Capricornia forces a reconsideration of foundational myths for Norman Shillingsworth as well as for the audience. Herbert attempted to redress the frequently unspoken matter of the racism of 1938, which would have been known to most audiences in the 1980s and to the ABA: this production would not have been expected to be counter-monumental. Nevertheless, Nowra’s Capricornia focuses on theatrical, historic, and social space and place to force the still largely unspoken topic of race relations in Australia to be read in the context of the national celebrations: the anxiety of race relations is, at its core, an unacknowledged result of the unsettling process of settlement. Nowra investigates what lies behind the representations of space and questions whether or not anything has changed since the publication of Herbert’s novel in 1938. As in Barungin, the performance of an uncanny or methektic relationship with landscape on stage is not the play’s conclusion. Instead, the effects of a potential countermonument shift the engagement with spatiality and the other social realities off stage to a location which incorporates the audience, which is left to compare the events of the 1930s with the contemporary context outside the theatre. In the 50 years since the publication of the novel, too little has changed, and this play, like Barungin, counters the celebratory rhetoric on which the monument of the Bicentenary was built.
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Figure 4 Laurence Clifford (Norman in Louis Nowra’s Capricornia, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1988) being engulfed by ‘The Wet’. Designed by Jennie Tate. Photo: William Yang
Perhaps the most significant play in 1988 was Stephen Sewell’s counter-monumental Hate, which pushes the sobering effect of an unflinching look at Australian history even further. A family reunion play, Hate takes place during the Easter weekend at a country property that comes to stand in for Australia itself. Encapsulating the nation’s history and, to some extent, the monumental and counter-monumental efforts of the year, Hate addresses the nation’s propensity to revise the problematic moments of its history to suit its own purposes. Hate’s
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[a] specially commissioned painting showing the wonders of Ravenswood in all its nineteenth-century glory. Even the cracks in the oil are fake. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, what money and vanity will do to give themselves a history they never had? (Sewell, 1988: 4) Authenticity matters little in a world where the patriarch, John Truscott, tells his son, ‘[i]mage, Raymond, that’s all that counts and the image that people finally want is an image of themselves as a strong, independent, confident nation’ (Sewell, 1988: 65). The family runs a successful business that must now deal with the effects of a stock-market crash and tax-dodging deals. John has also just been elected Leader of the rightwing Opposition to the federal government. The play stages the process by which the family recreates itself, a goal for which John and Raymond will pursue any action necessary, regardless of its consequences, even to the family. One of the reasons that Hate is so confronting is that different types of spatiality collide at the estate. The play begins in a particular genre that appears to support the celebrations of 1988 and Australia generally, with private and public spheres uniting harmoniously. For John and Raymond, the country estate is merely an asset. By contrast, Michael and Celia, Raymond’s siblings, consider what the changes in ownership of the estate mean. Michael has discovered that ‘[t]here was a massacre here, on this spot. In 1838. A whole tribe: they hunted them down and killed them here. Everyone: men, women, children. And when they finished, they called the place “Salvation Creek”’ (Sewell, 1988: 17). The remaking of landscape, so comprehensively accomplished 50 years into white Australia’s existence, attempts to hide the existence of the original custodians as the landscape is reworked to suit the new owners. Hate performs the way in which amnesia is fostered in the process of memorializing. The monument constructed on the estate is not to the Aboriginal people but to John. In the course of the play, Michael kills John, in a sort of sacrifice to protect his sister from what Raymond and John have come to represent. This act is explained away to the public as a ‘tractor accident’ (Sewell, 1988: 103). The final scene is a memorial service one year later, in which Raymond eulogizes John as ‘a great man, a devout man; a caring father and loving husband and what I’m sure he would most like to be remembered as, was an Australian , at one with the soul of this land’ (Sewell, 1988: 104–05). A tyrannical megalomaniac is
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description of contemporary Australia is best summarized by Raymond Truscott’s mocking of his parents’ most recent purchase:
thus transformed into an Australian archetype of a pioneer committed to the development of his country. As the memorial is unveiled and the eulogy proceeds, the gap between the representation and the reality is palpable to the point that Hannie Rayson and Hilary Glow exclaim in their review, ‘In the end, it was not the blood of the patriarch but the social and political implications inherent in the eulogy which followed that sent us reeling from the theatre’ (Rayson and Glow, 1989). Raymond’s reading of ‘Australia’ resembles the stereotypical national characteristics of bush nationalism, spirit, and greatness: John seems to typify the traditional construction of what every good Australian should aspire to be. It is not just the disjunction between John the character and John the eulogized great man that is calculated to disturb audiences, but that the play stages the process by which he moves from one role to the other. Establishing John’s status as son of the land and national hero takes place as easily as the faking of an oil painting and the obscuring of an Aboriginal massacre. Hate, which shows how places like Salvation Creek get their names, demonstrates that the congratulatory memorializing of Australia’s settlement spatiality must be read ironically. James Waites’s review rationalizes, ‘We had to wait until November for someone to create a decent play for the Bicentenary – or at least a gutsy one, that looks the celebrating hordes square in the eye and challenges any presumption that a pat on the back is correctly deserved’ (1989: 331). This counter-monumental play exposes and rejects the process by which monuments claim to encompass a soothing national unity. The 1988 plays examined here resist celebrating for the sake of celebrating, preferring to examine critically the nation’s myth and history. They look behind monuments and construct counter-monuments based more on diversity than a self-congratulatory unity favoured by ABA rhetoric. In recalling the origins of Australia as a settler nation and, at least metaphorically, imagining what it might become, the plays broaden the possibilities for reading space and place in Australia. If the anxiety of unsettlement circulates in Australian national celebrations, it will be no surprise that a discussion of Aboriginal monuments is underpinned by similar anxieties.
Aboriginal monuments [C]onquerors and revolutionaries eager to destroy a society so often have sought to do so by burning or razing that society’s monuments. (Lefebvre, 1991: 221)
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Narrative, it has been said, is the most fundamental mnemonic act: we mainly remember the past by telling stories. But to remember the past is also to reform the present or to change the future. By recounting histories of colonialism, indigenous peoples have not only created an understanding but also a critique of it, and in constructing stories of freedom they have been able to challenge their oppression. (Attwood and Magowan, 2001: xii) Given that memorials valorize particular versions of history over others, memorializing in Aboriginal cultures inevitably differs from the construction of monuments in settler cultures and stands in for a different order of anxiety. Aboriginal markings of the landscape are, as Carter explains, methektic, not necessarily resembling the mimetic form of a statue that enacts memory. The marking of landscape is, for most Aboriginal cultures, compromised by a lack of access to land that has been appropriated for exclusive use by settlers. Indeed, many monuments are erected to commemorate settlers who dispossessed Aboriginal people. In Davis’s Barungin, Robert notes the irony in Australian memorializing: ‘[e]very town – every little one-horse country town in Australia – has a war memorial. [But] The names of the streets rivers and towns celebrate our murderers’ (1989: 55). The memorials of white Australia, by design, render absent indigenous presence in the land. While they may not be remembered in the context of such monuments, Aboriginal people and Aboriginal presences do not disappear: many Aboriginal monuments take a different, refracted form that remains closely associated with spatiality, even if that spatiality competes with Western perceptions of spatiality.18 A performance of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny is an explicit starting point in indigenous theatre: the landscape is layered with signification well beyond what white settlers have ascribed to it. Indigenous theatre also advances methektic possibilities that counter-monumentalize the inadequate, mimetic settler monuments. Aboriginal perceptions of the landscape generally incorporate several dimensions of time, enveloping a greater temporal sphere than an ANZAC war memorial or the 200 years that the Bicentenary celebrated: the Aboriginal idea of space incorporates the dreaming past as well as the more recent past, the present, and the future. In Aboriginal plays, the characters tend to work productively for the future in the context of unfathomable loss, as the plays themselves also become counter-monuments. Before examining two plays – Ningali Josie Lawford, Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer’s Ningali (1994), and Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving (1995) – I summarize two principal ways in which land is
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staged in many Aboriginal plays. While it is useful to enumerate some of the specific tropes that Aboriginal theatre uses to represent and depict landscape and the continuing relevance of land to most situations, it is also important to register the complex imbrications of past, present, and future land use with each other, with narrative, and with white history. As Attwood and Magowan explain above, narrative helps retain a connection – however mediated – to landscape and the past. First, the significance of the land is virtually always depicted on stage, literally, discursively, and often methektically, as backdrop, foreground, and as metaphysical space. It can be suggested through a soundscape or through particular characters. The first Aboriginal play to be produced, Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1971), is even dedicated to the land.19 In Bob Maza’s The Keepers (1988), Koonowar and Mirnat explain the overriding prominence of the land. Koonowar says, ‘This is my land This is me This land is us Our people are here in these rocks in those waterholes’ (Maza, 1989: 193; original emphasis). Sixty years after Koonowar is killed, Mirnat explains the enduring principles of law, memory, memorials, and land, principles that apply to Aboriginal groups including the Boandik people of southeast South Australia: if you were to cast your eyes around as far as the eyes can see, you will see what is the land of the Boandik. I say ‘is’ because in Boandik law as long as the land is there, so is the law. It’s like putting your mark on water you can put all the lines you want you never change it. It stays the same way. So it is with the land. Some foolish men believe they can own the land . The law of this land, the Boandik law, says that all is there to use. It will feed you, clothe you protect you and it will be your friend if you learn its ways and live with it. If you don’t, it will be your enemy. This land is alive. It moves, it breathes we know because we are its keepers. (Maza, 1989: 227–8; original emphasis) The land is as central to the action as any actors on stage or narrative. Photographic and/or video images of country can extend the reach of space beyond the theatre walls. Images of humans in actual space register the effects of settlers carving up the landscape, leaving little room for the original inhabitants. A more metaphoric – but nevertheless anchored – method for dramatizing landscape and land in Aboriginal plays is by means of art, particularly dot painting. As Eric Michaels explains about painting in western desert sites like Yuendumu in the Northern Territory,
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‘[t]he paintings depict, in terms of a religious iconography, geographical sites for which the painters have some special responsibility’ (1994: 55). It is no surprise, then, that such art and its complex semiosis is frequently employed in Aboriginal theatre. The second means of depicting country is through staging the moment of contact, one of the most profound instances of change in Australian and Aboriginal history. As Jack Davis outlines in Kullark, contact between whites in the Western Australian Swan River settlement and the Nyoongah people were at times peaceful and cooperative. The misunderstandings between Aboriginal land use and settlers’ intention to retain exclusive control of the land did, however, lead to clashes and even massacres of Aboriginal people, who eventually realized that the white settlers were not going to leave. One of the most acute expressions of loss of land, home, and all it represents is Jane Harrison’s Stolen (1998), which extends the implications of placelessness to metaphors that may not at first glance seem spatial.20 The setting is not an outdoor landscape per se, but an enforced, indoor land-substitute: five small iron beds and a filing cabinet. The beds, in an institution housing children who have been stolen from their parents and who await ‘placement’ with ostensibly more suitable white families, ironically recall the name of the national report into the stolen generations, Bringing them Home.21 At different points in the play, the five institutional beds come to represent various types of ‘homes’, including ‘a children’s home; a prison cell; a mental institution; a girl’s bedroom’ (Harrison, 1998: viii). They are also juxtaposed to the children’s country. The children struggle to remember their original homes, as Stolen associates the loss of land with incarceration and forced forgetting wherein Aboriginal people who are removed from their land are incarcerated in missions, institutions or prisons, denied access to their own country. A direct result of this dispossession is the device of dispossessing the audience and transferring to them the effects of loss, however temporarily. Such plays frequently subvert the conventions of the theatre building to ‘make a symbolic claim for land rights by commandeering public spaces not normally used for theatrical purposes’ (Gilbert, 1998a: 86). The London tour of Jack Davis’s No Sugar (at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios in 1988) forced the audience to leave their seats three times, imitating the dislocation that the characters were experiencing. The same audience disruption occurred in the Northern Rivers Performing Arts Company’s 1994 production of the same play in Lismore, New South Wales, which was staged at, under, around the Ballina Street Bridge, near a river bed where dispossessed Aboriginal
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people had sheltered: the cold, uncomfortable experience at least gave a passing nod of recognition to the plight of the characters and those whose stories they told. The marking and containing of the land associated with settlement makes a wholesale recovery virtually impossible, but that does not stop the performance of a type of Gelder/Jacobs uncanny relationship of coexistence on stage. Two plays that illustrate the particular significance of polytopic layering of land/country in Aboriginal theatre are Ningali and The 7 Stages of Grieving. The chorus to the first song in Ningali, by Josie Ningali Lawford, Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer, demonstrates the first level of spatiality in this play.22 Ningali begins with: ‘Now she’s somewhere under the desert sky’ (Lawford et al., 1994: 2). Under a broadly configured desert sky (see Figure 5), the play mixes indigenous form and content with Western styles as it traverses a wide geographical and geological span to compare all the possible facets of Ningali’s complex, layered subjectivity which crosses indigenous and Western cultures.23 The play combines performance styles, including autobiographical monodrama, stand-up comedy routine, contemporary and indigenous music and dance, and
Figure 5 Josie Ningali Lawford in Ningali, designed by Trina Parker for deckchair, Western Australia. Lawford sits on a floorcloth that depicts the desert landscape of her home country, and, in some lights, Ningali’s own face. By permission of Robyn Archer, Angela Chaplin and Josie Ningali Lawford
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indigenous history. As such, it traces ‘a journey across vast distance and many landscapes. It is about balancing and mediating worlds and cultures’ (Grehan, 2001: 75).24 More than just a personal journey, Ningali also documents the importance of the desert landscapes to her people. The desert generates joy and pride: But it felt endless, there were no fences, We could go wherever we wanted. I knew all that big country of my people Our dreaming was all over that land. (Lawford et al., 1994: 4) This desert, Ningali’s home in northern Western Australia, is the basis for her Aboriginal heritage, her foundation stories, and the traditions that structure her culture. The desert is also home to her ancestors, and Lawford explains her history by introducing the audience to her extended family whose spirits appear to be on stage: the space of the stage and the duration of performance expand to incorporate thousands of miles, and thousands of years of ‘[m]aybe the oldest culture in the world’ (Lawford et al., 1994: 26). Following this introduction to the expanse of the desert, Ningali focuses location more specifically to literal dispossession suffered by Aboriginal people. Access to the land is taken away from Ningali and her family in 1977. Fences now separate Ningali and her family from topographical sites that had been sacred for centuries, and more personal locations such as the tree under which Ningali was born. Her family asks, ‘But what about those dreaming sites?/ How are we going to do law properly if we can’t tread on our own land?’ (Lawford et al., 1994: 9). Ningali chooses to talk about the dispossession in terms of access to physical land, shifting the emphasis of the lines from her song: ‘Well they say you can take the girl outa the country/ But you can’t take the country outa the girl’ (Lawford et al., 1994: 23). Spatiality is figured in the play through corporeality and language, each of which contributes to a reclamation of lost land, although neither may initially appear to be particularly spatial. Corporeality is itself broken into two components. In the first instance, Ningali marks the connection between dance and landscape. This is a somewhat abstract connection for many non-Aboriginal audience members, but she explains traditional dance as a way of literally but methektically marking the land in the sand while also reinforcing her custodianship. Ningali recounts the history of her people by dancing her tribal dance
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which transforms the space of the stage from a contemporary theatre to encompass thousands of square kilometres of Ningali’s people’s land, over thousands of years. Lawford’s dancing body is aesthetically rich, as well as representing an act of political engagement in which history becomes current and present with each step of the dance. Formerly a means of marking the land and telling dreaming history, traditional dance holds a more significant (and fraught) memory function now that Ningali’s family no longer has access to the land from which the dances, language, and culture emerged. The second component of corporeality as landscape becomes apparent in the set that reflects Ningali’s literal body. While Ningali’s narrative unfolds on the stage, the audience becomes aware of the play taking place on a floorcloth that depicts an image of the performer herself. In other words, ‘during the course of the performance, Ningali Lawford inscribes her story on the landscape of her face’ (Grehan, 2001: 76).25 The performer’s body is staged spatially as well as narratively: a literal theatre space and a psychic space of subjectivity appear, combining individual subjectivity with a well-defined historical context, rendered spatially. At the end of the play, Ningali removes her shirt and applies ceremonial paint to her face, arms and bare breasts in preparation for a final dance. The markings that she applies to her skin are actual, topographical locations as well as representations of spatiality, as she inscribes literal space onto her literal body in yet another way. Country is marked in and on Ningali, in a format that does not disturb the legal owners of the land. Finally, land is also represented through language, which acts as a trace of the spatially defined past. Ningali is performed in English, Wambajarri (her native tongue), and kriol (a combination of the two). Ningali engages in some direct translation and some contextual translation: few audience members are likely to understand everything. While English is used to communicate most of the narrative, the spatial memory contained in each dance is encapsulated in the Wambajarri language, a signifier of the physical culture that the Wambajarri did not lose with their land. Ningali demonstrates the process by which spatiality is transferred to other media (rather than being severed) when geographical access is no longer available. Ningali laments that while her son will learn the Wambajarri language and the confidence to do whatever he wishes in life, his movements in some arenas will remain restricted: he ‘can tread anywhere on the earth/ Except my own land’ (Lawford et al., 1994: 26; original emphasis). This land belongs to Ningali’s family by virtue of an ancient
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historical connection, but others, who also feel that the land belongs to them, hold the deed.26 The Gelder/Jacobs uncanny is not operating in a legal sense, but Ningali makes it possible on stage. Ningali proposes the non-standard monuments of dance, language, and bodies to memorialize and replace the land that her family has lost, but none quite makes up for the significance of the land itself. Nevertheless, the play establishes a counter-monument that takes issue with white settlement that has literally unsettled Ningali’s family. She initiates representational space with whatever means she has left. The 7 Stages of Grieving, also a one-woman play, examines the implications of the loss of land and culture in urban and traditional Aboriginal communities. For Grehan, the play outlines ‘how we inhabit [landscape] and the need to acknowledge the processes by which it is inscribed’ (2001: 102). The unnamed Woman begins by explaining that her grandmother has died. She conducts a purification ceremony: ‘The Woman lights up a wad of eucalypt leaves and watches them burn. She blows out the flame and as the embers smoke she sings a song [in language] for the spirits of those who have gone before her and asks permission to tell the story of her grief’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 42). The theatre is thus rendered a sacred place. The death of the character’s grandmother means that her grandmother’s photo will be removed from the house and stored in a suitcase with the photos of other people who have died (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 46). To deal with her grief for her grandmother, the Woman experiences seven stages of grieving – but not quite the ones that Elisabeth KüblerRoss popularized – because the process of mourning for her grandmother transforms to a mourning for the land itself and for lost souls, including the 1993 death in custody of Boonie (Daniel) Yock. The Woman’s stages, which structure the play, are thus the seven stages of grieving for Aboriginal history: ‘Dreaming, Invasion, Genocide, Protection, Assimilation, Selfdetermination and Reconciliation’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 68). The grieving process necessarily extends well beyond her grandmother, and she depicts this graphically: she fills with earth a suitcase containing the photos of dead people with earth. She subsequently dumps the earth and the photos onto the stage so that ‘Images of landscape interweave with family portraits creating a tapestry of Land and People’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 69). The stages of grieving contribute to spatial transformations on the stage. The set contains the grandmother’s large grave of red earth, which comes to stand in for the country. Above it is ‘[a] large block of ice suspended by 7 strong ropes. It is melting, dripping, onto a freshly
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turned grave of red earth. The performance area is covered in a thick layer of black powder framed by a scrape of white’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 39). The set changes as the ice melts: the red earth turns to mud as the action disrupts the neatness of the grave. As the Woman passes through the seven stages, the ice of grief also begins to melt, but the journey leaves its traces on the Woman, as well as on the set: dressed in a short, white cotton shift, the Woman wears on her body the effects of the mud and ice. Grehan describes the integration of the performer and the set: both begin as ‘pristine’ but they are transformed as ‘[t]he clean, almost sterile, environment vanishes and the blemished, inhabited set remains’ (2001: 101). The stage – and the land for which it is a metaphor – continually changes following contact with settlers. The play performs two specific examples of how settlement inhibits the possibility of the uncanny and methexis. The first pertains to kinship. In a move that further disrupts the increasingly muddy set, the Woman explains the Aboriginal kinship system using small piles of earth. ‘The Woman takes several handfuls of red earth from the grave, making a large pile on the floor’, a pile which represents ‘the land, the source, the spirit, the core of everything’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 63). She makes a circle around the pile, which represents ‘culture, family, song, tradition, dance’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 63). Then in between the pile and the circle, she drops eight smaller piles that represent the children (Figure 6). She then outlines the complicated system which indicates who can marry whom in the kinship system. This scene is presented humorously: even the Woman gets confused by whom she could and could not marry. She shifts the tone of the scene, though, when she ‘gathers up the smaller piles and relocates them on the white fringing that defines the black performing area’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 65). She says, ‘Now imagine when the children are taken away from this’, and then ‘flays her arms through the remaining large pile and circle, destroying it’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 65). Loss of land leads to loss of kinship relations and a disappearance of culture itself, an explicit depiction of the impact of the stolen generations in spatial and social terms. As in Ningali, the Woman in 7 Stages is inscribed by the landscape and the destruction wrought upon it by settlement. The second example from 7 Stages enacts the implications of a shift from co-existence to a relationship based on single occupancy. In staging the effects of contact, the Woman ‘slams a nail through two pieces of wood. She stands and carries the wooden cross over to the grave. As she drives it into the red earth, the words “FOR SALE” are revealed.’ She merely asks, ‘What is it worth?’ (Enoch and Mailman, 1996: 62), and the scene ends. The value
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Figure 6 Deborah Mailman explains the effects of settlement on indigenous culture in The 7 Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman. Photo: Tracey Schramm
her ancestors might have placed on the land that they assumed would always be theirs is not commensurate with the price that they eventually paid in death and dispossession as a consequence of the loss of that land. The grieving process enacted here forms a counter-monument that is located in the body, history, and time, as well as a place that can be configured in terms of at least double occupancy. It also outlines representational space, provided by the seven stages, but, like Ningali, its
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oppositional space is based on limited means, the relative equity of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny relationship not being available to the Woman in this situation. Even though the play suggests a breakdown in coexistence, the theatre venue maintains the layers of (sacred) indigenous spaces for the duration of the performance so that the audience retains a visual record of what coexistence might look like. Aboriginal theatre stages cultural memory in terms of a multifaceted remembering, as opposed to officially sanctioned forgetting. Further, plays by Aboriginal playwrights overlap indigenous perceptions of landscape with settlement history to reinforce the limitations of settlement monuments. The methektic monuments constructed in Aboriginal theatre extend the concept of spatiality through performance, corporeality, and language. The layering of both settler and Aboriginal subjectivities questions whether one type of spatial practice (and representation of space) can take precedence. Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy pursues similar counter-monumental questions in a landscape that merges settler and indigenous cultural and temporal realities with those of another group: post-war migrants to Australia.
Janis Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy If the Aborigines, the Chinese and the Islanders could have shared a language, they might all have remarked on the glut of unrested (and therefore troubled and troublesome) ancestors that were being produced in the colonial landscape. (Gibson, 2002: 139) The monumentalizing and the counter-monumentalizing of Australia, space, and history in The Ghosts Trilogy points to some of the specific symptoms of unsettlement. The trilogy encapsulates and juxtaposes the implications of the main spatial factors of anxiety of Australian culture outlined in Chapter 1: the uneasy relationship between colonial exploration, Aboriginal marking of the land, and the negotiations that more recent settlers make to inhabit Australia. The absences that an examination of monuments reveals question the meaning of the place, and boundaries in the landscape. The trilogy is composed of Too Young for Ghosts (1985), No Going Back (1992), and My Father’s Father (1996). In all three, the most prominent character is the historical figure of Ludwig Leichhardt (1813–1848) who is exploring the interior of the country, but he is at risk of being upstaged by the land itself. Balodis invests the land with an agency that competes
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with Leichhardt’s own. The narrative incorporates many of the environmental realities of Australia, including floods, storms, and searing heat. The second play, No Going Back, renders this vastness by means of a floorcloth printed with the map that Leichhardt helped establish. This map, however, offers little assistance to the ‘placeless’ Latvian refugees, the play’s other principal characters (see Figure 7). Counter-balancing the explorer who is trying to map and claim the vast expanse of Australian landscape is a group of Latvian detainees in the same refugee camp whose presence in Australia suggests placelessness, memory, forgetting, and absence: the migrants’ attempt to find room in Australia since their own country no longer makes room for them. The stage for all three plays is relatively bare to suggest the uncharted country that Leichhardt explores is the same space as the inexplicable landscape that is now home to the migrants. The contemporary narrative spans almost 50 years, from the time that Latvians leave refugee camps in Europe after World War II, to their arrival in Australia and to their lives here from 1948 until 1993. At the same time and in the same stage space, using the same actors, the trilogy incorporates Leichhardt’s three expeditions between 1844 and
Figure 7 The second play in the trilogy, No Going Back, Melbourne Theatre Company, 1992. Leichhardt and his men sleep on a floorcloth that is a map of Queensland, as it was known then. Designed by Tony Tripp. Credit: Jeff Busby
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1848 (one successful, one abandoned, and one ending in his death), in a performance of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny.27 The ghosts that haunt the trilogy further extend the time–space dimensions. I outline two of the trilogy’s many counter-monumental moments: Leichhardt’s legacy, most notably his carving of trees, and the overwhelming presence of ghosts. This ghostly presence is a less-pronounced countermonument, but one that is nevertheless significant to the trilogy’s reconfiguring of Australian space. In establishing a multi-layered spatiality, The Ghosts Trilogy rethinks conventional monuments, and almost manages to thwart Leichhardt’s desire for eternal recognition of his exploits. Before I address the tree – the main counter-monument – I outline the trilogy’s spatial and narrative juxtapositions. Aside from the land itself, a literal monument locates the second play, No Going Back, in history and geography. In the 1992 Melbourne Theatre Company production designed by Tony Tripp, a statue from Riga, Latvia, signified not just the particular statue in Riga, but Latvia itself, and all that the displaced persons lost by having to take refuge in Australia. This monument’s bridge between literal place and figurative space likely carried with it greater signification on stage than for people who may pass it in the square in Riga. In the production, the statue is almost an alien force in a play about alien land. The statue, as a geographical and temporal location, symbolizes the Latvians’ homeland, but it also suggests loss and absence: they find themselves removed from everything it represents. The map of Queensland (as it was known to whites in the time of Leichhardt’s explorations) was mounted as an enormous, looming floorcloth which curved upwards at the back of the stage to form the backdrop, all but overtaking the monument in scale. Given this set, it is no surprise that confusion regarding how to negotiate the landscape frames the plays for both characters and audience. In Too Young for Ghosts, the young Latvians cope with life in corrugated iron houses – hardly the space of monuments. Ilse remarks, ‘Is this the best they can do in a hundred and fifty years [of white settlement]? They live as if they don’t expect to stay’ (Balodis, 1997c: 22). No Going Back takes place 30 years later, as the Latvian couples from the first play reunite. Leichhardt’s time has only advanced a year or so, to the second expedition that he leads in and around the Latvians’ reunion. Whereas in the first play, the Latvian characters possess only memories and the clothes on their backs, in the second play, Ilse and Karl build their own house. Ilse says this house will finally make her ‘feel [that] I belong to this place’ (Balodis, 1997b: 94). Edvards and the other characters insist that the
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concrete foundation is still not in the right position: Edvards mutters, ‘Forever. In wrong place’ (Balodis, 1997b: 91), a comment that equally applies to him. In My Father’s Father the death of Edvards enables Karl and Ilse to return to Latvia for the first time since the war, accompanied by their adult son, Armand; this trip puts to rest old concerns (ghosts, as it were) and they return to Australia, certain that it is now home.28 Competing with the staging of absence is a demonstration of the ‘fullness’ which also characterizes the trilogy. The world of Leichhardt and the world of the Latvians continually speak to each other about history, space, place, and the marking of the land. The trilogy’s greatest accomplishment is the intersection between cultural landscapes, exemplified by Scene 8 in Too Young for Ghosts: Leichhardt’s men meet a group of Aboriginal people and plan to rape the women, played by the Latvian women who simultaneously are accosted by equally rapacious American soldiers in Stuttgart (the soldiers being the same actors as Leichhardt’s men).29 The two scenes fold at least two story lines together to perform Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny: the trilogy clearly articulates the historical precedent for the changing interpretations of the land, but it also demonstrates how the landscape can be figured and reconfigured for different constituencies at the same time. Leichhardt intends to explore his way into a triumphant history, crowned by a conventional monument to himself, but the trilogy destabilizes traditional monuments: as the narrative proceeds, it becomes clear that the monuments that Leichhardt leaves to imprint his presence on the landscape are more transient than he might wish. The trilogy suggests that Leichhardt misinterprets what type of monuments are appropriate to the Australian landscape; it thus offers a number of alternatives to generate usefully ‘fluid’ memorials to the landscape and the past, including the somewhat paradoxical focus on absence and the monumentalizing of ghosts. Intent on claiming a major portion of the history and the geography of the nation, Leichhardt concerns himself with his marks in and on the land before he considers the welfare of his men: ‘I will die for Australia in Australia. It is my destiny’ (Balodis, 1997b: 112). Leichhardt explains his philosophy to the naturalist, Mr Gilbert, in Too Young for Ghosts: We are in a new land in a new time. You look and you see specimens and you see danger. You are not seeing the woods for the trees. I am discovering the way for your ‘others’ to follow and the trees I mark will stand as monuments to our achievements. Thousands will come from the stagnant civilisation of Europe where men kill each other for
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Nevertheless, the secretive Leichhardt becomes one of many ghosts in the landscape. In constructing his own monument, Leichhardt marks the landscape by carving his initial and the year on trees to stake his claim and ground his legacy in the landscape. But these marked trees – always with the same message – do not remain as firm as he might have expected: they are burned, chopped down, washed away by floods. The land that is being pinned down on a map appears to have the capacity to refuse the basis of Leichhardt’s personal monument. Further, the tree monuments are open to significant misinterpretation. To his men, Leichhardt’s trees lead the way home. Gilbert and Phillips joke about the ‘inspirational message[s]’ (Balodis, 1997c: 12) that Leichhardt carves, and Gilbert later reads Leichhardt’s activity as ‘attackin’ that tree’ (Balodis, 1997c: 12). The trees are read differently again by the inhabitants of northern Queensland 100 years later, and then again by the audience, almost 50 years later still. The Latvians are not interested in Leichhardt’s vision of Eden, or in Leichhardt himself. Otto finds a tree with ‘L 1845’ but no one recognizes what it means (Balodis, 1997c: 69) and the tree is cut down (Balodis, 1997c: 76). Leichhardt’s legacy becomes meaningless because these characters – even McQuaig who has lived all his life in northern Queensland – have no idea who Leichhardt is. The ‘sign of hope’ (Balodis, 1997c: 73) that the last tree represents to Leichhardt’s ghost is squashed by Gilbert who says, ‘They’ll make no sense of it’ (Balodis, 1997c: 73), and he is right. The audience (who likely knows of Leichhardt from historical accounts or programme notes) also reads the trees through the first play’s multiple layers of signification, not in the straightforward manner that Leichhardt would prefer. Otto finds old bones (which the audience is led to assume are Gilbert’s, could be Gilbert’s, or are metonymic for Gilbert’s) near the tree with Leichhardt’s initial. These bones – methektic reminders of the significance of reading the landscape in order to avoid reinscribing alterity – actually become more resonant than Leichhardt’s trees and more productively linked to the other narratives from which the trilogy constructs a cultural memory. While the tree is not staged, Otto reproduces in the sand on stage the symbol that was cut into it. The potential impact of the monument that no longer communicates
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a pocketful of soil. They will come with knowledge that is hundreds of years old and cultivate this Eden. The future is all around, larger than life, innocent and without secrets. There are no ghosts in her closets. (Balodis, 1997c: 29)
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is then dispersed in the sand as he obliterates the sign. Ironically, this sand message could be interpreted in terms of Aboriginal memorialization, although Leichhardt would disapprove of such an interpretation because he dismisses the methektic Aboriginal cultures out of hand. The metaphoric meaning of Leichhardt’s tree-carving continues to be fractured in this narrative. In one of the more complex scenes in My Father’s Father, two meanings and/or locations and/or narratives are being communicated at once, to reveal two very different ways of reading the carving of trees. At this point, five of the expedition’s men have been killed in an ambush by Aboriginal people and Leichhardt is blind from malnutrition. Leichhardt and Brown, his Aboriginal guide, talk about the danger they face, Leichhardt’s legacy, and their location at the edge of the desert, but it soon becomes apparent that the conversation takes place at cross-purposes. Leichhardt wants the tree near their camp, the last tree before the desert, to be carved with his customary initial and the year, but Brown offers to put the symbol in the sand instead (Balodis, 1997a: 197). Leichhardt wants ‘D-I-G’ carved on the tree as well, to symbolize that this is where his beloved journal will be buried for posterity. He does not explain this to Brown, who thinks that Leichhardt is indicating that the tree points to water. Brown insists that there is no water either under the tree or in the tree’s trunk. Responding through his own cultural perceptions, Brown then assumes that the burial of the journal denotes its ‘evil’ and that it needs to be abandoned. Finally Leichhardt demands to be taken to the tree to carve it himself. Brown still misunderstands, thinking that Leichhardt now wants to hang himself from the tree (Balodis, 1997a: 198). Brown is thinking about literal survival while Leichhardt is thinking about his legacy. Brown’s own agency leads him to ignore Leichhardt’s wishes, keep the journal, and surreptitiously head for home (the opposite direction to Leichhardt’s orders) so that he can prove that he is not responsible for anything happening to Leichhardt. Brown’s ‘plot’ is discovered, and in the discovery, the precious journal – another potential, if unceremonial, memorial to his achievements – is irretrievably blown to the winds. Leichhardt’s name has been inscribed in the land around the country, but his imperial monuments were unsuccessful in his own time and, as Balodis suggests, immaterial in our own. Like most convergences of space in the trilogy, the performance of the uncanny in this scene is one that the audience – rather than the characters – reads, since neither character is able to grasp the other’s meaning. The exploration of ‘immaterial’ monuments encourages Brown to wonder about the absence of anything named for him, in light of
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Gilbert’s and Leichhardt’s memorial presence on maps. ‘Who is singin’ Brown? Where is Brown Mountain? Where is Brown River? Brown know which way to go, no one listen’ (Balodis, 1997a: 243).30 Leichhardt discounts Aboriginal people in his history of mapping of Australian space and landscape because in the thousands of years that they have been in Australia, ‘[t]hey have hardly marked the soil’ (Balodis, 1997c: 29). The trilogy suggests that such methexis is advantageous and that if Leichhardt learned to read the ways in which Aboriginal people did mark the land, he would have realized how memorialized it has always been and he would likely also have been able to return from his final trip. Leichhardt’s monument is thus put on a par with the Aboriginal markings of the land that he deemed worthless – in the sand and ‘in’ impermanence, not in stone or in an amnesia-laden memory. The absence of Aboriginal representation in white Australian monuments and history becomes significant again when Brown raises Aboriginal land rights, even drawing a parallel with the Latvians’ concern regarding the Russians invading Afghanistan (recalling memories of invasions of Latvia itself and the Latvians’ displacement) (Balodis, 1997b: 133). Brown, who dies far from his tribal land, sings a Latvian song with two ghosts, Ruth and Leonids, who drowned shortly after arriving in Australia in 1948, exactly 100 years after Leichhardt’s disappearance. The function of the song is to acknowledge displacement: ‘Although life is fine in/ Those far foreign lands/ I dream of my homeland’ (Balodis, 1997c: 246). The trilogy insists that the land and space of ‘Australia’ be read through multiple layers of signification, even if Leichhardt is oblivious to their meaning. The trilogy’s deconstruction of Leichhardt’s style of monument and its replacement with counter-monuments does not stop with the trees. The second form of counter-monument, the ghosts themselves, who, neither material nor insignificant, reconfigure monumentalizing since they also stand in for the past, the inarticulateness of memory, and enact a curious form of absence. They are also associated with a particular landscape. While this land is apparently too young for settler ghosts, the ghosts succeed in methektically extending the boundaries of space while simultaneously signalling the gravity of placelessness for the Latvian characters. Leichhardt, Gilbert, Ruth and Leonids, and to some extent Brown, mark the space as ghostly monuments. The ghosts, portrayed by flesh and blood actors, are not placed in the landscape like tombstones; rather, they take up space and add a sense of collective history, remembering and forgetting in much the same way as monuments do. Gilbert acknowledges that Aboriginal people ‘are right in believing that spirits
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Leonids: Our bones were never found, never laid to rest. Ruth: Who will remember us when he’s [Edvards is] gone? Leonids: When we’re forgotten we’ll find peace. (Balodis, 1997a: 230) For Leonids, peace outweighs remembrance. Ruth and Leonids reappear in My Father’s Father to guide the dying Edvards as he partakes in a ritual last supper that marks the crossing over from life to death. No dead souls can come to visit him from Latvia, because, Ilse says, ‘They don’t belong. [A] Spirit belongs to [a] place’ (Balodis, 1997a: 191). Ilse reinforces that these ghostly presences are directly connected to the place(s) they inhabit: the ghosts are memorials of space as well as time. These ghosts add a sense of collective history (and amnesia) in much the same way as monuments do. In the course of the trilogy, the spirits that inhabit Australia multiply and intersect with other strands of the complex narrative as the landscape becomes even more heavily traversed than it was before whites arrived. While Leichhardt is unwavering in his plan to have a monument to himself, the trilogy builds only a plinth on which any number of representations of Leichhardt could be placed to coexist. The Ghosts Trilogy questions not only the ways in which Australia has been historicized and spatialized, but how the nation has been ‘reduced’ by the anxiety associated with constructing traditional fixed monuments: the collective amnesia resulting from the establishment of monuments and their associated cultural imaginary has restricted Australia’s cultural borders. While Leichhardt keeps making his mark on the landscape, the Latvians keep trying to find a way to live in/with the land, generating a presence in the face of what is perceived to be absence. Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy productively counter-monumentalizes the cultural imaginary space of ‘Australia’ as it stages an increasingly unsettled history, characterized primarily by competing claims on literal and metaphoric space. The performance of a polytopic, counter-monumental haunted space in a landscape that is thought to be too young for settler ghosts helps remap the nation’s cultural imaginary, both on the stage and in the audience’s ‘translation’ of the staged events and spaces into the ‘real’ world.
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roam this land’ (Balodis, 1997c: 13). The ghosts of white characters form a type of natural counter-monument which, in contrast to the type of counter-monument of the ghosts of Aboriginal characters, is explained by the dilemma that Ruth and Leonids explore towards the end of My Father’s Father:
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Space in itself may be primordially given, but the organization and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation, and experience. (Soja, 1989: 79-80) A final counter-monument, a performance on a monument, concludes this chapter. The physical theatre troupe, Legs on the Wall, performed Homeland (1998) on the 26-storey AMP building in central Sydney (and other buildings around the country, including the Suncorp Building in Brisbane), forcing spectators to shift their viewing perspectives, literally and metaphorically (see Figure 8).31 Homeland engages in a relationship with the buildings that otherwise memorialize corporate Australia: Homeland brings together the disparate worlds of corporate Australia, migrants, and performance, worlds that coexist for at least its duration. Homeland combines physical theatre with evocative slides that commemorate migration to Australia. It begins with an image of
Figure 8 Legs on the Wall’s production of Homeland on the AMP Building, Sydney, 1988. The performers and their shadows descend the building. Photo: Cameron Martin. By permission of Legs on the Wall
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numerous visas and passports and an enlarged date, 1949, projected in enormous scale on the side of a building. There is no mistaking its starting point: it is the Australia of immediate post-war migration. The music – Bulgarian and performed by the Mara! World Music Ensemble, the Principals of the Martenitsa Choir, and local choristers – replaces conventional dialogue and reinforces a non-Anglo-Celtic focus. The second image, also appearing before the performers do, is a variation on the passport and visa slide, with other faces, some obscured by barbed wire. The barbed wire, if nothing else, underlines that migration to a country like Australia is not always by choice or for clichéd reasons of economic progress. The photos in Homeland are haunting in their depictions of joy, profound sadness, and absolute despair. Homeland brings photographic images of the abandonment of homes together with the seemingly incongruous physical venue of corporate Australia. The experiences of many of the migrants whose images are projected in Homeland have been soul-destroying, as their etched faces reveal. When the performers appear from the top of the building, they engage in a series of choreographed movements against the building, sometimes over the top of the projected images. On their slow descent, the actors meet, embrace, and engage in a short performance of (literal) connection and disconnection. They embrace and break away as they also make contact with the building’s walls. They then jump away from the walls into the night and back again. The apparent danger to the actors performing Homeland hints at the trauma of the migration experience. The gap between the ‘big-business’ function of the buildings and the personal images of suitcases, passports, and etched faces that are projected onto the building is enormous. Further, the scale of the building contrasts substantially with the size of the actors when they appear. These gaps are further reinforced by the relative distance between the performers and the audience, who are located across the street, some 20 metres away (to ensure both safety and sight-lines). These gaps hold the potential for shifting interpretations: the reunions that the couples stage are, when played through suspended cables and the technical obstacles of performing against gravity, more emotionally affecting than the average staged embrace, because the audience can see just how difficult the embrace is to achieve. The performance flirts with the displacement of other repressed physical and traumatic dangers associated with Freud’s uncanny. Despite the fears evident in the faces that are projected and the danger that suffuses the actual performance, it concludes in a social collectivity that extends far beyond the five performers joining together in their final moments on the building.
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Homeland leaves numerous traces of performance with its audiences. First, like Whiteread’s sculpture, the ‘markings’ on the buildings are temporary, methektic ones that remain with spectators: audience members who pass the building after the ropes and rigging have been dismantled can recall the spectacle of theatre on the actual architectural and political fabric of the city. Second, the unworldly and gravitydefying nature of the performers acting on the side of a tall building at night casts shadows that also perform extraordinary acts, as if to conjure up shadows of the past or even a larger community in the present. The actors play across the lines of history and even the paranormality of the ghostly shadows suggests that for Australia to represent ‘home’, it has to be able to encompass not only an accurate history of migration but also a sense of the nation’s ghosts. Homeland reinforces that both migration and conflicting perceptions of home are part of an overarching Australian identity. Finally, the methektic marking of the buildings (which themselves do not interact with the landscape methektically) suggests some of the ways in which performance might engage more directly in the cultural refashioning of settlement, identity, and self in an unsettled nation. A study of monuments, particularly those on stage, demonstrates how they can draw attention to cultural absence (in terms of cultural memory, history, diversity, and geography). They also allude to a cultural ‘fullness’, or cumulative wealth of representations that may be directly related or even only distantly connected to the metaphoric ‘place’ of a monument. These markers of nation appear to reinforce history when investigations of what lies behind the monument frequently signal the unsettlement and anxiety that pervade Australia’s cultural memory. Explorations of the counter-monument help document history and absence in a deliberately transformational format to incorporate diverse interpretations of space, landscape, and nation without reinscribing the inarticulacy that often characterizes conventional monuments. The staging of such counter-monuments reinterprets the Australian landscape and its associated historical record, but theatre is, of course, not the only art form that interrogates history through monuments and counter-monuments. The practical development of monuments that are more in tune with their surroundings has been the aim of the Public Art Agency, which has put a form of counter-monumentalizing into practice in Queensland. The project recognizes that public art must generate dialogue rather than being just ‘plonk’ art which John Stafford defines as art that is placed in a site with no reference to the purpose of the
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building or the nature of the landscape (Stafford). He has spearheaded the ‘Art Built In’ campaign, in which 2 per cent of the cost of all buildings whose construction or renovation surpasses $250,000 must be set aside for public art (Public Art Agency). The art that is commissioned in Queensland must speak to the landscape in which it is situated, in at least some degree of methektic dialogue similar to that which can take place on the stage, actively performing representational space, even when working in and around spaces of representation. The performance of the potential for methexis in theatre, combined with contemporary architecture’s concrete attempts to engage in reconfigured relationships with the landscape augur well for a more nuanced participation with landscape in Australia. But not all significant cultural locations are conveniently encapsulated in memorial form: the next chapter addresses the intersections between unsettlement and contamination in two locations that are deliberately forgotten in the national record.
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3
Maralinga is the one place in the country we have no picture of. (Lynette Wallworth, quoted in Archdall, 2002b: 27) Contagion connects civic with personal selves, nations and populations with individuals and bodies, local dialect with global metaphor. Contagion is powerful because it is one point at which health, hygiene and the human body transmits meaning and infects as metaphor and analogy, thinking about the nation-state, as well as transnationalism and globalisation. (Bashford and Hooker, 2001: 10)
This chapter examines the spatial effects of literal and discursive contamination in Australian theatre. The relative isolation of Australia and its strict quarantine laws have prevented the spread of certain diseases (like rabies), but Australia’s quarantine rhetoric frequently extends to humans, particularly when various groups of humans are perceived to threaten the nation’s sovereignty. Whereas Chapter 2’s investigation of the anxiety associated with memorialization draws attention to place, sites of contamination are rendered ‘non-places’ (Augé, 2000: 9), and, in some cases, they are even removed from the map. Contamination epitomizes a different order of the anxiety of spatiality in Australia, illustrated by the measures to which authorities will go to maintain an illusion of settlement, purity, and order. I address two sites of contamination and the theatre that has been produced about them: Maralinga and Woomera. Maralinga was the home of nuclear bomb testing in the 1940s and 1950s, and is now largely contaminated by radioactivity. While Woomera was a rocket launch site, its more recent life – housing a detention centre that has stood in for the contamination with which 87
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Contagion and degeneracy The poetics of contagion justified a politics of exclusion and gave social sanction to the middle-class fixation with boundary sanitation, in particular the sanitation of sexual boundaries. [S]anitation syndromes served more deeply to rationalize and ritualize the policing of boundaries between the Victorian ruling elite and the ‘contagious’ classes, both in the imperial metropoles and in the colonies. (McClintock, 1995: 47) As McClintock outlines, contagion erupts in an individual body but it can spread quickly to contaminate place, space, and entire classes of people. Not only can it literally transgress bodily and spatial boundaries, it has long been associated with metaphorization: ‘[c]ontagion is the primary symbol of Christian allegory since that allegory is chiefly concerned with sin and redemption’ (Fletcher, 1964: 199). The relationship between wellness and sickness can be all too easily collapsed to accommodate other binaries such as good and evil, colonizer and colonized, and self and other. Ann Laura Stoler, Anne McClintock, and Sander Gilman have each connected contagion with what has been termed racial and sexual degeneracy associated with colonialism. Stoler reads contagion through national boundaries that mirror moral and bodily boundaries: Colonial control was predicated on identifying who was ‘white’, who was ‘native’, and which children could become citizens rather than subjects, designating who were legitimate progeny and who were not . Ultimately inclusion or exclusion required regulating the sexual, conjugal, and domestic life of both Europeans in the colonies and their colonized subjects. (1991: 53; original emphasis) While the move from a medical contamination to a social one may appear to be swift, Gilman argues that the link is direct: most fears of revolutionary or social change in history have coincided with conservative attempts to demonize the other, linking it with sexual depravity
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asylum seekers have been equated in Australian political discourse – is the focus of the second part. Such ‘non-places’ illustrate another dimension to the nation’s anxiety, and, increasingly, to interactions between Australia’s various intra-cultural communities.
and disease (1985 : 213–14). ‘[T]he image of the dangerous [infectious] Other serves both as the focus for the projection of anxiety concerning the self and as the means by which the Other defines itself’ (1985: 129– 30).1 The attempt to suppress the anxieties that these categories elicit gives rise to a space of contamination, usually managed by governments (much as quarantine is), in which the ‘contaminated’ other can be sequestered. The separating of contagious people from the general population may make medical sense, but the all-too-easy shift from a literal contamination to the labelling of groups of people as metaphorically contaminated by dint of fear and/or simple ‘otherness’ has significant implications for categorizing social and spatial order. The biological model of contamination is not the only means of separating people and space in Australia, where fear of the Asian other, known as the ‘yellow peril’, has emerged as another significant anxiety throughout settlement history, reinforced by the nation’s unprotectable borders. It has also taken place legislatively: the fear of an imminent invasion of this settled land by outsiders culminated in the establishment of the White Australia Policy, the newly federated nation’s first piece of legislation in 1901 (under the name of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill; Markus, 1979: xi).2 The White Australia policy insisted that some people need to be protected from others who symbolized contagion, ‘foreignness’, or otherness. Most settlers feared Asia’s teeming millions might take the empty land from them as easily as they had taken it from the Aborigines. They were protective of their gold, of their jobs and working conditions, and of ‘their’ women, and again it was Asians who were assumed to want them. Fear, ignorance, and bigotry fomented hostility. (Broinowski, 1992: 3–4) It was one thing to fear invasion from outside the borders, but scaremongers within Australia’s borders insinuated that the arrival in Australia of large populations of Chinese workers (among others) to work the goldfields at various times in the nineteenth century would destroy the fabric of the nation. Publications like the widely read magazine, The Bulletin, promoted such racism: ‘For more than sixty years the magazine’s Australian readers had only to see a short, bespectacled Japanese, a smiling Chinese or an athletic African for familiar corollaries to suggest themselves: evil, cunning, depravity, bestiality’ (Broinowski, 1992: 12).
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While the White Australia Policy is now history, its effects linger and Australia occupies an ambivalent position in the Asian region: it is neither culturally Asian nor geographically European. The definition of ‘Asian’ is suitably loose, incorporating Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Malaysians, Indonesians, and other inhabitants of the region. Various factors affect the nation’s continuing (but ambiguous) relationship with its neighbours: for instance, the Australian economy is dependent on extensive trade with those same Asian neighbours who once were repelled from the borders.3 In addition to the quarantining of the nation from undesired migrants, those elements that cannot be kept out are sequestered in remote locations where they can be forgotten in an attempt to relegate traces of the Freudian uncanny to the margins. The delineation of such zones of contamination is extensive. Ross Gibson uses the term ‘badlands’, or ‘a dreadful sense of insufficiency felt by Europeans forging into the more “savage” parts of the “new” world. [A] badland was originally a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition’ (2002: 13-14). In more detail: badlands eventually demand our attention, because their perimeters are rarely secure. The troubles we’d contain ‘over there’ tend to turn up repeatedly in our own lived experience. They leave marks in documents, in bodies, in communities and places, in buildings, streets and landscapes. (Gibson, 2002: 179) The landscape in this chapter not only refuses to ‘succumb to colonial ambition’ but also transforms from one state of meaning to another. The detonation of atomic bombs at Maralinga and the history of the rocket range at Woomera – as well as its notorious detention centre – provide locations for studying how contamination has been configured. The first part of the chapter focuses on the contamination caused by nuclear fallout at Maralinga; the second examines a different type of breakdown of the principles of quarantine: the imprisonment of asylum seekers. In the first case, the plays stage a surprising representational space that resists Maralinga’s production in social space by performing heterotopic spaces. The presence of literal contamination does not limit the potential for the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny and even methexis, although their performance does shift somewhat. The second attempts to do the same, but while it succeeds in undermining representations of space, it cannot effectively produce representational space, given the constraints on spatiality for asylum seekers. In these plays, signification is played
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Contamination 91
out less explicitly on stage and more productively in the gaps between staged space and the space outside the theatre.
There’s ground out there that makes a geiger counter rattle like a bucket of bones and it will for another 20,000 years. It’s time frozen in space. (Rutherford, in Heart for the Future, Balodis, 1988: 40) While Maralinga has existed for thousands of years to the Tjarutja people and other indigenous custodians of the land, its presence in the national consciousness dates from the late 1940s when it was staked out as a utopian site, promising Australia scientific prosperity and security. Nuclear developments offered a utopian future to an unsettled settler nation, anxious about defining its role in the world and fearing invasion from Asia or even the Soviet Union. When the utopian dreams failed to materialize, Maralinga became a form of dystopia, or, more appropriately, a ‘non-place’, its literal and discursive signification quarantined from the cultural imaginary. As Lynette Wallworth explains in the epigraph that opens this chapter, Maralinga is not attached to visual images for most Australians, beyond the standard mushroom cloud that signifies a nuclear explosion. Before I explore the implications of this effective removal of Maralinga from the cultural map and the theatrical responses to this re-mapping enterprise, I provide some background to the tests. The Australian government and scientific communities encouraged the explosion of nuclear bombs on Australian soil in the 1940s and 1950s to secure a greater role in international politics, as well as for protection from its neighbours during the Cold War. ‘Twelve atomic bombs exploded on Australian soil between 1952 and 1957’ (Cross, 2001: 173), mostly at Maralinga, South Australia. Maralinga was deemed to be suitable because of the isolated and apparently barren landscape. To Henry Tizard, chair of the US subcommittee on atomic weapons, Australia contained ‘large tracts of “unfamiliar and featureless land” which was in many ways “akin to Russia”’ (quoted in Cross, 2001: 76). The ownership of the land on which bombs fell remained British during the tests, so that in 1952, ‘Australia became the first sovereign state to sacrifice willingly its territory to test the atomic weapons of another country’ (Butt, 2002).4 Australia’s desire to participate in international matters was convenient for the British, all the more so since Prime
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Maralinga
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Minister Robert Menzies ‘was flattered to be needed by the “mother country”’ (Cross, 2001: 1).5 When the programme was completed (or, as it transpired, different weapons and treaties took precedence), Australia was abandoned militarily by the British (and then the Americans), and left to deal with land which will be contaminated for the next 24,000 years (Blakeway and Lloyd-Roberts, 1985: 139). The ‘British ownership’ fell far short of adequately cleaning up the site; questions about clean-up continue to haunt governments. Part of the problem with clean-up responsibilities is that the magnitude of the bombs was much greater than anticipated. The flash from the final detonation ‘was reported to have been visible up to 600 miles away’ (Cross, 2001: 74). The third bomb’s cloud passed over the most heavily settled location in the broader region, the city of Adelaide (Cross, 2001: 71). Owing to unexpected changes in wind in one test or another, nearly every part of mainland Australia experienced radioactive clouds, rain, and dust. The reverberations from bombs detonated at Maralinga continue, given the distance the nuclear cloud travelled and the deaths of Aboriginal peoples. When considered at all, Aboriginal people were deemed to be easily relocatable to other land, but the decision-makers did not distinguish one people’s land from another.6 In fact, when a British scientist was asked about ‘the fate of the Aborigines at Maralinga, the response was that they were a dying race, and therefore dispensable’ (Cross, 2001: 32).7 Aboriginal people were not included in the census until 1967 so the population of the Maralinga region was difficult to ascertain, especially since they had had little interaction with white Australia until then. Everyone in the area was inadequately protected, but the Aboriginal communities suffered the most.8 Those people still at the site after testing found little comfort: ‘one family was sent off on foot to a destination 650 kilometres away – three of its members are said to have died on the journey’ (Turner, 1994: 61). They were forbidden to travel along their traditional routes and they were not offered transportation in available vehicles. Instead, they were ordered to walk on the roads, which did not pass through any water or food resources (Australian Nuclear Veterans Association, 2005). The most frequently reported example of the testers’ gross negligence regarding traditional Aboriginal people is the 1957 discovery of the Milipuddie family, gathering water in the Marcoo detonation crater, a site that had ‘in 1956 glow[ed] green in the evening like a “luminous watch hand in the dark” [and] would “be hot for a thousand years”’ (quoted in Blakeway and Lloyd-Roberts, 1985: 138–9).9
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The only possible way to decontaminate the plume area is to remove every tree and plant and all the soil to a depth of four inches. The [Maralinga Tjarutja] people see this as creating one environmental disaster to solve another and are reluctant to see that happen to their land. (Barton, 1992) The problem was thought to be buried – literally – but its remains continue to be uncovered. Burke claimed that Aboriginal people had ‘dug up contaminated articles such as Land Rovers and heavy engineering equipment and had sold them in Coober Pedy’ (quoted in Blakeway and Lloyd-Roberts, 1985: 215). The Tjarutja people’s lives were incalculably affected by the explosions: Archie Barton, indigenous administrator of the Maralinga lands, explains that his people were forcibly removed to Yalata, South Australia, from 1953–84 to guard them from what they called the ‘black mist’. The Yalata mission was not a success: in fact, it was marked by ‘the highest rate of alcohol-related illnesses and deaths of any Australian community’ (Barton, 1992). In 1984, the Tjarutja people were, however, successful in being granted 76,000 square kilometres of their own land, excluding the Maralinga test sites (which remain prohibited), although the land was still contaminated from the 12 major tests and from the 700 minor tests. Maralinga is not the only location in Australia to be so associated with nuclear testing: Woomera, effectively created for rocket testing, occupies a similar discursive location.10 From 1946 to 1970, Woomera was Australia’s chief rocket launch site, operated in association with British and European military support. Despite its Aboriginal name (meaning a hollowed out spear-launching stick), Woomera’s association with Aboriginal people was minimal, the Kokatha people being pushed off the land once it was deemed suitable for testing.11 The Woomera test site was chosen because it was deemed to be an isolated ‘wasteland’ (‘Woomera’) with very little annual rain to impede launches. From 1970 to 1999, the township provided housing and support services for the Joint Defence Facility, at the neighbouring military station of Nurrungar, operated by the US Air Force Space Command and the Australian Defence Force.
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In addition to the immediate and long-term radiation threat to Aboriginal people, the damage to the ‘empty’ land, its vegetation, and the wildlife on which Aboriginal people relied for food was extensive. Neither the winds nor the wildlife hunted by indigenous Australians could be contained by fences and signs:
Unsettling Space
Nurrungar and nearby Pine Gap house satellite surveillance programmes that continue to operate today; Pine Gap is ‘extraterritorially’ managed by the United States. Ironically, the community and range were built by post-war migrants under work bonds (Morton, 1989: 128). A generation later, Woomera became a detention centre for asylum seekers and housed those people who epitomized Australia’s fears regarding quarantine. This chapter returns to Woomera shortly to examine a secondary level of contamination, that ostensibly introduced by asylum seekers and refugees. Before that, I turn to the expression of nuclear contamination in Australian theatre.
Nuclear contamination plays Holidays for Maniacs See the End of the World Day-Trips to Maralinga Phone 085-690-7105. (Rutherford’s advertisement in Heart for the Future, Balodis, 1988: 12) The Maralinga test site was established with the utopian intention of making the world a ‘safer’ place by developing nuclear deterrents. But once it was closed off from the world following contamination, its configuration changed. In some respects Maralinga exists in what Timothy Luke terms an ‘ectopia’, or a space that is othered to the extent of being ‘outside’ space (1999: 37). More commonly, Maralinga is located somewhere between its utopian origins and the opposite, what Hetherington calls ‘ou-topia’, or a non-place (1997: ix; see also Augé, 2000: 9). Tracing the etymology of ‘utopia’, Hetherington explains that Thomas More ‘collapsed two Greek words together: eu-topia meaning good place and ou-topia meaning non-place or nowhere’ (1997: viii; original emphasis). Hetherington develops Louis Marin’s attempt ‘to pull apart the nowhere from the good place, to return utopia to eu-topia and ou-topia and to look at the space, one might say chasm, that opens up between them’ (1997: viii). This chasm is heterotopic space. Contamination renders Maralinga more dystopic than utopic, but in the chasm between the non-place and utopia, the plays explore heterotopic possibility. Contamination transfers the meaning associated with a utopia to ou-topia relatively quickly. Non-places, as contested as monuments, are ‘spaces of circulation, distribution, and communication where neither
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identity, relation, nor history may be apprehended’ (Augé, 1998: 97). Non-places are ideal for seeking traces of Freud’s uncanny. Theatrical engagements with Australia’s nuclear history tend to investigate the parameters of the utopia/ou-topia relationship: they usually look for more solid ground than the idealistic utopia and the ‘absence’ that is said to characterize non-places.12 Various theatrical interventions into this relationship have used the spatial device of heterotopia, a ‘place’ that has agency, meaning, and relevance to the real world, even if it is ‘unreal’. The concept of heterotopia, popularized by Michel Foucault (1986: 23) and elaborated by Hetherington, charts the emergence of anxiety about the absences that are being concealed in sites of contamination. ‘[T]he significance of heterotopia is that it is used in a way that unsettles the flow of meaning Heterotopic relationships unsettle because they have the effect of making things appear out of place’ (Hetherington, 1997: 50). Whereas Foucault’s heterotopia is a counter-site of resistance (1986: 22), Hetherington’s is a ‘space[ ] of alternate ordering. Heterotopia organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things’ (1997: viii). A heterotopia is connected with ‘reality’ but it is paradoxically disconnected from that reality at the same time. Heterotopias provide a means of performing the spatial implications of the relationships between utopia and ou-topia, rather than explaining them away. The plays use heterotopias to renegotiate and replace literal and figurative space. Heterotopias are particularly productive in theatre, which is predicated on the structuring of imagined worlds. Not only does this concept help reconfigure non-places, it also provides further anchoring in stage space for the multiple worlds that may coexist with, interact with, and resist the ‘real’, mimetic one. The implications of nuclear activity have been extensively portrayed in cinema: Japanese atomic bomb movies, for instance, aim for a ‘restoration of balance and harmony through playfulness’ (Shapiro, 2002: 6; emphasis in original). Such movies ‘are generally not marketed as consciousness-raising events or art, but entertainment’ (Shapiro, 2002: 11). In cinema, ‘universal to bomb films the world over are the (generally hopeful) themes of survival and achieving individual and social rebirth in an oppressive environment’ (Shapiro, 2002: 12), whereas in theatre, various degrees of apocalypse are more likely to materialize. While ‘[o]nly a handful of [non-Japanese] bomb films even mention Japan or the Japanese people’ (Shapiro, 2002: 54), the Aboriginal people
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Contamination 95
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who witnessed the bombing at Maralinga are frequently essential to theatrical narratives: a belated interest in the exploitation of Aboriginal people and their land is often the point. Theatre about nuclear activity began with the talk of testing. Jim Crawford’s Rocket Range (1946), set in an Aboriginal camp, offers a rare black perspective on the prospects of the Woomera rocket range. This play of conflicting visions reinforces that Aboriginal people were not informed that their land was being appropriated. Dymphna Cusack’s Pacific Paradise (1955) connects with Maralinga, even though it takes place on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Pacific Paradise is about the imminent explosion of a nuclear device that will obliterate the island and render the neighbouring islands uninhabitable. The agency detonating the bomb informs the inhabitants that they have two weeks to permanently vacate their island. Written shortly after the Bikini Atoll and Christmas Island tests, the play does not hide its anti-nuclear stance. These early plays and the examples to which I turn disrupt official versions of Australia’s nuclear history. While Maralinga has, since the failure of the tests, been defined by absence and symbolically written off the map, the plays that discuss Maralinga continue to signal ‘presences:’ they often begin by fixing a place on a map and then charting increasingly complex reminders of the instability of the landscape in the Australian cultural sphere. In staging a broadened ‘presence’, the plays heterotopically perform an alternative means of ordering and explaining difference in spatial and cultural terms. One might not expect such sites of contamination to be associated with methexis, but some of these heterotopic spaces do suggest methektic alternatives as they perform the non-place that has replaced ‘Maralinga’. In effect, they treat the sites of contamination as oppositional Lefebvrian representational space, but they also resituate the settler culture’s general failure to find the terms to express the anxieties of spatial (mis)management.
Sunrise At the time of Louis Nowra’s Sunrise (1983), Maralinga was almost exclusively a contaminated zone. As a result, this play’s locating of Maralinga is probably the most abstract of the mapping projects addressed here. Instead of being fixed to a geographical map, Maralinga is represented by the sun, which is the basis of the energy that the bombs reproduce. This abstraction of both place and the effects of nuclear activity sums up the play’s dilemma: how Clarrie, the patriarch of this family-reunion play, deals with the extensive anxieties of space in this unsettled nation.
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Clarrie has spent his career charting and mapping the constellation Cygnus, and the mapping of worlds is essential in this play. A witness to the Maralinga tests when he was a young scientist, Clarrie attempts to forget what he learned, but the implications of that knowledge continue to surface. He expresses the anxiety of his experience alternately through fascination and horror, unable to adequately describe it. His response – and that of most of the characters to their own anxieties – is to escape into other worlds or dimensions. Clarrie’s family is comprised of misfits. While many of these misfits inhabit other locations involuntarily, some, like Clarrie and his wife, Peg, seek heterotopias that make more sense for them than their actual surroundings. Peg is, he says, ‘one of those people who believe in the paranormal because reality holds too many mysteries’ (Nowra, 1983: 6), appearing to miss the irony of his own escape from ‘reality’. Various types of paranormal locations combine with Maralinga, and another type of apocalypse – bushfires – but the spatial manifestation of all these locations deliberately remains somewhat abstract. Clarrie discusses Maralinga in a long passage that suggests that even if he did not revisit the location of the tests, that place remains fixed in his mind: The beauty of it, the horror of it, so overawed me that, as I was driving back from the blast site, I got lost. After a while I came upon what looked like black melons scattered on the sand. When I was closer I saw that they were Aboriginals buried up to their necks, afraid of the black greasy smoke heading their way. ‘The devil spirit’ they called it. The old men of the tribe were standing in front of the group, pathetically trying to scare it way with their woomeras but they couldn’t compete with white fellas’ magic. All those Aboriginals are now blind. For days I was unable to sleep because my brain was soaked with this frightening, beautiful vision. It had come into being because men had imagined it. We wanted it! We had made it real! We were now capable of making real anything we imagined; truly, a dangerous age to be in. Men are barbarians with the creative gifts of gods. (Nowra, 1983: 40) He witnesses utopian potential becoming a ou-topian non-place. The terrifying beauty of the bomb and its attractive powers vie with the guilt associated with its devastating effects. Despite the inordinate difficulties in ascribing earthly mapping representations to outer space, mapping
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Contamination 97
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Cygnus is more imaginable to Clarrie than dealing with the responsibilities of the destruction of land and people at Maralinga. While Cygnus provides him with a heterotopia between the utopic and the ou-topic, he is unsuccessful in reconciling the ethical dilemma of Maralinga. His 14-year-old granddaughter realizes this and shoots him to protect him from what could be described as the sun, which she identifies as the basis of his anxiety. The sun, the energy of which is a core element in the nuclear tests, threatens to return metaphorically through the raging bushfires that edge closer to the house. The characters watch the bushfires, a return of repressed anxiety, in the same way that Clarrie watched Maralinga: with fascinated horror. As bushfires and nuclear tests are brought into the same representational field, there is an opportunity for a Gelder and Jacobs model of the uncanny, but this play abstracts the effects of Maralinga so that the unsettled implications of the explosions are staged, but few of the many ineffectual characters have any idea of what else to do but watch. The heterotopias in this play provide only an escape: this alternative ordering on stage barely intersects with the ‘real’ world. Clarrie’s abstracted (and distracted) relationship with Maralinga is reflected in the set which stages few fixed locations. The stage directions in Act I Scene 3 indicate, ‘We have very little idea of the interior of [Clarrie’s] house. It is really only the essential props in the limbo of night talk and self-absorption’ (Nowra, 1983: 21). The set for the 1983 (Adelaide) Lighthouse production provided a grassy stage that became the outdoors, the veranda, and even inside the house, signalled by a few subtle props. The sense of depth around the house was created by a scrim, behind which appeared to be an exotic garden that various characters could be seen exploring. Instead of naturalistic detail, the play’s spatiality focuses on landscape and nature, specifically the sun’s manifestations: whether it is being harnessed into nuclear activity, or running wild as bushfire. While Clarrie maintained that the nuclear tests bestowed on humans the ‘creative gifts of gods’ (Nowra, 1983: 40), in neither case are humans depicted as completely in control, even though the bushfire is contained, just at the edge of the property.13 Clarrie lies dead and the sun rises, flooding the stage with light. Rather than a blackout, the characters ‘disappear’ into the blinding, unredemptive light of the sunrise. The sun, Maralinga, and the landscape overwhelm the stage in Sunrise, threatening any perception of settlement that the nation might otherwise suggest. The insufficiently mapped cultural landscape of an abstracted Maralinga is a problem of space and ethics that Clarrie cannot solve.
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Since Sunrise, Maralinga plays have attempted to map the geographical and metaphoric locations more specifically and productively. Janis Balodis’s 1989 Heart for the Future combines memories of nuclear testing at Maralinga with the power of the media, a phenomenon that becomes almost as apocalyptic for some of the characters. It is likely the first play to stage Maralinga. Tony Tripp’s dominating set for the Melbourne Theatre Company premiere positions an enormous heap of earth to represent Maralinga inside ‘a globe that is scarred by a fissure’ (Neill, 1989: 7). The globe is also a split atom. This cracked sphere contains not just Maralinga but also an enormous video screen for the play’s television studio: these two worlds coexist in a deliberately awkward form. The unsuitability of both worlds for some characters prompts the construction of a heterotopia that operates more as an alternate ordering than it did in Sunrise. Heart for the Future stages a computer-generated documentary (a precursor to reality television) which follows the ultra-marathon career of Helen Bertells. But since Helen’s forthright, independent personality does not rate well, a photogenic actress ‘plays’ Helen in the television show, although Helen continues to do most of the running. The play manipulates illusion and reality as the audience watches ‘live’ video footage screened from the television show, even at the same time as seeing Helen ‘perform’ live on stage. In addition, the audience also witnesses the actress playing Helen on screen, footage which the audience knows is ‘faked’ (Kelly: 1992a, 125). Helen experiences a breakdown and runs off the pre-set path into the desert, but since the ratings are otherwise so good, the actress replaces Helen, in effect taking over her life even more than she had already. The actress stands in for Helen, coming to stand in place of her as well. While this proves to be helpful to Helen, it is devastating for the actress. For Neill, the manipulation of the media world demonstrates ‘the perverse capacity of images to become more real than their referents [and] how images control our lives, and hence, how the people who control images control our lives’ (1992a : 6).14 Helen abandons the programme at Maralinga, where Rutherford lives on the edge of the prohibited lands. The real version of Helen’s story differs markedly from what is televised, the footage ‘fixed’ by the producer to project the desired image. Rather than staging the absence of Maralinga, Heart for the Future stages a version of the geographical Maralinga augmented by rival, manufactured images. Locations, action, and actors are doubled.
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Heart for the Future
Dreams conflict with reality, as ghosts and ‘real’ characters (versus the actors playing them) compete, each one offering a possible way of filling this landscape with meaning. The media narrative illustrates how the best ‘take’ is selected for its own ends, as the play encourages the audience to discriminate between and among the various media depictions of Maralinga. The actual site of Maralinga is managed, in a manner of speaking, by Rutherford who has appointed himself as its gatekeeper. He takes tourists to the site: they are amazed by its resemblance to the rest of the country, instead of being either utopic, ou-topic, or even dystopic. They want this non-place to be identifiably different; its similarity forces them to rethink what this landscape has come to mean, specifically the process by which meaning has been made for it. Events that took place at Maralinga continue to require mediation and remediation. Named for a New Zealand pioneer in nuclear science, the depressed Rutherford attempted to escape his illness by retreating to the ‘end of the world’, a place that he decided was Maralinga. Haunted by the explosions and by his father’s role in them, Rutherford took part in a government enquiry into the site and stayed on afterwards, sharing a life with Esther.15 Ever the tour guide, Rutherford explains the level of secrecy surrounding the tests. The workers at the site only realized the gravity of what had taken place when an Aboriginal family was removed from the Marcoo crater: ‘They scrubbed the hides off that family under pressurized showers and then they [the workers] were told that there hadn’t been any aborigines there. To say otherwise was to be shot or put in jail for thirty years’ (Balodis, 1988: 39). In Heart for the Future, several conflicting narratives are proposed, but few appear to make sense. In response, Rutherford and Helen remake the actual location of Maralinga into an unlikely heterotopia, as part of the process of disentangling it from some of its other associations. Rutherford’s fascination with the location results partly from his father, who suffered a recurring dream that he was trapped in Maralinga: ‘He knew he dreamed of extinction’ (Balodis, 1988: 39). Maralinga is, however, where both Rutherford and Helen reconnect with family that have haunted them throughout the play (Rutherford’s father and the elusive child figure that appears in Helen’s sights). Helen stays with Rutherford, eventually having a child with him. When they leave Maralinga as a reconfigured family, they return from a heterotopic alternative ordering to the ‘real’ world. Their heterotopic respite and return to ‘reality’ does, however, still need to be reconciled with Heart for the Future’s parallel narrative, the television programme’s construction of a dream machine that attempts
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to overtake reality. Stepping out of the media manipulations of the programme enables Helen to redefine the non-place of Maralinga, compared with the actress whose movements have been restricted by the television studio. Helen’s experience suggests how mediatized configurations of the world can be altered by looking beyond the façade, but this relative success is somewhat individual. While the audience witnesses the highly constructed making of the ultra-marathon programme and the actress’s subsequent soap opera, the viewers for whom the programme is made will see only a straightforward, perfected version of ‘real’ life. Further, if extinction is not going to arrive by means of a nuclear mushroom cloud, the hugely-successful computergenerated programme that already controls life, death, and subjectivity for the unnamed actress threatens to take over its audiences in the ‘real’ world. The parallel narrative – characterized by the (utopian?) television show that celebrates the achieving of dreams – turns to a nightmare for the actress, risking removing her from location, place, and even a basis in reality. The play is more than a simple rejection of the official Maralinga story or an apocalyptic interpretation of either narrative. While the media organization’s predetermined vision thwarts human agency and misunderstands (prevents?) the potential for ‘off-message’ meanings, Heart for the Future reinforces that the productive potential in the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny can only be realized once interpretation is made possible. Interpretation itself is foregrounded here, as much as the particularities of location. When the non-place that overtook Maralinga’s utopia is equated with the rest of the country and for tourists becomes indistinguishable from the rest of ‘Australia’, a new interpretational frame is required. The heterotopic potential in Maralinga has influenced at least some of the characters to refuse to accept the media organization’s packaged vision of the world; likewise, the audience is encouraged to interrogate both the televisual image presentation and the non-place location ascribed to Maralinga. Tiger Country Whereas Heart for the Future maps Maralinga amid an environment of misinformation, Andrea Lemon and Sarah Cathcart’s Tiger Country (1995) charts a variety of interpretations of the same territory, over the top of one another, to generate a different map.16 Tiger Country explores the lives of four women who have lived in the remote landscape between Maralinga and Woomera in South Australia at various times in the last 150 years. Cathcart plays four unrelated women: the
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Contamination 101
early nineteenth-century Louisa, who assumes that Australia will only be a bit more rustic than the genteel English life she left behind; the opal-mining septuagenarian Iris, who has lived through Maralinga and an alien abduction; Barb, a city girl who now lives on a sheep station; and Stella, a 12-year-old girl from 1970s Woomera. An additional character, the Aboriginal woman Lucy, does not appear on stage but she links the white women to provide yet another perspective on landscapes known and unknown. Each of the women recounts a meeting with Lucy (or, in the case of Louisa, with someone who represents Lucy), an intriguing character who does not appear on stage. Lucy nevertheless is reported to provide three of the characters with help in making a significant, methektic link with landscape.17 While the borders of the play’s territory are marked by Maralinga in the west and Woomera in the east, at the core of the play is the relationship between literal geography and metaphysical territory that is ‘out there beyond the boundaries of our experience and understanding’ (Tiger Country programme notes).18 Trina Parker’s set, a bare stage with a sundial floorcloth, is punctuated by video projections that help differentiate the characters. It provides a canvas on which the narratives create ‘place’. As it stages the experiences of the women, this monodrama combines many possible meanings of ‘alien land’, whether it is the topographical landscape itself and methektic markings on the land, the world of underground opal mining, or even outer space. The play offers a way of approaching the unknown – both physical and metaphysical – via this usually ill-defined landscape. In other words, the characters confront the unknown in order to chart an appropriate place for themselves in the landscape. Anecdotes and stage directions regarding literal and figurative fallout from Maralinga punctuate the play: ‘A flash of white light the sound of a bomb going off scattered images of moments from the show interspersed with images of destruction science nature beauty horror’ (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 55). The women negotiate how to read the unknown – or the ‘out there’ – in their landscapes: ‘Sarah Cathcart and Andrea Lemon argue that they are trying to see, carve or highlight the place of white women in the landscape’ (Grehan, 2001: 51). Louisa’s experience with Australia is negative: she is unable to reconcile herself with the vastly different landscape. The three women who do engage with the landscape do so through heterotopic rethinking of their surroundings. Barb moves to the remote station when she marries, but the landscape generates a fear so immense that she cannot leave the house. Her ‘backyard’ is 2000 square miles and it gives her the impression
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that she’s ‘drowning’ (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 31) in the vast, inexplicable nature of this landscape. She explains to the audience that her response changes when Lucy takes her to a corroboree, the traditional ceremony that celebrates and preserves indigenous understanding of land and law. Through Lucy’s very different perception of the world (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 39), Barb comes to revel in the diversity and beauty of the land, even the land bordering on the contamination zone. She is able to transform this personal and ‘official’ non-place (the land that threatens to drown her borders, both contaminated land and the rocket range) into an articulated location in which she finds her place. Whereas Barb’s alternate social and geographical formation is provided for her by Lucy, Iris chooses her own. Iris and Stella, who respond to the place and to the unknown infinitely better than the other two women, expand the definitions of ‘location’. Rather than rethinking non-places, Iris and Stella generate additional ways to interpret the known and ‘unknown’ landscape that has captured their imaginations. Both these characters read their world in terms of outer space, constructing heterotopias that enable them to deal with the surrounding landscape and the isolation associated with it. Twelve-year-old Stella interprets her surroundings in terms of the rational universe of astronomy and science. If Woomera tracks satellites and missiles, Stella tracks knowledge. In her attempt to understand the magnitude of the universe, she appears to fly over her town, watching it in miniature while reading the broader context of the heavens. She imitates the satellite tracking function of Woomera (then an American satellite tracking station as well as a rocket launch test site) from the perspective of ‘knowing’ it all: ‘we know what’s going on everywhere in the world everywhere in the universe’ (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 21). Yet amid this world of surveillance, Stella learns the significance of a more private, psychic connection with the landscape that is essential for survival, once she experiences the limitations of the rational, scientific model of world organization. She notices the absolute regularity of Woomera’s town planning: ‘[n]obody ever dies in my town because nobody ever grows old’ (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 21). Further, the Americans manage and control all operations in the town to the point that she learns American history and geography in school instead of Australian history, in another lapse in Australian sovereignty that also yields no coexistence. When a missile crisis threatens the Americans, who are then evacuated out of the country, the white Australians are abandoned, just as Aboriginal people were 20 years earlier during the Maralinga tests. Stella’s fascination with space shifts then,
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Contamination 103
and she focuses instead on her special ‘earthly’ place, a cave with indigenous paintings. As she tries to understand the paintings and their significance, she realizes that her grid-framed town does not ‘fit’ the undulations of the local landscape. When Lucy visits the cave, Stella comes to accommodate additional interpretations of the landscape, as she learns, like Barb, to read her own world perspective in the context of others. Like Barb, Stella learns from Lucy how she might re-establish a place in this (cultural) landscape by learning a methektic response to it. Iris names her roadhouse the Moonrock, based on the appearance of the almost barren landscape (likely in the vicinity of the opal mining town, Coober Pedy). Like Clarrie in Sunrise, Iris has an association with the Maralinga explosion: she claims to have been abducted by aliens in the lead up to the Maralinga tests. While Stella negotiates a way between a rationalist scientific model and Lucy’s methektic world-view that is closely associated with the landscape as given, Iris chooses to adopt yet another interpretation of the world that includes alien visitations. Crucially, none of these possibilities is completely accepted or discounted in Tiger Country: rather, the simultaneous existence of all interpretations helps reconfigure the expressions of landscape, culture, and self. Each woman’s story brings a different configuration to the broad mapping of what was once considered an unknown (geographical) landscape. In a play where locating oneself is of central concern, it is not surprising that Lucy is reported to have told Barb, ‘Maybe you’ll find yourself one day’ (Lemon and Cathcart, 1996: 57). The women find themselves in metaphysical and geographical landscapes that are otherwise described as non-places. With the help of Lucy and her methektic relationship with the landscape, three of the women establish various ways of existing in the landscape on its terms, rather than replicating unsuitable mimetic models. Cathcart performs multiple responses to landscape in the same body and on the same bare stage: the play negotiates how these once ‘unknowable’ landscapes may simultaneously have different, overlapping associations for different characters. In this landscape, numerous conceptions of space coexist relatively easily, as the once non-place provides a fertile (stage) space for reconfiguring potential meaning(s) for place. The Career Highlights of the Mamu The first play by an Aboriginal person to directly address nuclear contamination, The Career Highlights of the Mamu by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson (2002), generates a more positive approach to contamination than one might expect.19 Mamu creates presence out of official
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absence: the performance of place that is supposed to be contaminated is demonstrated to be richly layered and nuanced. Originally staged as part of the 2002 Adelaide Festival, in which Maralinga was one of the featured topics, The Career Highlights of the Mamu substantially extends the possible staged interpretations of Maralinga. This play depicts Maralinga beyond just its mamu or devil connotations, for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences. Far from a non-place, this multivalent representation of Maralinga is mapped carefully in cultural and historical terms, if not according to ‘pure’ cartographic practices. Mamu uses video (shot by indigenous film-maker Debbie Gittins), projections of Wankatja (Spinifex) people and landscape, maps, and footage of Jamieson seeing first hand the damage that a nuclear bomb wrought in Hiroshima. In the original production, some projections were live feeds, bringing the ‘real-time’ literal landscape into the theatre. The narrative of Mamu continues to accrue ways of reading this one-time non-place. Mamu could be seen to refract, rather than abstract, the past to anchor a non-place that is actually laden with potential spatial interpretations. In other words, whereas in Sunrise, Clarrie and his family chose alternative heterotopic worlds as a form of avoidance of the difficulties in their ‘real’ worlds, Mamu explores all the strands of the past that contribute to the current experience of Maralinga in their present. In generating additional possible interpretations, Jamieson’s play successfully provides the heterotopic alternative ordering of the world as it establishes the necessary visual image of Maralinga for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Mamu’s ironic opening – with Jamieson joking about the genesis of the play being his desire to present ‘The Trevor Jamieson Show’, his life story, which was a trend among indigenous performers in the late 1990s – sets the scene for subverting expectations. For what would ostensibly be a one-man play, Jamieson decided to research his history by asking his family for stories: ‘I had to find out how we all got to where we are today. How it all changed so quickly, how we left the land, and lost so many people’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 8). Things do not go to plan: his family and their stories ‘took over’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 2). The play – punctuated by country and pop songs performed by Jamieson and the band – then morphed to involve numerous members of Jamieson’s family. Many of his family had never been inside a theatre before, let alone on a stage, but almost 20 of them assist in the performance. The play combines performance styles, histories, and spaces. It blends song, dance, storytelling, comedy, and video, while several spatial planes operate concurrently: at one level, the specificity of the landscape being
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Contamination 105
described is projected as the play’s backdrop (whether video footage of the Perth cityscape, important sites in Jamieson’s ancestral land, or maps of the part of Australia he is talking about). The physical mapping of the land on the floor anchors the stories in place, even in a venue that itself has little or no association with the particular landscape/country being depicted. On another spatial plane, the floor cloth is a large dot-painting ‘map’ of the family’s land, highlighting both a topographical and sacred interpretation of the land that his family tends. These two ‘spaces’ are connected directly by the emu dances performed by members of his family to enact the jukurrpa (or dreaming) that the dot painting depicts. The dancers are positioned in front of the video representation of the specific landscape that the dances protect.20 The emu dances ‘haven’t been performed for 30 – maybe 40 years’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 5), let alone performed outside the community. The dances exemplify methexis in action: they perform actual landscape as well as the responsibility for that landscape. Even after the contamination of their country, the Wankatja maintained spiritual and spatial connections with the land they have occupied since the last ice age. They continue to act as custodians of the land; to reinforce the point, members of Jamieson’s family, the actual land custodians, sit around a campfire at the edge of the stage. The old tyres from earth-moving machinery that are piled on either side of the stage even connect the traditional world to more practical aspects of traversing space in the outback today. The layers of landscape continue to accrue meaning. The timeless attention to land preservation is juxtaposed with the specific time when whites arrived. Jamieson’s narrative takes him to various parts of Western Australia, into South Australia, and even to Japan. Following the tests, his people moved through the Great Victorian Desert to Kalgoorlie (and later, Perth), rather than Yalata to which the Tjarutja people were removed. Jamieson’s multi-layered map renders ridiculous the precautions taken to clear the supposedly ‘empty’ and uninhabited area: the orders to leave failed to recognize that moving from one’s own land onto other people’s land carried with it potential threats. Those who were warned about the danger did not want to trespass on other people’s land that wasn’t theirs by virtue of thousands of years of ownership, knowledge, and jukurrpa (Laurie, 2002a: 17). The effects of the explosions were also inadequately explained: ‘The men of the tribe had attacked the rolling radiation cloud with spears, identifying it as a Mamu Devil Spirit’ (Eccles, 2002: 2). The Aboriginal people feared the planes that dropped (English only) leaflets that were intended to warn of the impending explosions (Archdall,
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2002b: 71), while ‘[t]wo native patrol officers were employed to clear an area ten times the size of Japan’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 9). In Mamu, members of Jamieson’s family detail what they remember of the immediate effects of the radiation poisoning: ‘We don’t know how many people were lost, directly by the tests, from radiation sickness, from the new life and the new sickness, alcohol’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 9). By the time the mushroom cloud is screened, from a blast at Maralinga that was ‘1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb’ (Rankin and Jamieson, 2002: 12), Mamu has already established a detailed, historicized map of the area. Jamieson and his extended family understand that there is no possibility of returning to a pre-test state. They know that the country will be seriously affected by nuclear fallout for thousands of years, but the conclusion to the play celebrates the achievement of native title. The Wankatja were able to return to parts of the country in the Great Victorian Desert, known as Tjuntjuntjara, ownership of which was granted by the Federal Court in 2001 (Laurie, 2002a: 17).21 Such connection to country is essential for spiritual well-being, since contamination does not remove the jukurrpa meanings associated with it. In accommodating all aspects of Jamieson’s culture, Mamu layers interpretational possibilities to perform the complex space of the Maralinga landscape, illustrating theatrically both the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny and, even more productively, methektic reconfigurations of landscape, despite the nuclear fallout. The land remains sacred despite the profane treatment of it. Mamu does not overlook the realities and tragedies of contamination; nevertheless, it attempts to move beyond just documenting that moment in a landscape that is much more than just a test site, and that continues to have a tangible connection to Jamieson’s people today. In Mamu, the heterotopia becomes a reality as the stories connected to this landscape travel through time and space, gathering new combinations of influences, ensuring the preservation of the jukurrpa.22 Explorations of the specific geography of Maralinga are rarely limited to just topography. The four plays chart contemporary geographies for Maralinga, even if their maps require negotiation beyond conventional navigation. While each layers various interpretations of this landscape, the four together situate Maralinga in a wealth of representational space, rather than the non-place to which it had been consigned. As Mamu makes clear, no amount of opposition can remove literal contamination, but the plays successfully and productively stage such a non-place in the national imaginary. In some cases, the staging of methektic space takes place on stage whereas others draw attention to the potential for
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locating methektic responses outside the theatre as well. The generation of representational space that resists the non-place rhetoric also reduces the likelihood of such catastrophes being authorized again.
By way of conclusion to this section, I gloss other manifestations of this order of contamination. Some plays locate contamination in the skies in an expansion of geographical and symbolic representational space. Nowra’s Summer of the Aliens (1992) and Elaine Acworth’s Composing Venus (1994) stage heterotopias to deal with the unknowability of the world as Sputnik orbits overhead and the Russians threaten missile invasion. Composing Venus is set in Charters Towers, in outback Queensland, in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik, the Russian satellite. Nowra’s Summer of the Aliens takes place in suburban Melbourne around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Other plays that address contamination, particularly those that are structured by biological contagion rather than nuclear contaminants, highlight spatial restrictions. The threat of contamination by biological agents is increasingly causing anxieties internationally, whether HIV or ‘bird flu’ or other such contagious illnesses. Yet, rather than exploring multiple interpretations of landscape, biological contamination plays tend to focus on the restrictions of space, whether geographical or metaphoric. Eva Johnson’s Murras (1988), which means ‘hands’, is not about unleashing a contaminant, but rather controlling or even preventing ‘contamination’ in the form of sterilization of Aboriginal women. Taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jayda, Ruby’s only daughter, has discovered that she has been rendered sterile by mysterious injections that were given to her to protect her from unspecified ‘disease’ while she was on the mission. The effects of this ‘experiment’ are devastating to a family for whom procreation is the vital means of passing on traditional skills to subsequent generations. The family’s realization of the implications of Jayda’s sterilization coincides with their forced relocation from their fringe-dwelling existence to the city. The irrecoverable severing of the family from traditional modes of regeneration puts all members at risk, literally and spiritually diminishing the community as a whole. The contamination is located in the literal ‘space’ of Jayda’s womb, a space that is correlative with cultural landscape. Ben Ellis’s Falling Petals (2003), which takes place in a small, droughtaffected town called Hollow, charts more directly the anxiety caused by biological contaminants released in the town. Hollow suddenly faces the situation of schoolchildren catching a highly contagious mystery
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Other types of contamination
disease. As the disease affects – and kills – more and more children, beginning with the youngest, the town’s response is to cordon off the children who are effectively left to their own devices. Attempts to escape are thwarted as all spatial retreats are closed off. Abandoned by the town, their restricted space gets narrower as the unaffected adults blame the children: ‘You kids brought it on yourselves’ (Ellis, 2003: 64). In both plays, contaminated people suffer physical restrictions from others. The burning of the dead bodies and the circulating on stage of white ash in Falling Petals recalls wartime concentration camps, while forced sterilization in Murras evokes a modern twist on the recurring traces of genocide that characterizes Australian history. Such social and spatial control exerted over some ‘contaminated’ individuals brings me to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers: the same issues of contamination and quarantine that have defined the Maralinga debates have been assigned to refugees who were held in the now-disused Woomera site. The theatre is one of the places where the relationship between the physical and metaphoric contamination and Australian cultural identity has been played out most publicly, although as the remainder of the chapter argues, there is virtually no room on stage for a productive engagement with the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny. Any opportunity for rethinking the space of asylum seekers happens in the gap between staged space and the world outside the theatre.
Woomera Having a place in the world makes the human animal a social being. (Sennett, 1997: 67) Since Europeans arrived in Australia in 1788 they have had two obsessions. The first obsession is with locking people up. The second obsession is with the hordes from Asia, the yellow peril. (Chris Sidoti, former Human Rights Commissioner, quoted in McMaster, 2001: v) Owing to the secrecy associated with its missile testing history, Woomera virtually ceased to exist in the cultural imaginary until asylum seekers were housed there in concentration camp-like facilities. They were vilified for trying to flee conditions in their home countries, while government discourse labelled them a new type of contaminant. The exploration of the space between utopia and ou-topia in the Maralinga
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Contamination 109
plays has largely been productive, but in the case of Woomera asylumseeker plays, the boundaries of the non-place location have been established much more thoroughly by detention-centre fences and the associated rhetoric. The theatre, prominent though it has been in the attempts to free asylum seekers, has generally not yet succeeded in reconfiguring this non-place. The limitations on those who have been held in detention camps like Woomera have been so extensive that in most instances, it is not possible to establish a heterotopia that might help construct an alternate method of ordering. This section explores the parameters of this detention non-place and the effects it has on the material lives of the people living there. Before turning to the ways in which theatre stages the detention centres’ reflection of the spatial dynamic of the nation, I briefly map the space of Woomera’s site for and of ‘contaminated’ people. From late 1999 until late 2003, the isolated township of Woomera, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, held asylum seekers awaiting the results of their petitions for refugee status.23 Asylum seekers at Woomera were kept in a ‘virtual Australia’, an Australia deliberately set apart from the rest of the country. Woomera epitomized the government’s desire to locate (or dislocate) those people who do not ‘fit in’ or cannot easily be identified as ‘Australian’ (see Perera, 2002). Its actual and discursive effects on representations of otherness in Australia cannot be underestimated. Most importantly, the events inside Woomera and other detention centres were carefully kept off the television screens of the Australian people: For over a decade, DIMA [Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, now Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs] had imposed a regime of censorship over the detention camps using the rationale that a photograph in the papers might help asylum seekers make a refugee claim or put their families at risk back home. As a result, Australians had only the haziest picture of what life was like behind the wire in Port Hedland and Woomera. (Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 135) Hazy pictures were brought sharply into media focus, however, when riots and escapes occurred, events that could be screened with the government’s blessing to reinforce the danger that asylum seekers might signify for the ‘rest’ of Australia. The asylum seekers themselves – several thousand people, mostly from Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan – lived in barracks at Woomera,
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surrounded by high fences, razor wire, and floodlights. Similar camps exist in isolated parts of Western Australia (Port Hedland and Curtin) and elsewhere in South Australia. There are also holding centres in outer-suburban Melbourne (Maribyrnong) and Sydney (Villawood). The inhabitants were asylum seekers under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, although the government prefers the term ‘illegal immigrants’ or the even more pejorative ‘illegals’ or ‘queue-jumpers’. These men, women, and children were effectively prisoners with access to few services and facilities. English lessons were not permitted, even though government officials criticized many asylum seekers’ poor grasp of English. Children at Woomera were not allowed outside the centre (Mares, 2001: 56), even though many of the facilities in this town were otherwise unused, and the detention centre had no recreational facilities. One former detainee said her centre did not have any play equipment, even a soccer ball for the children: ‘It was like leaving the children in the desert’ (quoted in Mares, 2001: 57). This was at Maribyrnong, not one of the actual ‘desert’ locations. Journalists were not allowed into Woomera and officials were forbidden from speaking to the media (Mares, 2001: 12). An exception was a brief visit allowed for a group of journalists, who quickly learned that the sections of the centre they were allowed into had been ‘sanitized’. For some years, most detention centres provided no phones; when one phone per centre was eventually installed, it only permitted overseas calls, preventing asylum seekers from contacting anyone within Australia (although these restrictions were eventually removed and more phones were later installed). Originally, no letters were permitted in or out of the centre, and when television sets did arrive, they were wired to play only videos and not news programmes (Mares, 2001: 14). Allegations of abuse and protests against conditions resulted in hunger strikes, riots, and escape attempts: a riot at Woomera in August 2000 marked the first time a water cannon had been used in Australia to control crowds (Mares, 2001: 35). There are countless reports of depression, suicide attempts, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, particularly since asylum seekers do not know the length of their ‘sentences’, unlike prisoners in jail: ‘You don’t know when you are going to get out. You’ve got no idea whether it is going to happen’ (Patrick McGorry, quoted. in Mares, 2001: 81). The desperation expressed by asylum seekers is best illustrated by an incident at Curtin detention centre in early 2000. Fearing removal from Australia and return to countries they felt would execute them, hundreds of men began a hunger strike. The more resolute – almost
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Contamination 111
20 – sewed their own lips together with ordinary needles and thread ‘to communicate’ in an ‘eloquent’ statement ‘the frustration and anger of [being] made mute and impotent. [I]t shows what people may do when the only power they have is over their own bodies’ (Mares, 2001: 15). They then dug (symbolic) shallow graves for themselves. Such actions echo those of other detainees/prisoners around the world, but there is no evidence that the detainees at Curtin were acting with knowledge of other protests: they had simply reached the limits of their ability to accept their treatment. They may have anticipated that their actions would be widely reported in the press, but such events were not subject to extensive scrutiny or reporting for some years. Even then, it was the detainees themselves who were labelled barbaric, not the conditions under which they were held (see Mares, 2001: 14-17). The lip-sewing underscores the detainees’ lack of control over any place beyond their own bodies: without any opportunity to mark out a space of their own, they marked their bodies, an act that demonstrates a profound level of frustration. As such incidents recurred, Australia’s actions were questioned by the UN (Amnesty International, 2000; United Nations, 2000), but an increasingly resolute government decided that voters approved of its treatment of asylum seekers: the ‘performance’ of desperation in the form of lip-sewing demanded an audience response that it was unable to elicit. The people incarcerated at Woomera maintained that they were landless. While they were kept at Woomera and related centres, they were kept out of the public eye of ‘ordinary’ Australians, and thus were given even less opportunity to lay a claim to Australian space, either literally or metaphorically. In the detention camps, asylum seekers wondered if they had reached Australia after all. In some cases, hessian covered the fences so that the asylum seekers could not even see ‘Australia’ (Independent Education Union, 2002: 14). Asylum seekers had been placed in an Australia that is effectively ‘not’ Australia: set apart from the rest of the country to quarantine off intrusions into a nostalgic representation of the Australian identity. Australia had, in the 1970s, established a multicultural policy (see Chapter 4) in order to promote a climate of cultural diversity, given the multiple ethnic heritages to which its citizens belonged, particularly following the migration of displaced Europeans after World War II. The asylum-seeker experience has altered the way in which alterity is configured. During Woomera’s operation as a detention centre, references to migration and alterity came to connote danger and containment such that the contemporary migrant was deemed dangerous, and
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needed to be locked away behind barbed wire and legislation, and, if possible, deported.24 Mares reads the vilification inherent in the current detention strategy as putting ‘the credibility of all refugees in question’ (2001: 160). Most asylum seekers at Woomera and other detention centres breached the borders of Australia when they arrived by boat without proper papers. The longstanding fear of the yellow peril in the nation’s cultural imaginary continues to emerge, as the nation’s borders once again seem permeable. ‘Even more persistent than the myth of White Australia in popular thinking has been the myth of the “threat from the North.” A few boats appear on the horizon and public opinion, followed by public policy, goes into a tail spin’ (Jupp, 2002: 11). The most notorious example of the effects of contamination that refugee and asylum seekers represent to the Australian government is the Tampa affair. The Norwegian container ship Tampa rescued 438 people from Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan who were headed for Christmas Island on a too-tiny boat that threatened to sink on 23 August 2001. Prevented from landing in Australia and boarded by Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) troops, the ship became home to the refugees before they were moved on 3 September 2001 to the Manoora, an Australian troop ship that would take them to New Zealand, New Guinea, and Nauru, or anywhere but Australia. The Tampa affair damaged Australia’s position in the world with respect to both refugees and maritime rescue law, but Prime Minister John Howard insisted, ‘We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (quoted in Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 277). The asylum seekers were kept off Australian shores: Pleas for asylum have to be made inside the ‘migration zone’ which does not include the territorial seas. Canberra had closed Flying Fish Cove [Christmas Island] and put a ring of SAS troops around the asylum seekers to keep them from reaching the zone, defined as Australia’s dry land and harbours. As an added precaution, anyone with power to accept asylum pleas made outside the zone – DIMA officers and agents, police, soldiers flying the flag – were being kept a very long way from the ship. In the eyes of the refugee world, the asylum seekers had reached Australia, but according to Australian law they were still a kilometre or two from safe haven. (Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 112; original emphasis) The Manoora could therefore not provide the ‘dry harbour’ required to lodge a claim.
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Contamination 113
In July 2005, the Howard government changed the nation’s borders, removing islands traditionally recognized as ‘Australia’ from its protection zone, exemplifying the heightened anxiety regarding Australia’s borders, Australian territory, and the identity of Australia itself. Following the 2001 excision of Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Prime Minister Howard retrospectively removed almost 4000 islands from Australia’s migration zone, including Melville Island, one of the Tiwi Islands, 80 kilometres off the coast of Darwin, and home to a large community of Aboriginal people (Morris, 2003: 1). This redrawing of the borders of the nation, both literally and metaphorically, segregates more places as ‘non-places’. The retrospectivity emphasizes the attempts to exclude asylum seekers. While Woomera is closed, a new site is under construction on Christmas Island, one of the islands no longer deemed to be ‘Australia’ in terms of any asylum seekers who reach it (Emery and Dodd, 2005: 1).25 These deterritorialized islands remain ‘Australia’ for other purposes, in a strange hybrid of non-place determined only by government convenience. The anxiety associated with the contamination of the outsider continues to guide the actions of the government.26 The timing of the Tampa incident is crucial: it is impossible to separate it from events several days later, the attacks on New York and Washington. In the wake of 11 September 2001, refugees were equated with terrorists in the same way that the war in Iraq has been confused with Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda, for the simple reason that men of Middle-Eastern appearance and backgrounds are involved in each (see Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 280–1).27 Following these events, the anxiety associated with the historical ‘yellow peril’ emerged again, but this time, this anxiety broadened beyond a vaguely defined ‘Asia’ to implicate people who are even more vaguely described as ‘of MiddleEastern Descent’, many of whom have arrived in Australia via Asian ports. The Tampa is the most spectacular example of Australian border control: the alteration of exactly what an Australian shore is demonstrates the extent to which the government of the day felt compromised by the breaches in its borders.28 The only Australian land some asylum seekers reached would be the land in which they were buried (see Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 284). Australia is not the only nation to hold asylum seekers in detention, but it is distinctive in the way in which theatrical responses to it illustrate the nation’s preoccupation with the anxieties of settlement and unsettlement.
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Contamination 115
[T]his is a nation hostile to its foundations. For much of our brief history we have been preoccupied with controlling our borders to prevent the entry of others. The White Australia policy is recent, not ancient history, its influence is still felt. (Mares, 2001: 5) The Australian government has pursued a policy of maintaining control over who enters the country, regardless of existing borders, humanitarianism, and UN obligations to refugees. It reallocates land as ‘Australia’ or ‘not Australia’ to deny refugees the opportunity to make a claim here: in effect, the government removes sovereignty to maintain sovereignty. The people who are caught in this non-place, or ‘not-Australia’, lose even more than the literal place in the world that they, as refugees, seek: they lose metaphoric place, and with it, hope for the future. I examine theatre about asylum seekers which focuses on the most infamous ‘notAustralia’ location, Woomera.29 Certainly the idea of sequestering otherness is not new to Australian theatre. Two examples discussed earlier – Andrew Bovell’s Holy Day and Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age – remove multiply defined ‘others’ in order to eliminate the threat of contamination for ‘authentic’ Australia. Like the Maralinga plays, theatre by and about refugees attempts to anchor spatiality and hence subjectivity, but most refugee plays face the even greater challenge of no land, space, or place at all. Such plays cannot generate heterotopic zones from which to reconfigure their worlds: most remain stuck in the gap between utopia and ou-topia, so embedded is the quarantining of asylum seekers. The most literal example of this limbo emerges in Citizen X (2002) where K explains, ‘It is more than one year now since the federal government rejected my application for asylum but no country will agree to welcome me. What can I do?’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 35). Even though the plays can neither construct heterotopias nor productively explore the potential of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, they still investigate physical and metaphoric incarceration, as manifestations of the anxiety of Freud’s uncanny that continues to manifest in Australian cultural representation. In doing so, they articulate the edges of the spatial and discursive limits to subjectivity for asylum seekers. There are a number of ways in which theatre has introduced the figure of the refugee on stage, particularly in the context of the recent wave of asylum seekers and detention centres. First, most directly
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Asylum-seeker plays
address the fears that refugees contaminate the ‘pure’ land and culture of Australia by examining the ‘non-space’ in which asylum seekers are contained; second, most implicate the audience in some form of the incarceration of asylum seekers. I look at several plays that focus on the fundamental contestation over space, including Linda Jaivin’s Halal-el-Mashakel (2003), Melbourne Workers Theatre and Platform 27’s The Waiting Room (2002), Sidetrack Theatre’s Citizen X (2003), Michael Gurr’s Something to Declare (2003), Towfiq Al-Qady’s Nothing but Nothing: One Refugee’s Story (2005), Ben Ellis’s These People (2003), and Christine Evans’s Slow Falling Bird (2005). Given the comparability in their approaches, I consider most of the plays together. Citizen X and Something to Declare are based on direct testimony (letters or interviews). Letter-writing campaigns organized by Australians to communicate with isolated asylum seekers provided the letters, while other types of verbatim testimony accounts of refugees also contribute to this form of theatre.30 Given the distancing effects of testimony and the need to protect some refugees, the characters are often unnamed (beyond Actor 1 or Actor 3 in Something to Declare), or only identified by a letter of the alphabet (such as K and S in Citizen X). Such disidentification intensifies the expression of placelessness that has come to be part of seeking asylum in Australia. Nothing but Nothing is the author’s own story, whereas The Waiting Room and These People combine creative and testimonial material. Slow Falling Bird and Halal-el-Mashakel are creative responses to the issues, contextualized by extensive research. Non-place and its limits Refugees have, by definition, no place in which to reside and, given the measures to keep them out of Australia, no position from which they can speak. K explains to his correspondent in Citizen X: ‘What you say Australia is like sounds very beautiful but unfortunately, maybe I will not have a chance to see Australia’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 34). Actor 4 in Something to Declare relates, ‘here we cannot see [the world, Australia], except the sky. The walls are blank. We cannot see around us’ (Gurr, 2003: 18). The ultimate expression of voicelessness and placelessness – lip-sewing, a last resort for those denied a metaphoric or literal ‘place’ – is also staged, at least by reference. This act – in itself performative – stands somewhat more chance of being interpreted fairly in a theatrical performance where, even if the audiences are limited, the immediacy of the live performer’s body brings the action into the audience’s personal space, something that heavily mediated film footage of distant protests cannot do. This image has been taken out of the detention centre and into
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performance space by Mike Parr who actually sews his lips together in UnAustralian, a performance video screened at the Adelaide Biennial in 2004 (Litson, 2004: 16; see Scheer, 2004). Plays that take place inside the detention centre first depict the overwhelming effect of placelessness in centres like Woomera. When the earliest of the plays were first performed, the shocking conditions would have been news to many audience members given the secrecy that had surrounded detention. Second, asylum-seeker plays attempt to address their placelessness by finding other ways to articulate place and location, including using memory to reconstruct places of the past, even if such places are no longer attainable. Finally, they juxtapose the hellish nature of that non-place with Australia at large. There is little opportunity for methektic responses to landscape here: there is little access to landscape at all. In Citizen X, K asserts, ‘Every day new laws and rules and regulations are imposed by which we are more restricted, feel more and more lonely, and have no access to anything’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 40). The common denominators include anonymity, the denial of humanity associated with space, name, and subjectivity, a repetition of meaningless activities, and long periods of no action whatsoever. K defines it thus: ‘The refugees are living in a very tragic place which is very limited and under so much pressure which cannot be imagined by a normal human’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 40). The plays that are mostly based on testimony do not even provide a theatre set: the placelessness is so profound that they do not attempt to recreate it on stage, preferring the power of talking, free bodies. Yet the refugees in these plays assert their presence physically, even if the official discourse attempts to obliterate them. Frequently, the characters talk about the strange non-place in which they find themselves. While Linda Jaivin’s Halal-el-Mashakel owes much to Athol Fugard’s The Island, the play connects the experiences of the two asylum seekers more to Auschwitz (2003: 11) than Australia or apartheid South Africa. Two detainees, a guitarist and a drummer, fill in time in the debilitating existence of detention. Music keeps them as sane as possible in a place where they have no choice in any matters. They are desperate to get out: ‘Anywhere is better than here’ (Jaivin, 2003: 11). The guitarist comments that the detention centre reminds him of [a]n airport where the planes come and go, but all the passengers have lost their passports and are stuck in transit. Every so often, an official comes along to check your ticket. You hold your breath cuz there’s a possibility that they’re gonna either put you on a plane
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Contamination 117
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The endless time with nothing to do but wait is also echoed in the title of The Waiting Room, which highlights the uncertainty about what comes next. Punctuated by the sound-effects of locking doors, The Waiting Room reinforces the restrictions on asylum seekers by staging much of the action in and around a movable cage at centre stage. The space afforded to asylum seekers is often as restrictive as the cage is. The large cage transforms to become many locations, including what is supposedly a safe house, but this prop remains overwhelmingly a cage, and specifically a cage that contains people. Descriptions of horrific conditions at the detention centres are helpful in getting audiences to reinterpret the government rhetoric that deems asylum seekers ‘queue-jumpers’ and ‘illegals’, but the staging of humans in a cage is even more effective to demonstrate the consequence of a non-place (see Figure 9). Asylum-seeker plays illustrate what happens when human beings are denied access to space, freedom, and movement. ‘Space’ sometimes takes different forms, as is clear in Nothing but Nothing: One Refugee’s Story (2005), written and performed by Towfiq Al-Qady. The story of Al-Qady’s own journey from persecution in Iran to a leaky boat that brought him to Australia, internment at Curtin, and, eventually, a temporary protection visa in Australia, this performance is positioned in the ‘ground’ between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Al-Qady’s set is dominated by a large cut-out of the word ‘no’, which provides the principal set piece, staging these words as physical locations on stage. The audience is positioned in the territory of ‘yes’ (after asking simple questions such as ‘will you be my friend?’ and ‘do you want to know more?’, and similar questions to which the answer is inevitably ‘yes’). In addition, the word ‘no’, written in a variety of languages, is posted on the wall of the theatre. The word dominates most of Al-Qady’s experience with authority figures in both Iran and Australia as he is refused almost all his requests (whether to be excused from fighting in various Iranian wars, to be allowed to pursue his career as a peaceful artist, or to stay in Australia). But achieving the opportunity to ‘live’ in the ‘yes’ territory cannot quite be equated with freedom. ‘Yes’ is itself fraught: if asylum seekers are lucky enough to be released, they are only given short term Temporary Protection Visas which have strict limitations, meaning they are unable to ‘settle’ in Australia. The play takes place in this linguistic and quasi-spatial territory between ‘yes’ and
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out or let you enter the country. But most of the time they’re just checking to make sure you’re still there, still in the transit lounge. (Jaivin, 2003: 7)
Figure 9 The actor in the cage awaits an uncertain future in The Waiting Room, Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, 2002. By permission of Melbourne Workers Theatre, Platform 27 and Richard Lagarto
‘no’, since he has no other ‘space’ to call his own: the possibility of heterotopia first requires a ‘place’, any place, one which Al-Qady is still waiting to visit. Such plays stage remembered events, including narratives from ‘home’ and from the journey to Australia. But the locked cell has the capacity to destroy even a personal ‘possession’ like memory: as K states in Citizen X, ‘Most of the people lost their memory and their mind in this bloody detention centre’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 36). Actor 2’s comments in Something to Declare echo K: in addition to losing substantial weight and sleeping most of the day, ‘My memory has become very weak – and I’ve forgotten many of the matters related to my professional job’ (Gurr, 2003: 8). Actor 2 is lucky enough to be taken on an excursion out of the detention centre at one point, but she finds, ‘I started to feel uneasy, I wanted to come back into the centre. I figure out that I was missing my routine in the centre, that’s what I got after spending over four years in detention or is it I have become institutionalised?’ (Gurr, 2003: 21).
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Contamination 119
Jaivin’s Halal-el-Mashakel even asserts that detained children forget how to play (2003: 3). Juxtaposed to the various types of restricted space is the projection of a much broader ‘Australia’ where freedom is taken for granted. The collectively written The Waiting Room screens extensive video footage as a backdrop to the detention centre. While it initially provides context (such as dangerous oceans through which the asylum seekers arrived in Australia) it quickly moves to images of Uluru, several maps of Australia, and a lush, picturesque Australia. Uluru, also in Australia’s ‘centre’, contrasts Woomera, a newer mythic ‘object’ at Australia’s geographic and psychic core.31 The contrast between these locations reinforces the play’s ironic connection with some of Franz Kafka’s work (including The Trial, The Castle, and ‘The Hungry Artist’), which structures Hhada’s story of life as a refugee, and indeed the play. In addition to the ironic juxtaposition between this non-place and the rest of Australia, several plays stage characters (with Australian passports) expressing shock that Australia contains such a place as Woomera. They are characters based on Australians who were interviewed for the plays. The character of Lyn Bender, a psychologist who worked at Woomera, relates experiences in These People that do not seem part of the ‘nice place’ (Ellis, 2004: 21) of Australia. Ellen, a nurse who worked at Woomera whose recollections are part of Citizen X, conveys disbelief that such events could take place in Australia: We travelled the 80kms to Woomera slowly and arrived at this hot, dusty, arid, miserable cage in the desert. It was surreal, like being transported to the scene of a Mad Max movie. The zoo, full of men, women and children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, beseeching the guards. (Sidetrack, 2003: 51) Later, she witnesses a military exercise at the centre, recounting in amazement, ‘I could have been anywhere except Australia’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 54). The stories of detention that have come from asylum seekers who have been released may appear to be exaggerated, but Lyn and Ellen, Australians with professional credentials, confirm them, countering the government’s arguments about the ‘bad’ behaviour of asylum seekers. The staging of ‘bona fide’ Australian characters is an effective extrapolation of the limits of location: these characters corroborate the descriptions of the non-place of the detention centres, and articulate the anxiety of living in a country where people are treated so poorly.
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Contamination 121
An extension of the use of characters like Lyn and Ellen is the calculated deployment of the audience. The direct implication of the audience in the action is a more profound method by which the spatiality of the detention centres (that is, its absence) is staged; it is a device that almost all the plays employ to ensure that the events that take place on stage are embedded in a cultural landscape beyond the theatre. By actively crossing the boundary into the audience’s territory, they seek engagement that may have material consequences outside the theatre. At one level, the audience’s observation of detention centres and what goes on in them is significant, since general knowledge about the centres had been circumscribed for so long. Yet, while these plays do force audiences to observe the horrific facilities, they also encourage a greater degree of interaction, placing some responsibility for these events at the feet of the audience. The audience is frequently implicated in the action, whether through being equated with the guards, or appealed to by an asylum seeker. This is a deliberate attempt to bring the issue of mandatory detention into the lives of the (usually urban) audience, even though the issues have been played out far from the cities, in locations that have been removed from the frame of ‘Australia’. The non-place of the detention centres is relocated firmly in the context of the place and space that audiences can access. In Jaivin’s Halal-el-Mashakel, the drummer learns that he will be released, but his elation is tempered by the inexplicability of who is released and why. This play establishes the fears of asylum seekers that no one in the rest of Australia even knows they are there. One character asks the audience if they know of his existence, but he receives no response and he concludes that they/we do not know, since to know would surely be to intervene somehow. He attempts to rationalize his predicament: In my country we say, ‘When the people on the top of the mountain look at the people in the valley, they look small. But when the people in the valley look at the people on the mountain they look small to them as well.’ My question is, do the people in the valley see us at all? Maybe we’re so small we’re invisible? (Jaivin, 2003: 4) In Citizen X, S echoes this feeling: ‘We feel like all the world is unaware of us and that finally we have the choice to choose either to proceed towards death in one step, finish ourselves or go on living this life which
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Audience participation and implication
is not living’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 40). K expresses the same reaction with greater historical resonance: ‘Heil Australians! Open your eyes and be aware of what is being done in your name’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 40). The refrain in Citizen X forces the audience to appreciate their metaphoric distance from asylum seekers: ‘Will you please observe through the wire/ I am sewing my lips together’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 32). Such a refrain, from increasingly desperate detainees, makes clear the extreme circumstances that would prompt such action, neutralizing the official interpretation that people who carry out such actions are barbaric. This play, based on actual letters between asylum seekers and the general public, frequently includes phrases such as ‘my good friend’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 44) or ‘It makes me really happy to find a new and nice friend’ (Sidetrack, 2003: 32). Such phrases humanize asylum seekers, demonstrating their desperation for contact and human kindness. G draws attention to the similarities between the correspondents and the asylum seekers: ‘I would like to have a home. Do you know everyone here has these wishes?’ (35). In an effort to demonstrate their innocence, S pleads, ‘Please know that we are innocent people not invaders. Let them know that nobody is illegal, it is an absolute abuse of humanity to stamp us as “illegal”’ (36). Later, S insists, ‘Certainly, this injustice done to innocent people will form a dark spot in Australian history and Australians cannot escape from it’ (40). The plaintive comment, ‘I wait for your letter’ (47), invites an active response from the audience, not just passive observation. Audience action/interaction is taken even further in The Waiting Room where the audience is invited/forced to share the space of detention with the actors. As they enter the theatre, the audience is forced to protect themselves on the ‘sea’, asylum status having been thrust upon them. When they are processed by guards, they are given a number before they can find their seats. Several numbers are called out as audience members/detainees are forced to queue for a shower, led by one of the actors. The naked, uncomprehending character played by this actor is surrounded by eight or ten audience members whose discomfort is palpable. They can abandon this ‘role’ when they resume their theatre seats, unlike those in detention. Finally, two actors leave the stage, after securing the third actor in the cage. They leave the key to the cage in full view of the audience, dangling from a low-hung light bulb, centre stage. For some minutes, the actor looks at the audience from the cage while the audience looks back. Then the actor asks, ‘would anyone here like to help?’ In the video of a performance in Melbourne, three audience members get up and free the actor, who leaves, while they take her place. Eventually, many members of the audience leave their seats to free those
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122 Unsettling Space
in the cage, as the play ends. Heterotopia is a luxury in The Waiting Room when the essentials of freedom – a place in the country from which to imagine an alterative ordering of the world – are unattainable. These People and Slow Falling Bird implicate the audience structurally: they combine the experience of asylum seekers with Australians who are not in detention (and in many cases who do not work for the detention centres) in the same space as asylum seekers. Avoiding the sensationalism of The Waiting Room, they demonstrate the folly of detention being a simple ‘us’ versus ‘them’ argument. These People’s interview-based material regarding asylum seekers is balanced with the mundane life of an urban Australian family of four. The concerns of ‘these people’ in detention are juxtaposed with the inane actions of the family. The four actors transform into inmates of the detention centre, guards, officials, and whoever is necessary to illustrate the considerable distance – but also the eerie similarity – between the groups of people. The nameless son visits a detention centre, accompanying his more politically committed girlfriend, while the nameless daughter writes a well-balanced essay on the subject of detention for a school assignment. The intersection of these two narratives is reinforced by the surreal introduction of several penguins who seek asylum in Australia, owing to ‘voracious Antarctic oil drilling’ (Ellis, 2004: 19). The penguins are figments of the daughter’s imagination, as she seeks a contemporary equivalent of the yellow peril that her research has uncovered. Over the course of several scenes, the daughter’s engagement with penguins and refugees results in her donning a penguin suit, being taken into custody, and removing the suit to reveal a full Islamic veil and robe. Forced to remove these clothes too, the daughter reveals a Ned Kelly costume (borrowing from Sidney Nolan’s paintings of the nineteenthcentury bushranger), as daughter, penguin, asylum seeker, and trueblue Australian are located and performed on the same body. In These People, it becomes impossible to sustain the segregation of asylum seekers (of whatever heritage or even ‘breed’) from ‘mainstream’ Australians. Finally, the play closes with a bushfire threatening the family’s suburb. In another spatial intersection with asylum seekers, the play juxtaposes the inhabitants of Woomera with the circumstances of appealing for refuge when an Australian ‘home’ is no longer a safe place. The play concludes as the father insists that they flee: Father: Newspaper says, ‘Hundreds Flee by Boat as Wall of Fire Races on Homes.’ Clouds of smoke and soot gather around the family and their home.
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Contamination 123
124 Unsettling Space
Son: Until none of them are sure – Mother: Exactly where it is they are – Father: Or where they will arrive. All are scared, looking at each other. Waiting.
The irony that this ‘bona fide’ Australian family must take refuge in a boat – the very vehicle of the anxiety that asylum seeker have been constructed to produce off northern Australian shores – cannot be overlooked. Who the ‘these people’ are is merely an accident of birth and circumstance, and the place of each of ‘these people’ can be compromised more easily than one might expect. Slow Falling Bird draws ‘Australia’ into the non-place of Woomera differently, balancing the trauma of three asylum seekers (who have survived the sinking of their boat and are now incarcerated) with narratives of their guards. By the end of the play, all three refugees have killed themselves or have died from injuries received at the centre. The set is, like The Waiting Room, cage-like, surrounded by endless space that the guards see when they patrol the perimeter of the fence to spot escape attempts. Their only relief from the anxiety of the ‘blank’ space and the boredom of their jobs is the pub; the asylum seekers have no relief. The space for the play is constructed much like it is in the other asylumseeker plays. The guards identify the centre as ‘dead centre’, ‘Asshole of Nowhere’ (Christine Evans, 2005: 10) and ‘the end of the earth’ (Christine Evans, 2005: 43). The Iraqi Zahrah describes her current location: ‘This isn’t life or death, but something in between./ Some other geography’ (Christine Evans, 2005: 78). Later she says, ‘We’ll found our dream country, here between the sky and the wire./ A country for birds, with no land in it’ (79). Such a country may have more promise of fulfilment than the barren land of Woomera.32 Following the drowning death of her husband, the birth of her reluctant baby, and rape by a guard (the latter being the price for more milk for her child), Zahrah kills herself. Slow Falling Bird establishes a different relationship with the space between the detention centre and the world of ‘Australia’ outside the camp. It juxtaposes a mother in the detention centre with a would-be mother outside in the town of Woomera. The guard, Rick, is a longterm resident of the town of Woomera, whose wife, Joy, has experienced multiple miscarriages. Joy spends her time sanitizing her house, preparing for the child that will not come. Rick spirits the dead Zahrah’s baby away to his house so that he and his wife can raise her as their own, since ‘[t]he babies could be assimilated. The others are a lost cause’
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(Ellis, 2004: 54)
(Christine Evans, 2005: 83). Like These People, Slow Falling Bird establishes the similarities between asylum seekers (who happen to be from Iraq) and Australian families (who happen to be from Melbourne or Woomera). The most relevant aspect of Slow Falling Bird is that the sleight of hand that Rick performs by taking the child to complete his family may not be successful. The child retains some memories of her birth mother, later taunting her adopted father with them through a drawing: ‘This is my other Mama. She turned into a bird and flew away. But she got caught in the wire – this is all the blood falling out her neck – and she’s crying. Her tears are making a ladder. It goes right from the sky to the ground’ (Christine Evans, 2005: 87).33 It is unclear whether she realizes how well her picture depicts the circumstances of Zahrah’s death. The final image of the play is the child appearing to pass salt to her father but in fact dumping it out on the floor, mirrored by the dead Zahrah and the other characters, each of whom pours out a handful of red earth. This apparently assimilated child not only retains memory traces of her mother but intuitively understands how to use them: the juxtaposition between the non-place of asylum seekers and the assumed place of documented Australians is designed to unsettle audiences. Asylum-seeker plays effectively deploy audience participation, endeavouring to stage a polytopic response to what a broader ‘Australian’ spatiality might look like. Such theatre is frequently produced in conjunction with anti-detention lobby groups such as Actors for Refugees, Amnesty International, and Refugee Action Collective.34 Petitions, donation boxes, and information about letterwriting campaigns usually adorn the theatre foyers. Asylum-seeker theatre generally is concerned with the implications of detention at the present moment, and the removal of asylum seekers from detention. Most plays only gesture towards the future and to what psychological locations the asylum seekers will inhabit if and when they are released (or deported) following lengthy terms of dehumanization. The ambivalence of the place in the nation’s imaginary for refugees and asylum seekers in Australia today means that a balanced play on the topic has not yet been produced that establishes a convincing representational space.35 This may not even be possible until the policy of mandatory detention changes. The closing off of Woomera as a ‘place’ has circumvented the construction of heterotopic alternatives that might contribute to a reinscription of this site in the national imaginary. While it remains a site of considerable anxiety, its place is ambiguous. Yet the plays remind us that these are actual bodied spaces.
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Having a place is, as Sennett outlines in the epigraph to this section, essential to being a social being. Woomera and other such locations do not just compromise geography: they also destroy subjectivity.
The literal contamination of Maralinga and Woomera illustrates the nation’s anxiety of settlement. Theatrical expression of these sites of contamination generate heterotopias in the Maralinga examples, to redefine and renegotiate both the literal contaminated lands and what they mean in the cultural imaginary. The surprisingly productive responses – in light of the extreme contamination – present an opportunity for methektic reinterpretation of that imaginary in a way that is not possible in the Woomera examples. In the Woomera plays, the absence of place in the detention centre plays precludes the establishment of a heterotopia. Instead, placelessness is reinforced, further unsettling and destabilizing the nation, when the actions to sequester asylum seekers were designed to reinforce the settlement of the nation. Maralinga and Woomera are, then, symptomatic of an Australian response to spatiality, to unsettlement, and to the nation’s inability to easily accommodate polytopic layering of spaces, interpretations of spaces, and possibilities for rethinking places and spaces. The limits to the borders of the nation continue to be surprisingly topical as Australians are encouraged to be alert to anyone who transgresses its borders – but not alarmed.36 The borders of subjectivity that must be negotiated by the individuals who inhabit Australia are even more complex.
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Detention and settlement
4
Boundaries are threshold spaces that demarcate one thing from another. Boundaries are a means of relational ordering: they give a space or thing an identity defined in relation to its Other. Boundaries are places of uncertainty and as such often play a very significant role in the processes of social ordering. (Hetherington, 1997: 64) Definition of ‘boundary’ in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘In political geography, [it is] an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.’ (quoted in New, 1997: 6)
As Chapter 3 has demonstrated, recent alterations to Australia’s borders – activated to keep asylum seekers from claiming refuge – reinforce the timelines of studying geopolitical boundaries when traditional fears of invasion have returned in a new guise. Borders signal an attempt to demarcate the space allocated for ‘presence’ from the space relegated to ‘absence’.1 This division, witnessed in Australia’s recent border panic, highlights the way in which borders visibly display anxiety. The distinction between presence and absence is also signified by here/there, us/them, self/other, to name a few, and these more specific, but commensurate binaries are deployed in this chapter instead of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. This chapter addresses the borders of identity in a time when the fear of terrorism that has been provoked by a focus on external borders reverberates loudly within national borders. People of Middle-Eastern appearance and/or backgrounds are increasingly associated, in the mind 127
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The Borders of Identity
of many members of the Australian public, with terrorism and are the targets of various types of abuse (Kerbaj, 2005).2 A process of ‘transference’ takes place between the political realm of the nation and the individual, as anxieties associated with perceived threats from outside the nation’s borders are ‘transferred’ to anxieties regarding the other within the nation. I examine the staging of identity in Australian theatre as it deals with personal dislocation, cultural heritage, and otherness. Identity is located in both abstract spaces and the recognizable locations in a cultural landscape; this chapter focuses on the abstract spaces associated with identity to define the self with and against differing interpretations of Australia and unsettlement. The imagined places in this chapter – the psyche, culture, and myth – may be more metaphoric than physical, but they are as mappable on stage as any geographical coordinates, since metaphoric places occupy literal space on stage. The plays stage characters who confront the uncertainty of geographical and metaphoric place and displacement as it affects individual subjectivity.3 Gelder and Jacobs’s uncanny operates extensively in these examples: the same places often have competing and complementary interpretations at the same time. This articulation of a location or subject position being ‘his’ or ‘hers’ at the same time as it is ‘mine’ sets the groundwork for understanding how intercultural relationships (might) operate in Australia. In some cases, the characters are also able to forge methektic connections with their literal and metaphoric landscape, even if on a very personal level. The sections that follow address the construction of subjectivity and the ways in which subject positions intersect, overlap, and clash: I begin with the mapping of psychic identity, followed by an exploration of the cultural places of a loosely articulated multicultural theatre tradition, concluding with a multiply defined mythic place. Before addressing the ways in which subjectivity and alterity are staged, I establish the spatial context for a discussion of identity and borders.
The poetics of displacement and the politics of location As the body moves through space, crossing borders of all kinds, identity acquires sedimented and palimpsestic layers each of which reflects the locations through which the person has moved, each of which exerts some influence on the other layers and on identity as a whole. (Susan Stanford Friedman, 2001: 28–9)
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The Borders of Identity 129
The basis of my argument is that identity is grounded in spatiality. The construction of identity is often framed as discursive, or located in the body, but as Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space, ‘[o]n whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being’ (1969, xxxvi). In other words, our earliest memories of place launch our understanding of who we are. The perception that identity is essentially linked with spatiality first (before language or the body) is confirmed by neuroscience research that suggests that the establishment of vision, awareness, and identity in the human brain is spatial, first and foremost: Spatial awareness is so unconscious and pervasive a part of our beingin-the-world that we may not realize the degree to which we perceive and act in our everyday lives on the basis of concepts of objects, persons, and events that are in large part constructed out of spatial features and relations. (Dissanayake, 1992: 158; original emphasis) Ellen Dissanayake uses neuropathology to confirm that ‘much of the content of human thought and language [is] expressed in terms of spatial metaphor’ (1992: 169). The tiny sensory perceptions (or images) that we see, make sense of, and combine to form knowledge (whether about things or about ourselves) are in the first instance spatial: ‘Images are based directly on those neural representations, and only those, which are organized topographically and which occur in early sensory cortices’ (Damasio, 1994: 98; original emphasis). To process an image, the necessary elements are reassembled from the different recesses of the brain where they are stored (Damasio, 1994: 84; Dissanayake, 1992: 151, 184). Such storage, tracking, and locating of images in the human brain is part of the construction of the brain’s memory map: when we encounter other things, events, or people, we use our initial memory map to place them into a frame of reference (whether it be to recognize familiar people or concepts, or to ascertain how to process new information). Even though language may be thought of as the expression of the body’s practice, space structures identity in the first instance. Perhaps one of the most basic responses to a spatially determined identity is the construction of borders. This section outlines, firstly, the
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Having recognized that insisting on an all-or-nothing approach is counterproductive, many minorities are building bridges among themselves based on such overlapping fragments. (Lavie and Swedenburg, 1996: 10)
more prominent context of geopolitical borders before turning to their effects on the space of the individual. The attraction of border theory as a theoretical paradigm was greatly enhanced by Gloria Anzaldúa’s influential work on borderlands, even if her mestiza politics, a hybrid ‘consciousness of the Borderlands’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 77), risks valorizing the border.4 As a result of the popularity of this theory, the bordercrossing metaphor is deployed with an apparent ease and gratuitous porosity in many critical discourses. A thoroughly useful conceptualization of the border would need to account for different borders with different types of restrictions for different subjects.5 Border crossing is effortless for weather masses and air pollution, but not necessarily for all people, particularly for ‘aliens’ or those without the correct documentation. The increased risk of terrorism (whether real, imagined, or politically constructed) transforms permeability from an object of celebration to a location of panic, even for those who possess the necessary documentation. The principal function of the border is to police the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, however it is configured. It is virtually impossible to ascertain the parameters for ‘us’ or ‘them’ with any certainty in a national or cultural context for at least four reasons. In the first place, the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ does not remain stable in any theory of self/other relations. Nor can ‘us’ and ‘them’ be relegated to what is outside one’s political or social boundaries: as attractive as it might be to keep alterity ‘out there’, it tends to intrude ‘in here’. Second, the instability of national borders has implications for the individual: that is, the unstable us/them binary is transferred to the individual and how she or he constructs self. The binaries of us/them or self/other that delineate the nation also structure the individual, in almost the same way. As Julia Kristeva explains, ‘the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself’ (1991: 1). The other is located within the self, even if the self chooses not to acknowledge ‘him’. Further, in both nation and self, the other may emerge unexpectedly. Third, the location and composition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ have been significantly altered by international migration (especially in the second half of the twentieth century): in most Western nations, national culture is composed of many types of ‘others’ who reside within one’s national borders. As Etienne Balibar explains, ‘[t]he historical insertion of populations and peoples in the system of nation-states and of their permanent rivalry affects from the inside the representation of these peoples, their
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consciousness of their “identity”’ (2002: 76; original emphasis). Strict delineations of what constitutes ‘us’ versus ‘them’ are, then, increasingly meaningless since ‘they’ live in the same context with ‘us’, ambiguously sharing many of the same locations of subjectivity and the performances of it. Finally, the identity that is already split by the divisions that Balibar describes is inevitably going to be split further: any subject’s identity is already fractured into at least the national and local (not to mention gender, sexuality, class, and the like). No one is located exclusively in the place of the national: every subject needs to negotiate the local as well, since the national does not overlap exactly with the local. Even though most nations simplify national ‘culture’ into a convenient shorthand that can provide an overarching subject position for all citizens, the space of the local already requires a different subject position. As Arjun Appadurai explains: The nation-state conducts throughout its territories the bizarrely contradictory project of creating a flat, contiguous, and homogeneous space of nationness and simultaneously a set of places and spaces calculated to create the internal distinctions and divisions necessary for state ceremony, surveillance, discipline, and mobilization. (1996: 189) The borders that structure national and/or political identity are, of course, commensurate with perception of identity in the individual. As Robins explains, ‘As territories are transformed, so too are the spaces of identity’ (1999: 17). Individual subjects also acquire numerous subject positions, accruing what Lavie and Swedenburg call the ‘many geographies of identity’ (1996: 4). The geographies of identity ‘take place’ when several different ‘identity spaces’ intersect and/or overlap (see Jonathan Friedman, 1994: 76; Holledge and Tompkins, 2000: 4-5, 177–9). Caren Kaplan’s identification of a relationship between ‘a poetics of displacement [and] a politics of location’ (1990: 26–7) provides an opportunity to situate the components of the geographies of (individual) identity in the larger sociopolitical context in which an individual resides. A poetics of displacement accommodates the multiple effects of a destabilizing unsettlement (whether created by migration, diaspora, Aboriginal dispossession, an inability to settle in the Australian landscape, or other factors). A politics of location reinforces the need that humans have for some spatial identification, even if it is contested. The
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borders of subjectivity are made visible when the ‘poetics of displacement’ intersect with the ‘politics of location’. I use Kaplan’s model, which was designed for post-colonial narrative, to frame a discussion of subjectivity in Australian theatre. The plays discussed in the next section demonstrate physically how identity can be performed. Theatre facilitates the staging of even intensely personal psychic places which can be compared with more public locations. As several of the plays in previous chapters have demonstrated, the intersection between the imagined worlds that are performed on stage and worlds that are off stage can also be significant. Kaplan’s intersection of ‘the poetics of displacement and the politics of location’ also facilitates a form of ‘transference’ through which staged events can become relevant beyond the bounds of the theatre. In other words, theatre stages – literally, visibly – models for identity spaces and, more importantly, the potential for audience engagement with such spaces outside the theatre venue. While the identity spaces that are explored in this chapter are only a sample of the responses to the anxieties associated with displacement and unsettlement, they illustrate the range of possibilities that can be performed. They also offer choice: many characters opt for one over another possible alternative in a format that enables them to methektically try out, develop, and rethink their identity spaces.
Psychic places [S]patiality cannot be completely separated from physical and psychological spaces. (Soja, 1993: 120) Identity is itself grounded on the huge unknowns of our psychic lives, and we are unable, in any simple way, to reach through the barrier of the unconscious into the psychic life. [S]ocial, cultural and political life cannot be understood except in relationship to the formations of the unconscious life. (Hall, 1996: 340)
The construction of a multivalent subjectivity relies on spatial realms that may not be bound by physical geography. The mapping of imagined spaces is often outside the empirical study of geography, which has traditionally avoided abstract locations:
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When geographers gaze at social space, the space economy, urban space and so on, their claim to know and to understand rests on a notion of space as completely transparent, unmediated and therefore utterly knowable. The geographical imagination thinks space can always be known and mapped, and that’s what its transparency, its innocence, signifies: that it’s infinitely knowable; that there are no obscure corners into which geographical vision cannot penetrate. (Rose, 1993: 70) The plays addressed here stage psychic place and displacement in locations that do not appear on conventional maps, but nevertheless contribute to the formation of identity spaces, and which are rendered visible and concretely spatial on stage. Psychic and memory places are as central to the history and function of a culture as the concrete spaces of buildings and recorded topography, such that Edward Casey insists that ‘memories are selective for place: they seek out particular places as their natural habitats’ (1987: 189; original emphasis). It is not just identity at large that is spatial. The two examples – Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela (2002) and Richard Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead (2002) – perform Casey’s point in their investigation of the psyche as spatial. Like heterotopias, which help in the perception of ‘real’ space, the exploration of the psyche spatializes displacement in a context that comes to be seen as production for the characters. Both plays stage the complex psychic map of a character’s mind in order to deal with the onerous task of negotiating ‘real’ space and the complicated identity spaces therein. This performance enacts a type of personal methexis in which the characters work against a mimetic relationship with the ‘real’ world and instead establish an imagined world that is at least temporarily more suitable. Still Angela stages the spatial workings of one character’s mind in the context of the geographically mapped location of the Simpson Desert. Angela travels by train to the ‘interior’ of the country, where she grapples with a problem that plagues her psyche, her personal interior.6 Typical of Kemp’s work, this play locates several versions of the main character, all played by different actors. Still Angela traces the life of Angela (Angela 3), about to turn 40, as she looks back at herself through various ages: as a 6-year-old when her mother died, in her late twenties (Angela 1), and early thirties (Angela 2). The play begins with Angela mapping her life at its most mundane – ordering her house and reminding herself of her routine – but other thoughts intervene as her mind wanders to places which are vaguely familiar but make little sense to her. It becomes clear to the audience
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that Angela experiences a trace of something repressed. At the end of the prologue, Angela 3 says, ‘There was something to discover about time, it was as if the sandwich, the bushes, the trees, the earth, were all getting on with something and she just wasn’t quite getting it. Something important was eluding her’ (Kemp, 2002: 2). The audience shares the confusion: Angela repeats herself as one location and time turn into another with little sense of logic. Soon, the domestic location gives way to a psychic place that she inhabits for most of the play. This is characteristic of Kemp’s work which, she explains, ‘attempts a dialogue with the disjunction that exists when you walk down the street and see the real world but feel aware of an “inner world”’ (quoted in Fensham, 2004: 52). Reflecting the apparently random association of objects and incidents that Angela experiences, the entire stage space becomes a multidimensional, spatial expression of Angela’s geographies of identity. The physical locations of Still Angela with which the play begins include the house that she shares with Jack, and the Simpson Desert to which she travels by train. The psychic settings that intrude and come to dominate for most of the play are more extensive than the physical locations, including memories of herself at previous ages, her childhood house, and other places that are harder for her to pin down and encapsulate. These locations are superimposed on the physical locations, and at times the two orders of action compete with each other, even taking place simultaneously. The action and its locations are fragmented somewhat by the three actors playing Angela, but the actual locations they inhabit – literal space and psychic space – are all positioned in the same stage space. The psychic place which displaces the eldest Angela collides with the younger Angelas and their space(s) and with the ‘real’ space of the house she shares with Jack. The different actors playing Angela isolate different times and moods but they are all located in roughly the same stage space, forming a ‘mind map’ for Angela 3’s confused psyche. The spatializing of psychic place takes place in several ways. First, the psyche is entered through the geographically ‘real’ location of the desert. Most of the psychic world is tied to the actual physical location of the Simpson Desert, roughly in Australia’s geographical centre. The desert is the first image in the published script and is projected in performance on a tall, narrow video screen in front of which the psychic place is mapped (Figure 10).7 Angela only gets a limited glimpse of the desert on this narrow screen, as if to suggest that it is only one aspect of her ‘big picture’. Her return to the psychic/memory place of her mother’s death (when Angela was six) is the main place that needs to be explored,
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Figure 10 The three Angelas stand in front of an image of the desert in Jenny Kemp’s Still Angela, 2002. Image from the DVD of the production. Photo: Playbox/Malthouse, Melbourne
whether ‘real’ or psychic. This mapping exercise prompts the visit to the desert. While Angela explores the implications of her mother’s death and replays some of the earlier scenes so that they make more sense, the ‘real’ desert remains on the screen, each location adding to Angela’s increasingly layered identity spaces. Second, various actions that take place – some repeated several times, in different ways – are spatialized on the stage and in Angela’s mind as she pieces together the events of the past to make meaning from them. This process includes the playing of chess with Jack, during which Angela is encouraged by the memory of her long-dead mother’s voice: her mother advises her to use her knight, the chess piece that can move in two different directions in the same turn. At the same time, on stage behind her, an image of her father constructs a concrete garden path, its squares matching the chessboard pattern. This path takes her into her emotional memory, as does the chess game and the regularly irregular movements of the cha cha dance that Angela and Jack execute.
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The dance’s precise steps are less important in themselves than in their connection to another aspect of her psyche. At the beginning of the play, the choreography appears to be random. This apparently erratic movement by the characters, the stage directions explain, ‘Angela’s process of sorting, sifting, remembering. It should depend on a complex pattern of spatial dynamics’ (Kemp, 2002: 3). As she tries to piece things together, ‘she travels internally, her memories and emotions bounce, jostle and nudge at her for attention’ (Kemp, 2002: 3). The actors literally jostle and nudge each other as they traverse the stage in patterns that appear random but ‘rhythmic’ (Kemp, 2002: 3). The locations too collide over the top of one another, achievable on stage by bringing one Angela into contact with another. The irregular process by which the characters reach their destinations (literally and metaphorically) is, like the play as a whole, a necessary navigation of the (psychic) landscape. Each image is made physical: it is located on stage at the same time so Angela 3 can see and negotiate the corners of her psyche. It becomes apparent that there is a spatial logic for the psyche, just as there is a cartographic logic for the desert and even an organizational, domestic logic for the house. The movement that takes place in psychic space helps chart Angela’s course of direction. For Angela, identity is demonstrably spatial, across several dimensions. An even simpler pattern of meaning emerges for Angela, particularly once she herself begins to make sense of the various colliding places of meaning, as the poetics of displacement intersect with the politics of location. In the play’s final scene, Angela finally understands the aphorism she had been given when her mother died: ‘[T]here are two landscapes, Angela. One always on top of the other’ (Kemp, 2002: 19). Layering the literal landscape with the psychic landscape structures her geographies of identity, but the landscapes, like the separate Angelas, maintain their edges, rather than blending into a single entity. This realization is a form of personal engagement with the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, one that is ultimately successful for Angela. The parallel domestic/bush landscapes also gesture towards a reconfiguring of topographical landscape: the final scene is called ‘Back Home with the Desert Inside’, as other types of unsettlement can now be canvassed. After Kemp’s characters map psychic place, however configured, they are able to negotiate physical place, even occupying several different types of place at the same time. But Still Angela does not completely integrate all aspects of Angela: her fortieth birthday party that concludes the play includes all her manifestations, again in the one location. The
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spatializing of a psychic location permits Angela the opportunity to solve the personal dilemma of a repressed grief for her mother; it also maps psychic subjectivity in such a way that she understands herself for once. Still Angela’s actual and psychic deserts give way in Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead to the world of death. The grim poetics of displacement intersect with a more urgent politics of location associated with the high rate of untimely deaths in the Aboriginal population. Conversations explores a range of spaces of the past and the present which haunt the main character, Jack, who is employed to investigate the deaths of Aboriginal people, as a custodian of the urban dead, as it were. The world of the contemporary dead threatens to overtake Jack’s sanity and his life. Conversations situates Jack’s personal crisis within his community which is destabilized by the deaths of so many young Aboriginal men. As the play opens, Jack bears the full weight of Aboriginal history, in addition to his crises of confidence, self, and career. He appears to face the entire history of settlement on his own: as he arrives on the stage, he meets an image of Captain Cook’s ship, The Endeavour, and Cook himself, arriving to claim the continent of Australia for Britain. Jack fires a spear at the ship, ‘shattering it as if it is glass’ (Frankland, 2002: 220). The implications of Cook’s arrival cannot be removed so easily: the ‘shards’ from this shattering ship continue to inflict psychic injury on Jack. Jack’s exploration of psychic place in Conversations is informed by a cultural memory of dispossession, but it is spatialized in terms of Jack’s individualized psychic place as he deals with the current incompatibility among his geographies of identity: he faces a trace of the Freudian uncanny that is only partly explored in the play. Jack is having difficulty establishing identity spaces that suit him because the ones to which he has access are not the ones he would choose. The sheer number of deaths in custody, suicides, and unexplained deaths of Aboriginal people – mostly young men his own age or younger – severely affects him and his outlook on life: I don’t know who I am anymore, I don’t know who I can be. Every time I look around I see the dead: in my memories; my heart; in the winds; everywhere. You know when I’m at a party and I get introduced to someone with the same name as one of the dead I know I flashback I see their whole life in front of me. Feel like a million years old with a million people’s secrets and lives inside me. (Frankland, 2002: 247–8)
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Amid this personal confusion, Jack is frequently handed identity spaces to adopt, forced to perform the role of expert Aboriginal cultural informant. He explains to the audience that at dinner parties, ‘Here is where I get to be the lawyer, the politician, the doctor, the herbologist, the historian, the spiritual one, the mystical noble savage and, of course, the suffering wounded activist warrior’ (Frankland, 2002: 261–2). Even though he is very familiar with this multiply interpellated role, its limitations are many, particularly since it involves identity spaces that are thrust on him by virtue of his race and education. These identity spaces provide little direction; in fact, they reinforce the feeling that he is caught between worlds. Yet the indigenous/non-indigenous schism is not the one that creates the most anxiety for Jack. Of more concern is that his living identity space is all but taken over by the dead people whose case he investigates. Their lives – and the lives and locations of their families who remain – come to haunt him. Each death is played out in the same place as (but not ‘in place of’) many more. Not only does the accruing of the ‘space of death’ magnify the political problem it also takes over, as the space of the stage becomes the space of all deaths in custody. The space of his personal life is virtually squeezed out. The effect is harrowing for the audience as the names of 124 people who have died in custody in an eight-year period are read out (Frankland, 2002: 242), but for Jack, it is literally life threatening: his living identity space is being engulfed by those of each dead man who, as he is named, takes over more of Jack’s own identity space. An identity space of ‘death’ threatens to take over. This identity space may on one level be a figment of Jack’s imagination, but the bodies talk back when he ‘talks’ to them in his clinical role of trying to establish how they died. Some are still on the morgue table, others are doing what they enjoyed doing in life, and still others come to ‘visit’ him specifically. His psychic place comes to be an increasingly narrow location between the space of life and the place of death. The pattern of this map is marked by his meandering from one pole to the other, although on the stage, one location is staged on top of the other. When he talks to the audience, he locates himself more on the ‘life’ side, but when he talks to the dead men, he risks being dragged away towards death. The place of death leaves traces on Jack: the indigenous community avoids him not because he works for a government agency, but because, he says, ‘they could see the death on me’ (Frankland, 2002: 226). He cannot hold his children when he gets home from work, for fear that the day’s activities and deaths will transfer literally to them. More than
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a conventional identity crisis, Jack faces an almost literal displacement from the space of life, and he is pushed further towards the place of death that threatens to take over the stage. While the space of life involves adopting uncomfortable identity spaces, the place of death appears to be strangely appealing. The psychic place in the middle is perhaps the most uncertain, characterized by an absence of borders. Psychic place in this play overlaps with the world of the living, the world of death, and even the ancestral spirit world which makes several appearances.8 Its amorphous nature is, for Jack, an unattractive feature. While he needs to inhabit this zone to work out the boundaries between life and death, he seeks to leave it quickly. Jack’s discovery of the place of death is not surprising in itself, and while it is oppressive to him, he does fear the feeling that the place of death is becoming the only space he can inhabit, as he flirts with suicide. Clearly, crossing between these identity spaces can have significant consequences. As he explains to one dead young man, David, ‘our lives become so intertwined that I don’t know where one begins and one ends. I mean I can’t even be me without you anymore’ (Frankland, 2002: 231). Whereas Angela explores the psychic world in order to better negotiate her way in the ‘real’ world, Jack comes to have difficulty marking the borders between life and death. The recently dead Peter provides the clearest way out of the trap, suggesting that Jack might look on his role thus: ‘maybe you are shining [a] light for us. Being a storyteller for us. Telling our stories which are now your stories as well’ (Frankland, 2002: 272). Peter provides Jack with a solution that will help him generate individual identity spaces, rather than taking on the cumbersome and ill-fitting identity spaces of the community at large. This is a relatively simple solution which regulates the path between the space of life and the place of death, enabling Jack to distinguish between the two. The psychic place now has distinct boundaries, much to Jack’s relief. While he intuitively finds a way to refrain from being consumed by the spirits of those he calls the old people, he had been unable to separate the recently dead from himself. The final image of the play is, however, hardly redemptive: yet another Aboriginal man has died in custody. Conversations negotiates the difficulty of combining various personas: the attempt to do so brings Jack distressingly close to the edge of sanity and even life. In spite of the personal and cultural displacement, he chooses to locate himself among the living. The psychic world acts as a liminal zone between the uncomfortably coexisting worlds of the living and the dead. Conversations with the Dead develops a particular identity space of the mind, demonstrating the path to Jack’s crisis. In both Conversations with
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the Dead and Still Angela, the main characters explore the individualized space of their psychic worlds to work out how they might inhabit the ‘real’ world. Angela’s psychic map takes her back to her childhood, whereas Jack’s psychic exploration is designed to help him distinguish himself from his community: he seeks to define himself, instead of being defined by others. These psychic worlds are staged in ‘real’ spatial terms as any mapped place might be, despite the irregularity of the path to/through them. They also function as a methektic model of how else space may be configured. Psychic place actively resists – even if temporarily – ‘real’ space. Only in theatre is such psychic place able to be performed and thus actualized, particularly in its relationship with the ‘real’ world of the narrative (whether collaborative or conflicting). Of course, the world of the narrative is itself a fictional foil to the offstage space of the audience’s ‘real’ world. The poetics of displacement merges with the politics of location to generate representational space for the characters in such a way that audiences may also find relevance in borrowing from these models in the formation of their own geographies of identity. While the exploration of a psychic place is individualized, the formation of identity spaces also relies on larger cultural matters. One of the most significant manifestations of the poetics of displacement and the politics of location in Australia is the cultural space of multiculturalism. Before turning to its staging, I provide an overview of the policy, a concerted attempt to manage the potential boundaries within the nation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Staging the geographies of identity [L]ives are lived in more than one location, generating fragmentary and fugitive biographies that defy fixity in politically delineated space. (Donnan and Wilson, 1999: 109) Identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space, or an unresolved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses. (Hall, 1996: 339) The relevance for the mapping of individual identities on stage, beyond the individual subjectivity of the characters of Angela or Jack is, as I suggest above, connected to the transference between the spatializing of
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individual identities on stage and the broader interpretations that might be taken from it by audiences. A parallel transference (although one that is reversed, moving from macro to micro) is increasingly apparent in Australia: from the political realm of the nation to the individual, wherein the fears associated with what is outside the borders are transferred to the ‘other’ within the borders. In other words, since the transference of the anxieties associated with the external geopolitical borders to the individual fosters additional fears of alterity, it is essential to examine how individual (cultural) identity spaces are staged and what implications arise from them. The construction of identity spaces is primarily a process for the individual, but in Australia one effect of a contested settlement is the experience of numerous national experiments with identity formation, each designed to deal with the anxiety of location. One of the more recent discourses – multiculturalism – created a structure through which some ambiguities of subjectivity could be ameliorated. Before exploring how theatre deals with the anxiety of alterity in the individual, I contextualize multiculturalism, a policy that recognized that post-World War II migrants in particular did not abandon their ethnic heritage and languages when they arrived in Australia, and that the maintenance of other cultural contexts was constructive to the nation as a whole. Until relatively recently, this 1970s cultural reformation policy appeared to manage many anxieties of subjectivity.9 Designed to ‘make room’ for post-war migrants (mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans) and to manage ‘otherness’, as well as to overturn the White Australia Policy, multiculturalism fostered cultural diversity, placing value on the expression of languages, cultures, and traditions other than English and the Anglo-Celtic.10 In a way, it sought to settle the poetics of displacement in a national location. Multiculturalism as official policy (based loosely on the Canadian model) aimed to make room in the Australian cultural imaginary for migrants from targeted European nations.11 The Galbally report (1978), the first stage in establishing multicultural policy, insisted that ‘every person should be able to maintain his or her culture without prejudice or disadvantage and should be encouraged to understand and embrace other cultures’ (quoted in Jupp, 2002: 87). The needs of migrant communities were to be met by social programmes, including education for adults who required assistance learning English. Schools were to teach language and culture classes; government-supported services would ensure access for all to the nation’s facilities; and cultural diversity would be viewed positively (Lopez, 2000: 292). It was assumed that the
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provision of such services would assist most of the nation’s migrants, but the policy was based largely on the desires of first generation migrants. Their children, who had reached a different relationship with the discursive ‘space’ of the nation, had little use for the services that multicultural policy provided ostensibly for their benefit. In the twentyfirst century, the discourse remains marginal, partly because of persistent misunderstandings of its purpose. It was convenient at the level of legislation, but not necessarily at the level of community development. Jon Stratton outlines some of the precise shortcomings of the multicultural approach: First, it does not accept, confront and challenge the discourse of race, but rather represses it. Secondly, it operates with the notion of a core culture and consequently marginalises the hyphenated so-called ethnic cultures. Thirdly, official multiculturalism is formulated around stable – that is fixed and unchanging – national cultures. (1998: 206) As Stratton suggests, there is significant difference between official multiculturalism and how divergent cultures generally coexist in the Australian community. Official multiculturalism has come to mean nonAboriginal alterity, rather than a cultural policy of imbrication.12 In many circles, it has been reduced to a ‘food and folkdance’ model of cultural diversity, fostering cultural display that provides suitable photograph opportunities for politicians. It has become, in practice, a convenient location for ‘them’, effectively removed from the ‘us’ of the general Australian imaginary, however each category might be described. It does not have the cultural weight to generate an actual engagement with the real issue of, for instance, racial vilification. Many proponents of multiculturalism have promoted the notion of ‘critical’ multiculturalism to counteract the dilution of the policy.13 Given its increasingly marginal position, multiculturalism has been unable to challenge the recent yoking of ‘alterity’ and ‘fear’ (although it was never anticipated that the policy of multiculturalism would be faced with issues beyond its scope, like terrorism). Instead, the repressed fear of invasion returns. Designed to ensure the survival of various cultures, histories, and languages within an ostensibly homogenized Australian identity, multiculturalism has become instead a target for many disaffected Anglo-Celtic Australians, who continue to fear invasion and contamination. The inclusivity that multiculturalism once fostered has been destabilized, a fear of the other manifesting again
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in an ironic return of the repressed: multiculturalism marked a deliberate attempt to remove the traces of the White Australia Policy from Australian government and culture. The backlash against multiculturalism was most spectacularly played out in the popularity of one-time Member of Parliament and Leader of the One Nation political party, Pauline Hanson. It was convenient for many politicians to distance themselves from her racist policies until the arrival of increased numbers of people seeking refugee status in Australia from areas of the world that had been collapsed with the terrorists responsible for 9/11. Her xenophobic politics were then taken up by the mainstream conservative parties, particularly as they relate to fears of invasion. A well-meaning – if pejorative – interpretation of multiculturalism in its early days figured migrants as ‘new’ Australians or proto-Australians who were in apprenticeship roles, training for fully-fledged status as Australians. Today, many people who have recently migrated are not perceived to ‘fit’ into this apprenticeship model, since they do not resemble either ‘Australians’ or their migrant predecessors: some, for instance, ‘fail’ to speak English, while many women in Muslim communities retain headscarves. Attempts by some Middle-Eastern communities to preserve their cultures have come to be viewed with suspicion as the anxiety associated with ‘them’, those people who are apparently not like ‘us’, returns with renewed force.14 Rather than a marker of cultural well-being, the alterity that is associated with the migrant is now translated to a danger, an interpretation that has been promoted in many media outlets. Just as people of diverse cultural heritages have lived in Australia for years, their cultural production has enhanced the Australian stage for almost as long. The number of Chinese miners in the goldfields, to choose just one example, was sufficiently great to support the tours of 14 different Chinese opera troupes between 1858 and 1870.15 More recently, the narratives from writers of diverse backgrounds were common on the stages of the 1980s and 1990s, performing the cultural experiences of groups beyond the Anglo-Australian norm, and even overlapping with the cultural spaces of the stereotypical ‘Australian’ culture.16 Most plays that deal with multicultural issues tend to recognize the nuances in cultural representation, to resist placing another culture over the top of or next to the ‘Australian’ supposed norm, and to establish identity spaces at the level of the individual, with, around, and in spite of the ‘guidelines’ of multicultural policy. The plays discussed here deploy some of the traditional multicultural signifiers (particularly, in many cases, the displacement of ‘home’ – both
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the home in which some of the characters were born and the home of Australia), but they do not remain within any multicultural model, conventional or otherwise, preferring to perform broader ways in which the geographies of identity might be charted. In investigating the fracturing of received perceptions of ‘space’ and ‘Australia’, they stage a rejection of a unified nationalist response to identity. Instead, they articulate a more convincing display of otherness as a way of dealing with the anxiety associated with the politics of location. In identifying the poetics of displacement, Home of a Stranger (1994) by Adam Hazimanolis and Patricia Cornelius, further displaces its characters by locating them in an English classroom designed for children. William Yang’s Sadness (1992) distils the different subject positions that emerge from Home of a Stranger to the level of the individual. Noëlle Janaczewska’s Songket (2003) illustrates what happens when the individual and community responses to the same cultural identity spaces are vastly divergent. The plays present a combination of cultural forces and expectations that clash with the restricting national limits of conventional Australian cultural representation. Each works across cultures to construct overlapping identity spaces that constitute new geographies of identity. Home of a Stranger addresses the ways metaphorically and literally displaced migrants attempt to make sense of Australian space and make a place for themselves in it. The play combines a variety of cultures under the multicultural rhetoric of ‘Australia’ and, rather than just articulating how many people have difficulty in fitting in, it explores four different ways in which one might become ‘Australian’. The setting is a classroom for learning English as a second language, and many of the adult students are culturally and linguistically displaced in a land very different from their birthplace. Much of the play’s structure is pedagogical (repeating after the teacher, each student getting a chance to speak). It quickly becomes apparent that the lesson plan mimics a conservative version of multicultural policy, with little awareness of multiculturalism in practice; therefore it is of limited value to these characters. The students sit at desks that are too small for them: this setting inevitably returns them to their experiences at school, and in the infantilizing setting, even to the silly behaviour they engaged in as children. Not only are they displaced socially and, in this classroom, spatially in the desks, the ‘space’ on stage that the characters occupy metonymically stands in for their birthplace. The classroom comes to resemble a map of Australian multiculturalism, its characters each representing a region from which they have migrated. This map’s coordinates are, however, very difficult to fix (much to the
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teacher’s chagrin), owing to the disjunction between official depictions of multiculturalism and the realities of individual displacement. In this classroom, where many different expressions of displacement are staged, the characters continue to bump up against the borders of constructed identity spaces. They struggle to negotiate a place for themselves from the choices made available because they are neither willing nor able to accept the identity spaces allocated to them. The neat map of this classroom continues to be disrupted physically, as the students come to terms with its limitations and with the teacher’s lessons for finding a ‘place’ in Australia. The first lesson is to learn English. Mee Ling attempts to improve her English to gain credit for the medical training she completed in China, while Mehmet’s unemployment benefits will only continue if he learns more English. As the students compare notes about how they are different when they speak their own language, compared to English, Mehmet explains, ‘The English me is not me. The Turkish me is gregarious, confident, sensitive. I like him. In English, no-one knows him. He is dull in comparison’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 19). Mehmet clearly defines his English-language identity space and differentiates it from his more dynamic Turkish-language identity space. He is the least receptive to the teacher’s lessons, deciding to locate his geographies of identity in a different sphere from the one the teacher suggests. He even illustrates his unease physically, unable to remain in his seat, as if to suggest his refusal to occupy the identity space marked out for him. Mehmet is adept at being ‘two’ people at once, and most of the students have experience with a form of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny to articulate the existence of several identity spaces at the same time. But the teacher’s second lesson is to ignore old allegiances and focus only on Australian matters. When resentments surface between the Serbian Mira, the Greek Penelope, and the Turkish Mehmet, Anna, the teacher, naively overlooks them: ‘This country embraces everyone’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 8). Anna and Mee Ling sing, ‘Join hands and dance the steps/ of a multicultural society’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 8), but the other students know that this ‘rainbow of humanity’ version of Australia (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 9) does not exist outside the walls of the classroom. A subsequent discussion of favourite national sports further complicates the question of allegiances as the students come up against the limits of what responses may be appropriate when one settles in a new land. The debate overturns the teacher’s advocacy of an umbrella nation protecting everyone under it, and she risks losing control of the class.
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A third way to become Australian is to leave the past behind. The teacher sets a task for each student to tell a story about him or herself. They must use the continuous present verb tense: ‘No accounts of faded moments from the past please. It is the here and now I’m interested in’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 4). But the story of their lives now, in Melbourne, inevitably needs to turn to the reasons why they left their birth countries, since their lives in Melbourne cannot be separated from their other home. The teacher insists that ‘You have made the journey and now you are here. So, let’s get on with life’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 10). An astute Mehmet responds, ‘You got bags if you like it or not’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 10). Their location in a classroom in Melbourne is, they demonstrate, layered over the top of their birth cultures, and the narratives of how and why they arrived in Australia. The impossibility of following the teacher’s instructions reflects the difficulty of settling in Australia, particularly while they still possess so much metaphoric, emotional baggage of ‘home’. The students learn more about the difficulty of reconciling both the present and the past in their lives than they do about a continuous present tense or its association with their lives. The final lesson is to ‘fit in’ by every means possible. Ironically, this lesson causes the greatest anxiety for the teacher, Anna, who came to Australia as a child, from Italy. She insists that names do not matter, but has changed hers from Mastrogianni to Masters (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 15). The students insist on maintaining their heritages, while Anna comes to lament the loss of her birth culture: ‘I’ve lost something I never had’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 25). This ‘absence’ of heritage overwhelms her, but she, unlike some of her students, can lay claim to the signifier ‘Australian’. Mee Ling insists that she is Australian because she ‘ha[s] the papers’ (Hazimanolis and Cornelius, 1994: 16), but the other students insist that even if she learns perfect English, she will never be ‘Australian’. This is partly a recognition by the other students of the role that race plays in the day-to-day activities of living in Australia. It is also a realization of the nature of difference: Mee Ling, who tries to parrot the teacher, will not be able to imitate a ‘typical’ Australian successfully enough. She will always be ‘out of place’ even if she has the papers to show that she is ‘in place’. Others abandon mimicry altogether, generating separate – almost schizophrenic – identities for each culture. Several characters succeed in developing identity spaces (however awkward they may be) that combine their various cultural heritages rather than suppressing them, in an expression of cultural coexistence.
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In Home of a Stranger, Anna tries to ignore the displacements that her students express verbally and spatially, suggesting the viability of a nation characterized solely by a unified multicultural rhetoric, but most of the characters find it inappropriate to their lives. Anna attempts to defuse displacement and disagreement by removing the opportunity for locating geographies of identity that will work for the students in Australia. These students reject the teacher’s lesson, as the play stages a range of identity spaces. William Yang’s work develops the significance of intersecting identity spaces more overtly than Home of a Stranger. Yang, a professional photographer, has chronicled aspects of his life in several slide-show performances that appear, on first glance, to be little more than a screening of hundreds of slides with a monologue to stitch it together, but each is a subtle exploration of place and displacement, and of locating oneself among various communities. Yang’s portraits always document their subjects in a location that is appropriate to them, often their own home: capturing place is part of capturing the person. His performances include Friends of Dorothy (about homosexuality in China), Blood Links (about the migration paths his extended family has travelled), The North (about his childhood in far north Queensland among a variety of cultural heritages) and Objects for Meditation (one of the most personal performances, sharing the objects from his life which ground and inspire him). I focus on Sadness, which compiles images of his friends in Sydney, many of whom are living with (and dying from) HIV, counterposed with images of his Queensland-based Chinese-Australian family. With two projectors and large screens, Yang shows images that are usually (but not always) portraits, often of ordinary people. These images fluidly appear, disappear, and sometimes reappear. An image on one screen is often contrasted with an image from another part of Yang’s life or current preoccupation, appearing on the other side. At times, a single image is projected across the two screens as in Figure 11. The accompanying monologue is poignant and witty, often funny, but delivered in what might be described as an almost deadpan style.17 By the end of the performance, the structure for the piece is clear, the narrative and the images intersecting beautifully, and the juxtaposition of images provocative. Accompanied by live music, these productions challenge conventional boundaries of performance while also providing a simple and significant method of founding a complex subjectivity. Sadness deals with the poetics of displacement simply and convincingly. Yang explains that he had long considered his Chinese background to be something associated with his past. He links the ‘past’ with
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Figure 11 William Yang stands before his own projected images in Sadness, Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1992. By permission of William Yang
his northern Queensland childhood home, which is somewhat remote geographically and culturally from the up-to-date cosmopolitanism of Sydney. Compiled shortly after his mother’s death, the two main narratives in Sadness connect, as the title suggests, through death and loss. At the end of Sadness, Yang’s Taoist shrine overtly connects the activity of paying respects to the dead, but before that, the staging of two of the significant parts of his life are brought into focus to, in effect, deal with each other. The connection of grief brings the two stories together, and the combining of the two ‘families’ collapses the boundaries that might otherwise exist between such diverse groups of people who are, for the most part, politically, geographically, and culturally disarticulated from each other. Each narrative describes and documents photographically the context of a loved one in Yang’s life, the physical deterioration of loved ones, their eventual loss to death, and an unsentimental coming to terms with that loss. The two main narratives are interspersed, the merging of the two becoming more and more comfortable, while the poignancy and dignity of the photographs endows each story with a cultural relevance that eventually comes to be more powerful than the sadness. In Yang’s ‘performance’, the photographs come to tell the story and the politics of location. He barely moves from his dimly lit podium,
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his hands only occasionally gesturing towards a point of interest in a slide, ensuring that most of the audience’s attention is focused on the slides which play the role of setting, character, and narrative. It is as setting that they are most evocative and, ironically, theatrically significant. While projected images are often counter-productive in theatre if they take the place of realized worlds on stage, the slides in Sadness promote an extended spatial awareness: the two narratives intersect spatially by means of the slides. Yang performs the overlapping of identity spaces through the otherwise static device of slides, particularly as one gently blends into another. A trace of the original image remains behind momentarily, until the next image becomes clear in its own right. This dissolving of one face into another is particularly striking in The North, where he photographs a collection of smiling children, roughly the same age, each almost superimposed on the next, blending ethnic heritages in the happy faces of children full of potential. If nothing else, the overlap from one image to another, and one narrative to another, resembles the way in which Yang’s work refuses to close off identity spaces. He demonstrates how apparently incompatible spaces can be brought together to produce meaning together in a form of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny in practice. The slides reinforce the simultaneity of the ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’ components of this concept: the slides themselves seem out of place but their structuring of Yang’s geographies of identity ground them on the stage. This method of projection reinforces the closeness of the narratives, despite their apparent differences. It also performs a methektic function as the potential of the intersections of narratives and slides suggests to the audience various means of productively refashioning identity spaces off stage as well. The superimposition of locations is particularly helpful in Yang’s work, but he further analyses each narrative from the perspective of someone who also lives in the other place. These are not detached images: each part is contextualized by the other, even coming to be interdependent with the other. It is not a matter of living between cultures or being trapped by one or even by the combination: instead, it is a modification of the range of cultural contexts to suit the situation. He talks of his family being ‘Austasian’ (Yang, 1996: 12), a term he coins and prefers to any other designation of Australian and Asian or Chinese heritage. In this identity space, as well as the other ones marked in his other performances, Yang identifies multivalent locations that accurately politicize his experience, generating representational space at the level of the individual. Displacement engages productively with the politics of location. In Sadness, the slides ‘replace’ spatiality in performance, succeeding in
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also extending it far beyond the bounds of conventional performance. The poetics of displacement is evoked powerfully by means of the images and the quiet contemplation their projection permits. Noëlle Janaczewska’s Songket explores the geographies of identity in yet another way. Janaczewska’s work typically focuses on constructing subjectivity in a multivalent and multicultural context, asking difficult questions about identity spaces, while recognizing that the space of the migrant’s identity formation fails to fit into a formulaic construction. She examines the relationship between the discursive and literal spaces of Australia and individual Australian subjects. Janaczewska’s plays map the experiences of Australians who have ties to multiple cultures and languages, locating them in ‘a spatial, rather than a timebased framework [where] various locations are tangible, intangible and remembered’ (quoted in Allen, 1996: 26). Many of Janaczewska’s plays stage people from a variety of cultural backgrounds so that a simple binary (‘Australian’ and ‘other’) is meaningless. Her work thwarts the customary ‘migrant’ narrative: Saren, a Cambodian-Australian character in Janaczewska’s play, The Butcher’s Wife, ridicules ‘cute migrant misunderstanding stories’ (2000: 29), preferring to engage with matters that make a difference to her life in Australia. In Historia (1996), Zosia attempts to reconcile herself with her Polish background, although she rejects some parts of this heritage, such as the conservative sexual politics of her extended family: ‘I’m looking for a way to be Polish-Australian that doesn’t gloss over, or make invisible, my sexuality’ (Janaczewska, 1997: 283). Janaczewska facilitates both a symbolic and literal transaction between culture and politics that may require a reinvention or a relocation of self or culture. Her work resists any attempt to preserve an ‘authenticity’ of culture, location or self. Janaczewska’s theatre challenges the assumption that any cultural community – migrant or otherwise – remains fixed and knowable. In fact, Songket investigates the many different ways in which LaoAustralians may construct themselves, even if they are in some respects bound by some common cultural understandings. Further, this play negotiates the ‘other’ without ascribing fear to him/her. Like most of Janaczewska’s plays, literal translation and cultural/metaphoric translation issues abound. The play is about a young woman of Australian and southern lowlands Lao heritage, Soumieng DeMarchi, who is a fabric designer. She meets Chong Koua Vang, a Hmong from northern Laos who migrated approximately 15 years ago, and who is now a garment worker. A relationship ensues, but each defines the nature of this relationship differently, and Soumieng accuses Chong Koua of rape.18 In the
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court case that results, one of the lawyers calls Claudia, an anthropologist, to testify about Laotian cultural practices. Songket – subtitled ‘What Happens when One Person’s Culture is Another’s Crime?’ – is about interpreting place, space, subjectivity, and cultural history. Janaczewska focuses the audience more on the cultural questions posed by location in, and relocation to, Australia than on what actually happened, events that the audience does not see and which are related in competing versions by the characters. While Janaczewska does not diminish rape or its effects on a woman, her point is less whether or not the rape took place but how culture takes up space in identity and on stage. Songket plays with more than just linguistic misunderstanding. Geography and culture are woven into the cloth that form Soumieng’s livelihood, act as a set in the play’s production, and present the opportunity for the cultural misunderstandings at the centre of this play. A songket is a fabric woven with gold and silver threads, and in the weaving lies a rich narrative of place. The equally carefully woven play about place suggests vastly differing world-views: Soumieng’s varies widely from Chong Koua’s, despite a shared ancestry. Whereas the politics of location in Sadness is in Yang’s slides, in Songket it is in elaborate weavings. As a different means of introducing Lao spatiality to a stage in Australia, the songkets establish place and, secondarily, narrative. They literally and metaphorically foreground the politics of location against a poetics of substantial displacement. Claudia begins the play by describing a textile woven to represent a North Laos village, a region in which she conducted fieldwork. Her description of this songket reinforces how much can be encapsulated in a representation of place: Imagine you’re flying. You’re looking through a porthole edged with ice. Down at a quilting of clouds. And mountain mist. Then far below the forests to the valleys and a watery plain of rice paddies crisscrossed by straight white roads. The broad sweep of the river. Then you adjust your eye to take in the mass of tiny, green dots. The seedlings sewn in rows around the comforts of home. (Janaczewska, 2000b: 1) Chong Koua later describes the same story cloth for Soumieng, recalling his mother’s life in much the same area of Laos: A hen with her chicks, gathered under her wing. There under a clump of rose-apple trees. Beneath a sky bursting with the light that comes
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before the rain. Then a chain of mountain peaks. And along the lower slopes water-buffalo rolling in pools of mud and dragonflies floating on the breeze. On the river shore are a group of men. Pathet Lao soldiers in green uniforms. Aiming their rifles at a bunch of women who are trying to swim across the Mekong to the opposite bank. [Pause.] The embroidery doesn’t say what came first: the shooting or the running scared. Nor does it show what awaited us on the far shore. There’s just the aeroplane – like a big house – that brought us here. And the harbour bridge. But down here in this corner, if you look carefully, you can see hanging by a thread, the ghosts of those we left behind. (Janaczewska, 2000b: 9) This vastly different interpretation of the same cloth articulates the play’s fundamental dilemma: the construction of identity spaces varies from individual to individual, even when they share a culture. At first, the play appears to corroborate the productive potential of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny, but Janaczewska weaves in to Songket additional layers of displacement. At the play’s end, Soumieng appears to describe another cloth, but it becomes clear that she is relating what she actually sees as she arrives by plane in Laos: ‘The woven and rewoven fibre of collective memory. The petit-point of a past life’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 78). Encapsulated in each interpretation is a lifetime of experience and a place that is geographically remote but emotionally near. Displacement is creatively reworked into fabric, but meaning may vary substantially: the characters ‘weave’ and narrate for themselves an interpretation of the culture and of what they see as they form a relationship with the country of Laos, its history and geography, and a way of reconciling that with life in Australia. Mary Moore’s set for Griffin Theatre’s production of Songket staged large strips of gauze that acted as projection screens and that could be lit to seem almost transparent; when opaque, they even formed a type of enclosure for some of the characters who appeared to become trapped in the places and cultures represented. Moore also projected literal locations onto the screens in the same spot where the songket images had been displayed, suggesting that literal places have their pattern and narrative, just as songkets do. These literal places also need to be deciphered, decoded, and documented, even if they are places that are ‘known’ or well mapped, like courtrooms. The space of Laos is, then, positioned in the same stage space for each character but its effect varies significantly. The layers of overlapping place, whether performed,
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projected, or narrated, ground the identity spaces for the characters, even as they each interpret their geographies of identity differently. Songket outlines how the characters come to articulate their cultural understanding, but some of the characters may have only very limited space in which to map their identity spaces. Chong Koua knows that while he has a legal right to be in Australia, he ‘won’t belong’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 11), ever. This situation is complicated by the fact that ‘Here I do the right thing [according to Hmong custom] and it’s wrong’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 12). The play focuses on how one defines the boundaries between Australian and whatever other culture(s) constitute the characters’ identities, in this case, various types of Lao cultures. It also questions the role for such ‘lesser-known’ cultures in Australia when Claudia accuses Hayden of setting up the Hmong as ‘[t]he perfect blank canvas on which to project xenophobic fantasies’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 55). Lao customs don’t disappear in Australia, nor should they. But if Chong Koua’s actions were based on the Lao custom of marriageby-capture (Janaczewska, 2000b: 75), a custom in which he assumed Soumieng was literate and complicit, where are the boundaries when the act takes place in Australia? Songket refuses simplistic responses based on multicultural discourse or on any other notion of Australian identity. The characters attempt various default solutions based on culture and displacement. Hayden, Chong Koua’s lawyer, insists: Mr Vang’s interpretation of what he saw and heard on the streets and [television] screens of his adopted country led him to expect leniency, if not approval for approaching Miss DeMarchi as he did. Bewildered and insecure, he saw his assertiveness as a completely acceptable blend of Australian and Hmong actions. (Janaczewska, 2000b: 39) Soumieng’s lawyer ‘tr[ies] to show the complexities of Asian-Australian identity’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 42), but she too fails her client. Soumieng accuses Claudia, the expert witness, of a ‘so-called cultural defence [that] commutes crime to ritual. I think it relegates it to some shadowy legal borderland where perpetrator and plaintiff are both seen as victims of the same barbaric culture that exists – where else of course but – elsewhere’ (Janaczewska, 2000b: 43). The play concludes before the result of the trial is known, leaving the audience to reflect on what the legal decision might be. In Songket, the productivity of the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny is tempered somewhat: the personal experience of coexisting worlds or identity spaces may clash with those established by others.
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The plays discussed in this section rely on identity spaces founded in culture and from the clash of cultures. Songket provides many identity space options, as did Home of a Stranger, but Songket merges more obviously the discussion about identity spaces with actual staged locations. Just as the potential identity spaces multiply on a stage that can barely contain them, Songket conveys how difficult it is to chart the geographies of identity – and how insufficient the conventional models are when the borders of identity disrupt the cultural borders of the nation. The three plays squarely face the reality of developing subjectivities that accommodate multiple cultural contexts in an unsettled nation. They perform the displacement of identity but they also convey the impossibility of identifying a single location for that displaced identity. Home of a Stranger disputes the conventional borders of multicultural discourse. The intersection of the poetics of displacement and the politics of identity in William Yang’s Sadness is a particularly personal examination of constructing identity spaces, an example of the construction of representational space at the level of the individual. The overlapping geographies of identity can be, as Songket illustrates, open to significant – even legal – contestation. Such cultural spaces intersect, overlap, and clash to generate a comprehensive geography of identity. The plays interpret multiply defined cultures more broadly than multiculturalism usually allows, illustrating the identity spaces that might be available to Australian subjects. In some cases, these identity spaces are conveniences whereas in others, they play an oppositional role that permits the delineation of representational space and a methektic suggestion for how such spaces might be realized off stage as well. Such representational space that emerges from the investigation of individual identity spaces can contribute to opposing spatial practice and representations of space even though the ‘space’ is cultural rather than Lefebvre’s typical social space. The fear associated with alterity has the potential to dissipate in these plays: the investigations of the geographies of identity at the level of individual identity spaces merge differing identity spaces that blend various examples of otherness on the same stage space, and sometimes in the same individual. In other words, alterity itself may not be the problem. Rather, the issue remains one of space: how different individuals explore the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny in order to coexist in the same place, how that coexistence is played out, and what potential exists for the results of such spatial performances to have relevance for off stage identities too.
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The Borders of Identity 155
Mythic places
The broader context of mythic spaces is the final means by which I address identity spaces and the intersection between the poetics of displacement and the politics of location. Myth frequently functions in a fable-like capacity, its applicability extending beyond ‘just’ the individual, exemplifying the transference from individual staged subject to the audience and to experience beyond the theatre. Whereas the plays to this point have staged an individual subjectivity within a naturalistic, memory or documentary format, this section’s characters are more archetypal. The subjectivity offered for/by such archetypal characters differs: with myth’s potential laying partly in the communitybased fable narrative, myth is, as Shields explains above, located in place, even accruing around a particular, identifiable place. Shields calls these locations place-myths which operate ‘as a cosmology: a more emotionally-powerful understanding of the geography of the world than that presented by rational, cartographic techniques and comparative statistics’ (1991: 62). Nations have numerous place-myths to help define national parameters in a different way from that of the borders that set its limits. I am not exploring place-myths per se here, but the myths that are spatialized in the final two plays also reinterpret the geographies of identity, even across geopolitical borders. The place of the abstractly located ‘myth’ comes to take on more specificity than a non-place or an ‘every place’, providing a politically complex location from which the poetics of displacement can be expressed. A mythic contribution to the geographies of identity is, like the cultural and psychic locations, metaphorically methektic, even though the actual narratives discussed in this section are in themselves not necessarily methektic. The first play, Beatrix Christian’s Blue Murder (1994), reuses a wellknown European myth in an Australian setting. Stephen Sewell’s Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A Drama in 30 Scenes (2003) establishes a new, international political mythology for Australia. While Blue Murder looks back to the reuse of a traditional mythic narrative, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A Drama in 30 Scenes looks to the future where myths associated with place may be substantially displaced.
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Myths are actualised, acted out in space, as both ritual and as spatial practices. (Shields, 1991: 264)
In an extension of the abstractness of psychic places, Christian’s Blue Murder locates the story of Bluebeard – the legendary murderer of wives – in Sydney Harbour.19 Blue’s home, Blackrock, is ‘a natural stone formation, resembling a gothic cathedral, at the centre of Sydney Harbour’ (Christian, 1994: vi). The characters watch tug-boats leading ships out of the harbour. Blue, an apparently immortal writer of children’s books, entices Evelyn to work for him when she arrives in the city from the distant, dusty small town of Nyngan in country New South Wales. The European myth has been transplanted to Sydney, but in this version, Evelyn manages to break Blue’s spell and, in killing him, releases the spirits of the women who preceded her. The geographical location is real, while the mythic background extends place beyond the boundaries of a Sydney street directory. Evelyn explores the spatial dimensions of Blackrock: its imaginary existence in Sydney Harbour is framed by well-known Sydney landmarks. Roy explains that Blackrock was called ‘Cathedral Rock, once. Then they built St. Mary’s and the City Council changed our name’ (Christian, 1994: 19). But Roy also tells Evelyn that ‘Blackrock has stone roots that go right under the harbour, even underneath Sydney’ (Christian, 1994: 19). Blackrock is also, simultaneously, a less-anchored place, one that ‘[r]ises out of the water and falls, in and out, in and out and us riding on its back’ (Christian, 1994: 19). As if to confirm that the gothic Blackrock is only sometimes visible (literally and metaphorically), Leura, one of the dead women, refers to it at a ‘vile cathedral under the waves. Wrecked ships in the vestry, your hair gets caught on them’ (Christian, 1994: 35). This mythic geography exists side by side with the actual Sydney topography, each contributing to the Gelder/Jacobs uncanny so that the politics of location in Blue Murder is both specifically defined and metaphorically resonant. As Blackrock takes on a curious position in Sydney, the presence of the ghosts augments the space, extending through time and introducing traces of Freud’s uncanny as they revisit the place of their deaths. The ghosts of Blue’s murdered wives eventually release themselves from the walls of Blackrock, once Evelyn begins to ‘hear’ them and their warnings to her. The oldest is Leura, who married Blue in the 1880s, with Rosemary joining her in the 1930s and Angel arriving in the 1980s. This different type of polytopia merges time with place, the actual occupying of the place and time made ‘real’ when the ghosts take up space with Evelyn. One of the features of the labyrinthine Blackrock is the ‘Nowhere Stairs – a flight of stairs that leads to nowhere’ (Christian, 1994: 29). This
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staircase, where the women watch the harbour, is as important in the mythic realm of the play as in the setting. Evelyn’s quest to make something of herself could end disastrously on these stairs, but she decides not to imitate the women of literature, theatre, film and opera who are ‘killed off’ (Christian, 1994: 37). She sacrifices Blue by stabbing him, releasing the souls of the three ghosts, her own life, and the souls of thousands of other women. Blue’s creativity needs, he claims, the murders of women, but Evelyn refuses to accept such an excuse for their sacrifice. ‘Since when’, she insists, ‘has killing women been called art’ (Christian, 1994: 48). She rejects the role of muse and the place of this myth, as it has been told for centuries, in contemporary Sydney. Blue Murder retains the mythic quest structure, wherein a character searches a particular location to attain a symbolic goal. The location for this myth requires, however, a different conclusion because archetypal European myths may not suit the spatial myths of contemporary, postcolonial (if unsettled) Australia. Situating the play in Sydney accentuates this mismatch, encouraging audiences to consider what lies beneath the layers of metaphoric and actual history and landscape. The poetics of placement and displacement intersect with a politics of location that is, here, partly temporal. Like many other characters in this chapter, Evelyn is faced with a ready-made subjectivity that she may inhabit, but she rejects it, much like Jack rejects the options open to him in Conversations with the Dead. If she can repudiate this role, she can alter the borders of identity to suit herself. Christian’s play deliberately disarticulates Australia (especially Sydney) from the European myth of Bluebeard. Australia requires a different narrative, one that Evelyn is willing to explore in order to shape her identity spaces and to resist the models that have been established for her. In the final play, the imaginary space of Australia is implicated in a new mythic ‘place’ that seems impervious to geopolitical borders. In Sewell’s Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America the borders of subjectivity get drawn for the characters with terrifying consequences. The main character, Talbot Finch, would like to assume that the myths of disaster are only stories, but they become more real than he could ever have anticipated. Here, the limitations of myth and geography are restrictive but the punishments for transgressions are worse, both individually and nationally. This play suggests that borders might actually be meaningless in the current world, where displacement is not about poetics but about death. Nevertheless, Talbot continues to collide with the boundaries of ever-more tightly regulated identity spaces.
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An Australian who lectures in an MBA programme at a prestigious New York university, Talbot is married to Eve, an American who is a successful television writer and whose scripts for CSI and The West Wing finance their apartment with its view of Ground Zero. He is completing a book (with the same name as the play) but Talbot misunderstands his literal and metaphoric location, in light of the events of 11 September 2001. He fails to realize that the myths that construct the United States have changed, and that even expatriate intellectuals in universities need to modify their beliefs and their teaching practices. Like Blue Murder, some of the characters take on archetypal roles, but in Myth, Propaganda, neither the audience nor Talbot knows where the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘not real’ lie. The connection that Talbot draws between Nazi Germany and the United States today is best explained by a passage from Hermann Goering’s statement at the Nuremberg Trials, following World War II, included in the programme notes within the script: ‘[a]ll you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country’ (Sewell, 2003: ii). Talbot recognizes this connection intellectually, but even he does not countenance that Goering’s statement could find footing in the United States. He believes the United States to be capable of sinister retaliation for terrorism, but not until he is attacked, then kidnapped and tortured, does he realize that he will be killed as an enemy of the state. He has been ‘denounced’ (Sewell, 2003: 47), which means that he can be brutally assaulted, his publisher can halt publication of his book, and his university can fire him following fabricated sexual harassment charges. His wife subsequently becomes a car bomb victim, while his student, guilty only of a fondness for intellectual ideas, is imprisoned for being part of their supposed terrorist cell. Several of the characters debate what myth actually is: following 9/11, many of the American characters have lost their critical distance and for them terrorism evokes the feelings associated with the Freudian uncanny. Talbot’s explanation of how nations use myth is thus misunderstood. Talbot insists ‘that every nation is constituted by a set of myths about who we are and where we’re going, and those myths can blind us from the reality of what we’re doing and impel us toward our own destruction’ (Sewell, 2003: 7). In spite of the protests from his colleagues, Talbot maintains that Americans are engaged in a ‘kind of delusional myth that is endangering democracy in this country’ (Sewell, 2003: 7). He explains later that his failure – his own delusion – is to believe ‘the myth that everything turns out right in the end’ (Sewell, 2003: 87). The
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basic citizens’ responsibility now is to keep their heads down, not to intervene: there are no options, no opportunities for multiple interpretations of spatiality or subjectivity. Resistant representational space is impossible: Talbot is swept up in Goering’s account of humanity, or, to frame it in literary terms, the narrative myths that Kafka described in The Trial and Orwell outlined in 1984, both of which are directly referenced. Talbot’s life comes to resemble Joseph K’s all too closely, with Talbot’s demise coming just as incomprehensibly. So unfathomable is Talbot’s experience that he is accused of imagining even his original assault (which was witnessed by the audience): the intruder does not appear on surveillance footage, so the university decides that he never existed. Myth, Propaganda situates a future (and a present?) in which myth (and everything else) is defined almost entirely by fears of terrorism. If myth is a symbolic narrative which helps interpret reality, the boundaries between myth and reality become very hard to distinguish. The place-myth that is established in Myth, Propaganda is broader than the place-myths that Shields discusses, or Blue Murder’s Sydney placemyth. This place-myth is, ironically, no place, or more accurately, a denial of place and of the human/legal rights associated with place: Talbot is relegated to a stateless existence associated with terrorism. Once again, the denial of place is the greatest confrontation to identity. From impassioned academic who challenges his students to question what they see around them, Talbot has been recast as murderer of the people who died in the World Trade Center (Sewell, 2003: 69), ‘the worst sort of terrorist of all, the terrorist who hides behind respectability, the terrorist who keeps his hands clean while others go about their filthy business; the terrorist who kills with words’ (Sewell, 2003: 68). He knows that he is now stateless (therefore placeless), that he will get no help from the Australian embassy. If terrorists are stateless, the security agencies that exist to protect the state also operate, as it were, underground. Talbot comments, ‘[e]very now and then you get a glimpse of it – the Security State, the Intelligence State – it’s just there, just under the surface, waiting to break through’ (Sewell, 2003: 31). Talbot is shackled, hooded, and dressed in an orange suit when he is captured, resembling detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison, a US prison that is located extraterritorially in Cuba. The security agencies that operate beyond the boundaries of the state in Cuba or in ‘rendition’ camps around the world are, of course, essential props for the place-myth of ‘America’. This place-myth is corroborated in the play by video footage of current events including George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil speech (Sewell, 2003: 65), enormous American flags (Sewell, 2003: 88), and slogans such as
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‘Land of the Free’ (Sewell, 2003: 9). The irony of the presentation of these images following the display of images from Nazi Germany (used to illustrate Talbot’s lecture) reinforces Talbot’s thesis and challenges the recent dominance of the American place-myth’s association with ‘freedom’. This play may seem to be a curious choice for exploring spatiality in Australia, but Myth, Propaganda sets up a model for disaster that connects directly to Australia. Talbot and his Australian colleague, Max, compare notes on the differences between Australia and the Unites States. Max, enamoured of the United States, laments that the whole of Australia – has become one big joke – you know, a pretend country, like Fiji or the Solomon Islands: there’s a police force, there’s an army, there’s even theatre companies putting on plays by important people like Shakespeare and Beckett, but basically the whole thing’s fucked. (Sewell, 2003: 10) Talbot later learns just how attracted to the American system Max is when he is revealed to be one of the torturers, an occupation that enables him to cross the borders of nations easily. As Max opts to work for the Americans, Australian audiences are given a chance to ponder the implications of the incarceration of another orange-suited Australian, David Hicks, who has been in Guantanamo Bay since 2001. In response to Talbot’s question of why him, and why torture, his chief assailant explains, ‘Because now we can’ (Sewell, 2003: 92). The introduction of draconian anti-terror laws around the world – including Australia in 2005 – confirms that many security agencies ‘can’. In Myth, Propaganda, matters Australian are handled well beyond the borders of Australia as the effects of geopolitical ‘myths’ redraw the maps of nations – metaphorically and literally. In this case, exploring the borders of individuated subjectivity is a luxury few can afford, while this variation on the recurring invasion fears disrupts the concept of the ‘nation’. For all that Australian spatiality contributes to cultural identity, the increasingly influential international context also forms individuals’ geographies of identity. In Myth, Propaganda, a poetics of displacement is forbidden, the politics of location already set for Talbot. Completely stateless, he is at the mercy of people and agencies he can barely identify. The constraints of predetermined identity spaces are restricting for the characters in Home of a Stranger, but in Myth, Propaganda, they are literally confining. While the place(s) associated with myth may appear to be abstract, the
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disassociation of place and myth in Myth, Propaganda demonstrates the potential for disaster for the individual and the nation. Blue Murder establishes a relationship to myth that responds to the specificity of Australian place, but Myth, Propaganda demonstrates what could happen if myth is disarticulated from place, as the social order and the rights of individuals disintegrate. The fable aspect of Blue Murder and Myth, Propaganda takes place beyond the level of the individual. Myth, Propaganda also provides the opportunity for audiences to reconsider the role of place-myths, to decide how restrictive their identity spaces are, and to ascertain whether the geographies of identity are too tightly controlled. Subjectivity is always contingent and insecure, borders functioning to manage the anxiety associated with the permeability of a recombinative subjectivity. An examination of the borders of subjectivity as performed on the Australian stage illustrates the ways in which Australians deal with both the general contingency of subjectivity and the specific displacements associated with Australian spatial identity. While the identity spaces that are explored in this chapter are only a sample of the responses to the anxieties associated with displacement and unsettlement, they illustrate the range of possibilities that are being staged, many of the characters choosing one over another possible option. While many of the plays in this chapter do not offer productive conclusions for the characters, their performance of identity spaces can be methektic for members of a theatre audience who may wish to borrow for their own contexts the identity spaces that have been performed on stage. These locations enable the defusing of the fear associated with a repressed otherness when contested space intersects with compromised personal subjectivity. The transference from national anxieties to the individual helps focus the problem to one of spatiality: the intersections between individuals and cultures rely on unravelling the complications that arise from a fraught spatiality. The transference from the subjectivity of the staged individual to the broader subjectivity of audience members suggests ways in which Australian subjectivities might help reinterpret spatiality at the level of the geographies of identity, and beyond that, at the national level of the production of space. In an unsettled Australia, the problem of spatiality is the continued negotiation that numerous individuals and groups must make when they cohabit landscape and place that mean different things to each of them.
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In the final analysis, our conception of ourselves is indelibly linked to our conception of space. (Wertheim, 1999: 308) Every time we have thought that we’ve defined the boundaries of space, we find another. (Balodis, in Kelly, 1990: 35)
I began this book with a brief description of the painting that collocates many of Sir John Soane’s architectural achievements in one room. I introduced this painting to highlight that the relocation of spaces (and places and landscapes) onto the stage has the potential to comment on the meanings of space that are produced in a particular culture. Unsettling Space has assembled a broad range of spaces – from specific geographical places to less-conventionally staged psychic spaces – in order to read them with and against each other. While Gandy depicted many of Soane’s creations in one painting (Figure 1), my collection of space(s) accounts for only selected examples of theatre and some larger aspects of spatiality in Australia. I have focused on three topoi – monuments, contamination, and the borders of identity – to illustrate the ways in which the anxiety surrounding spatiality is expressed on the Australian stage. I hope that my approach will facilitate the interpretation of other spatial contexts that make meaning on the Australian stage, in Australian culture, and beyond.1 Two factors have emerged from the analysis of spatiality and anxiety in Australian cultural identity: the haunting by ghosts of various types, and the desire to rethink a better future. 162
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Conclusion: Haunted Pasts and Methektic Futures
Marvin Carlson has addressed the haunting of the stage as an art form in his study of theatre as memory machine (2003), but my project uncovers the extent to which Australia’s spatiality maps onto this already haunted art form another fundamental layer of ghostly presences (and absences). If, as Lefebvre outlines, ‘every society produces a space, its own space’ (1991: 53), then Australia’s ‘space’ is a haunted one.2 The plays in Chapter 2 not only stage monuments; they also give space to a variety of ghosts. The Maralinga dead haunt some of the plays in Chapter 3, while the ghostly presence that the placeless asylum seekers are granted in public discourse is more material in the remainder of that chapter’s plays. Among other interpretations, these ghosts can be read as manifestations of the dreaded Freudian uncanny that continues to return in Australian cultural representation. The ghosts in the haunted/haunting Australian plays also locate past times and places in the context of the present. They reinforce how Australia’s production of space occurs, chiefly through its anxiety regarding its history. Gibson explains that Australia is ‘shaped by persistent obligations, memories and patterns of growth and re-growth. Governed by this system of physical and metaphysical interdependence, the country lives like something with a memory, a force of the past prevailing in the landscape still’ (Gibson, 2002: 63). The anxiety associated with terra nullius is the subtext of Gibson’s statement, but trace memories are also formed by other dimensions of unsettlement, including the frequently revived fear of invasion, and the most recent anxieties about terrorist threats, whether accurate or the product of government-supported scaremongering. The staging of a ghosted and ghost-filled landscape recalls various historical moments in which people have been disconnected and dispossessed from the land, often violently, in an attempt to settle an unsettled and unsettling nation. When space, place, and landscape are staged in stark geopathological terms, they look back to history, but they also contribute to the development of a different future. This is the second factor to emerge from my study. Elizabeth Grosz comments on the potential for rethinking concepts such as time in the context of the future and, given the commensurability of ‘time’ and ‘space’ as structuring concepts, it is reasonable to suggest that space might also contribute to the future: The task is not so much to plan for the future, organize our resources toward it, to envision it before it comes about, for this reduces the future to the present. It is to make the future, to invent it. And this space, and time, for invention, for the creation of the new, can come
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Inventing a future is, for Gibson, located in recognizing the crimes of the past and to mark the point at which all parties can move on to the prospect of a better future: Sooner or later, any society that would like to know itself as ‘postcolonial’ must confront an inevitable question: how to live with collective memories of theft and murder? Sooner or later, therefore, acknowledgment and grieving must commence before healing can ensue, before the badlands can be understood as redundant. (2002: 83) Gibson’s argument for an apology, relying on the principles of etiquette, is laudable. But while such a response is desirable, it is unlikely to take place in Australia’s current political climate. Further, a conventional apology may be less efficacious than inventing a (better) future. Instead, the experience of Australian theatre’s engagement with spatiality suggests that other responses might be more helpful. The performance of the various orders of anxiety that take place in most examples of theatre discussed here exceeds the apology’s standard function of maintaining civility. Rather, the extended performance of anxiety on Australian stages engages with the awkwardness of the absence of apology, but then it addresses an alternative: staging the polytopic places and spaces and commenting on their collocation on the same stage. In fact the stage preserves the most concerted opportunities to grapple with the issues of settlement and unsettlement. While these issues are debated in other art forms, the theatre regularly emplaces and stages ‘worlds’ – both real and imagined places and spaces – through which characters and audiences might cultivate historicized alternatives to existing social and political structures. Inventing a future may encompass other factors, beyond apologies, including the Gelder/Jacobs interpretation of Freud’s uncanny and a methektic rethinking of how landscape is marked, used, and figured. Both constructively interrogate landscape and land use without reinscribing a singular, mimetic linearity to it. The Gelder/Jacobs version of the uncanny provides a means of reconciling that which has been
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about only through a dislocation of and dissociation with the present rather than simply its critique. Only if the present presents itself as fractured, cracked by the interventions of the past and the promise of the future, can the new be invented, welcomed, and affirmed. (Grosz, 2004: 261)
absented. While it moves some distance from Freud’s dreaded recognition of something from the past, it permits a re-establishment of a relationship with landscape that had been severed. Its discursive blending of different functions of landscape taking place simultaneously may come to have literal effects. Methexis, Carter’s concept for reinterpreting the ways in which we mark and traverse the landscape, avoids reinscribing the foundational repression of alterity in the first place. Methexis, which seeks ‘a different, more measured, more diplomatic means of moving about’ (Carter, 1996: 5), renders landscape ‘present’ even when all attempts have been made to ‘absent’ it. These reading strategies contest settlement (and its associated preoccupations of presence and absence), while facilitating a productive reinterpretation of landscape, but it is only in theatre that their strategies are mobilized. Theatre is a particularly methektic intervention in culture and politics: its performance of significant sociopolitical matters marks its cultural context lightly in material terms, but it has the potential to offer its audiences substantially new visions of how they might inhabit their cultural landscape. The plays discussed in Unsettling Space have provided practical examples of a polytopic reinterpretation of history, spatiality, and subjectivity, which contribute to a more productive future. They have staged conventional interpretations of places and spaces and then staged alternatives which require from the audience an active engagement with spatiality, history, and politics. The plays have experimented with rendering absent space present, whether historic, imagined, heterotopic, psychic, or otherwise suppressed. They have also explored non-place and the effects on humans of having no place to stand. Many examples are transient. Many are more discursive than literal, but all suggest the possibility of inhabiting different (even competing) orderings of social structures and social space. They thus present opportunities for establishing a Lefebvrian representational space that continues to draw attention to the unsettled nature of the Australian landscape and history, and to its reinterpretation. The contestations that define Australian culture are heavily engaged in the politics of spatiality. An exploration of Australia’s cultural identity suggests its substantial fear of otherness is greater than might be anticipated (both that manifested ‘within’ the nation and that threatening from beyond the borders). The majority of plays directly investigate otherness and spatiality, endeavouring to counter the expression of anxiety and racism that is now associated with alterity. Its expression is, however, still well-entrenched in Australian cultural practice. The extent of the
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Conclusion: Haunted Pasts and Methektic Futures 165
preoccupation with spatiality and with ascribing certain spaces to certain people(s) was expressed in the Cronulla Beach Riots in Sydney, just before Christmas 2005, when a turf war erupted over which groups had more right to be (where) in Australia. Over several days, large groups of youths from Middle-Eastern backgrounds fought with large groups of whites, who wielded Australian flags in an attempt to argue a prior claim to the landscape of the beach. The claiming of space, place, and authority by means of the flag demonstrates the ways in which people invest space with their particular identity. The assaults on bystanders, the property damage, and the fears of increased injury led community leaders to advocate the radical option of isolating various groups on the beach: ‘sunbathers, soccer players and surfers could each be allocated an area on the southern Sydney beach to reduce the chance of arguments and conflicts over who controls the sand’ (Sexton, 2005). The proposed segregation of groups of Australians on a beach reinforces the fear of alterity and the ways in which contestations over place and spatiality continue to reveal the nation’s anxiety over settlement and unsettlement. The dilemma of being ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’ at the same time (Gelder and Jacobs, 1998: 139) continues to resonate: traces of the Freudian uncanny continue to emerge unexpectedly in Australian cultural practice. These events in Sydney suggest that a study of spatiality continues to matter, precisely because a culture’s awareness of how spatiality is divided, allocated, quarantined, and memorialized has implications for how and where its citizens live, and how they construct subjectivity. As Shields explains, ‘[u]nderstandings and concepts of space cannot be divorced from the real fabric of how people live their lives’ (1991: 7). The historicized performance of the many places, spaces, and landscapes on Australian stages challenges spectators to contest conventional spatial practice, even after a performance has concluded. Certainly we can never free ourselves from space since we are always already incorporated in it. In Australia, it appears that we can never be free from the anxiety of space as well. But attempts to understand the history of the anxiety, its expression, and the challenges to its fixity mean that we may be able to prevent the continued playing and replaying of its worst effects. This study has addressed Australia specifically, but its implications extend well beyond any one nation or culture. Each culture has its own expression of space and spatial structuring, based on its history, geography, and politics. While a different order of spatiality may underpin the construction of national identity in different contexts, theatre is the place to begin looking for it because it is in the theatre
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166 Unsettling Space
that the opportunity arises to construct worlds that help interpret and reinterpret what happens outside the venue. The wider contribution of Unsettling Space is its methodology for reading theatre texts and productions which are inherently concerned with spatialization, in order to elucidate the particular spatial understandings and preoccupations of the culture that gives rise to them.
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Conclusion: Haunted Pasts and Methektic Futures 167
Introduction: spatial coordinates 1. His work (executed between 1776 and 1833) included large projects (the Bank of England, Law Courts, Privy Council offices) and small projects (his own house, now a museum). Soane’s classical style introduced elements of romanticism (Watkin, 1983: 40) and even abstraction (Bolton, 1924: xii). 2. Other theories of spatiality (not all complementary) include: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s smooth and striated spaces (1987: 474–500); Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space (1984: 117–18); and Edward Casey’s work on place (1987: 184–90). 3. Hetherington critiques representational space for being ‘too caught up with the romance of resistance and transgression’ (1997: 70). With this reservation in mind, I find Lefebvre’s concept useful for my analysis. 4. Among the studies that address spatiality in theatre, at least to some extent, are: Carlson, 1989; Chaudhuri, 2002; Chaudhuri and Fuchs, 2000; Dillon, 2000; Garner, 1994; Kirby, 1996; Mackintosh, 1993; McAuley, 1999; Sullivan, 1998; and Ubersfeld, 1998. 5. Alan Read describes the ongoing presence of a defunct factory in the life of a theatre complex later established on the same site (1995: 23–57). This phenomenon is increasingly well-known to audiences as more industrial sites are turned into arts establishments. 6. See Burvill’s (2006) research on Sydney venues, designed to achieve this aim. 7. Augé offers a helpful anthropological definition of place as ‘a space long taken over by human beings and where something is said about relationships which human beings have with their own history, their natural environment and with one another’ (2000: 9) 8. The year 1979 marks the production of Kullark, Jack Davis’s play written in protest against Western Australia’s sesquicentenary celebrations in which Aboriginal Australians barely figured. This year could be said to be a turning point in contemporary Australian theatre: the belated celebration of indigenous theatre heralded a more concerted examination of ‘absence’ on Australian stages. 9. The uncanny manifests in literature (and theatre) slightly differently from in real life. Freud cautions that ‘in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and, in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life’ (1950: 404; original emphasis). 10. Gelder and Jacobs explain, ‘where sacredness and modernity solicit each other, [they] produce a condition for the nation which we will designate as “uncanny”’ (1998: 22). 11. Ironically, Carter uses theatre at large as an example of mimetic action that ought to be reconsidered: methexis is ‘[h]ostile to the stage’ (1996: 85) but 168
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Notes
the version of theatre he is using is a stereotypical, purely metaphoric model, with a ‘neutralized space, its exits and entrances that have to be motivated’ (1996: 83). In a more nuanced reading of theatre, methexis can usefully contribute to an understanding of contestations of landscape. The practice of theatre itself is usually methektic, leaving only traces of performance, once a production is completed. 12. In the age of colonialism in particular, space was perceived to ‘be systematized and systematically represented’ (Murray, 1997: 6), a notion that is directly related to the earlier development of perspective and the fixed viewpoint in the Renaissance. Thus ‘[t]he accumulation of wealth, power, and capital became linked to personalized knowledge of, and individual command over, space’ (Harvey, 1989: 244). 13. Of course, a thorough interpretation of spatiality combined with the performing body is beyond the scope of this book but the foundation for such a study is laid here.
Chapter 1
Mapping Australian space in theatre
1. While I am concerned with theatre, many of the same arguments apply to film, literature, and other forms of cultural representation. 2. See Lawson (1995), and Johnston and Lawson (2000) for an analysis of settler colonies. 3. Many early painters who were also unable to describe the landscape chose to depict what it might become through cultivation and settlement: painted ‘images from the earliest decades of colonization are landscapes of future association. Here in Australia there were no ancient castles or monastic ruins to focus the eye and the emotions. Instead, there was potential’ (Clark, 2000: 9; original emphasis). Such ‘potential’ was achieved in the early part of settlement history through mining (especially gold) and agriculture (especially sheep farming) and, more recently, through tourism. See Haynes for a description of tourist advertising which regularly mobilizes landscape to serve national identity, often using iconic locations like Uluru (1998: 3). 4. Performances that take place outside are, of course, a different matter. 5. The date following the first mention of a play refers to the first professional production. In-text references cite publication date (or, for manuscripts, the date of final draft). Some publication dates do not coincide with production dates. 6. There is disagreement regarding the length of human presence in Australia: recent datings of the Lake Mungo 3 (LM3) human remains arrived at an age of about 60,000 years (more specifically, 56,000–68,000 years) using three different dating methods (Thorne et al. 1999). Although the use of three methods should yield a reliable age estimate with high accuracy, there is still much argument about the ‘true’ age of LM3, with several archaeologists and geomorphologists insisting it is more likely to be 43,000 years old. (Australian Museum, 2004)
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Notes 169
7.
8.
9. 10.
11.
12. 13.
14.
Macintyre believes ‘there are strong arguments for 60,000 years’, and Day notes that ‘there have been some claims that the human occupation of Australia could be doubled to 120,000 years’ (quoted in Australian Museum, 2004). The consequences are numerous. For traditional people, they include an increased reliance on an imbalanced diet with its associated health problems. The forced removals to mission settlements severed ties with country, language, and customs. The effects of these disruptions to indigenous ways of life are evident in high rates of substance abuse, and jail terms for minor crimes. Those who are jailed cope even less well with incarceration than the rest of the population, resulting in an inordinately high incidence of deaths in custody. For a theatrical exploration of some of these issues, see Enoch and Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving (1995), in Chapter 2. Not all land claims have been made on this basis: in 1984 the Maralinga Tjarutja people were granted 80,764 square kilometres of freehold title to their lands (Mazel, 2005). They won access to land that is not as highly valued in Western real estate terms: this remote country was contaminated in the Maralinga nuclear tests in the 1950s. For a fuller account of terra nullius, Wik and Mabo, and other aspects of co-tenancy in the context of land rights on pastoral leases, see Attwood, 1996; Michael Bachelard, 1969; Butt and Eagleson, 1998; Hiley, 1997; McGrath, 1995; Russell, 2005; Sutton, 2003. Perhaps it is not surprising that Alice, who lives in a form of Wonderland, dies before she is able to execute her utopian plan. Many of Louis Nowra’s early plays are gothic, but film (such as Peter Weir’s 1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel of the same name) has explored the gothic landscape more extensively than theatre. Before recent advances in harvest mechanization, the harvesting of sugar cane was preceded by burning off the leaf debris and vermin around the canes, a process implying, symbolically at least, some mastery of the landscape. See Collis for a discussion of the Australian desert in cultural representation. This use of Aboriginal people in texts by white writers was to change in subsequent decades with the work of playwright and novelist Katherine Susannah Prichard, for one. For the beginnings of a complicated response to the place of Aboriginal characters in Australian theatre, see the role of Channa in Drake-Brockman’s Men without Wives (1938) in which she appears at first to represent the women who are ‘grabbed’ by the eponymous men, then plays the same comic function as Pidgeon in The Drovers, but finally reminds audiences that the establishment of the country takes place at the expense of her family. For critical responses, see Goldie and Healy. See Drake-Brockman’s Men without Wives for another anthropomorphic set: Ma Bates dreads going ‘south’ for an urgent operation, but the sudden onset of the wet season makes roads impassable. The off-stage presence of a wall of water means that the landscape comes to her rescue in a perverse way: she prefers to stay in the North, even if it costs her life, in a play where the country wins over the city in terms of inventing strong nations, manly men and effective women. For a more contemporary evocation of the build-up of the Wet, see Balodis’s Wet and Dry (1987).
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170 Notes
Notes 171
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains, I love her far horizons, I love her jewel sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me. (39) 16. The practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families, to be raised by white foster parents or in institutions, was widespread throughout the country until the 1970s. See the discussion of Jane Harrison’s Stolen (1998) in Chapter 2. 17. Melbourne is often characterized as a European-style city, as opposed to Sydney with its harbour and beaches. 18. The only production that appears to have resisted the temptation to overdo the harbour views is the 1987 Perth Hole in the Wall Theatre production: ‘Against a backdrop of Michelin clouds – designer Serge Tampalini has happily resisted setting the Sydney scene by means of the harbour [bridge] coathanger’ (Amos, 1987).
Chapter 2
Monuments
1. For a discussion of the dynamic role of general props, see Sofer, 2003: 23–8. 2. I do not distinguish between memorials, obelisks, statues, etc., preferring to concentrate on the larger concept; Inglis discusses the difference (1998, 52–60). For a discussion of remembering ‘lost’ places, see Peter Read (1996). 3. Lefebvre acknowledges the ambiguous location and function of monuments (1991: 223–4). 4. ANZAC, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, was formed in World War I. It refers colloquially to soldiers from both world wars and to their memorials. 5. Commemoration of wars also varies from culture to culture. See Prost for the ways in which war memorial ceremonies operate in France. Internationally, they typically commemorate survivors of a particular war and children in order to ensure that the memorial signification is passed to the next generation (Prost, 1997: 325). 6. Whereas American war dead are repatriated, Australians who die in wars that have been fought overseas tend to be buried on the battlefield or in war cemeteries. 7. I am indebted to Julie Holledge for this insight. 8. For the Gerzes, ‘the didactic logic of monuments, their demagogical rigidity, recalled too closely traits they associated with fascism’ (Young, 1993: 28). See also Moriarty (1999) and Trumpener (2000) on counter-monuments.
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15. A good example of the romanticization of the landscape is the well-known poem, ‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar, one stanza of which is reproduced here:
9. The Fourth Plinth is an initiative of the Greater London Authority and other agencies to exhibit contemporary sculpture temporarily at Trafalgar Square. 10. The Golden Age focuses on World War II, among other wars. Nowra’s Inside the Island (1980) examines World War I with a comparable connection to the Australian landscape and Aboriginal dispossession. For complementary discussions of Nowra’s work, see Gilbert (1998b); and Kelly (1996 and 1998). 11. Tasmania’s Aboriginal people did not die out, despite settlers’ attempts to exterminate them. They have, however, suffered from what might be termed discursive genocide in which history inaccurately records that they were obliterated (see Lawson, 1995: 25). 12. Between 1962 and 1973, more than 59,000 Australians participated in this war, which claimed 508 Australian lives (Australian War Memorial). 13. For a complete list of the productions, commissions, tours, guests, exhibitions, forums, and arts/culture complexes funded by the ABA, see Overton, 1989: 758–70. Approximately 18 per cent of Australians attend theatre each year (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002a), with slightly more participating in 1988 (Cultural Ministers Council, 1991). 14. For some of the numerous critiques, see Bennett et al.; Cochrane and Goodman,1992; Hodge and Mishra, 1991; and Shaw, 1988. For an analysis of 1988 theatre, see Gilbert, 1998b: 99–114; and Tompkins, 1994. 15. See, for instance, Tes Lyssiotis’s A White Sports Coat (also a 1988 one-woman play, but not part of the ABA programme). The unnamed woman reconciles her Greek heritage with her rural Victoria upbringing, and her life in Melbourne now as she completes a play on the eve of her child’s birth. 16. Sarah’s decision to climb Uluru (formerly known as Ayer’s Rock) may have been appropriate then, but the indigenous owners now request that visitors not climb it. 17. A subsequent production in Perth in 1989 foregrounded the significance of staging the landscape. Gareth Griffiths compares the two: in the open Belvoir St staging, the storm with the rain falling into mud-pool centre stage in a neatly confined concentric circle turned a potentially powerful scene (Norman, lost in the wet, confronts his childhood) into something resembling the ultimate Aussie shower. At the [West Australian] Playhouse, Mark Thompson and Duncan Orde created a tour de force of special effects with a continuous panorama of sunrises, sunsets, electric storms and a very convincing wet season downpour. The epic quality of the setting was triumphantly realised in these scenes, though perhaps at the risk of sometimes overwhelming the actors. (1989: 58) 18. I avoid discussing sacred sites because not only would that require permission from their custodians, but the plays that deal with monuments tend not to focus on them. 19. Maryrose Casey provides a detailed history of indigenous theatre, pointing out that the customary identification of Gilbert’s play as the first Aboriginal play to be produced obscures earlier plays (2004: 4–10).
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172 Notes
20. Placelessness in Harrison’s play differs from Chaudhuri’s description of the term. In many of the Australian examples, a literal interpretation of placelessness overrides Chaudhuri’s ‘placelessness as the combination and layering, one on top of another, of many different places, many distinct orders of spatiality’ (2002: 138). 21. The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was established in May 1995 by the Attorney-General, and was carried out by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. The report, Bringing them Home, was published in 1997. The inquiry identified the effects of separation on individuals, families, and communities, investigated appropriate response and compensation for those affected, and examined current laws, policies, and practices regarding the care and placement of indigenous children (Bringing Them Home, 1997). 22. An earlier version of this discussion forms part of the argument in Tompkins (2006). 23. The play is about the life of the woman who wrote and performs it. To avoid confusion, I refer to ‘Lawford’ as the author of the play and ‘Ningali’ as the character. 24. For a more detailed analysis of all aspects of Ningali and of the next play that I address, The 7 Stages of Grieving, see Grehan’s extensive investigation (2001). 25. Other critics read Trina Parker’s set differently, including a ‘map-like floor’ (Griffiths, 1994: 53) and a ‘desert landscape’ (Waites, 1996: 29). 26. The dispute which stopped Lawford from returning to her country was resolved after the play prompted its mention in Parliament. She and her family have since visited the place where she was born (Chaplin, 2005). 27. The staging of worlds on top of each other is ‘a wonderful visual metaphor : people moving in something that has no edges or boundaries, or frame’ (Kelly, 1990: 250). 28. In addition to a focus on history and ghosts, the trilogy also has linguistic interest: the languages of Latvian, English, and some indigenous language overlap, much like the characters moving between historical moments. 29. At times, the intersections are less strategic and more playful, including when Edvards and Lauma are seen running behind the storm that plagues Leichhardt’s men in No Going Back (Balodis, 1997b: 152). 30. Leichhardt has achieved some degree of memorializing in the landscape. His strenuous efforts in the trilogy suggest that his desire to represent history and glory in Australia would still not be satisfied with having a Sydney suburb, a Queensland river, and several other sites bearing his name. 31. The AMP building is in Sydney’s Customs House Square, the arrival port for many migrants (Hudson, 1999). Legs on the Wall have also performed on the Sydney Opera House as part of 2000 Today, the 25-hour millennial broadcast to celebrate New Year in 2000 (Schofield, 1999) and for the Sydney Olympics. Other companies, including Rock’n’Roll Circus and the women’s circus troupe, Vulcana, have used the ‘performance space’ of the walls of the Brisbane Powerhouse Performing Arts Complex.
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Notes 173
174 Notes
Contamination
1. Gilman notes that Freud ‘move[s] the category of degenerate from its sexual context and place[s] it where it belongs, in the realm of political rhetoric. Freud sees the degenerate not as a real biological category but as a concept revealing of a specific understanding of the historical process’ (1950: 212–13). 2. This policy became so entrenched in the developing national psyche that it was directly supported by every federal politician as late as the 1940s: all parties agreed that ‘this policy is a sacred trust, a dogma, which must not be questioned’ (Elkin, 1946: 217). In spite of Elkin’s claim, Broinowski outlines attempts by individuals in government to encourage broad-scale migration to develop a utopian nation (1992: 2–3). See Tavan for a fuller account of the White Australia policy (7–29). 3. Following 9/11, a specifically anti-Indonesian sentiment has developed in Australia in the wake of the two bombings in Bali (killing over 200 Australians) and the lengthy jail term handed down to Schapelle Corby for drug trafficking (2005). Corby is believed to be innocent by many Australians. These are but a selection of events from contemporary Asian–Australia relations that continue to leave traces of the ambiguous fears associated with the yellow peril. 4. Australian space is not entirely under Australian control even today: ‘certain operations undertaken by the CIA at Pine Gap have never been officially made known to the Australian government’ (Ball, 1980: 16). 5. Morton argues that this excuse is inadequate: ‘Even in 1946 Australian loyalty was not quite as blind as that. A good deal of self-interest was at work’ (1989: 11). 6. Among the non-indigenous protestors were Charles Duguid and Alf Watt. Duguid’s objections saved the lives of the Aboriginal people who lived in the area of Mt Eba (1947: 5). Watt argues that the project was misguided on economic, moral (in relation to indigenous occupants of the land), and ideological grounds. 7. See also Cross, 2001: 48. Aboriginal people were not the only people deemed ‘dispensable’: a British pilot told a Perth researcher that in the 1950s he carried ‘two groups of seriously handicapped people to a test area shortly before one of the 12 nuclear blasts’. The people were presumed to have died (Hickman, 2001: 3). 8. During the 12 years of tests, 15,000 Australians were employed (Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service, 1998), many of whom bypassed security measures: ‘A veteran remembers going into the forward area, without protective clothing, to clear up and recover the dummies that had been placed in battledress near ground zero. He and several others kept the battledress and a pair of boots “and wore them because they were very good working gear”’ (Blakeway and Lloyd-Roberts, 1985: 130). 9. The Milipuddies had walked a path that took them a year to traverse, so they did not meet the authorities who reported that the path was no longer used. The family’s dogs were immediately killed by officials, and the Milipuddies were forcibly removed, taken through areas that were taboo to them (Australian Nuclear Veterans Association, 2005).
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Chapter 3
10. At the time, it was the largest overland rocket range in the Western world: 1600 km long and 300 km wide. The Woomera Prohibited Area is composed of approximately 127,000 square km of land. Woomera’s population peaked at about 5000. Until the establishment of the detention camps to house many of the asylum seekers arriving in Australia, its population would have been approximately 1900, many of whom were US military personnel working at the Nurrungar satellite station. 11. Morton argues that few efforts were made to discuss the range plans with local Aboriginal people, ‘although at least three individual Aborigines protested against the Range plans at a very early date’ (1989: 73). Even the translation of the site’s name was out of place: woomera came from Aboriginal people who lived in eastern Australia whereas western desert cultures used the word miru (Morton, 1989: 117). 12. My discussion of utopia varies from Jill Dolan’s ‘utopian performative’, in which ‘live performances that reject a fixed, more static vision of utopia, and work instead to offer a fleeting glimpse, an ephemeral feeling, of what a better world might be like’ (2004: 165). 13. The bushfire is controlled, even though it kills many livestock, but the play was written in the year of the deadly Ash Wednesday fires in South Australia and Victoria, and the comparison should not be overlooked (Kelly, 1987b: 125). Bushfires are a frequent summer phenomenon that can rage through eucalypt forest to devastate landscape, homes, and lives in a very short time. 14. This manipulation recalls another spatial takeover: the indigenization of the settler who takes on ‘facsimile’ Aboriginal status. 15. He and Esther are also versions of Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir waiting for Godot at Maralinga. Instead of God, Godot, or the end of the world, Helen arrives and Rutherford nurses her back to health. 16. See also the discussion of Tiger Country in Tompkins, 2006. 17. Lucy is not staged because it has been considered inappropriate for a white actor to portray an indigenous person since approximately the 1990s. Cathcart also received some criticism when she performed a section from The Serpent’s Fall at the Third International Women Playwrights’ conference in Adelaide in 1994: this performance was viewed by some participants as appropriating the voice of marginalized women (for an account of how this has influenced Tiger Country, see Grehan: 2001, 48–50). 18. ‘The title for Cathcart and Lemon’s play came from an outback sage’s phrase, used to describe the wild land beyond sheep country. Andrea Lemon quotes him: “further north of anywhere you are in tiger country”’ (Harford, 1995: 22). 19. Another theatre piece, Half a Life, developed in conjunction with Belvoir St Theatre and the director/deviser, Paul Brown, brings Aboriginal groups whose land intersects with Maralinga together with the Australian Nuclear Veterans Group (Brown, 2004). 20. Jukurrpa is also spelled tjukurrpa. In brief, ‘dreaming’ is central to many Central Desert Aboriginal people; it incorporates a broad sense of indigenous law and culture. 21. In 1984, the Tjarutja people were granted 76,000 square km of their (still contaminated) land, excluding the (prohibited) Maralinga and Emu test sites.
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Notes 175
22. Mamu is not Rankin and Jamieson’s only staging of Maralinga and nuclear contamination. At the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival, Jamieson performed Ngapartji Ngapartji. Here, the place of Maralinga is mapped onto (deformed) bodies. Jamieson teaches the audience a few words of Pitjantjatjara, including the words to the song, ‘Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes’. When he subsequently describes the effects of the explosions using the same words the audience now knows, the connections between the explosions, land, and people are clear. 23. Woomera was originally designed for 425 people, but was expanded to house 2300 people, although the figures (number of inmates, beds at the centres, length of stay) were notoriously rubbery. The centre was run by Australasian Correctional Management, a private company owned by Wackenhut, the American correctional institutions management company, contracted to the Department of Immigration (Spencer, 2000). 24. Other politically and historically laden discourses also operate: asylum seekers are deemed guilty of queue-jumping (see Mares, 2001: 14, 19) and falsely claiming refugee status until proven innocent. Those who are released, whether through Temporary Protection Visas or deportation, are then billed hundreds of thousands of dollars for the full cost of their incarceration in what Steketee terms ‘the ultimate in “user pays”’: Barrister Julian Burnside has been able to find only two precedents for innocent people being charged for their incarceration: in France under Robespierre, when people suspected of harbouring anti-revolutionary thoughts were liable for the costs of their detention; and in Nazi Germany, when bills were sent to families of Jews, including for the costs of their gassing. (Steketee, 2005) 25. The government’s Pacific Solution included paying the Nauru government to incarcerate some of the Tampa refugees in the small Pacific island country. In late 2005, there were two remaining detainees there. This decision to detain asylum seekers as far off-shore as Nauru suggests the extreme anxiety they would represent if they were to actually reach Australian shores. 26. Another type of contamination continues to circulate around Woomera’s future: whether or not Woomera will enter into a third major phase of controversial, contaminating existence: as a storage site for the nation’s nuclear materials. Sydney’s (low level) radioactive waste has been stored at Woomera (Hoy), reinforcing its position as a non-place – and even a place of abjection – in the national imaginary. 27. The children overboard scandal (in which government officials misrepresented asylum seekers as throwing their children over the side of a leaky boat in order to blackmail officials to give them entry) provided another opportunity to vilify asylum seekers as inhuman, or not the type of people Australia should ‘accept’. This scandal dogged the government, but like many such scandals connected to actions that a government takes in the name of protection, it was soon forgotten. See Marr and Wilkinson (2003) for more on this scandal.
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176 Notes
28. The boat that the Tampa rescued was not the only boat heading for Australia. At least one boat capsized, resulting in the loss of many lives. 29. Geoffrey Milne has counted almost 20 plays about/by asylum seekers between 2002 and 2004. The rawness of the emotions in asylum-seeker and refugee theatre is mirrored by, frequently, a roughness in style. The speed with which they are produced to address a political opportunity sometimes compromises quality. Most plays do engage critically with contamination and spatiality; many, supported by the non-profit organization Actors for Refugees, have met with success. Asylum-seeker theatre is not just an Australian phenomenon. Sparked by the Tampa crisis that was taking place the last time her company was performing in Australia, the French director, Ariane Mnouchkine, created Le Dernier Caravanserail (2003) which also uses direct testimony from refugees and asylum seekers around the world. It incorporates the Tampa crisis and detention in Villawood. 30. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) established a ‘letters to refugees’ campaign: over 2000 Australians wrote letters ‘to make contact with and welcome refugees imprisoned in detention centres in Australia’ (Rural Australians, 2002). Approximately 4000 detainees participated in this programme. 31. The Waiting Room intersperses these images with ‘Whites Only’ slogans across a map of Australia, and a clown-like routine performed by the Ku Klux Klanstyle guards. 32. The location of Woomera at the centre of the nation takes on an ironic context in the pub’s karaoke contest, when two of the guards sing Neil Murray’s ‘My Island Home’, a song about desert and ocean Australia. When Rick sings, the song conjures up an exclusionist Australia. Micko, of Aboriginal background, brings to it indigenous Australians’ compromised relationship with spatiality. 33. Slow Falling Bird stages another location, that of a spirit world that the asylum seekers try to call on to locate themselves. The mystical musical communication between the child and her mother, and later between the child and her foster mother, are one manifestation of this unmapped place. 34. Actors for Refugees was established by Alice Garner and Kate Atkinson in 2001 (www.actorsforrefugees.org.au). It and the Refugee Action Collective (http://www.rac-qld.org/default.asp) have mounted many community campaigns on behalf of asylum seekers. Amnesty International has worked extensively to urge the Australian government to bring its policies into line with international standards (www.amnesty.org.au). 35. The closest, Philip Dean’s 1999 First Asylum, avoids just attacking current government policy. A woman from Vietnam arrives on a boat in Darwin, where the play takes place in 1996, and escapes the police round-up. She is aided by some Australians, and she applies for asylum on the basis of religious persecution. Her claims of persecution may be true, but her grounds of religious prosecution are proven to be false. In this play, there are often three sides to every story. First Asylum asks the ‘where do you come from’ question of all characters, the perspective always shifting; very few characters are entirely honest with their answers.
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Notes 177
178 Notes
Chapter 4
The borders of identity
1. While boundaries and borders are not exactly the same, I use them somewhat interchangeably. It is also beyond this study’s scope to establish the differences between borders that demarcate one zone from another and borders as liminal spaces in their own right. 2. One per cent of Australians identify as Muslim, and approximately the same proportion were born in the Middle East, with twice as many nominating parents born in the Middle East (Australian Bureau of Statistics: 2002b). The numbers are low, but the notoriously vague catchphrase, ‘people of Middle-Eastern appearance’, covers an increasingly broad spectrum of Australia’s multicultural population, including some Southern Europeans, some people form the Indian subcontinent, and even some Aboriginal people. The association between terrorism and Islamic extremists risks turning large portions of the population into suspicious characters. The sign of the body is not necessarily reliable in such categorization. 3. Certainly postmodernism and post-colonialism both address the anxiety of displacement as well but my argument here is that the anxiety of displacement evident in Australia is connected with its spatial history, even if it intersects with postmodern/post-colonial thought. 4. See Castronovo who avoids theorizing the border as a ‘space divested of “hegemonic culture”’ (1997: 199), and Benito and Manzanas, who read Anzaldúa’s border theory as overly ‘optimistic’ (2002: 11), inviting calls for ‘caution against the idealistic construction of border culture and theory’ (2002: 11). For an analysis of the problems with Anzaldúa’s theory, see Johnson and Michaelsen, 1997: 12–15. 5. Many contemporary discourses hinge on the potential productivity of thinking about borders, edges, and boundaries: nationalism maintains borders, while other discourses such as multiculturalism, interculturalism, post-colonialism, and globalization tend to identify borders in order to cross them. A border artist/theorist whose work addresses questions of borders and issues significant to these theories is Guillermo Gómez-Peña (see La Pocha Nostra, 2005). 6. The train is also a complicated image of psychic space that resonates here with gendered and psychological associations as well. 7. The production of Still Angela varies from the printed script’s scene order. 8. As well as conversing with recently dead people, he also speaks to long-dead spirits: ‘“Old People, how come I’m here doing this? Who’s fucking killing us? Old People, how come I’m walking this dreaming path? How come any of us are?” They never answer not how you can see anyway ’ (Frankland, 2002: 241). They do answer, he later realizes, but not as he expects. Jack comes to engage in a physical battle with the spirits who manifest in a
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36. ‘Be alert, not alarmed’ was the federal government’s anti-terrorism slogan in the early days post 9/11. Yet the purpose of the campaign is to make people very alarmed, while the materiality of the campaign (a fridge magnet with a hotline phone number) is unlikely to make anyone alert.
9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
17. 18.
19.
ferocious storm, which he withstands, in effect overcoming the latest urge to end his own life. While multicultural policy was legislated in the 1970s, the experience of a multi-ethnic nation was already well familiar to Australians. Australia has essentially been ‘multicultural’ since at least 1788: the convicts who arrived at Botany Bay brought racially and culturally diverse backgrounds. Even earlier, in pre-contact times, Aboriginal groups interacted with other cultures: for instance, some groups along the north coast engaged in trade with Indonesians (Mulvaney, 1989: xvi, 22–8). Following contact, migrants from around the Pacific Rim and beyond came to Australia, particularly once gold was discovered in the 1850s. For a detailed analysis of this process, see Jupp, 2002: 83–104 and Lopez, 2000: 156–91. ‘About one million migrants arrived in each of the five decades following 1950’ (Australian Government Department of Immigration, 2005). More recently, substantial numbers of people from Vietnam, China, Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among other countries, have settled in Australia, some forming sizeable communities in larger centres. In the mid1990s, 40 per cent of migrants to Australia were born in Asia (National Multicultural Advisory Council, 1999: 7). Australian multiculturalism does not include indigenous Australians, a choice made by indigenous groups when the policy was first mooted. See O’Regan for a 1994 account. Mishra critiques multiculturalism ten years later. In an extreme example, Chulov reports Australian federal police attempts to encourage a man of Middle Eastern descent to admit to planning a terrorist attack in Sydney, an attack which existed only at the level of rumour: no evidence was found suggesting it would actually take place, let alone that the man was involved. Goldfields display, the Chinese Museum, Melbourne (16 October, 2005). Many such plays use a family setting through which the problems of reconciling with ‘mainstream’ Australia are played out, often incorporating multiple languages and linguistic registers. Other plays, particularly monodramas, outline a character’s rapprochement with otherness in an Australian context. See Tompkins, 2001, for an exploration of multiculturalism in Australian theatre. For further analyses of the performance style of Sadness, see Grehan, 2002; and Lo, 2000. It could be argued that Chong Koua assumes that the custom of ‘marriage by kidnap’ will work on Australian soil, whereas Soumieng establishes the boundaries of her sexual being differently, although the play does not pursue this necessarily. A variation on mythic subjectivity in Blue Murder is Dorothy Hewett’s Nowhere (2001) which uses as its base the Australian myth of the bush: a road sign pointing to ‘Nowhere’ marks the oxymoronically named Dry Torrent, one of a legion of dying country towns where even the place-myth has degenerated for marginalized characters. It chronicles the ‘nobodies’ (Hewett, 2001: 42): an elderly communist, a Vietnam vet, and an Aboriginal prostitute whose mother was a member of the stolen generations. The authorities
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Notes 179
180 Notes
Conclusion: haunted pasts and methektic futures 1. An additional location that emerges from this study is cyberspace, a concrete dimension of spatiality that is deemed ‘real’ by some and ‘imaginary’ by others. Wertheim explains: ‘[d]espite its lack of physicality, cyberspace is a real place. I am there – whatever this statement may ultimately turn out to mean’ (1999: 230–1; emphasis in original). Cyberspace, like all forms of mediatization, is increasingly being deployed in Australian theatre, partly in a heterotopic format to explore alternative orderings of the ‘real’ world, and partly as an extension of the ‘real’ world. For a thorough description of the spatiality of cyberspace and its relevance to theatre, see Harvey and Tompkins, 2005. 2. See Josephine Wilson’s play, The Geography of Haunted Places (1997), which aptly locates haunting in contemporary Australian theatre. This one-woman play brings living bodies and ghostly presences together in the landscape, connecting white women and the contested Australian landscape. The play ‘positions the body of the performer as an unstable site for the exploration of narratives of Australian colonialism, exploring the ambiguities of the female body (icon, agent, victim) within those nation-building stories’ (Wilson, 1999: 131). For a detailed analysis of this play, see Grehan, 2001.
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try to commit Snow, the vet, to an institution for mental disabilities, and Josh, the aging communist, in the Home of Peace retirement home. They do not seem to care about Vonnie who falls between the cracks of society. The conclusion to the play heralds a substantial flood of biblical proportions, one the older characters are able to read in the landscape.
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——. (2004). Wonderlands. Sydney: Currency. Tiger Country. (1995). By Andrea Lemon and Sarah Cathcart. Programme Notes, George Fairfax Theatre. 20 October. Tompkins, Joanne. (1994). ‘“Celebrate 1988?” Australian Drama in the Bicentennial Year.’ Australian and New Zealand Studies Canada, 12: 103–12. ——. (2001). “‘Homescapes” and Identity Reformations in Australian Multicultural Drama.’ Theatre Research International, 26.1: 47–59. ——. (2006). ‘Gendering Space: The Desert and Psyche in Contemporary Australian Theatre.’ Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory. Ed. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 190–208. Trumpener, Kate. (2000). ‘Memories Carved in Granite: Great War Memorials and Everyday Life.’ PMLA, 115.5: 1096–103. Turner, Graeme. (1994). Making it National: Nationalism and Australian Popular Culture. Australian Cultural Studies. Ed. John Tulloch. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Ubersfeld, Anne. (1998). Reading Theatre. Ed. Paul Perron and Patrick Debbèche. Trans. Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. United Nations. (28 July 2000). ‘Press Release HR/CT/587.’ United Nations. 9 December 2005. Available at: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/ 2000/20000728.hrct587.doc.html. Waites, James. (1989). ‘The Truscott Family’s Love Gone Wrong.’ Review of Hate, by Stephen Sewell. Reviews: Australia’s Bicentennial Arts Program 1988. Ed. Sarah Overton. Sydney: Australian Bicentennial Authority, p. 331. [Rpt. from New Theatre Australia, Jan. 1989]. ——. (1996). Review of Ningali, by Robyn Archer, Angela Chapman and Ningali Lawford. Australian and New Zealand Theatre Record, 10.1 p. 29. [Rpt. from Sydney Morning Herald, 8 Jan. 1996]. Watkin, David. (1983). ‘Soane and his Contemporaries.’ John Soane. London: Academy Editions. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 40–59. Watt, Alf. (1947). ‘Rocket Range Threatens Australia.’ Adelaide: SA State Committee, Australian Communist Party. Wertheim, Margaret. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday. Williamson, David. (1980). Travelling North. Sydney: Currency. ——. (1987). Emerald City. Sydney: Currency. Wilson, Josephine, and Erin Hefferon. (1999). The Geography of Haunted Places. Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts. Ed. Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman. Sydney: Currency, pp. 129–35. ‘Woomera.’ (2004). Walkabout: Australian Travel Guide. Fairfax Digital. 9 December 2005. Available at: http://walkabout.com.au/locations/ SAWoomera.shtml. Wright, Judith. (1966). Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Yang, William. (1992). Sadness. La Boite Theatre, Brisbane. 1994. ——. (1996). Sadness. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. ——. (1998) The North. Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane. ——. (2005). Objects of Meditation. Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane. River Festival. 8 September. Yen, Anna. (2000). Chinese Take Away: Three Plays by Asian Australians. Ed. Donald Batchelor. Brisbane: Playlab, pp. 32–71.
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Works Cited 195
196 Works Cited
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-05
Young, James E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——. (1997). ‘Germany’s Memorial Question: Memory, Counter-Memory, and the End of the Monument.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly, 96.4: 853–80. ——. (2000). At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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1841 56–7 The 7 Stages of Grieving 170, 173
66, 69, 72, 74,
Aboriginal art dot paintings 67, 106 Aboriginal Australians and absenting from landscape 25, 34, 38, 39, 66 and dispossession 9, 15–16, 23–5, 42, 66, 68, 70, 74, 131, 137, 163, 172 and genocide 5–2, 109, 172 and kinship 73 and land management 24–5 and land rights 3, 6, 16, 26, 68, 81, 170 and memorialization 44, 66–75, 80 and native title 23–27, 107 and the stolen generations 38, 59, 68, 73, 171, 179 Kokatha people 93 Aboriginal deaths in custody 52, 60–1, 72, 137–9, 170 Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra 3 Actors for Refugees 125, 177 Acworth, Elaine Composing Venus 108 Allen, David 150 Al–Qady, Towfiq Nothing but Nothing: One Refugee’s Story 116, 118–19 Al Qaeda 114 alterity 15, 46, 50, 79, 112, 128, 130, 141–3, 154, 165–6 Amnesty International 112, 125, 177 Amos, Mardy 60, 171 Augé, Marc 13–15, 87, 94–5, 168 ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) 45, 47, 49, 66, 171 Anzaldúa, Gloria 130, 178 Appadurai, Arjun 131 Archdall, Susan 87, 106 Archer, Robyn 66, 69 Ashcroft, Bill 22
asylum seekers 6, 17, 88, 90, 94, 109–26, 127, 163, 175, 176 Attwood, Bain 20, 66–7, 170 audience participation 68, 121–3, 125, 165, 176 Australian Bicentennial Authority (ABA) 55–7, 59, 62, 65, 172 Australian Defence Force (ADF) 93 Away 29 badlands 90, 164 Bachelard, Gaston 129 Bachelard, Michael 170 Bali bombings 174 Balibar, Etienne 130–1 Balodis, Janis 17, 44, 75, 77–82, 91, 94, 99, 100, 162, 170, 173 Heart for the Future 91, 94, 99–101 The Ghosts Trilogy 17, 44, 75, 77, 82; My Father’s Father 75, 78, 80, 82; No Going Back 75–7, 173; Too Young For Ghosts 75, 77–8 Wet and Dry 170 Barnes, Mick 30 Barnes, Trevor 13 Barton, Archie 93 Barungin 57, 59–62, 66 Bashford, Alison 87 the beach 28–32, 39, 166 Benito, Jesús 178 Bennett, Tony 59, 172 Berlant, Lauren 45 Bicentenary, Australian, 1988 16, 44, 55–7, 59, 62, 65, 66 Bierce, Ambrose The Devil’s Dictionary 127 Binding, Paul 13 Blackrock, 29–30 Blair, Sandy 5 Blakeway, Denys 92–3, 174 Blood Links 147 Blue Murder 155–9, 161, 179 bodies as a site of performance: see corporeality
197
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Index
Bollen, Jonathan 29 Bolton, Arthur T. 168 Bovell, Andrew 36–8, 40, 115 Holy Day 36–9, 42, 115 and Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 40 Bower, Humphrey Natural Life 35–6 the Bringing Them Home report 68, 173 Brisbane, Katharine 28, 32 Broinowski, Alison 89, 174 Brown, Paul Half a Life 175 The Bulletin 89 the bush 21–3, 28–9, 31–3, 36–41, 179 as a frontier 32 bushfires 23, 97–8, 123, 175 Bush, George W. (US President) 159 bushfires: see the bush The Butcher’s Wife 150 Butt, Peter 91, 170 Capricornia 57, 61–3 The Career Highlights of the Mamu 104–7, 176 Carlson, Marvin 163, 168 Carter, Paul 10–12, 16, 32, 43, 44, 46, 66, 165, 168 and methexis 10–12, 16, 46, 66, 165, 168–9 Casey, Edward 14, 133, 168 Casey, Maryrose 168 Castronovo, Russs 178 Cathcart, Sarah: see Lemon, Andrea and Sarah Cathcart Cerwonka, Allaine 19 Chaplin, Angela 66, 69, 173 Chaudhuri, Una 5, 59, 168, 173 geopathology 4, 59 polytopianism 4 The Cherry Pickers 67 Christian, Beatrix 155–7 Blue Murder 155–9, 161, 179 Christmas Island detention centre 96, 113–14 Chulov, Martin 179 Citizen X 115–17, 119–22 Clark, Jane 169 Cloudstreet 29
Composing Venus 108 Cochrane, Peter 55, 172 Collis, Christy 170 colonialism 9, 36, 66, 75, 88, 90, 169, 180 contamination 16–17, 87–90, 94–6, 103–4, 106–9, 113–15, 126, 142, 176, 177 and binary constructions 16–17, 87–90, 109, 130 and boundaries 88, 110 and legislation 87, 89, 113 and quarantine rhetoric 87, 89–91, 94, 109, 112 biological model of 89, 108 Conversations with the Dead 133, 137, 139, 157 Cook, Captain James 137 Corby, Schapelle 174 Cornelius, Patricia 40, 144–6 and Adam Hazimanolis Home of a Stranger 144, 147, 154, 160 and Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 40 corporeality 3, 14–15, 18, 70–2, 75, 90, 109, 112, 117, 176, 180 and performance 14–15, 58, 71, 73–4, 116, 169, 180 Crawford, Jim 96 Rocket Range 96 Crazy Brave 40 Cronulla Beach riots, Sydney 166 Cross, Roger 91–2, 174 cultural amnesia 24, 45, 47, 52–3, 57, 60, 64, 75, 81–2 cultural memory 75, 79, 85, 81, 137 Curtin detention centre 111–12, 118 Cusack, Dymphna 96 Pacific Paradise 96 cyberspace 180 Damasio, Antonio R. 129 Davis, Jack 33–5, 57, 59–60, 66, 68, 168 Barungin 57, 59–62, 66 The Dreamers 34, 59 Kullark 34–5, 59, 68, 168 No Sugar 59, 68 Dean, Philip 177 First Asylum 177
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198 Index
de Certeau, Michel 168 Deleuze, Gilles 168 Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) 110, 113 desert landscapes 21, 54, 69–70, 79–80, 111, 120, 134–7, 170 detention centres 17, 87, 90, 94, 110–26, 175, 176, 177 and riots 110–11 and trauma 111, 124 Curtin 111–12, 118 Christmas Island 96, 113–14 Maribyrnong 111 Villawood 111, 177 Woomera 17, 90, 94, 109–15, 117, 120, 123–5, 175, 176, 177 The Devil’s Dictionary 127 Diamond, Elin 7, 10–11 unmaking mimesis 7, 10 Dillon, Janette 168 DIMA: see Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Dissanayake, Ellen 129 Diving for Pearls 41 Dodd, Mark 114 Dolan, Jill 175 Donnan, Hastings 140 dot paintings 67, 106 Drake–Brockman, Henrietta 170 Men Without Wives 170 The Dreamers 34, 59 The Drovers 33, 170 Duguid, Charles 174 Duncan, James 13 Dunstone, Bill 19 Eagleson, Robert 170 Eccles, Jeremy 106 Elkin, A. P. 174 Ellis, Ben 108–9, 116, 120, 123–4 Falling Petals 108–9 These People 116, 120, 123–5 Emerald City 40 Emery, Ryan 114 Enoch, Wesley, and Deborah Mailman 66, 72–4, 170 The 7 Stages of Grieving 66, 69, 72, 74, 170, 173 Enright, Nick 29–30 A Property of the Clan 30
199
Blackrock, 29–30 and Justin Monjo, Cloudstreet 29 Esson, Louis 33 The Drovers 33, 170 Evans, Bob 61 Evans, Christine 116, 124–5 Slow Falling Bird 116, 123–5, 177 Falling Petals 108–9 Fensham, Rachel 134 First Asylum 177 Fletcher, Angus 88 Forty Lounge Cafe 41–2 Foucault, Michel 95 Frankland, Richard 133, 137–9, 178 Conversations with the Dead 133, 137, 139, 157 Freud, Sigmund 8–11, 16, 28, 36–7, 45–6, 50, 61, 84, 90, 95, 115, 137, 156, 158, 163–5, 168, 174 the uncanny 8–10, 28, 36–7, 45–6, 50, 61, 84, 90, 95, 115, 137, 168 Friedman, Jonathan 131 Friedman, Susan Stanford 128 Friends of Dorothy 147 Fuchs, Elinor 5, 168 Gandy, Joseph Michael 1–2, 5, 18, 162 Garner, Stanton B., Jr. 168 Gelder, Ken: see Gelder and Jacobs’ uncanny Gelder and Jacobs’ uncanny 9–13, 25–6, 28, 31, 34–5, 39, 56, 49–50, 52, 60–2, 66, 69, 72, 75, 77–8, 90, 98, 101, 107, 109, 115, 128, 136, 145, 149, 152–4, 156, 164, 166, 168 genocide 51–2, 109, 172 and Tasmania’s Indigenous peoples 51, 172 Genty, Philip 6 The Geography of Haunted Places 180 geopathology 4, 59 Gerz, Jochen and Esther 47, 171 ghosts 36, 54, 77–9, 81–2, 85, 100, 156–7, 162–3, 173 The Ghosts Trilogy 17, 44, 75, 77, 82 Gibson, Ross 18 75, 90, 163–4 Gilbert, Helen 68, 172 Gilbert, Kevin 67, 172 The Cherry Pickers 67
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Index
Gilman, Sander 88, 174 Gittins, Debbie 105 Glow, Hilary 65 The Golden Age 49–55, 115, 172 Goldie, Terry 170 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 178 Goodman, David 55, 172 Gow, Michael 29, 56–7 1841 56–7 Away 29 Great Victorian Desert: see also Tjuntjuntjara 106–7 Grehan, Helena 70–3, 102, 173, 175, 179, 180 Griffiths, Gareth 172, 173 Grosz, Elizabeth 18, 163–4 Guantanamo Bay prison, Cuba 159–60 Gurr, Michael 40, 116, 119 Crazy Brave 40 Something To Declare 116, 119 Guattari, Felix 168 Halal–el–Mashakel 116–17, 120–1 Half a Life 175 Hall, Stuart 132, 140 Hanson, Pauline 143 Harrison, Jane 68, 171, 173 Stolen 68, 171 Harvey, David 1, 169 Harvey, Neal 180 Hate 57, 63–5 Haynes, Roslynn 169 Hazimanolis, Adam 144–6 and Patricia Cornelius, Home of a Stranger 144, 147, 154, 160 Healy, Ken 41, 170 Heart for the Future 91, 94, 99–101 Hetherington, Kevin 3, 15, 94–5, 127, 168 heterotopia 90, 94–103, 105, 107–8, 110, 115, 119, 123, 125–6, 133, 165 Hewett, Dorothy 179 Nowhere 179 Hickman, Belinda 174 Hicks, David 160 Hiley, Graham 170 Hiroshima bombing, Japan 105, 107 Historia 150 Hodge, Bob 172
Holledge, Julie 131, 171 the Holocaust 45 Holy Day 36–9, 42, 115 Home of a Stranger 144, 147, 154, 160 Homeland 83–5 Hooker, Claire 87 House 47 Howard, John (Australian Prime Minister) 113–14 Howitt, Richie 42 Hoy, Anthony 176 hunger strikes in detention centres
111
Immigration Restriction Bill 89 Indigenous Australians: see Aboriginal Australians Inglis, K. S. 45, 171 ‘Invasion Day’ 59 Jacobs, Jane M.: see Gelder and Jacobs’ uncanny Jaivin, Linda 116–18, 120–1 Halal-el-Mashakel 116–17, 120–1 Jamieson, Trevor 104–7, 176 and Scott Rankin, The Career Highlights of the Mamu 104–7, 176 and Scott Rankin, Ngapartji Ngapartji 176 Janaczewska, Noëlle 144, 150–3 The Butcher’s Wife 150 Historia 150 Songket 144, 150–4 Johnson, David E. 178 Johnson, Eva 108 Murras 108–19 Johnston, Anna 169 Jupp, James 113, 141, 179 Kane, Paul 21–2 Kaplan, Caren 131–2 Katz, Cindi 13 Keene, David 40 Low 40 The Keepers 67 Kelly, Ned 47, 123 Kelly, Veronica 31, 99, 162, 172, 173, 175 Kemp, Jenny 133–6 Still Angela 133–7, 140, 178 Kerbaj, Richard 128
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200 Index
Kirby, Kathleen M. 168 Kristeva, Julia 130 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 72 Kullark 34–5, 59, 68, 168 landscape, Australian and anthropomorphism 22, 170 and clearing 19 and beaches: see beach and the bush: see bush and metonymy 9, 23, 33, 43 and theatrical staging 7–8, 22, 29, 35–6, 39, 40–1, 43, 99, 107, 163–4, 172; literal depiction 22; non–realist depiction 22; the frame play 22; the room play 22 and the veranda 22, 31, 98 and spatial metaphors 9, 21–2, 31, 35, 39, 42, 48–50, 57–9, 65, 67–8, 73, 80, 82–3, 85, 128–30, 157–8, 169; the isolated landscape 33, 91 language 70–2, 75, 129, 141–2, 144–5, 150, 170, 173, 179 Laurie, Victoria 106–7 Lawford, Josie Ningali 66, 69–71, 173 and Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer, Ningali: The Story So Far 66, 69–74, 173 Lawler, Ray 39 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 39–40 Lawson, Alan 25, 169, 172 Lavie, Smadar 129, 131 Le Dernier Caravanserail 177 Lefebvre, Henri 2–3, 16, 39, 43–4, 61, 65, 154, 163, 168, 171 Legs on the Wall theatre troupe 83, 173 Homeland 83–5 Leichhardt, Ludwig 75–82, 173 Lemon, Andrea and Sarah Cathcart 20, 57–8, 101–4, 175 The Serpent’s Fall 57–8, 175 Tiger Country 20–1, 101–4 Le Quy, Duong 49, 50, 53–4 Meat Party 49, 50, 53–5 Lindsay, Joan 170 Picnic at Hanging Rock 170
201
Lingwood, James 44 lip–sewing in detention centres 112, 116–17, 122 Litson, Jo 117 Lloyd-Roberts, Sue 92, 93, 174 Lo, Jacqueline 179 Locke-Elliott, Sumner 33 Rusty Bugles 33 Lopez, Mark 141, 179 Low 40 Lowenthal, David 20 Luke, Timothy 94 Lyssiotis, Tes 41, 172 A White Sports Coat 172 Forty Lounge Cafe 41–2 Mabo, Eddie Koiki 26 Mabo native title decision 26, 170 Mackellar, Dorothea 171 ‘My Country’ 171 Maclean, Alanna 37 Mackintosh, Iain 168 Magowan, Fiona 66, 67 Makeham, Paul 20–2 the Manoora 113 Manzanas, Ana Maria 178 maps 13, 58, 76–7, 79, 105, 120, 177 Maralinga 17, 87, 90–4, 96–105, 107, 109, 115, 126, 163, 170, 175, 176 and nuclear fallout 90, 102, 107 and nuclear testing 17, 87, 91–2, 170 Maralinga Tjarutja people 93, 170 Marcoo detonation crater 92, 100 Mares, Peter 111–13, 115, 176 Maribyrnong detention centre 111 Marin, Louis 94 Markus, Andrew 89 Marr, David 110, 113, 114, 176 Massey, Doreen 14 Maza, Bob 67 The Keepers 67 Mazel, Odette 170 McAuley, Gay 4, 168 McCallum, John 37, 39 McClintock, Anne 88 McGorry, Patrick 111 McGrath, Ann 170 McMaster, Don 109 Meat Party 49, 50, 53–5 Melbourne Theatre Company 76, 77, 99 Melbourne Workers Theatre 116, 119
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Index
Men Without Wives 170 Menzies, Sir Robert (Australian Prime Minister) 92 methexis 7, 10–13, 16, 28, 32, 34–5, 50, 73, 81, 86, 90, 96, 106, 133, 165, 168–9 Meyrick, Julian 4 Michaels, Eric 67, 178 Michaelsen, Scott 178 migration to Australia 83–5, 112–14, 141–3, 174 Asian 17 Post-war 75–6, 84–5, 94, 112, 141–4 and trauma 84 Milipuddie family 92, 174 Milne, Geoffrey 177 mimesis 7, 10–13, 25, 28, 34, 52, 66, 95, 104 Mishra, Vijay 172, 179 Mnouchkine, Ariane 177 Le Dernier Caravanserail 177 Monjo, Justin 29 and Nick Enright, Cloudstreet 29 multiculturalism 112, 140–5, 147, 153–4, 178, 179: see also Galbally Report Mulvaney, D. J. 179 Murras 108–9 Murray Island/‘Mer’ 26 My Father’s Father 75, 78, 80, 82 Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A Drama in 30 Scenes 155–61 mythic space 155–7 Native Title 23–7, 107 Mabo decision 26, 170 Wik decision 26, 170 Yorta Yorta decision 26 Natural Life 35–6 Nauru 113, 176 Neill, Rosemary 99 New, William H. 127 Ngapartji Ngapartji 176 Ningali: The Story So Far 66, 69–74, 173 No Going Back 75–7, 173 No Sugar 59, 68 Nolan, Sidney 123 Non-place 87–8, 91, 94–7, 100–1, 103–5, 107–8, 110, 114–15, 117–18, 120–1, 124–5, 165, 176
The North 147, 149 North, Michael 43 Nothing but Nothing: One Refugee’s Story 116, 118–19 Nowhere 179 Nowra, Louis 29–30, 49–52, 57, 61–3, 96–8, 108, 115, 170, 172 Capricornia 57, 61–3 The Golden Age 49–55, 115, 172 Radiance 29–32 Summer of the Aliens 108 Sunrise 96–9, 104, 105 nuclear testing 17, 93, 98–9, 170 at Maralinga: see Maralinga and radioactivity 87, 92, 176 Nurrungar 93–4, 175 Nyoongah people 34–5, 59–60, 68 Objects for Meditation 147 The One Day of the Year 49 One Nation party 143 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid 5, 6 O’Regan, Tom 179 ou-topia: see non-place Overton, Sarah 172 Pacific Paradise 96 Parker, Trina 69, 102, 173 Parr, Mike 117 UnAustralian 117 Pavis, Patrice 4 Payne, Pamela 30 Perera, Suvendrini 110 Picnic at Hanging Rock 170 Pike, Jimmy 60 Platform 27 116, 119 The Waiting Room 116–20, 122–4, 177 Plinth (or Untitled Monument) 47–8 polytopianism 4–5 Port Hedland detention centre 110, 111 Prichard, Katherine Susannah 170 A Property of the Clan 30 Prost, Antoine 171 psychic place 132–40, 156, 162, 178 Public Art Agency 85–6 ‘Art Built In’ campaign 86 Quah, Karen
6
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202 Index
racism 61–2, 89, 143, 165 Radiance 29–32 Rankin, Scott 104–7, 176 and Trevor Jamieson, Ngapartji Ngapartji 176 and Trevor Jamieson, The Career Highlights of the Mamu 104–7, 176 Rayson, Hannie 65 Read, Alan 168 Read, Peter 171 Reeves, Melissa and Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, and Christos Tsiolkas, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 40 Refugee Action Collective 125, 177 refugees 17, 76, 94, 109–11, 113–18, 120, 123–5, 176, 177 Latvian 76 return of the repressed 8–10, 61, 98, 142–3 repression 8–11, 15–16, 20, 35, 46, 51–2, 55, 61, 84, 98, 134, 137, 143, 161, 165 Reynolds, Henry 24, 25 Roach, Joseph 45 Robert, Richard 29 Robins, Kevin 131 Rocket Range 96 Rock’n’Roll Circus 173 Rose, Gillian 133 Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) 177 Russell, Peter H. 170 Rusty Bugles 33 Sadness 144, 147–51, 154, 179 Said, Edward 1 Sarah, Peter 55–6 Scheer, Edward 117 Schofield, Nell 173 Sennett, Richard 109, 126 September 11 attacks 114, 158 The Serpent’s Fall 57–8, 175 settler culture 6, 20–1, 24–5, 28, 33–7, 47, 56, 60–2, 65–8, 169, 172 and the Australian landscape 21, 24–5, 28, 33–5, 47, 66–8, 73 settler monuments 44–5, 66 Sewell, Stephen 57, 63–4, 155, 157–60 Hate 57, 63–5
203
Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A Drama in 30 Scenes 155–61 Sexton, Jennifer 166 Seymour, Alan 49 The One Day of the Year 49 Shapiro, Jerome F. 95 Shaw, George 56, 172 Shields, Rob 155, 159, 166 Sidetrack Performance Group 115–17, 119–20, 122 Citizen X 115–17, 119–22 Sidoti, Chris 109 the Simpson Desert 133–4 Slow Falling Bird 116, 123–5, 177 Smith, Neil 13 Soane, Sir John 1–2, 5, 18, 162, 168 Sofer, Andrew 44, 171 Soja, Edward 83, 132 Something To Declare 116, 119 Songket 144, 150–4 Spencer, Matthew 176 Stafford, John 85–6 Steketee, Mike 176 Still Angela 133–7, 140, 178 Stolen 68, 171 the stolen generations 38, 68, 73, 179 Stoler, Ann Laura 88 Stratton, Jon 142 Sullivan, Garrett A. 168 Summer of the Aliens 108 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 39–40 Sunrise 96–9, 104, 105 Sutton, Peter 170 Swedenburg, Ted 129, 131 Sydney Opera House 173 the Tampa 113–14, 176, 177 Tate, Jennie 62, 63 Tavan, Gwenda 174 Temporary Protection Visas 118, 176 terra nullius 8, 16, 23–7, 163, 170 terrorism 17, 114, 127–8, 130, 142–3, 158–9, 163, 178, 179 These People 116, 120, 123–5 Tiger Country 20–1, 101–4 Too Young For Ghosts 75, 77–8 Truscott, Marilyn 5 Thomas, Martin 56 Thompson, Anne 55
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Index
Thomson, Brian 31 Thomson, Katherine 24, 26–7, 41 Diving for Pearls 41 Wonderlands 29, 26–8 Tizard, Henry 91 Tjuntjuntjara: see Great Victorian Desert transference 128, 130, 132, 138, 140–1, 155, 161 Travelling North 29 Tripp, Tony 76, 77, 99 Trumpener, Kate 171 Tsiolkas, Christos and Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, and Melissa Reeves, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 40 Turner, Graeme 56, 92 Ubersfeld, Anne 3, 168 Uluru 58, 120, 169, 172 UnAustralian 117 the uncanny see Freud see Gelder and Jacobs’ uncanny utopia 91, 94–5, 101, 174, 175 veranda: see landscape, Australian Vietnam War 53–5 Villawood detention centre 111, 177 Vulcana women’s circus troupe 173 Waites, James 65, 173 The Waiting Room 116–20, 122–4, 177 Wallworth, Lynette 87, 91 Wankatja (Spinifex) people 105–7 War in Iraq 114 war memorials 45–7, 49, 52, 66, 171 American 45 ANZAC 66, 171 Australian 45, 66, 171 Boer War 45 French 171 German 45 Italian 45 World War I 45 World War II 52 Watkin, David 161
Watt, Alf 174 Weir, Peter 170 Picnic at Hanging Rock 170 Wertheim, Margaret 15, 162, 180 Western Desert, Australia 12 Wet and Dry 170 A White Sports Coat 172 Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? 40 the White Australia Policy 89–90, 113, 115, 141, 143, 174 Whiteread, Rachel 47–9, 85 House 47 Plinth (or Untitled Monument) 47–8 Wik and Thayorre native title decision 26, 170 Wilkinson, Marian 110, 113–14, 176 Williamson, David 29, 40 Emerald City 40 Travelling North 29 Wilson, Josephine 180 The Geography of Haunted Places 180 Wilson, Thomas M. 140 Winton, Tim 29 Wonderlands 29, 26–8 Woomera 17, 87, 90, 93–4, 96, 101–3, 109–15, 117, 120, 123–6, 175, 176, 177 detention centre 17, 90, 94, 109–15, 117, 120, 123–5, 175, 176, 177 Kokatha people 93 rocket launch testing 17, 87, 90, 93, 96, 103, 175 Wright, Judith 21 Yang, William 63, 144, 147–9, 151, 154 Blood Links 147 Friends of Dorothy 147 The North 147, 149 Objects for Meditation 147 Sadness 144, 147–51, 154, 179 ‘yellow peril’ 17, 89–90, 174 Yock, Boonie (Daniel) 72 Yorta Yorta native title decision 26 Young, James E. 47, 171 Yovich, Urshula 36
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204 Index
