Performing (Un)Forgiveness: the Psychomachia of Recognition and the Return of the Colonial Repressed in 21St Century Settler Gothic Drama

Performing (Un)forgiveness:

The Psychomachia of Recognition and the Return of

the Colonial Repressed in 21st Century Settler

Gothic Drama

Andrew Frederik Harmsen

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements

of the degree of PhD. Arts

September 2018

Department of Culture & Communication and The Victoria College of the Arts (VCA)

University of Melbourne, Victoria

For Code: 101AA

PhD. Arts

Abstract

This project explores recent Australian plays that deploy the Gothic as a representational strategy that critiques the nation’s recent Reconciliation project. In these

Gothic dramas, non-Indigenous characters and their audiences witness the return of colonial violence and are confronted by the ways in which it continues to influence and shape contemporary Australian culture. This dissertation will argue that the Australian Gothic, as a theatrical mode, is used by non-Indigenous playwrights as a way of representing a kind of

Lacanian ‘psychomachia’ – a psychic allegory that dramatises a crisis of moral excess in the formation of identity. This project – a theoretical dissertation and practice-led creative component – is an attempt to recognise and theorise the emergence of a distinct, historically situated, and uniquely national mode of theatrical representation that is, as yet, not fully recognised in Australian Theatre Studies.

Declaration

This is to certify that:

i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the degree of PhD. Arts

except where indicated,

ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,

iii) the thesis is 87 304 words as approved by the RHD Committee.

______

Andrew F. Harmsen

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Denise Varney and Dr. Raimondo

Cortese, for their patience, support, and expertise. I would also like to thank the folks at the

University of Melbourne’s The Australian Centre for their vital work and their support for this project and for their PhD Top-Up scholarship program. I would especially like to thank my partner, Ailish Lydon, for her support and for tolerating all the sleepless nights and distressed nocturnal mutterings that took place over the course of writing it all down.

Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Declaration 2

Acknowledgements 3

List of Figures 6

1. Introduction:

Australian Gothic Drama, Colonial Repression, and Cultural Rupture

1. Project Overview 9

2. Colonial Gothic Fiction 14

3. Postcolonial Gothic Fiction 16

4. The Gothic and Australian Theatre Studies 18

5. The Return of the Repressed 24

6. Context: Reconciliation, Recognition, and Relevance 28

7. Imagined Identities 30

8. Approaching Australian Gothic Drama 35

i. Psychomachia as ‘The Mirror’ for the Lacanian Subject 36

ii. Paradiastole 41

iii. The Uncanny 43

iv. The Abject 44

v. Melancholia 45

9. Chapter Outlines 48

10. Creative Component 50

2. Chapter One:

(Un)Consensual Spectacles: Gothic Melodrama and Metaparody in Constance

Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset 53

3. Chapter Two:

(Dis)Placement: Inheritance and Madness in The White Earth 98

4. Chapter Three:

Thresholds: Amnesia, Madness, and Failure in The Flood 144

5. Chapter Four:

Intervention: Trauma, Tyranny, Bureaucracy, and Neo-Gothic Enthralment in

The Dark Room 186

6. Bridging Document:

Forgotten Quarantines: An Introduction to Long Shadows 221

7. Creative Component:

Long Shadows: An Australian Gothic Melodrama 225

8. Conclusions and Implications (ii.):

(Un)Forgiveness: Imagined Identities, the Future, and the Australian Settler

Gothic Drama 340

Works Cited 356

List of Figures

1. Fig. 1 Suellen Maunder as Lady Constance Drinkwater in Constance Drinkwater

and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of

JUTE Theatre Company).

2. Fig. 2 Christopher Glover as Hope and Elle Watson-Russell as Fortitude in

Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio Theatre,

2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

3. Fig. 3 Suellen Maunder as Constance Drinkwater and Daniel Cunningham as

Fortitude in Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio

Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

4. Fig. 3 John du Feu as Crabbe (rear left), Jason Chong as Hop Lee (rear right),

Christopher Glover as Angelico (centre), and Daniel Cunningham as Fortitude

(right) in Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio

Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

5. Fig. 4 Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio

Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

6. Fig. 5 Jason Chong as Hop Lee and Christopher Glover as Angelico in Constance

Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo

courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

7. Fig. 6 Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The Studio

Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

8. Fig. 7 Anthony Phelan as John McIvor, Kathryn Marquet as Elizabeth, and

Steven Tandy as Daniel in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo:

Justin Walpole). Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

9. Fig. 8 The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole).

Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

10. Fig. 9 Katharine Marquet as Veronica and Stace Callaghan as William in The

White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image

Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

11. Fig. 10 Veronica Neave as Harriet and Anthony Phelan as John McIvor in The

White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image

Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

12. Fig. 11 Anthony Phelan as John McIvor in The White Earth, Roundhouse

Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre

Company.

13. Fig. 12 Steven Tandy as Daniel McIvor in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre,

2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

14. Fig. 13 Stace Callaghan as William in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre,

2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

15. Fig. 14 Shirley Cattunar as Janet Ball in The Flood, La Mama, 2012 (Photo:

Finucane & Smith Productions).

16. Fig. 15 Maude Davey as Dorothy (left), Caroline Lee as Catherine (Centre), and

Shirley Cattunar as Dorothy Ball in The Flood, La Mama, 2012 (Photo: Finucane

& Smith Productions).

17. Fig. 16 The Dark Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo:

Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre Company.

18. Fig. 17 Will O’Mahony as Stephen in The Dark Room, Perth Institute of

Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan

Theatre Company.

19. Fig. 18 Arielle Gray as Grace and Jacinta John as Anni in The Dark Room, Perth

Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of

Black Swan Theatre Company.

20. Fig. 19 Tom O’Sullivan as Craig (Left), and Kazimir Sas as Joseph (Right) in The

Dark Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh).

Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre Company.

21. Fig. 20 Arielle Gray as Grace, Jacinta John as Anni, Tom O’Sullivan as Craig

(Left), and Kazimir Sas as Joseph (Right) in The Dark Room, Perth Institute of

Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan

Theatre Company.

Introduction

Australian Gothic Drama, Colonial Repression, and Cultural Rupture

Project Overview

In the last ten years, ‘Australian Gothic’ has become an increasingly popular way for critics, publishers, playwrights, and the companies that produce their work to describe

Australian plays that are dark, disturbing, perhaps morbid, or menacing. This dissertation will look at four recent plays that have all been referred to as ‘Australian Gothic’ dramas. They are: Stephen Carleton’s Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset (2006), Stuart

Charles and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2009), Jackie Smith’s The Flood (2012), and Angela Betzien’s The Dark Room (2009). While each of these plays has been described as ‘Gothic’, what constitutes ‘Australian Gothic drama’ remains mostly untheorised in

Australian theatre studies. Given the recent profusion of explanations of Australian Gothic fiction and cinema, an exploration of it as a dramatic form is long overdue. The near-decade long period of theatrical production that this dissertation is interested in has produced many grim theatrical representations of Australian culture and its European history. This dissertation asserts that these four particular dramatic works constitute a brief but representative body of plays that exemplify the range of narratives, theatrical styles, and forms these dark visions can take in the theatre.

The focus of this dissertation is on how these plays present a Gothic version of the way non-Indigenous Australians represent colonial history and its legacy in the present. One of the clichés of Gothic drama is that, as theatre scholar Marybeth Inverso argues, it

‘pulverizes any sense of a morally operative universe, instead substituting a radically amoral one in which the innocent perish alongside the wicked’ (1990:2). Furthermore, the ‘sweeping

annihilative activity of the Gothic is exerted upon physical as well as moral and political certitudes’ (Inverso 1990:3). While these are general statements, the plays up for analysis will confirm this aspect of the Gothic drama. Moreover, and of particular interest to this project, we will also see a sustained and intertextual annihilation of several key moral assumptions that are unique – both geographically and historically – to an Australian context. Through close-readings of both the published plays and of specific productions of them, these analyses will demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary Australian Gothic drama exerts its own sweeping annihilative activity on the position that settler Australians occupy within the nation’s history and the postcolonial culture it has, over the past few decades, attempted to describe. This project is an attempt to recognise and theorise the emergence of a distinct, historically situated, and uniquely national mode of theatrical representation that is, as yet, not fully recognised beyond its more aesthetic motifs and accoutrements within the field of

Australian theatre studies.

Across the theoretical dissertation and practice-led creative components, I argue that the contemporary Australian Gothic deploys the Gothic as a strategy that critiques Australian postcolonial theatre. Within this context, postcolonial performance is understood in terms of

Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’ definition:

- Acts that respond to the experience of imperialism, whether directly or

indirectly;

- Acts performed for the continuation and/or regeneration of the colonised (and

sometimes pre-contact) communities;

- Acts performed with the awareness of, and sometimes the incorporation of,

post-contact forms; and

- Acts that interrogate the hegemony that underlies imperial representation

(1996:11).

These plays react to this model by critiquing the position and roles that non-Indigenous or settler Australian theatre makers occupy within the postcolonial and reconciliatory discourse in contemporary Australia.

This concept is not novel to Australian theatre studies and the larger discussion about non-Indigenous playwriting in general. Gilbert and Tompkins argue that within non-

Indigenous theatre, ‘colonisation is not a state but a process [and] a continually self- constituting hegemony which is always under threat from competing discourses’ (1996:125).

Indeed, both scholars go on to claim that ‘[h]istory is a particularly fraught issue for settler societies because of their ambivalent positioning in the imperial paradigm as both colonisers and colonised’ (Gilbert & Tompkins 1996:113). They refer to this as the ‘double-vision’ in non-Indigenous Australian playwriting of the 1980s and 1990s that emerged particularly in work interested in deconstructing official versions of Australian history:

Non-Indigenous plays which do concern themselves with history often

participate (albeit unwittingly) in the dominant mythologies of a society

even while they attempt to articulate suppressed versions of the past. Such

plays are thus marked by the contradictions particular to their position as

texts constructed by and for settler subjects. These contradictions dislocate

old hierarchies without proposing new orders of privilege (Gilbert &

Tompkins 1996:114).

To this view, while non-Indigenous playwrights can often express a desire to both belong and reconcile with the colonial past, an authentic postcolonial speaking position remains a problematic aspiration for non-Indigenous writers and theatre makers.

In a more recent study, Gilbert challenges the very concept of a postcolonial, non-

Indigenous Australian theatre. She argues it is often difficult to determine if the work of non-

Indigenous playwrights should be considered postcolonial at all because – following literary and cinema theorist, Stephen Slemon – ‘it is not sufficiently pure in its anti-colonialism [and] its modalities of postcoloniality are too ambivalent, too occasional and uncommon’ (qtd.

Gilbert 1998:97). The distinction between non-Indigenous playwriting and Aboriginal theatre

‘remains crucial to an understanding of resistance literature [ … ] where settler and indigenous communities often vie to define the parameters of the recently valorised term, postcolonial’ (Gilbert 1998:98). As a result, non-Indigenous playwriting, particularly plays that attempt to represent colonial history, exert their own particular force upon the postcolonial project as both expressive of and resistant to its discourse. Instead, Gilbert’s own term of ‘settler/invader plays’ is more useful because it describes non-Indigenous plays ‘that illustrate the broad concerns of a nonindigenous theatre attempting to find stage images for a past/present that reflects the ambivalence of the settler subject’ (1998:99).

Each of the relatively recent plays up for analysis in this dissertation represents

Australian colonial history. While the ways in which they do so are unique, the form each representation takes all focus on themes of violence, dispossession, colonial domination, and the psychological effects that these horrors inflict upon their non-Indigenous characters.

Thus, these plays have been selected for analysis because they resemble Gilbert’s concept of

‘settler/invader’ playwriting. If we look at these plays and the creative component of the overall thesis from within the critical category of ‘settler/invader’ theatre, then the question remains: what does the invocation of the Gothic say about the ‘ambivalence’ of the settler

subject in the early twenty-first century to and on behalf of non-Indigenous Australians in the theatre?

The first section of the dissertation explores these four recent Australian plays and establishes how the Australian Gothic is constructed in the pages of a twenty-first century

Australian play and then translated to the stage. When read in historical context, the analysis unknits the very real anxieties and fears that lurk beneath the plays’ often hysterical, spectacular, and grotesque styles of theatrical presentation. Because such a precise investigation has not yet been undertaken in Australian theatre studies, the overarching question of the dissertation is: what does a sustained Gothic lens that focuses on the genre’s subversive index reveal about the representation of history in postcolonial Australia through this contextually connected body of plays and their various productions?

This dissertation’s thesis is that the Australian Gothic, as a theatrical mode, is used by these non-Indigenous playwrights to represent a settler ‘psychomachia’ – a crisis of good and evil in the soul – in which the plays’ characters and their audiences are confronted with the return of colonial violence and are made witness to its consequences in the present. As a result, this collection of Australian Gothic drama exemplifies a turn in early twenty-first century Australian theatre that subverts the symbolic absolution of the country’s official

Reconciliation project and the aspirations for a unified nation as specified by the Council of

Aboriginal Reconciliation Act of 2000 that sought to lay the conflicts and violence of the past two centuries of settlement to rest. The second section of this project is an original play entitled Long Shadows. The work is an attempt to synthesise the dissertation’s aesthetic observations and arguments about contemporary Australian Gothic praxis and develop it further through an experimental, practice-led approach to the form. Thus, the overall focus of

this study is to re-dress the peculiar absence of the Gothic in existing theories of contemporary Australian drama, particularly those that represent colonial history and its legacy from a non-Indigenous perspective, and to explore the form through practice.

Australian Colonial Gothic Fiction

We can first turn to scholarship on colonial Gothic fiction in order to establish the historical foundation and the conventions that warrant a ‘national’ style of the genre.

Furthermore, this is a useful point of departure because it demonstrates the similarities between the literary and theatrical Gothics through their different strategies of representing the non-Indigenous psyche and their treatment of the experience of being a settler in

Australia. From the outset, literary scholar Gerry Turcotte outlines the dichotomous nature of

‘Gothic’ writing, arguing that it has an ability ‘to inscribe and erase, to argue toward closure and yet to resist it too’ (2009:52). As we move from the ‘old world’ or European Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the ways in which it emerged in colonial writing of nineteenth century Australia, Turcotte likens the genre’s dichotomous nature to the colonial experience itself. He argues that ‘[t]he state of colonialism is the state of in- betweeness personified, and of a movement away from what can misleadingly be called “the centre”, toward what may impossibly and inaccurately be termed “the goal [and this] state of in-betweeness is at once exciting and terrifying as it suggests endless (self)creative possibility” (2009:56). From an aesthetic perspective, we can understand this as the exciting confrontation with and the terrifying anxiety of colonial feelings of ‘isolation, entrapment, fear of pursuit and fear of the unknown in unsettled landscape’ that erupt from the pages of colonial Gothic fiction (1998:1).

As will be brought up numerous times in this dissertation, Marcus Clarke’s His

Natural Life (first serialised in 1870) is generally considered the paradigmatic example of post-frontier Australian Gothic fiction. The novel’s eccentric plot of convicts, wrongly accused people, concealed lineage, and cannibalism constitutes an embryonic collection of motifs and thematic concerns that will be played out in the Gothic over the next century and a half. Of the novel, Turcotte writes that,

[the Gothic] was a way for Clarke to assert a national history, to recover or

make legitimate his own landscape; it offers a way of proving, as Clarke

sought to do, “that history and romance was aplenty in the ‘new world’”.

Interestingly, he did this not by inventing fictional “ghosts”, but by

Gothicizing “truth”. He delved into the convict past and pulled out its

darkest chronicles and strung them together (2009:111).

This tendency to Gothicise ‘truth’ – to draw on established knowledge and discourse and to emphasise there romantic and transgressive aspects – in order to serve a contemporary purpose or psychological need is central to the Australian Gothic. For Turcotte, early Gothic writers expressed a strong desire to inscribe and erase simultaneously, to evoke and obliterate, and to condemn as well as privilege particular historical and geographic horrors in a way that became entrenched in the nation’s literary canon. To this view, the Australian

Gothic is a paradoxical mode of fiction that is, as Turcotte suggests, motivated by ‘a fear of nothingness [and] [i]t is a fear of being negated, stripped of identity, or blanked out in a land

“without history”’ (2009:57).

In colonial Gothic fiction, Ken Gelder observes that ‘Gothic tropes seemed to lend themselves all too readily to the colonially perceived interior’ as an empty and terrifying place (2012:116). He notices a particular melancholic sensibility in mid to late nineteenth-

century writers like Clarke and others, such as W. Sylvester Walker, Rosa Praed, and Ernest

Favenc, that ‘is imprinted on the bush so often in colonial writing as to make it paradigmatic’

(2012:117). Recalling Freud in his reading of Favenc’s short story, ‘Doomed’ (1899) – the tale of the wanton murder of a pregnant Aboriginal woman by a group of colonials – Gelder argues that this sensibility is registered ‘not only through the loss of Aboriginal lives [ … ] but also through the effects of that loss, in particular the dissolution of youthful colonial optimism: as if this, more than anything else, is colonialism’s lost object’ (2012:118). With its ties to the violence and dispossession of Aboriginal people, this lost optimism is similarly yoked to a pervasive theme of lost innocence that is played out time and time again in fiction concerned with dispossession and convictism. For example, His Natural Life draws on all of these conventions by planting the dark shame of convictism and the barbarity of the penal colonies into the genesis narratives of the foundling settlements. The origin of these influences can be broken down into two, so-called, ‘original sins’ of settlement or, as Maggie

Tonkin labels them, Australia’s original ‘object[s] of repression’ (2007:118). For her, these repressed Unconscious objects are, explicitly, ‘the original dispossession, verging on genocide, of indigenous peoples, and the institutionalised violence of the founding penal colony’ and they continue to haunt the Australian psyche (2007:118).

Postcolonial Australian Gothic Fiction

As the Gothic continued to exert an influence on Australian fiction over the twentieth century, postcolonial perspectives and dimensions begin to appear in the genre. The fearful and excited obsession with the return of these colonial anxieties, the theme of dispossession, and questions of legitimacy and indigeneity within the settler culture continue to underpin

Australian Gothic storytelling. Turcotte considers the postcolonial Gothic, like postcolonial

Subject-hood itself, as hinging ‘on a particular desire [ … ] to fill an absence and to reconcile

the contradictory elements that constitute it’ (2009:235). The postcolonial Gothic, while rooted in the colonial, ‘often engages in a textual attack on such confining limitations, and, with varying degrees of success, struggles against determining itself in relation to its other’

(Turcotte 2009:56). He goes on to trace this impulse through the novels of Patrick White – In particular, Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976) – as they continued in their attempt to invest the Australian landscape with an absent sense of European history and antiquity

(2009:145). Moreover, from a formal perspective, White’s novels proffer an attack on

‘bourgeois placidity’ which saw the Australian novel embrace an ‘excess of style, of metaphor, as well as an excess of scatological and noxious imagery, ribald humour and comic grotesquerie’ (2009:163). In Turcotte’s understanding, this nascent ‘postcolonial Gothic novel’ paves the way for other late-twentieth century writers to follow. He goes on to identify postcolonial elements in Louis Nowra’s use of the Gothic – in both his novels such as The

Misery of Beauty (1976) and plays such as The Golden Age (1989) – and their tendency to undermine imperialist master narratives by re-describing them in an eschatological, abject, and hybrid schema of language that highlights the very frangibility of systems of meaning themselves’ (2009:180). Furthermore, he describes Elizabeth Jolley’s novel, The Well (1986) as an attempt to interleave the experience of women into the genre by retrieving ‘female writing’ from patriarchal or colonial control. He argues that Jolley’s focus on a female perspective is interested in subverting patriarchy as a “system” ‘which institutionalize[s] and perpetuate[s] imperialist, sexist, or so-called “normative” values’ (2009:181).

In recent settler literatures, Gelder suggests that ‘[p]ostcolonial Gothic narratives often chart the ways in which the taken for-granted categories of “native” and “settler” end up colonizing each other; the Gothic effect is the result of insisting at the same time on their irreconcilable differences’ (2014:202). Gelder’s example of this type of postcolonial Gothic

arises from his analysis of Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter (1999) that is about an American who is hired to hunt and kill what is believed to be the last thylacine – the extinct and now mythic ‘Tasmanian Tiger’. Gelder reads the novel allegorically ‘about a white man who is literally imported into Tasmania – an introduced species, we might say – to extinguish a native species’ (2014:205). As the hunter ‘goes native’ and becomes immersed in the landscape and, literally, settles it, he is made aware of his ‘inalienable difference’ to it

(2014:205). The irreconcilable difference between the hunter – the colonial – and the world of the extinct ‘native’ thylacine is expressed in the uncanny recognition that the “native” is now something [he] can only imagine and be haunted by. [The hunter] is preoccupied by the thylacine, but [ … ] it also knows that this enigmatic native species marks “the limits of its own discourse” (2014:205). In this description, the problematic assertion of settler indigeneity after colonialism and the ways in which it is expressed continues to underpin and, perhaps, define the postcolonial Gothic in a settler culture such as Australia.

The Gothic and Australian Theatre Studies

The Gothic is not discussed as explicitly and as comprehensively in Australian theatre studies as it is in literary criticism. Yet, like colonial Gothic fiction, many plays over the last thirty years have similarly been obsessed with the twin Gothic themes of dispossession and convictism. Major playwrights such as Louis Nowra, Stephen Sewell, and Andrew Bovell have all produced plays that deal explicitly with the return of these objects of repression.

There has been much written about these playwrights and their plays as well as many others of the period that re-visit themes, settings, and conflicts that derive from the nation’s colonial origins. However, the Gothic – as a genre that is paradigmatically interested in the relationship between past and present – remains a peculiar absence in the exhaustive commentary that has accompanied them. Eminent theatre scholars such as Helen Gilbert,

Veronica Kelly, Joanne Tompkins, and Denise Varney all look at plays that, from time to time, have been referred to as ‘Gothic’ and often discuss them in ways that draw on critical languages and concepts often associated with Gothic Studies. However, exploring them through a sustained Gothic lens is an approach that has, in general, been overlooked in the past. Notwithstanding this trend, interest in Gothic themes and critical approaches has begun to appear within the field over the past two decades.

The majority of the plays that have been referred to as ‘Gothic’ feature in a period that

Helen Gilbert calls the ‘post wave’ of Australian theatre – that is, after the infamous ‘New

Wave’ of the 1970s and early 1980s that was characterised by an ‘aggressive use of

Australian vernacular, a paradoxical celebration/critique of nationalism, and a foregrounding of offensively masculinist humour associated with Ockerism’ (1998:3). For Gilbert, the post wave opened up what she refers to as a period of ‘swells’ in production that, for many playwrights, nurtured the trend of ‘deconstructing the dominant discourse from within its self-privileging framework [ … ] [and as a result,] some of these plays are deliberately designed to clear a space from which the marginalised might speak’ (1998:8). This is an effective periodising frame for this dissertation given that it is in discussions of the post wave that mention of the Gothic appears for the first time in Australian theatre studies. Gilbert looks particularly at Nowra’s oeuvre and argues that while Gothic tropes abound, they ‘tend not to replicate the absolutist version of the Gothic world in which all possibilities for ontological change are blocked’ (1998:130). Similarly, her analysis of Sewell’s Hate (1988) observes that it draws on the bloody spectacle of the ‘Grand Guignol’ to ‘express the trauma of Australian History [and] the thesis that the violence of colonization is apt to recoil on itself’ (1998:109). As previously mentioned, Gilbert goes on to tie this more superficial interest in Gothic tropes to theatrical representations of colonial history by describing the

plays in which they appear as ‘settler/invader’ plays ‘that illustrate the broad concerns of a nonindigenous theatre attempting to find stage images for a past/present that reflects the ambivalence of the settler subject’ (1998:99). Other major plays that fall under the

‘settler/invader’ tag are Michael Gow’s 1841 (1988) and Nowra’s Visions (1978), Inside the

Island (1981), and Capricornia (1988) and (Gilbert 1998).

Veronica Kelly is similarly aligned with Gilbert’s argument about how these so-called

‘settler/invader’ plays deploy their more generic use of Australian Gothic motifs and the genre’s link to the strange ambivalence and alienation of the settler experience. In an article from 1990, she looks at the legacy of convictism in, what were then, contemporary settler dramas that drew on the tradition of colonial tragedy. Also looking at Gow’s 1841, Nowra’s

The Golden Age, and the ‘technicolour nightmares’ of Sewell, Kelly resists branding convictism as the key object of the Gothic repressed by arguing, instead, that convictism ‘is not a version of the Unconscious, privileged as [the] primal base and origin, but a chosen discourse produced in current contexts, focalising anxieties which are dispersed over a wide political, social and aesthetic grid’ (1990:142). The problem, as she goes onto argue, is that settler playwrights – as ‘split Australian bourgeois subject[s]’ – are at an impasse between a colonial settler subjectivity and Aboriginality (1990:142). She suggests that,

[r]ecent Australian theatre, with its interrogation of myths of convictism,

reminds us that two hundred years can be a short time in theatre history, and

that the most questioning and radical of our dramatists find their modes of

expression still caught up in the back wash of the 1790s European paradigm

shift with which this country is contemporary (1990:142).

To this view, Kelly argues that ‘the impossibility of white Australian dramatists ever occupying a convincingly unitary and credibly “historical” speaking position continues to generate both creative energy and renovation of our theatre’ (1990:142-43).

From this perspective, contemporary, non-Indigenous theatre, even while it resists it, is still located within a colonial discourse in which the ambivalent speaking position of the settler playwright remains problematic. However, elsewhere, Kelly acknowledges that the

Gothic, even detrimentally, does play a role in the explication of this position. On several occasions, she similarly identifies Nowra’s attraction to the Gothic motifs he shares, in part, with ‘Jim Sharman and [the plays of] Patrick White’ (1987:12). In Kelly’s reading, Nowra’s plays do not completely surrender to an overwhelmingly nihilistic vision of Gothic nightmare. Essentially, Kelly argues that Nowra’s particular evocation of the Gothic does draw on its symbolic language and excesses but ultimately resists its crucial subversive index.

Instead, she observes that Nowra’s work offers up a sense of ‘ethical containment’ in which

‘[t]he tragedy doesn’t crush, the capricious cruelties don’t sadistically oppress, and any happy endings are well-earned’ (1987:22). On her view, this form of the Gothic is a ‘mediated reinstatement’ of its traditional vocabulary rather than a surrender to its more conventional obliteration of political and moral certainties.

Perhaps the most substantial invocation of the Gothic in Australian theatre studies – which evokes it but does not fully incorporate it into a comprehensive analytical approach – comes from Joanne Tompkins and the connection she makes between the psychology of white settler characters, sublime landscapes, and colonial history. In her reading of recent plays by non-Indigenous playwrights in performance, she develops a concept of the Freudian

‘uncanny’ that is particular to the Australian theatre (2006). She refers to this concept as

‘unsettlement’, which, following Freud, theorises and explicates upon the historically troubled relationship in theatrical representations of settlers in uncolonised or uncolonisable landscapes. She argues that the ‘uncanny is what is experienced when the repressed threatens to return [and] in Australia the repressed usually signals knowledge of what has been done to places and the people in them’ (2006:8). This uncanniness or sense of unsettlement stems from a history that is marked by narratives of invasion, violence, and mastery. The anxiety stimulated by this knowledge and through unsettlement ‘is expressed in terms of spatiality on

Australian stages [and] extends well beyond this absence’ by ‘reinforcing a fundamental discomfort with the process of settlement and the establishment of nationhood’ (2006:8).

There are two Gothic plays that Tompkins discusses that are relevant to this dissertation –

Andrew Bovell’s violent frontier thriller, Holy Day (2001), and Humphrey Bower’s adaptation of Clarke’s colonial Gothic novel, His Natural Life (1998) – as both can be considered as examples of ‘settler/invader’ plays. In both plays, landscape is represented from the perspective of colonial Australians as a place of anxiety and threat, haunting, and the confrontation with the repressed and shameful histories of convictism and the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples.

Denise Varney has also looked specifically at the work of Bovell and the way two plays in particular – Holy Day and When the Rain Stops Falling (2009) – negotiate themes of guilt and reconciliation through their cast of non-Indigenous characters. She approaches both plays through the prism of a self-reflexive modernity and argues that they represent the irreconcilable conflict between European and Indigenous ways of seeing and knowing

(2013). Both plays excavate the ‘hidden stories behind European settlement and the irreconcilable contradictions of Australian modernity’ (Varney 2013:54). She further highlights the connection between guilt and symbolic apology in When the Rain Stops

Falling and the Government’s Formal Apology in 2008 (2013:77). The play’s central relationship between three generations of British immigrants and settler Australians is constituted by ‘haunted subjects who are disconnected from, or tied to, the past’ (Varney

2013:78). Though Varney does not use the term Gothic, there is a distinct unsettling aspect to

Bovell’s work that emerges out of her reading of the play’s fixation on psychological haunting, the uncanny collision of domestic action and transgressive violence, sexual assault, taboo, and the return of repressed, traumatic histories, into which the figure of the British

Australian subject is represented as either a destructive or an impotent, guilt-ridden figure.

There is also a profound sense of melancholy that runs through the play that ‘suggests

Australian modernity is haunted by the persistence of memories that are fragmented, disturbingly out of reach and yet present in the social and familial relationships that constitute our everyday life’ (Varney 2013:42).

Until recently, Australian theatre studies has tended to marginalise the Gothic’s radical potential in Australian playwriting and, instead, has approached dark or shocking plays from other, more established critical approaches. Generally, scholars in the field have tended to reduce what Inverso refers to as the ‘crucial subversive index’ of Gothic drama

(1990). In, perhaps, the most recent book-length study that looks exclusively at the Gothic as a contemporary theatrical mode, Inverso, in a broad statement, argues that ‘the driving force of the Gothic is the urge to make a shambles of all certitudes and verities (even though it longs for their retention) and its choicest mode for doing so is the mode of parody’ (1990:4).

As a result, she argues that ‘[r]ecognition of the Gothic as a radically destabilizing aesthetic form makes it possible to recognize its presence even as it mimics and appropriates other aesthetic forms’ (1990:4). This argument characterises the Gothic as a radically subversive, amoral, and spontaneous genre rather than a distinct and easily recognisable aesthetic.

Moreover, as a critical approach, it creates a space in which analysis can move beyond exclusively historicist definitions of Gothic drama that locate the genre in European theatrical traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This argument opens up a new approach to Australian plays that have, thus far, been found to be interested in Gothic themes, but have instead been explored from different, more established critical perspectives.

The Return of the Repressed

The ‘return of the repressed’ is a key structural logic of the Gothic. This exploration of the Australian Gothic asserts that the key annihilative register of the mode relies on the return of cultural anxieties that have been repressed in the Australian theatre. At this stage, it is important to determine what psychical materials are ‘returning’, and the process by which they ‘return’ is best understood in terms of Freud’s theory of ‘repression’ – ‘the psychical representative of [an] instinct being refused entrance into the conscious’ (The Freud Reader

570). Literary theorist Anna Valdine Clemens outlines the relationship between the Gothic and repression:

This return of the repressed, or emergence of whatever has been previously

rejected by consciousness, is fundamental to the dynamism of Gothic

narratives. Something – some entity, knowledge, emotion, or feeling –

which has been submerged or held at bay because it threatens the

established order of things, develops a cumulative energy that demands its

and release and forces it to the realm of visibility where it must be

acknowledged (1999:4).

From this perspective, we can see how Australian playwright and scholar Stephen Carleton, following Marvin Carlson’s concept of the theatre as a ‘haunted medium’, suggests that

‘[t]heater itself might be thought of as the embodiment of the ‘repressed being returned’

(2012:66). Specifically, Carleton argues that Australian theatre does, in fact, have a tradition of Gothic drama that stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century. Like repression itself, it appears, often bombastically and unexpectedly in the field of theatrical production before disappearing for decades at a time. However, the uncontrollable need to represent undesired, repressed ‘objects’ remains a constant theme throughout its history.

In mapping dozens of plays performed or published from 1856 to the present,

Carleton argues that the Australian Gothic – based on existing critical approaches to the genre

– has appeared and then disappeared over several distinct periods over the course of

Australian theatre history (2015). In particular, he identifies an evolution from isolated, technically created ghostly apparitions in the vein of popular Victorian-era theatre in early plays such as Archibald Murray’s The Fatal Gap (1873) and George Darrell’s Back From the

Grave (1878) towards a unique and particularly antipodean version of the Gothic in recent plays such as Bovell’s aforementioned ‘postcolonial thriller’ Holy Day and Melissa Reeves’

The Salt Creek Murders (2004). Across his list of plays, Carleton illustrates how the Gothic has adapted to the local climate over the twentieth century by accumulating its own distinct geographic vocabulary, theatrical styles, conventions, and settings in a way that has slowly and unpredictably developed into a genre that is wholly distinct from its more infamous

European Gothic forebears of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Within this list there are a number of early bush melodramas that include adaptations of early Australian Gothic novels, violent accounts of convicts and cannibals, and plays interested in the occult. These elements are all represented on the nineteenth century

Australian stage, continue through the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. Looking at

Carleton’s aetiology, the Australian Gothic, like repression itself, is an unreliable signifier. It

appears and disappears within the landscape of the national theatre scene and, as Carleton argues, ‘[t]hese periods of absence may disrupt the Gothic continuum, but they do not disprove its existence’ (2015:33). Instead, the Gothic emerges from, erupts into, and reacts to moments of cultural rupture, responding as it tends to do in the European and British national traditions in Inverso’s study. It appears as an annihilative force on the psychic and moral confidence of the historical context in which it appears.

By ‘mapping’ the Gothic’s influence on a relatively large scale, Carleton’s argument accounts for the Australian Gothic drama’s sporadic discontinuity. As a result, he aligns periods of interest in the Gothic with a wider view of Australian culture. Moving quickly through time and by grouping plays broadly, he identifies two periods that are of particular interest to this dissertation in which anxiety and cultural rupture correlate with spikes in interest and production of Gothic plays:

A longitudinal reading allows the ‘mapping’ of key foundational traumas

(which we see include the early convict experience, the violent

dispossession of Aboriginal cultures from the land, as well as an upsurge in

‘ghostly’ theatrical activity dealing with the trauma and aftermath of World

War 1) and offers a psychoanalytic ‘snapshot’ of the nation’s collective

subconscious over time, at least as far as this has been identified by

playwrights working in the field of the Gothic (2015:12).

Carleton’s approach to Australian Gothic Drama is a suitable point of departure for this dissertation as it first acknowledges, on a critical level, the genre’s very existence in the history of Australian theatre, and secondly, identifies its potent, albeit unsustained presence within the nation’s theatrical traditions.

On this larger scale and through a sustained Gothic lens, these ‘psychoanalytic snapshot[s]’ provide a fertile frame for an analysis of contemporary Australian Gothic drama and, at the very least, a way of recognising the interconnected, often unconscious anxieties that have been identified by playwrights interested in the Gothic across the contemporary theatre scene. Looking at his most recent examples of Gothic playwriting – Holy Day,

Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, and Angela Betzien’s two plays, The

Children of the Black Skirt (2005) and The Dark Room (2009) – Carleton argues that,

[w]e see a marked surge in the latter post-millennium, occurring in a

cultural context of mid-late Howard era politics that saw mass protests on

the streets of most capital cities during 2000 [ … ] which responded to then

Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to issue an apology to Stolen

Generations survivors over Australian government complicity in the

removal of Aboriginal children from their families in preceding decades

(2015:29).

From this perspective, the controversy of Howard’s response to the Bringing Them Home

Report (1997) and the way it echoed throughout the greater Australian public exemplifies a

‘moment’ of cultural rupture. Carleton contends that the Australian Gothic responds to these

‘moments’ in a way that constitutes a symbolic ‘lancing of the national wound in relation to the abuse of Indigenous peoples, following as it did on the earlier Mabo High Court decision’

(Carleton 2015:29). In this more focused critique, the Australian Gothic similarly re-emerges, as David Punter and Glennis Byron argument about other Gothic traditions, ‘with particular force during times of cultural crisis and [ … ] serves to negotiate the anxieties of the age by working through them in a displaced form’ (2004:39). Thus, the Gothic in the Australian theatre is well-situated to represent the return of the anxieties of any given historical moment in which cultural pressure and grievance are particularly prevalent. Indeed, Carleton goes on

to suggest that ‘Gothic tropes of haunting, excess, hybridity and return of the repressed would appear to be custom-made for a national airing and perhaps even grieving of such trauma’

(2015:31). The connection between the Gothic and its facility to encompass more national, political, and mythological aspects of history gives it a unique perspective compared to other more representational modes of playwriting – such as realism – that are often considered dominant or more commercial forms in the Australian theatre.

Context: Reconciliation, Recognition, and Relevance

Like the post-millennium anxieties surrounding the Bringing Them Home Report and the Former Howard government’s refusal to apologise to the ‘Stolen Generations’, the early twenty-first century continues to be vexed by questions of colonial history and assumptions surrounding legitimacy, property, ownership, and the way these potent postcolonial issues are represented in the theatre and elsewhere. Indeed, the period is marked by monumental public performances that deal with these themes and issues particularly within the discourse of

Australia’s reconciliation process and the way it has dominated discussions of history and social justice over the last two decades.

According to the Australian Government’s official statement, reconciliation is about

‘unity and respect between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and non-Indigenous

Australians. It is about respect for [ … ] [Aboriginal] heritage and valuing justice and equity for all Australians’ (‘Reconciliation’ Australian Government, Australia.gov.au).

Reconciliation, in Australia, has been punctuated by three notable performative events that have offered up utopian visions of equality to Aboriginal people on behalf of settler

Australians. Paul Keating’s ‘Redfern Address’ of 1992, the opening ceremony of the 2000

Olympic Games in Sydney, and Kevin Rudd’s ‘Apology’ in 2008 represent three well-

received public performances that act as markers when looking to the public of the reconciliation project and the depth and breadth of discussions of colonial history over the period. These public performances represent an official, mainstream ritual of conciliatory discourse. However, the formal process of reconciliation began with the signing of the

Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act in January of 1991. The indigenous studies scholar, Andrew Gunstone, outlines The ‘CAR’ act’s three far-reaching objectives:

[T]o foster an ongoing national commitment to address Indigenous

socioeconomic disadvantage; and to investigate the desirability of

developing some form of document of reconciliation, and if it was

considered desirable, to provide advice concerning the content of such a

document (2005:2).

Gunstone goes on to argue that, although the CAR act produced many positive outcomes, there were several issues that limited its overall impact. The problem, as Gunstone argues, was ‘a confusion within the wider Australian community over the meaning of

‘reconciliation’’ (2005:2).

While the formal apology event marked a solemn and reflective day for the nation, scholars from across disciplines have critiqued the official program and expressed several deep-seated reservations about its efficacy. Gunstone, for example, has further criticised the formal reconciliation process as being unduly fractured along symbolic and practical lines to the detriment of Indigenous rights and, ultimately, discussions of a treaty and sovereignty

(2005). Cultural geographer Jane Jacobs suggests that the Apology symbolised an attempt to momentarily empower Aboriginal Australians so that they, as a community, might bestow a much desired sense of forgiveness among non-Indigenous Australians. She argues that the project was predicated on a Catholic/colonial model of moral exchange that was incapable of

facilitating authentic reconciliation. As a result, the loss of this desired sense of absolution perpetuated a form of settler melancholy amongst non-Indigenous Australians who felt compelled to apologise in the first place (2010). Cultural theorist Fiona Nicoll stridently argues that programs intended to foster inclusivity – reconciliation being one of the nation’s largest and latest – are, in fact, intentionally implemented to divert attention away from the struggle for rights and recognition (2002). She argues that ‘[i]n contrast to the vigorous debates surrounding reconciliation, there has been a deafening public silence on Indigenous sovereignty since the celebrations and Aboriginal protests during the bicentennial year in

1988’ (2002:9). She goes on to argue that the semantic ambiguity of reconciliation ‘has proven to be extremely convenient for politicians of all colors anxious to indefinitely defer the constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights’ (2002:10).

Imagined Identities

Anthropological approaches to postcolonial projects such as Reconciliation reveal much about the problematic relationship between modern settler-states and the ways in which they can, concurrently, appear to privilege a reconciliatory agenda whilst suppressing competing political claims for recognition with an entrenched neoliberal bias. Elizabeth

Strakosch argues that ‘neoliberal Indigenous policy does not have significant sovereign implications and effects [ … ] [i]t just means that more of this work takes place in the diffuse language of policy rather than in the centralised language of rights and recognition’ (Chapter

5:2016). The political ethicists, Paul Muldoon and Andrew Schaap, suggest that potential grounds for the lingering conflicts across reconciliation, the struggle for sovereignty, and the moral malaise that seems to have followed are not because of withheld offerings of forgiveness on behalf of Indigenous Australians, but with the nature of the apology itself.

They argue that,

while the apology provided a measure of recognition (both of the suffering

endured by Indigenous people and of the value of their culture), it was

marred by an ongoing failure of the Australian state to properly

acknowledge what the history of its relations with Indigenous people

disclosed about its identity (2012:185).

This observation seems to directly contradict the ‘mutual’ benefit and unity that was so central to the official apology’s public message. The absence of this particular element of self-reflection, on behalf of the settler-state, reveals much about the actual progress made by and through Australia’s particular version of a reconciliation process.

Putting aside the Apology’s symbolic power, many scholars have argued that little has been done to alter the colonial structures that preceded this attempted form of reconciliation. While the gesture of extending an apology – from settlers to the nation’s first peoples – signified an admission of guilt, the form which it was expressed represented the settler-state’s failure to reconsider the power structures that it has privileged for over two hundred years of settlement. Muldoon and Schaap identify the Apology as an ‘event’ rather than the symbolic genesis of any significant change in the existing relationship between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. They argue that,

Australian reconciliation has to date included two well received acts of

official remembrance, both of which were heralded as signalling a new era

in Indigenous settler relations. While they both included post-colonial

sentiment and sought to imagine a new direction for Australia in this regard,

they both occurred in a colonial political context that contradicted their

narratives. The apology, in effect, not only ‘buried a history of genocide’

(Barta, 2008) but it imagined Australia as post-colonial when no

meaningful structural or functional change to the colonial order has

occurred (2012:301-2).

It is this ‘imagined post-colonial identity’ that is important here. This reading re-frames the reconciliation process by defining it as a ‘new’ age in Australian culture in which the imagined or perhaps desired exculpation for the crimes of the ancestors of non-Indigenous

Australians did not occur in a satisfactory form. Thus, reconciliation marked an effect on, rather than a structural change to the continuity of the nation’s colonial hegemony. Political theorist Damien Short reads criticisms along these lines as an important challenge to reconciliation ‘as a process formed and underpinned by fundamental colonial impositions, assumptions and constructions’ (2012:301). The historian, Dirk Moses, iterates this point explicitly by arguing that the apology ‘did not succeed in transforming existing colonial relationships with Indigenous people (2011:149). To this view, beyond its symbolic power, reconciliation remains problematic.

Developing this approach to apply to an understanding of ‘sovereignty’ and

‘recognition’, anthropologist Barry Morris provides precise and contextually relevant definitions of the concepts in his study Protest, Land Rights and Riots (2013). Morris argues that ‘recognition’ is not a ‘passive compliance to Indigenous demands’, but rather a highly politicised discourse in which political agency and the struggle for visibility have, in fact, been in an active conflict with the dominant, neoliberal agenda for the past three decades

(2013:10). Moreover, he asserts that,

[a]ddressing social inequality and rejecting racism are the focal points for

knowledge of the social and economic marginalisation of ‘minority’ groups

[ … ] [and] neoliberalist policies invoked a variation on a populist form of

historical erasure, whereby Indigenous rights threatened to divide

postcolonial futures. The contradiction that the prosperity and freedoms of

the post-settler state rest upon the dispossession of its Indigenous peoples is

neither ‘left behind’ nor ‘truly surmounted’ (2013:2).

To this view, while reconciliation signified a puncture in historical time, recognition runs parallel to it in a way that concomitantly endorses, negates, and challenges policy in a univocal political discourse. As a result, recognition embodies a permanent challenge to colonialism and the liberal universalism that has underpinned Australian nationhood for the last two centuries. In Morris’ critique, the reconciliation project is an extension of a power relation designed by and for the settler-state that only appears to address racism, inequality, and the historical circumstances that created such conditions. In reality, it is a political strategy that is emptying out any contradictory claims of indigeneity and absorbs it into a progressive system that cannot exist with the difference it is trying to reconcile with the majority, non-Indigenous polis.

This argument radically re-interprets and critiques the more utopian aspirations of the government’s official rhetoric. To return to Former-Prime Minister Rudd’s speech, its language proposes a homogenous nation that claims to acknowledge, but does not recognise,

Indigenous claims of sovereignty and cultural difference:

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of

our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by

acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all

Australians (2008).

For Indigenous scholars, the desire for homogeneity expressed in assertions such as this has troubling implications beyond the incompatibility of neoliberal policy and Indigenous sovereignty. Aileen Moreton-Robinson – a Geonpul scholar and current president of the

Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association – argues that it is the concept of

‘policy’ itself that is problematic (2004). She argues that Western theoretical models for progressive Indigenous policy are incapable of incorporating Indigenous concepts of sovereignty because ‘[q]uestioning the integrity and legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing and being has more to do with who has the power to be a knower and whether their knowledge is commensurate with the west’s "rational" belief system’ (2004:3). Critiques such as these paint a dire picture of the possibility of serious change in the attitudes of the settler community and its approach to sovereignty and recognition as it stands in the early twenty-first century. The result is an impossible confrontation between two irreconcilable politics that exert ethical and moral pressure upon both parties without producing any of the desired outcomes on either side.

The contemporary political climate is wont to produce its own unique and capricious theatrical discourse in the same way that the ‘settler/invader’ plays of Sewell, Gow, and

Nowra coincided with the nationalist rhetoric that accompanied the ‘Bicentennial

Celebrations’ of settlement in the late 1980s. The connection between mainstream performances of reconciliation and counterpolitical performance is also recognised from an historical perspective by the historian, Penelope Edmonds, who argues that,

settler societies, unlike other colonial societies, have not been transformed

by the dramatic rupture of decolonization and the move to the postcolonial

state, but rather are marked by settler colonialism’s historical continuity.

The foundational violence of settler colonialism, its palpable legacy and

enduring structures, perpetually haunts the national psyche, notwithstanding

[the] halting efforts at redress (2016:2).

To this view, the recent history of reconciliation and the increasing visibility of recognition within Australian cultural consciousness seems to have had no effect on the problematic ambivalence of the settler subject within the larger discourse of postcolonialism as it exists within the twenty-first century. Instead, recent mainstream reconciliatory performance has exhumed the contradictions that have both defined and haunted it for over two hundred years of settlement. Edmonds’ use of the word ‘haunting’ resurrects the tensions between continuity and rupture or essential ‘in-betweeness’ that has traditionally both excited and terrified Australian writers interested in the Gothic (Turcotte 2009:56). By examining the psychological, cultural, and political implications of contemporary Australian Gothic drama, this thesis will explain and account for why it, based on the five plays discussed in this thesis, has found such a diverse and receptive audience in the early twenty-first century. As a result, this thesis considers how the Gothic opens up new spaces for understanding this complex and divisive period in Australian history.

Approaching the Australian Gothic Drama

This dissertation will traverse the multitude of forms a contemporary Australian

Gothic play can take within this political and historical context through the psychoanalytic analyses of the plays and their performance. The analyses will look at the way these plays resurrect and fetishize the ‘original sins’ or ‘objects of repression’ that are said to lie at the centre of these morose visions of Australian settler families and the society that, in the Gothic imagination at least, is constituted by them. The Gothic is most successful when it is visceral and affective. It is an audience’s bodily response – the dread, the dis-ease, the shock, the titillation, and the suspense – that indicate the quality of the various productions of the Gothic and the way they dredge up these foundational, national anxieties and represent them

theatrically. This aspect of Gothic drama is articulated through tropes of the ‘psychomachia’,

‘Gothic spectacle’, ‘paradiastole’, ‘the uncanny’, ‘the abject’, and ‘melancholia’.

The Psychomachia as ‘The Mirror’ and the Lacanian Subject

The concept of ‘psychomachia’ is used in Gothic Studies to describe the representation of an individualised expression of a moral crisis. The psychomachia is literally defined as the internal struggle of good and evil within the individual that stimulates a great deal of stress, psychic trauma, melancholia, and terror. However, it is often under-theorised in scholarship and used generally to describe the overarching allegorical texture of relationships and spatiality in Gothic narratives. It is originally a medieval, Christian concept or metaphor used to describe representations of moral struggle in religious allegory and poetry. In the twentieth century, the Canadian literary theorist, Northrop Frye, uses it as a critical tool to chart the return of medieval sensibilities in sixteenth and seventeenth century epic poetry in his analysis of poets such as Giles Fletcher and John Milton (published in 2015). However, it is only recently that the concept of psychomachia begins to appear in Gothic Studies to describe the ways in which spectacle and symbolism gesture towards meanings that exist outside literal interpretation. In this way, the Gothic psychomachia is constructed through a symbolic reading of the dialogue between all elements of the text in what feminist literary critic Susanne Becker has described as both an ‘‘excess’ in moral, but also in formal terms’

(1999:25). That this crisis of the soul is always grounded in an irreconcilable conflict between competing moral positions reminds us that the Gothic, even as it often resists or subverts it, is and always has been deeply bound up with the traditions of Western

Catholicism.

There is a theoretical analogue to this broad definition of psychomachia that is useful to further explicate the ways these plays use the Gothic to create holistic representations of psychological conflicts of moral excess. Literary theorist Shuli Barzilai draws a parallelism between this understanding of the Christian psychomachia and the intrapsychic conflict described by the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, in his concept of ‘the mirror stage’ in

Subject development by focusing on the ways both concepts organise representations of interiorised struggle (1999). Barzilai argues that in the traditional understanding of the psychomachia as a Christian form of allegory, the interrogation of intrapsychic forces – i.e.

‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ – is predicated on the ontological presupposition of “I am” – and the investigation proceeds from there’ (1999:105). For Barzilai, the Lacanian understanding of psychomachia differs from this in that ‘the Christian psychomachia is a substantial, albeit sinful, individual soul [while] [t]he Lacanian Subject does not possess a unitary soul composed of warring but (e)mendable parts’ (1999:108). In this Lacanian model, the

Subject’s existence is, itself, not assumed, but is instead mediated and negotiated through a process of identification Lacan refers to as ‘the mirror stage’ in the development of the ‘Self’.

For Lacan, ‘the mirror stage’ ‘has to do with the first time the [Subject] thinks of itself as ‘I’ in relationship with an image that it starts to understand as representing itself’ (Bailly

2012:17). For the Subject, it constitutes a first act of identification that transforms and established the ‘Self’ it as it assumes an ‘image’ that is abstract or, in Lacanian terms, ‘other’ to it:

When it finally recognises itself in the mirror, the child already knows that

this image is not ‘the real person’ [and] understands almost immediately its

unreality, while experiencing powerfully through this unreality the

wholeness of itself for the first time – ‘this is not me, and yet this is me’.

From the beginning, the child’s identity (or Subject) is ‘what I am’ and

‘what others see of me’ – the image is oneself and simultaneously not

oneself, and no sooner has there been this splitting, then there is a merging

and confusion of Subject and object – an ‘adoption’ by the Subject of its

objectified image (2012:19).

In this way, the founding of identity is ‘not just emotional and intellectual, it is also schismatic, separating the Subject from itself into an object’ (Bailly 2012:18). Thus, the process establishes and constructs the ego as reliant on external objects to which it is also subject through,

a relation between the organism and its reality; this intellectual relationship

of the Subject’s internal world and the external world is the beginning of

consciousness of self as an object, and because of the mental process of

translating the image into a concept of ‘self’, it is also the beginning of the

submission of the Subjective self to processes of symbolisation (2012:19).

As a result, the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ as an explanation for the psychomachia does not assume the Subject’s existence, but rather, questions the dimensions of ‘I’ itself. Within the psychomachic frame, the Lacanian Subject is not the presumed ‘I’ from which objective, intrapsychic forces are interrogated. Instead, the psychomachia questions ‘what’ the Subject is and problematizes its relationship to the order in which it exists. The formation of the ‘I’ emerges as both alienated by and obsessed with its own, reflected image.

This Lacanian definition of the ‘Subject’ and the ways in which the mirror stage of its development is dramatised by the Gothic psychomachia is central to this thesis. The mirror stage and the psychomachia both describe the Subject as confronting and identifying objects that it dialectically negotiates as both itself and other. As a result, the psychomachia is thus

considered as a theatrical analogue for the ‘mirror stage’ because of the ways it negates the assumption of a pre-existing, stable, and primordial Subject identity that is able to negotiate and interrogate the fixed moral forces of the cognitive drama it represents.

The subversive or Gothic aspect of this understanding of the Lacanian psychomachia and how it represents the Subject, is described by Isabella van Elferen as a representation of

‘reality in an uncanny mirror appearance [the Gothic shows] paradoxes [and ambivalences] from an anti-dichotomous perspective, without commenting morally. [As a result,] [t]he

Gothic is situated right within the uncanniness resulting from this realisation, [it is] uncomfortable and yet undeniable’ (2007:4). The forthcoming chapters will look at how these plays construct psychomachic, intrapsychic conflicts that fetishize the uncanny ambivalence of the Indigenous Australian Subject within the larger discourses of sovereignty, Aboriginal recognition, and the representation of colonial history in the Australian theatre.

Gothic Spectacle

The ways in which these plays construct the uncanny mirror of the psychomachia is articulated through a collection of Gothic theatrical conventions. The first of these is ‘Gothic spectacle’. The forthcoming chapters will discuss stage moments as examples of theatrical,

Gothic ‘spectacle’. This concept draws directly on Edmund Burke’s original description of the ‘sublime’ in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful (1757). Burke conceptualised the aesthetic into two rational types – ‘beauty’ and

‘the sublime’. Beauty’ is concerned with all that is aesthetically pleasing, or comprises ‘that quality, or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it’

(1757:112). In contrast, ‘the sublime’ – beauty’s inverse – is, thus, not stimulated by the

pleasure of the well-formed, but rather through the effect of fear or pain upon the passions.

Burke describes ‘the sublime’ as,

[w]hatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is

to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible

objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the

sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is

capable of feeling (Burke 1757:51).

Theatre scholar Christine A. Colón develops Burke’s claim that the sublime stimulates strong emotional responses, arguing that ‘[r]ather than allowing the viewer to be lulled into complacency by the softness of the beautiful, the sublime’s delight comes mixed with terror that can wake humanity up to the intensity of life’ (2009:94). As a Gothic strategy, the invocation of the sublime is concerned with ‘compelling an audience to derive pleasure from horror and has the potential to shatter audience indifference by representing the internal state of the characters’ minds as the author explores how individuals react in times of great stress’

(Colón 2009:94).

The Gothic sublime is a model for interpreting the world of dramatic action and scenic organisation. Through the fetishization of transgressive behaviour, an emphasis on grotesque gestures, the imposition of hostile and gloomy exterior worlds, and elaborate special effects, the Gothic spectacle invites its spectators to look at the world around them and even gestures to how they relate to that world by foregrounding irreducible elements that challenge textual and cultural logics. It makes accessible the intimately, unknowable private made public and communal through the act of performance as a paranoid fantasy. Ed

Cameron further articulates the ways in which the Gothic spectacle evokes the sublime, arguing that,

[w]ith the Gothic, the aesthetic mode of the sublime no longer articulates

the otherworldly; rather, it reveals the inherent inconsistency and

incompletion of the newly emerging immanent-oriented view of the world [

… ] the Gothic sublime is utterly without transcendence, and it takes us

deep within rather than beyond the human sphere (2010:12).

Drawing on this conception of the Gothic sublime in the terms of theatrical spectacle, this strategy of dramatising ‘interiority’ will be explored through the analysis of the way these plays make visible a transcendent form of realism that moves beyond the verisimilitude of surface, cultural, and interpersonal relations and rationalities.

Gothic Paradiastole

The overarching psychoanalytic concept of Gothic paradiastole, recently explored in

Agnieszka Monnet’s The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (2016), is a fertile point of departure in accounting for the intensely calamitous and self-critical representations of the settler or ‘white’ culture – to take a cue from Ghassan Hage, who argues that ‘white culture’ is the unconsciously ‘dominant mode of self-perception’ amongst Australians who do not claim Indigenous or non-Anglo identity – found in these plays (1998:19). Monnet considers the Gothic in terms of a performative genre, rather than an objective or critical classification, and proposes that the genre is ‘a complex and ethical reading experience [ … ]

[and] a meta-fiction, frequently breaking the illusion of realism in order to explore the limits of narrative and stylistic possibilities’ (2016:2-3). The argument extends to the Gothic’s use of irony, self-parody, the camp, and the sophisticated, often within a single text. From this perspective, Monnet recognises an ethical dimension in the Gothic due to its preoccupation with ‘ghosts, monsters, murders, and bizarre circumstances that raise troubling questions about cultural norms and complacencies’ (2016:3). The concept of ‘paradiastole’ is key to her

theory of the Gothic and she describes the concept as the ‘rhetorical re-description, i.e. the retelling of a narrative in a completely different moral light. For example, greed can be characterised as entrepreneurial spirit, modesty as frigidity, or prudence as cowardice’

(2016:3).

This contracted definition of paradiastole is specific to the representation of a single virtue or character trait. However, in the plays up for analysis here, paradiastole can also extend to a set of qualities and behaviours that are attributed to whole categories of characters. With an excess of metaphor, colonial authority figures – the settler, the Governor, the landowner, the father, and the well-meaning social worker, for example – are stripped of their moral qualities and bestowed with a morally ambiguous, yet contextually normalised, opposite. Behaviour, ideology, and their re-contextualisation will be shown to accrue heightened importance in the Australian Gothic drama as metaphors for the violence that underpins even the most benign agents of colonial authority. The variety and banality of these colonial authority figures construct and illuminate the entrenched critique of colonial hegemony within each play. Furthermore, the paradiastole is the literary counterpart to the postmodern scholar, Jean-François Lyotard’s, notion of the differend – the ‘conflict, between

(at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments’ – that connects these plays to the political context of recognition and the paradigmatic situation of their Gothic protagonists (1989:xi). Monnet posits that ‘the relationship between a positively connoted evaluative term and its negative double tacitly implies a shift from one moral paradigm to another’ (2016:10). Thus, paradiastole theatricalises difficult questions of interpretation, historical truth, and the way the self is constructed within history by playing off the repressed uncertainty of moral

confidences bound up in identity – national or racial – when it is reduced to the characterised and performed behaviours of individual characters on stage.

The Uncanny

The next Gothic convention is ‘the uncanny’. In his famous essay on the topic, Freud develops the concept through the use of two terms, ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ (literally translated as ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’) to describe how the uncanny works:

The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich,

heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we

are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely

because it is not known and familiar [ … ] Something has to be added to

what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny (1919:124).

As a Gothic convention, the uncanny seemingly deploys heimlich signifiers with an unheimlich signified in a way that prompts a convergence of the familiar with the unhomely

– or, perhaps, the unfamiliar or unknown – into a single symbol that is, concurrently, both recognisable and foreign. Turcotte comments on the palpable ubiquity of the uncanny in

Australian storytelling by arguing that it is often disorientating, provoking terror ‘through a transformation of the familiar into its opposite’ (2009:66). David Punter reminds us that the presence of the uncanny is remarkably suggestive and that its presence suggests ‘other realms which hover just beyond the reach of our conventions and assumptions, it asserts the irreducible presence of ‘the ghost in the machine’, and thus relates directly to the Gothic and its insistence on forms of knowledge counter to everyday expectations’ (2012:123). On this view, the uncanny becomes a way for any given play to approach the themes of homeliness, identity, violence, and obscured historical and political discourse through both the written script and its performance. In the four plays up for analysis, desires for ‘homeliness’ are often

underpinned by a double sense of unease where the familiar and unfamiliar are inverted through the play’s Gothic representation of Australian history and culture. The analysis of the ways in which they mobilise the uncanny will reveal much about how concepts of nationhood, national identity, and ‘home’ are contested in the twenty-first century Australian theatre.

The Abject

The ‘abject’ is the next Gothic concept of interest here. Emerging out of the post-

Lacanian psychoanalysis of French-Bulgarian scholar Julia Kristeva, ‘abjection’ is commonly associated with disturbing emotional affects attached to states of liminality, societal taboo, and the materiality of bodies. Kristeva argues that abjection is, ‘above all[,] ambiguity [ ... ] because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the Subject from what threatens it

– on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger’ (1980:9). Abjection is primarily used to signal the horror that is stimulated by the Subject’s inability to separate itself from what it is not. Kristeva goes on to argue that the abject ‘is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence’ (1980:9). Kristeva’s conception describes the abject as a site of strangeness and horror in which disgust for the

Other is deployed in order to produce a border between the self and not-self. Kristeva uses the image of the corpse as her primary example, arguing that, in its presence, the Subject is

‘forced to recognize [its] own mortality, yet unable to do so at the same time, thus, [it] must repel it, reject it, abject it’ (1980:13).

As a central Gothic trope, the abject is deeply bound up with nationalism and the definition of Other and Self within its imaginary framework. Fred Botting argues that

Kristeva’s concept of the abject is applicable to the Gothic as a whole because the genre, itself, generates ‘a nationalist sense of the unpure’ because it ‘occupies a border zone between desire and the super-ego (or symbolic) and is ambiguous in the sense that it partakes in both ‘enjoyment’ and disgust’ (1996:195). However, a more applicable, aesthetic use of the term ‘abject’ comes from Barbara Creed who argues that:

The place of the abject is where meaning collapses, the place where I am

not. The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place

of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the

other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which

threatens the self (1993:65).

The plays in this dissertation will traverse many images, performances, and descriptions of moments in which threat and horror are located in the singular, abjected object. Ritualised performances and prurient descriptions of massacre and extermination, murder, suicide, abduction, and paedophilia feature prominently in their plots. A sustained close-reading of them will expose the ways in which the Gothic exploits the unsettling effect of the abject and abjection in broad, universal images (the corpse, the body, the victim) as well as in culturally and historically specific instances relating to Australia, its history, its theatre history, and to symbolic confrontations with the Lacanian ‘other’ as reflected in the psychomachia.

Melancholia

The final psychoanalytic concept that is important to define from the outset is

‘melancholia’. Freud describes melancholy as a response to and a symptom of ‘loss’ (1917).

However, melancholia differs from the more immediately recognisable condition of

‘mourning’ in that an affected sense of ‘loss’ is projected inwards, onto the self, instead of an external object to the extent that it ‘is linked to the loss of an object that has withdrawn itself

from consciousness’ (1917:205). He suggests that melancholia is not limited to literal objects, in that what is ‘lost’ may be ‘some abstraction which has taken the place of love, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (1917:252).

Melancholia has a particular resonance in the Australian Gothic. Stemming from

Marcus Clarke’s much cited invocation of the ‘weird melancholy’ of the Australian landscape in his description of the suicided poet Adam Gordon Lindsey, the Gothic, melancholia, and the colonial representation of the Australian landscape have been yoked together from the mid-nineteenth century. To quote Clarke’s preface at length:

The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is

desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen

despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade … The sun

suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-

human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out of the

bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like

monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from the ooze. From a

corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around the fire dance

natives painted like skeletons. All is fear – inspiring and gloomy (qtd. in

Gelder 2007:116).

This description is certainly a recognizably Gothic vision of the Australian landscape as experienced by a colonial settler. However, it also exemplifies a particular melancholic sensibility that, recalling Gelder’s argument, has been ‘imprinted onto the bush so often in colonial writing as to make it paradigmatic’ (2007:117). Gelder goes on to argue of Clarke that there is a further ‘loss’ registered and embodied in the absent Lindsey as the archetypal colonial settler-adventurer. For Gelder, a ‘shadow has fallen over the colonial ego [ … ] in

which case it could well be that Clarke’s account gives expression to the ‘Weird Melancholy’ of settler colonialism itself’ (2007:117).

Jane Jacobs evokes another form of Australian melancholia in her discussion of the guilt that profoundly motivated the expressions of sympathy and solidarity from non-

Indigenous Australians towards Aboriginal peoples in the lead up to reconciliation. She refers to these Australians and their associated social movement as ‘Sorry People’ – Australians who were compelled to express a ‘collective expression of sympathy towards Aborigines and

Torres Strait Islanders’ (2010:16). Of Sorry People, Jacobs writes:

Sorry people were, then, settler Australians who, in the face of revelations

about Australia’s hidden (we might say actively forgotten or repressed)

colonial past, came to feel they had lost the Australia they once knew and

loved. They assumed not only feelings of guilt but also the mantle of

responsibility for assuaging the legitimacy of their national subjectivity

being compromised (2010:17).

What Jacobs is describing is a particularly contemporary form of settler melancholia in which the lost object, in the present case of the reconciliation movement, is ‘an unresolved grief for a lost idea of nation’ (2010:17). Jacobs regards this melancholic state as an important postcolonial moment in which the power relations between Indigenous and settler

Australians was temporarily inverted:

In short, some of the memory work going on through reconciliation in

contemporary Australia is about de-valuing the structure of good and evil

held within pre-revisionist histories of the nation. In so doing it is a reaction

to the ressentiment of indigenous Australians towards colonial pasts. But

does this restructuring deliver a joyous postcolonial moment?

Reconciliation remains a “gloomy thing” and not just because once

empowered settler Australians now feel less legitimate. It is “gloomy”

because the moral infrastructure that Aboriginal ressentiment has delivered

is already held within the very Christian morality that colonialism delivered

(2010:18).

The adjective ‘gloomy’ is a peculiarly Gothic description of the desire to apologise. It is pertinent to consider how this condition is expressed through Gothic drama when the nation’s past is theatricalised to effect an emotional response from an audience in the present.

Analysing the way each play expresses this form of melancholia will establish how the contemporary Gothic can explicate, transform, or even repudiate the more ‘gloomy’ characteristics of non-Indigenous guilt.

Chapter Outlines

Chapter one, entitled ‘(Un)consensual Spectacles: Gothic Melodrama and Metaparody in Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset looks at Stephen Carleton’s play,

Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset (2005) for the way it reappropriates

Australia’s tradition of colonial melodrama and pantomime. These are related theatrical forms that theatre scholar, Veronica Kelly, has called ‘colonial theatre’s most deliberately consensual spectacle’ and are looked at through the lens of the Gothic drama (1993:61). The chapter will argue that the play fully conjures melodrama’s world of moral absolutes, its stock characters, and its vast archive of recognisable conventions whilst simultaneously evoking an antithetical Gothic drama. Approaching this congested, multifocal symbolic structure through Gary Saul Morson’s concept of ‘metaparody’ (1989), the analysis will demonstrate how the play ‘metaparodises’ both forms by supplanting the melodrama’s generic moral universe with a Gothic spectacle that theatrically re-inscribes colonial

settlement with an alterity that marginalises and demonises it within its own theatrical and historical narratives. The Gothic re-describes the theatrical representation of colonial history as a disturbing, non-Indigenous Gothic ‘psychomachia’ that dramatises the confrontation with the repressed psychological materials of colonial history.

Chapter two, entitled ‘(Dis)Placement: Inheritance and Madness in The White Earth’’ looks at Stuart Charles and Andrew McGahan’s stage-adaptation of McGahan’s novel, The

White Earth (2009). This chapter develops the interest in colonial melodrama and metaparody by arguing that the play has its own expression of the Manichean struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, personalization, and the dramatic hyperbole that is typical of melodrama. However, the focus of this analysis will be on how the play’s metaparody effects the play’s thematic concerns. In The White Earth, we see how the Australian Gothic is able to subvert more conventional theatrical treatments of melodrama’s conventional themes of

‘family’ and ‘inheritance’. In doing so, the play offers a critique of everyday Australian settler culture, as represented by a pastoralist family, by drawing the repressed horrors of systematic violence into history and the legal ways colonial power is perpetuated through

European notions of inheritance. The White Earth represents the pressures of perpetuating settler culture in postcolonial context by representing it as a psychomachia in which the desire for cultural continuity and the fear of rupture are left unreconciled through the Gothic spectacle of catastrophe.

Chapter three, entitled ‘Thresholds: Amnesia, Madness, and Failure in The Flood’ looks at Jackie Smith’s play, The Flood (2012) which focuses on the experience of women in rural Australia. The play interrogates the sublimated colonial and patriarchal narratives that both partially includes and excludes women from the psychological nexus of history, guilt,

and anxiety that is exploited by the Gothic’s expression of the Australian landscape. This chapter argues that The Flood is a play of representational tensions that recurrently move between realist and Gothic registers, creating an analogue between the spectre of violence that haunts a non-Indigenous family and the colonial ghosts that remotely haunt the landscape. The play is structured so that these representational, spatial, and narrative tensions remain unresolved in a way that uses ‘failure’ – the failure of settlement, the family, and the means by which the Subject reconciles its history – as a convention of Australian Gothic drama. This chapter argues that these tensions and the failure to reconcile them generate a psychomachia that personifies larger, unheimlich libidinal tensions within non-Indigenous settler culture.

Chapter four is entitled ‘Intervention: Trauma, Tyranny, Bureaucracy, and Neo-

Gothic Enthralment in The Dark Room’. This chapter will move away from the Gothic melodrama of Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset, The White Earth and the domestic horror of The Flood towards what Marybeth Inverso has called ‘Neo-Gothic’ drama, that is, a theatrical form that, following Artaud, focuses on the ‘enthralment’ of its audience through the dissolution of the passive spectacle-audience relationship (1990). This chapter will look at Angela Betzien’s The Dark Room (2009) and argue that the play creates a different kind of non-Indigenous psychomachia through the strategies of Neo-Gothic enthralment by incorporating its audience in a Gothic spectacle of cruelty. By incorporating real-world politics – particularly the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response into remote Indigenous communities by the then-Howard Liberal government – the play stages the return of repressed guilt triggered by the ongoing failure of government policy.

Creative Component

The creative component of this thesis will develop the Australian Gothic’s strategies of representing settler guilt and melancholia in an original, full-length play entitled, Long

Shadows. The play is heavily influenced by Sarah Maddison’s observations in Beyond White

Guilt (2011). She suggests that Anglo-Australian identity is, on an unconscious level, deeply affected by the revelations of past atrocities committed against and the dispossession of indigenous peoples. Maddison, drawing on the work of anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw, argues that the effect of this repression is an intergenerational guilt that has become an undesired, though ‘distinctive element of Australian national identity’ (2011:29). She defines two responses to this guilt:

For many of us this knowledge is a source of guilt. Some of us turn this

guilt inwards, leaving us paralysed and helpless to address the

contemporary manifestations of our history. Others turn this guilt outwards,

expressing anger at this country’s original in-habitants for a failure to grasp

the opportunities that colonisation has brought. As a nation, however, we

have failed to deal with the collective and intergenerational nature of our

guilt (2011:4).

Long Shadows explores the more melancholic elements of this definition of non-Indigenous guilt and the way it can represented theatrically through time and space in the form of a contemporary Gothic melodrama.

The play presents itself in a way that is unambiguously Gothic. It is set in the decaying rural mansion – Aparrerinja House – that is owned by an affluent Melbournian family whose heritage stretches back to the early days of settlement. The death of the family’s patriarch leads to the discovery of an archive that has lain untouched for a century.

The drama focuses on one Chinese-Australian postgraduate researcher. He and his associate

believe they have uncovered evidence of strange and grotesque experiments conducted by one of the family’s ancestors on members of a nearby indigenous community in 1919. As the evidence mounts and the team begins to fantasise about the enormous historical find they have stumbled upon, the surviving family launch a counter attack. As the drama escalates and the allegations against the ancestor become more grotesque, each group becomes increasingly motivated to defend themselves, securing either fame or their dignity. Long Shadows is an attempt to synthesise the critical approaches to Australian Gothic drama as outlined in the dissertation. The original contribution to Australian playwriting lurks in the way Long

Shadows approaches its melodramatic form in order to deploy the concept of psychomachia, itself, as a dramatic and structural device.

Chapter One

(Un)Consensual Spectacles:

Gothic Melodrama and Metaparody in Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of

Somerset

Introduction

This chapter looks at Stephen Carleton’s Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of

Somerset (hereafter Drinkwater) (2005) and the ways in which the play subverts the colonial form of melodrama. Drawing on Gary Saul Morson’s concept of ‘metaparody’ (1989), the chapter will argue that Drinkwater ‘metaparodises’ colonial melodrama and the Australian

Gothic to create a non-Indigenous psychomachia that violently re-animates and then contains repressed historical violence against Aboriginal and non-European immigrants on-stage.

The Play

Drinkwater is set in a fictional town on the storm ravaged coast of far north

Queensland. It is 1899 and the small trading town of Somerset is beset by a violent tempest.

As Federation looms down South, Constance – widow to the former governor, Wilberforce

Drinkwater – struggles to keep the settlement and her family together as she battles the challenges wrought by Somerset’s isolation. She is assailed by the persistent threat of a native uprising and the spread of an unexplained and inexplicable plague. Of her seven daughters, only the youngest twins remain – all victims of a mysterious Asian influenza that is believed to be transmitted by Asian fishermen and errant pearl divers. One desolate, storm-ravaged night, two survivors of a shipwreck knock at her door. Drenched and begging for succour, these two strangers – Hope Lee, a Chinese businessman educated in Singapore, and Cornelius

Crabbe an eccentric anthropologist and man of science par excellence – claim to have

travelled up from Melbourne. Their task is to observe settlement in the furthest reaches of the colonies and study the hope, however slim, of the evolution of the hybrid European – one that might develop the fortitude to weather and colonise the harsh conditions in the continent’s deep North.

Trapped by weather and quarantine, the characters witness the death rattle of the once prosperous Somerset settlement. As its feeble buildings smoulder and collapse, Constance remains steadfast in her dream that Somerset will secede from the Federation and herald the beginning of what will, one day, be the capital of a vast, independent state in the north – stretching from the Kimberley in the west to the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is a utopian dream full of imperial pride, confidence, and optimism. However, as the play unfurls its hysterical and excessive plot, we learn that the late Captain Drinkwater was not the upstanding colonial gentlemen he claimed to be. Lurking beneath Somerset’s veneer of purported imperial pride and authority lies a tyrannical system of racism, sexual assault, and genocide. The play ends with the once proud settlers either poisoned, murdered, or mad. Constance’s last remaining daughter, Fortitude, leaves the doomed settlement with Hop Lee, off into an unwritten yet hopeful future. The labyrinthine history that folds itself into the drama and profoundly effects the psychological states of those on-stage will be unpicked in the analysis to follow. This rather brief description of the plot cannot do justice to the drama as it unfolds in real time on- stage, to which I will now turn.

Drinkwater won the Patrick White Playwright’s Award for 2006 and enjoyed multiple productions in Sydney, Brisbane, and the Northern Territory. However, to date, there is little commentary on the play within the field of Australian theatre studies. Australian theatre historian, John McCallum, offers a brief summary of Drinkwater by connecting it to a group

of plays that ‘revisit old Australian myths in a gothic style’ (2009:377). He suggests there has been a newfound interest of contemporary dramatists in the past and observes that

Drinkwater is a ‘strong melodrama with brooding atmosphere and some very strange characters, set in far north Queensland in the late nineteenth century, about a dying settlement full of dark secrets about the dispossession of indigenous people’ (2009:377). While the theme of dispossession and the admission of frontier violence are major themes in the play,

Drinkwater aggravates this return to the past by broadening the scope of its representation of colonial symbols and racial politics.

Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo similarly identify the play’s broad scope and provide a brief, benchmark analysis of Drinkwater in the closing chapter of Performance and

Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (2007). They, like the many reviewers and few scholars to discuss the play, describe it as a contemporary ‘gothic drama’

(2007:2010). Their analysis focuses on the way Drinkwater consciously draws on anachronistic, late-colonial ‘invasion narratives’ that were a popular genre of fiction in the late nineteenth century (2007:210-11). Three examples of this eccentric subgenre, which linger somewhat in popular memory, are William Lane’s, White or Yellow? A Story of the

Race War of AD (1888), Kenneth Mackay’s, The Yellow Wave (1895), and The Australian

Crisis (1909) published with Charles H. Kirness’ as the named author, though it is suspected to be a pseudonym of the infamous journalist and radical imperialist, Sir Frank Ignatius Fox.

Gilbert and Lo highlight the way Drinkwater emphasises the often neglected geographic ramifications of frontier-set narratives – far north Queensland in this instance – and the often unacknowledged proximity of the colonies to Asia and the regional influence on them in this form of historical narrative.

Gilbert and Lo’s brief analysis focuses on the allegorical texture of the play’s narrative and form. They observe that the ‘text’s invasion narrative, which explicitly dramatizes the colonial society’s fear of racial and cultural miscegenation with Aboriginals and Asians, is consciously framed to critique contemporary Australian anxieties about border security, refugees and ethnic diversity’ (2007:211). This interest in the play is based on their larger thesis of an emerging ‘practice of cosmopolitanism’ in recent Australian theatre

(2007:11). This contemporary praxis, following Ulf Hannerz’s definition, is described as ‘‘an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences’ which generally entails sufficient reflexive cultural competencies to enable manoeuvrability within meaning systems’ (2007:11). They situate Drinkwater within this expression of contemporary

Australian cosmopolitanism or, to use their term, a ‘cosmopolitics’, and claim that it is

‘caught up in hybrid spaces, entangled histories and complex human corporeographies’

(2007:11). The aim of this is to (re)locate emerging Australian theatre within a larger,

Australasian regional context that is often neglected within nationalist approaches to Theatre

Studies.

From this larger, periodising taxonomy of Australian theatre production, Gilbert and

Lo argue that Drinkwater represents a Gothic or subversive vision of contemporary

Australian cosmopolitanism. They argue that,

By underscoring the racial/racist foundations of the nation, Carleton

suggests that White Australia’s violent appropriation of indigenous land

and its continuing failure to accept moral responsibility for this history will

lead to self-destruction, dramatically portrayed by Constance’s systematic

murder of her family with the poisoned flour used by the authorities to

‘manage’ the indigenous population. The impossibility of sustaining

whiteness as a regime of power is stressed at the end of the play when

Constance’s only surviving daughter steps away from the Residency

towards a miscegenated future with the Chinese trader and the local

indigenous community (2007:211).

In this reading, Drinkwater deploys the conventions of Gothic drama to represent the cultural tensions in contemporary Australian culture that challenge dominant settler culture that lie, as is more established in colonial studies, in a rigid binary between Indigenous and non-

Indigenous Australians. Instead, the play dramatizes a larger conflict that, through its allegory, unpicks the racial and historical assumptions that underpin modern settler states. As a result, through the Gothic, Drinkwater allegorically represents the conflict surrounding issues such as Aboriginal recognition and sovereignty as a historically inherited racial tension that will, either practically or textually, spill over into a multicultural discourse and undermine the covert strategies of containing, restraining, and assimilating its racial Other into a culturally homogenous settler-state.

This reading of the play, as an allegory for racial legitimacy in contemporary

Australia, is compelling. However, there is more within the play’s engagement with cosmopolitanisms that further expresses the tensions that emerge when attempting to relocate

Australian theatre beyond a national frame. Gilbert and Lo marginalise the Gothic’s proclivity for representing internal or psychological states, instead privileging the political ramifications of the play’s distinct allegorical leanings. This chapter’s analysis focuses on the ways in which the play constructs a Gothic psychomachia – the internal struggle of the soul – through the metaparody of Australia’s colonial tradition of melodrama.

Colonial Melodrama

Melodrama has featured on Australian stages for over the last two centuries. Richard

Fotheringham observes that early colonial playwrights drew on the inherited theatrical traditions of Britain – the burletta, the pantomime, and the masque – to address an emerging demand for a local theatre that reflected ‘popular myth[,] [ … ] mass enthusiasm and anxieties’ (2006:p.lxxxvii). Indeed, the first locally inspired play ever produced in the colonies is said to be Henry Melville’s The Bushrangers that was produced in Hobart and

Launceston in 1834. The play is unashamedly melodramatic and tells the story of a young settler woman who is rescued from a bushranger attack by her Indigenous lover. John

McCallum regards The Bushrangers as a kind of uber-text for the development of a distinct sub-genre that he calls ‘bush plays’ which were popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2009:23). These plays pitted ‘lost’ characters against a pitiless and hostile Australian landscape by deploying the staging conventions of late-melodrama and the representational realism that was ‘called for by the new nationalist drama’ (McCallum

2009:23). However, many of these once plays remain obscure in spite of their popularity at the time.

Plays such as Bert Baily and Edmund Duggan’s adaptation of Steele Rudd’s novel,

On Our Selection (1912), Harry Tighe’s, Open Spaces (1927), and Betty Roland’s, Touch of

Silk (1928) were often criticised by critics for their use of a melodramatic style – narrative- based plotting and presentational theatricality, for example – over the more highly regarded conventions of realist drama. The resistance of critics to the melodrama’s more presentational, self-reflexive theatricality stems from an ‘excess rooted in popular culture’ that was not welcome in the realism that was showcased in the repertoires of companies at the time (McCallum 2009:28). However, this does not undermine the potency and currency of what is, retrospectively, a major trend Australian theatre history. As McCallum argues, ‘[i]f

we stop thinking of the bush plays as bad realism and start thinking of them as good melodrama then we might rehabilitate many fairly neglected works’ (2009:28). Melodrama, with its colonial audiences who responded enthusiastically to the local references and the representation of their lived-experience, was a mainstay of the turn-of-the-century Australian theatre scene. There are many accoutrements that overtly herald that Drinkwater is very aware of its invocation of colonial melodrama. As already discussed, the play opens with a roaring tempest in a nod to Louis Esson and his own Gothic melodrama – Shipwreck (written in the 1920s but never performed) (1984). Moreover, Drinkwater’s Asian businessman, Hop

Lee, is taken from another colonial melodrama – Randolph Bedford’s White Australia, or the

Empty North (1912) (qtd. in Carleton, 2006:107).

Veronica Kelly accounts for this largely unrecognised popularity by arguing that colonial melodramas – Melville’s The Bushranger in particular – were especially well positioned to chart the popular shift away from more representational forms of drama that were dominating European markets at the time. Kelly argues that the indigenised colonial melodrama offered local audiences cathexis with their,

potent narrativisations of their audiences’ complex negotiations towards the

goal of imaginative self-insertion into the authorised public order of

colonial life. Since this order was based on political and economic

subordination to a remote English metropolitan centre whose cultural

hegemony strove to be monolithic, the continual reproduction of various

forms of self-alienation in the colonised subject was guaranteed (1993:51).

This is an instructive paradigm that describes the relationship between play and audience because it accounts for the way melodrama facilitates cathexis by drawing on the discrete body of mythic data that is variously encoded into national narratives and culturally specific

contexts. For Kelly, this profound interest in local colour and content is exemplified in the well-known images of the outlaw and the bushranger, who were represented as the

‘demonised Others or alienated figures of bourgeois selfhood’ in such a way that they became ubiquitously recognisable figures on the stages of nineteenth and early twentieth century

Australian theatres (1993:52).

In an earlier essay, Kelly looks at another colonial melodrama that is somewhat congruent with the themes and narrative of Drinkwater. Looking at Charles Harpur’s

Stalwart the Bushranger (1867), she focuses on the play’s tragic plot and melodramatic interest in larger, utopian or progressive forces in decline, defeat, or containment (1990:131).

She argues that the play dramatises the psychological pressure that near-feudal domination of the colonies by the British metropole effected on the locals and how this condition put radical colonial dramatists in a discursive bind. Essentially, they were caught between the desired, liberated bourgeois self and the emerging proletariat – whether bourgeois-liberal or Marxist – through which it is constituted (1990:136). All to which she adds that ‘[m]elodramas of defeat and containment, which are at the same time electric with the force of undischarged

Utopian desire, are the cultural products’ (1990:136).

We can see a similar libidinal charge in Drinkwater through the way it reanimates a similar discursive bind; Somerset’s population is also beholden to a remote metropole.

However, in this case it is the whims and fancies of the southern colonies. The settlement is caught between the seat of colonial power in the south of the continent and its ‘far-flung’ remote settlements which are eager to claim an identity of their own. The theatre director and arts journalist, Douglas Leonard, recognises the similarities between the original appeal of

colonial melodrama and Drinkwater’s anachronistic interest in the dashed hopes and settler

Utopias that underpin its moral universe and generates its allegorical texture:

The interlocking facets of Carleton’s ingenious, timely play work well

together to recall that, in order to dream its own good, white Australia

historically manifests a marked aggression to alterity. Constance’s defense

[sic.] of her beleaguered moral universe, her perverse attempt at “the right

thing”, reflects darkly now that the vexed question of defining national

values is abroad again (RealTime Arts Issue 75, October-November

2006:8).

These comments highlight how Drinkwater’s highly visible network of competing texts – melodrama, the Gothic, historical drama, and personalized socio-political force – and their struggle for authority pushes these colonial themes into a contemporary political domain. For example – on one hand, there is the grand narrative of imperial conquest made strikingly clear by the play’s context and the march towards Federation that looms in the background.

On the other, there are the foibles of melodrama and its semantic collapse into the Gothic spectacle and an excess of theatricality that, recalling Gilbert and Lo, is interested in the ways in which its representation of race and xenophobia speak to a more contemporary context.

The ways in which Drinkwater’s contemporary appropriation of colonial melodrama and the historically specific cathexis it offered audiences will form the basis on which the following analysis unpicks the logic of its Gothic psychomachia.

Melodrama: Dramatic Hyperbole and ‘Personalization’

Melodrama is a rich and varied form of theatre and even the most traditional examples of the form had their subversive elements. However, Drinkwater draws on a condensed and generalised conception of the conventions and cultural efficacy of melodrama as a

dramaturgical strategy and neglects its more nuanced aspects. The play exploits the generic preconception about melodrama’s conservative approach to the dramatization of moral conflict and uses it as a foil to its more subversive, Gothic elements. The two major aspects of melodrama that are important to this strategy are the form’s dramatic hyperbole and the concept of ‘personalization’.

Through its enormous archive of recognisable tropes, conventions, and stage languages, melodrama positions audiences in particular ways in order to produce emotion and aesthetic effects. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the influential critic and scholar, Peter

Brooks, argues that ‘[m]elodrama, as a broad and influential mode can be promptly distinguished from theatrical Realism by its hyperbole or the ‘desire to express all’ (1976:4).

This is rendered in performance through overt gestures, heightened movement, and a deliberately strategic mix of representation and presentational styles. As a result, ‘significant things and gestures are necessarily metaphoric in nature because they must refer and speak of something else. Everything appears to bear the stamp of meaning, which can be expressed, pressed out, from it’ (Brooks 1976:16). This theatrical and thematic hyperbole or excess lends the melodrama a distinct allegorical texture.

We can draw out how exactly Drinkwater draws on this by turning to Christine

Gledhill’s description of melodrama and the convention of ‘personalization’. She argues that,

[m]elodrama, as an organizing modality of the genre system, works at

western culture’s most sensitive cultural and aesthetic boundaries,

embodying class, gender, and ethnicity in a process of imaginary

identification, differentiation, contact, and opposition. [Thus, she continues]

melodramatic modality, personifying social forces as psychic energies and

producing moral identities in the clash of opposites, is committed to

binaries which bring the ‘others’ of official ideology into visibility

(2000:238-40).

Indeed, melodrama is organised in a way that facilitates ‘personalization’ by dramatizing actions that illustrate ‘how social forces and economic-political forces actually get realised in human actions, materialised into action through physically-driven, [and] personally- motivated performance and practice [sic.]’ (qtd. Loren and Metelman 2015:298). The characters in a melodrama have no ‘psychology’ and they are not a mechanical reflection of individual ideologies. Instead, they can be seen to embody a libidinal charge in which the concentration of emotional energy – cathexis – can occur between the larger and unseen social-political forces, individual characters, and the psychic energies invested in them.

This aspect of the play’s textual logic was partially recognised by popular reviewers of Drinkwater. Particularly, it is the dialogue between the play’s superficial use of the conventions of melodrama and the way they position audiences to read its characters as personalized social forces:

Melodrama provides Carleton with stock characters to drive home points

about myths of nation building, and also the means to confabulate what has

been historically repressed. In the light of Freud’s analysis of secrecy and

the uncanny having their roots in the home, Gothic features not only

delineate a haunted landscape but bring history home to roost in a theatrical

tour de force (Leonard RealTime Arts Issue 75, October-November 2006:8).

This personal allegory, as theatricalised through the form’s ensemble of stock and heightened caricatures creates many of Drinkwater’s more bathetic moments with large sequences of absurdity, farcical misunderstandings, and dramatic ironies that, when viewed in isolation,

suggest that Carleton has produced a generic, conservative remediation of the Victorian melodrama rather than the more sinister, complex Gothic work this analysis is claiming.

Instead, this chapter will explore the ways in which Drinkwater’s use of melodrama aesthetic does not allegorise a contemporary political conflict. Rather, it argues that the play operates as an outlet for an audience’s emotional apprehension of colonial history and its ramifications in the present.

Drinkwater in Performance and Haunted Houses

Drinkwater’s narrative moves in linear fashion over the course of a few days in

Somerset. Most of the action takes place within Constance’s drawing room in ‘The

Governor’s Resident’s House’ or Residence. The room dominates the mise en scène in a way that creates the illusion of safety and homely protection from the threatening exterior. Indeed, it is the entrance and exit of characters through it that provides the play’s initial conflict and offsets the Gothic threat of the storm that underpins the entire plot. The first scene makes this explicit, with the bedraggled shipwreck survivors Crabbe, Angelico, and Hop Lee furiously pounding on the closed door (10). The sound of the tempest rages outside, native curlews’ screech in the distance, and the strange, supernatural imposition of children moaning completes the effect. It is a distinctively Gothic prologue that, from the outset, clearly demarcates the borders of the Residence as a relatively safe place that protects these colonial settlers from the environmental threats off-stage.

The sense of the uncanny creates a tension between style, form, and setting. Leonard describes this effect, writing that ‘[m]elodrama and a drawing room setting pull in opposite direction’ in way that sustains a ‘claustrophobic, preternatural atmosphere, [and] an insidious feeling of dreadful suspense building towards Carleton’s shock ending’ (RealTime Arts Issue

75, October-November 2006:8). As is typical of Gothic stories, the Residence is imbued with a preternatural agency, a will, and a memory. These ghostly presences are foreshadowed and expressed by dissonant sound design, lighting, and theatrical special effects. For the historical style of the Residence, Carleton ransacks the rather under-represented history of colonial interactions between Asia and settlements in the Northern half of the continent. Carleton describes Drinkwater’s Gothic house thus:

The entire action is set in the main living room of the Residence, which is a

stone and corrugated iron building decorated in an attempt at tropical

colonial grandeur: potted palms; wicker furniture; tiled parquetry; a large

Chinese ginger jar; a chaise longue; and a combination of other English

and Oriental furnishings (9).

While the Asiatic influence is clearly on display, these Oriental artefacts are clearly contained within this altar to European domesticity and taste. The drawing room itself – as a powerful symbol of English hestia – is represented as a space of stubborn, colonial culture in a state of stasis – it remains undamaged by the storm and chaos outside. Festooning the playing space are remnants of English custom and tradition that have been adroitly upheld within a geography which they are not particularly suited.

While not constituting a revision of the generic setting of the traditional melodrama, the ways in which the mise en scène is encoded with the uncanny produces slightly differing meanings when translated to the stage across Drinkwater’s several productions. Looking specifically at Queensland’s JUTE Theatre Company’s production for the Darwin Festival in

2007, designer, Morag Cook, keeps turn-of-the century dressing to a minimum. It creates only a fleeting impression of its Victorian historicity and only subtle references are made to both the play’s 1899 setting and the colonial melodramas it is imitating (Fig. 1). It is coded

symbolically with a combination of both modern and colonial elements that conspire to create the illusion of historicity.

Fig. 1 Suellen Maunder as Constance Drinkwater in Drinkwater, The Studio Theatre, 2007.

(Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

Costume is designed in the same way. Constance’s stern, unblemished black dress is caricatured and shows no wear from the chaos outside. Similarly, there is a grotesque element incorporated into costuming with the white gowns worn by her two surviving daughters – the identical twins, Fortitude and Hope – clashing with the mature bodies of the performers

(Christopher Glover and Elle Watson-Russell, respectively) (Fig. 2). When read holistically, the drawing room and the characters are deceptive confections within an otherwise historical scene. The effect of this design was recognised by reviewers of this production, with one

observing that it ‘adds to the significance of the story in modern society, showing what are now considered to be the nineteenth century notion of cultural superiority echoed in the 21st century life’ (Cairns Sun, September 2007).

Fig. 2 Christopher Glover as Hope and Elle Watson-Russell as Fortitude in Drinkwater, The

Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

In Cook’s design, the country beyond the Residence’s walls is represented through large windows by blackened wings. With this nothingness, the exterior is a blank surface upon which the characters’ project apocalyptic descriptions of swirling tempests and plague- riddled settlers – if, indeed, the characters and their reports are to be believed. The unverifiability of the landscape – and by extension, reality itself – is both a major theme of the play and its translation to the stage to the extent that it creates conflict and action in the narrative. At one moment early in the story, this aspect of the play is exemplified as the

characters’ confusion and grip on reality is brought into question. They debate the nature of the world outside the Residence’s walls:

ANGELICO: You must forgive Lady Drinkwater’s hesitation. It stems

from patriotism, you know. The fever lurks and stalks us.

Settlement by settlement. Burketown has been wracked

by fever. Abandoned entirely.

[ … ]

CRABBE: The township has been rebuilt [ … ]

HOP LEE: [ … ] We’ve just been there. It’s as lively as it’s ever

been. [ … ]

ANGELICO: The North is a mirage for many men. We can be whatever

you wish us to be … (15-6).

Everything off-stage is unverifiable to both the characters within the play’s Gothic universe and to the audience observing it. Moreover, the structure of the three walls is fragile – both literally and symbolically – with canvas stage flats standing in for stone walls. No attempt has been made to create the illusion of permanency to the extent that sound design, particularly during the violent storm, rattles the threadbare walls. Moreover, recordings of birds and animals wail from the exterior at strategic moments in which the imposition of the supernatural is imminent in a manner that sounds eerily like howling wind (10, 79).

Over the course of Drinkwater’s narrative, as the attempt to retain a sense of English decorum slowly dwindles, so too do the literal and symbolic borders of the Residence become increasingly porous. The potential breach of the perimeter between inside and out – with inside signifying civilisation and outside an antagonistic realm of barbaric Natives, plague, and potentially violent retaliation – is a constant threat. In this context, the uncanny is

literally projected onto the primitive world beyond the unnaturally homely, colonial

Residence. When breaches occur, Gothic spectacle intervenes. Rocking chairs rock by themselves, portraits glow with unnatural light, disembodied hands hurl stones against windows, and the native curlew’s screeches become increasingly debauched (80). In this regard, Reuben Hopkins’ lighting design augments these stark changes by transitioning from soft washes of amber light to stark and unnatural ground lighting during the play’s spectacular moments of supernatural excess (Fig. 6). With the Residence’s strange, quadrilateral design, dominating the proscenium, it is clear from the outset that dramatic action will not leave the confines of the drawing room and escape from Somerset is not the foreshadowed, cathartic object of the play’s narrative. Instead, claustrophobia and entrapment, often re-described as comfort and protection, are the central Gothic threats created by both the play and this particular production of it.

Haunted Objects

In JUTE’s production, the Residence’s English furnishings – its Victorian symbols of class and decorum – are the only sturdy fixtures that imbue it with a partial sense of homeliness. The specific objects highlighted amongst the scenography are Constance’s beloved bone-china tea set, a pewter snuff box, a decanter of brandy, and a silver tray for the serving of scones. However, as the plot progresses, these emblems of ‘Englishness’ and civilisation are re-cast as demonic totems and imbued with a nefarious agency of their own.

The snuff box, we learn, contains the ashes of the tyrannical Late-Captain Drinkwater; the scones are laced with the poison intended to decimate the local Aboriginal peoples; and the

Earl Grey in the fine china teapot is contaminated by his ashes when poison is mistaken for sugar (105). Ironically, it is the sanctified way in which these objects are treated throughout the play that bequeaths them their robust sense of identity and permanence. Throughout the

scene, high tea is served ‘correctly’ despite Constance’s guest near starvation and Crabbe guzzles brandy and snuff (30). This inviolability allows these symbols of colonial authority to soak up the latent, malevolent energy that lingers in the room in a way that is, simultaneously powerful and evil.

The Haunted Theatre

These design elements culminate in what is a familiar, yet distant vision, of a late- nineteenth century domestic scene that is polluted by the menacing imposition of the supernatural. When realised theatrically, the Residence culminates into an uncanny distortion of conventional memory, rendering this instantly recognisable seat of colonial power and typical site of melodrama as a deliberately flawed imitation of history and genre. Indeed, when read in its entirety, it appears as if it is an entirely confected one that is intended to deceive. While the audience is told emphatically and repeatedly in the characters’ dialogue that the remote, windswept settlement outside is all that stands between the characters and oblivion, what is experienced within the proscenium is something more claustrophobic and deceptive altogether.

The uncanniness of the Residence operates at two levels. The first is the pressing dramatic action – the melodramatic plot devices, the slow-acting poisons, the mistaken identities, the conflicting moral and ethical bickering, and the hysterical descent into madness. The second is on a formal level of the historical scene it sets out to simultaneously represent and subvert. Both are undoubtedly occurring within the theatre. Thus, the audience is positioned intentionally to emphasise the experience of spectatorship and the participation in a re-enactment of both an event and a style of theatrical representation. It is an uncanny, dramatic theatricalisation of haunting that draws explicit attention to what theatre scholar

Marvin Carlson calls the theatre’s inherent ‘ghostly quality’ and the ‘sense of something coming back’ (2001:2). He goes on to argue that, as a result, ‘every play is a memory play’

(2001:2). Drinkwater approaches this point in a self-reflexive way. Specifically, it is interested in the memory of both Australia’s non-Indigenous history and the ways in which it has been expressed in the theatre. Carleton’s text and JUTE’s production are dynamically re- framing the theatre as a site of memory – both personal and cultural – in order to draw attention to the artifice of recollection and remembrance.

In Drinkwater, memory is being re-staged, perhaps recycled, in a way that purposely focuses on the inevitable slippages, mistakes, and distortions present in all theatrical repetitions. Carleton, JUTE Theatre Company, and its director, Merrilee Mills, evoke historicity in order to undermine the authority and authenticity of the theatre as a receptacle of memory. This production organizes both its form and content to be in a subtle, almost uncanny, aesthetic conflict that augments the already heady ambience of dread, unease, and mystery woven into the mise-en- scène, setting, and opening dramatic action. As we will see, this strategy frames and informs every proceeding moment and interaction throughout the play in a way that is unable to reconcile itself, forcing a descent into Gothic spectacles of hysterical excess.

Performing Civilisation & Narratives of Decline and Defeat

As the dramatic action begins, Constance’s sense of domestic pride is sparked by the arrival of her guests even while the settlement around the Residence lies almost uninhabited and in ruin. For these characters, the homestead and the stage itself remains a beacon of

English homeliness, of safety, and of succour. The priest, Angelico’s desperate pleas for

amnesty from Constance that open the first act signpost a farce or an awkward comedic sequence. It becomes progressively absurd because of the extreme context:

ANGELICO: Lady Drinkwater, I implore you.

CONSTANCE: Absolutely not.

ANGELICO: It is our Christian duty.

CONSTANCE: Then take them to the Church.

ANGELICO: The Church is made of weatherboard. The entire structure

could blow away at any moment (11).

The comedy belies a more immediate and dramatic purpose. For Constance, the environmental threats are real enough and denying Angelico is a resolute act of self- preservation. The severity of the moment clashes with the figure of a well kempt and dignified colonial woman while the circumstantial indignity impugns her very identity and sense of moral character. However, once formal introductions are made and a personal history with the survivors confirmed, Constance regains her xenia as she ‘frantically straightens up her appearance and straightens a few items around the room’ [before] ‘[s]he casts one final frantic eye of scrutiny around the room’ (12). Decorum and politesse returns despite the storm still raging and Professor Crabbe compliments Constance on her ‘Chinese market garden and fortified wine collection’ (12).

This absurd obsession with appropriateness is, once again, interrupted by the entrance of the Chinese businessman, Hop Lee. His arrival is met with a contrived and excessive display of shock; ‘(There is a sudden frozen shock as she fully regards Hop Lee [and] pulls out a handkerchief and puts it immediately to her nose and mouth)’ (14). Moreover, Crabbe’s failure to forewarn her of his ethnicity is treated as a grave betrayal. Constance’s tribal-like paranoia is re-ignited with the disimpassioned exclamation: ‘What is this?’ (14). Her reaction,

like all casual instances of xenophobia in the play, is deflected with a feigned rationale. In this instance, it is her fear of plague that is used to justify her tribal-like paranoia and appeals to ‘system’ – the strict, bureaucratic regulation of Somerset’s ‘cordon sanitaire’ – that diverts the act of inhospitality away from herself (14). The pervasive influence of system is revealed further with Crabbe’s harried defence of Hop Lee. Crabbe minimizes the threat posed by the interloper, asserting that Lee is, in fact, a ‘civilised’ Oriental:

Hop Lee is a man of culture and education. He is Singapore-trained in

English language and Literature. He is a fine tailor: a successful prospector

and entrepreneur – and, I might add, something of a poet. Despite the latter,

he is no more fever prone than you or I (14).

This explanation is ironic and subtly deracinates Lee through the focus on his more European pursuits. The racist elements that are folded into these negotiations are exposed when

Constance’s conditional acceptance of Lee is tested. She reprimands him for mistakenly calling her ‘Lady Constance’, snapping ‘[d]id they not teach you protocol in Singapore?’

(23). The whole sequence effects both dramatic and comedic action. There is the creation of conflict and suspense before both are immediately deflated. Particularly, it is Constance’s unpredictable caricature of Englishness that is the source of both comedy and racial hostility.

Reviewer Gabby Birmingham observes the comedic effect of this strategy; ‘[t]he play itself has some very funny moments, mostly arising from the upright nature of Drinkwater’

(Stagenoise September 25, 2006). Her behaviour and, by extension, the colonial authority she personalizes is positioned as irrational, even alien, to the larger situation. Moreover, her colonial authority remains unchallenged. The emblematic rituals remain intact despite their evident unsuitability. Both are re-described as suspicious and threatening in an otherwise homely scene.

Drinkwater further yokes this farcical performance of colonial pride to a sense of imperial optimism that is personalized within the symbolic perimeter of the Residence.

Constance reels off, at length, nationalistic screeds that are full of imperial rhetoric. In what appear to be rehearsed speeches that are punctuated with momentary ellipses of doubt,

Constance dictates her late husband’s Utopian vision for Somerset that is, by proxy, also hers:

We are at a pivotal moment in Australian history … Federation will make

or break the North. If we seize the moment and separate from the rest of the

colony, Cooksland can become a vast and self-governing northern state

with the new Federation. From this tiny satellite poised on the very

fingertip of the nation, we see all. I have caught a glimpse of the twentieth

century … and it has Somerset firmly in its grasp (23).

Although her ellipses indicate that this dream may not be entirely hers but rather an indoctrinated aping of her violent husband’s dreams of conquest, these monologues, nevertheless, imply her strong sense of entitlement to the Far-North. However, they are tinged by a tragic element in her subtextual resentment for the colonial government in the south. Moreover, the relative youth of the ruined township insults Constance’s pride in a way that is as appalling as taking high tea incorrectly – ‘Five daughters lost to fever. A husband murdered, and a settlement – [She appears very close to breaking [ … ]’ (52). It is a particular kind of ignominy that, like so many other repressed fears and anxieties played out on stage, reads as if it were a state of delusion. All of which, further problematizes the border between what is real and what is imagined to these characters.

The interaction creates a gloomy ambience, as the far-reaching, dazzling vision of progress that can only – and arguably already has – end in failure. Once again, it is important to stress that history is not the interest of Drinkwater’s Gothic representation of memory.

Instead, it is the construction of the self in history. The ‘Self’ – the nationalised Subject – that is personalized in this moment is utterly deluded, actively disavowing the apocalyptic events in the exterior, yet bafflingly stoic; unable to admit even the hint of failure. The personalization of the colonial Subject as entrapped within Drinkwater’s ‘haunted house’ re- frames these bellicose imperial declarations ironically and re-describes this deluded optimism as melancholia. With exultation staged amongst the decay of the colony’s most treasured symbols of authority, Constance’s lost objects are the virtues symbolised by her dead children’s namesakes – temperance, prudence, faith, justice, and hope – required to propagate the colonial imagination of the settler.

While it is a cliché that Gothic drama is totally focused on pathos, Drinkwater typifies a stranger, more playful version of the Gothic. Heather Anne Wozniak has challenged the prevailing prejudice that the Gothic is ‘universally terrifying, dark, and mysterious, politically and socially subversive, and reflects the repressed ruptures in the human psyche’ (2011:1).

Instead, she explores the British Gothic drama’s historically established bathetic qualities, arguing that,

[t]his uplifting dimension does not cancel out the threatening one [ … ] it

accentuates the disruptive moments and transforms these works into gothic

literature, a genre that overlaps with but can be distinguished from romance

(focused on the idealistic, and fantastic), melodrama (starkly polarised and

musical), or tragedy (heavily serious and grim) (2011:1).

Wozniak suggests that the traditional presence of comedy in the genre is a kind of pandering strategy that can ‘conservatively smooth over cultural ruptures and fears to affirm the status quo as well as progressively reach toward the lower and middling classes to contest patriarchal tyranny’ (2011:x-xi). Drinkwater strives for such a balance or, at least, invokes

the strategy by utilising traditional comedy and satire within its simulation of the late nineteenth-century colonial scene in order to punctuate the moments where its spectacle overwhelms all other dramatic conventions.

Gothic Intrusions & Excess

As the comedic elements of these early scenes cease and farce begins to fall flat,

Drinkwater moves away from the more conventional parody of melodrama and its other

Gothic devices become more intrusive. The twins, Hope and Fortitude, exemplify this turn in theatrical mode. The twins embody a grotesque performance of sexuality and obscenity that strikes them like a demonic possession. These are disarming moments that are rendered hysterically by their unexpected staccato appearance in, what are otherwise, relatively domestic or naturalistic interactions. With their strange maturity and their inclination to prurient bursts of abject behaviour, it is through their actions that the play triggers the imposition of the supernatural into the mise en scène. These moments are accompanied by technical lighting and sound effects that complete the Gothic spectacle. In the first of these,

Hope and Fortitude enter, laughing in an increasingly hysterical fashion that transforms into moans and cries (33). Hope approaches Hop Lee unsolicited and whispers – ‘Do you want to touch me? (Hope raises her night dress) [ … ] But it is time … The allotted time … (Hope urinates, a pool forming at her feet)’ (33). Here, the play’s element of farce is abruptly and unexpectedly interrupted by the abject presence of the daughter’s urine and the allusion to sexual assault. The relationship between the concomitant invocations of farce and the Gothic no longer produces the ironic sense of strangeness and uplift it did only moments before.

Instead, the intrusion of the Gothic halts it, perverts it, and ushers in a strange uncanniness that re-frames all proceeding action.

These strategies construct an uncanny Gothic house in such an overt way it borders on cliché. However, in embracing this type of dialogue between the ways in which remote homesteads are represented in more traditional ‘bush melodramas’ and Drinkwater’s form of

Australian Gothic drama, the play is able to transform its contrivance from harmless parody into Gothic spectacle that both recalls and subverts the historical concept of ‘consensual spectacle’. The convention is exemplified in a sequence where a loud ‘bang’ – ‘[l]ike a cannonball in the distance’ – interrupts a debate over how the tropics have affected the girls’ state of mind (41). Hope and Fortitude recoil in pain and horror by screaming and thrashing about the room as if possessed:

(Hope has grabbed Hop Lee’s hand for comfort.)

CONSTANCE: Hope! Do not touch Mr Lee! Both of you! Go to

your rooms immediately!

CRABBE: Are we under attack?

CONSTANCE: Do you hear me?

ANGELICO: A solider misfiring a musket, perhaps?

HOPE: Liquid fire falling from the sky!

FORTITUDE: Ten thousand voices crying as one!

HOPE: Twenty thousand!

FORTITUDE: Heaving and swelling and crying out in pain!

HOPE: A chorus of unthinkable carnage!

GIRLS: Day will turn to night!

FORTITUDE: There will be total darkness within the week!

CONSTANCE: Stop it this instant! (41).

As Hope and Fortitude reel off prophetic, apocalyptic whoops of terror, the shock of the distant sound is misinterpreted by Crabbe and Angelico as a gunshot. The two men become

increasingly paranoid of an attack by the survivors from the Aboriginal tribe murdered by

Captain Drinkwater. As an astute audience may decipher, the sound is a simulation of the eruption of Krakatoa in the Asian north of which the aftermath is ambiguously expressed in the hysterical dialogue and action of the possessed twins. However, here, without precedent or explanation, it is a spectacular sequence that, in a moment of shock, reveals the psychical pressure and persecution that plagues these settlers on the edge of colonial territory. Their distress is expressed as a paranoid fantasy of the racial Other and the fear of violent takeover.

The spectacle constitutes a radically unique register in which comedy, tragedy, history, and horror become inseparable effects. Moreover, when the real cause of the sound is revealed in the final scene by an errant sailor at the end of the play – ‘Island in the Dutch East Indies [ …

] Krakatoa. The whole thing. Blown sky high [ … ] Causin’ the sunsets. Makes you think what a small world it is, don’t it?’ (102) – the invocation of the sublime image of the erupting volcano re-locates Somerset further away from the imaginary coordinates of the southern metropole that legitimates colonial power in the North and closer to the alien ‘Orient’. As a result, the mythical, colonial desire for a spatially, ideologically, and racially homogenised nation is exploded through and by Gothic spectacle.

The eruption of Krakatoa was, in its own way, one of the first truly global events that was recorded as a common experience, shared across national borders and physically connected disparate national borders and cultures. In Drinkwater, the eruption as a Gothic spectacle dredges up a geographic reality that is repressed by the Europeanised self and a colonial imagination that, ironically, has been represented in a way that must disavow the real and factual in order maintain its hegemony over its fictional settlement. Moreover, when that sublime landscape does penetrate the walls of the Residence and mythic geographies are questioned, chaos ensues and the settler ego re-describes any form of alterity as hostile. The

next section focuses on how, in the minds of the play’s settler characters, the Asian settler becomes the untrustworthy plague vector and the dispossessed Aborigines are treated as vengeful and insurgent figures into the Australian Gothic drama.

Manicheanism, Hybridity, and Spectacle

Drinkwater invokes the ‘essential moral universe’ of the melodrama – the Manichean polarization of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – in which the world of the play ‘is subsumed by an underlying Manichaeism and the narrative creates the excitement of its drama by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface of things’ (Brooks

1976:4). However, the Manichean ‘evil’ is embodied by its settler characters, which, in turn, personalize various aspects of colonial authority in an explicit subversion of the colonial melodrama. In an act of formal subversion, the ‘good’ entity is personalized by the Chinese business man, Hop Lee, as he articulates virtuous characteristics of an inverted moral universe that valorises contemporary Australian cosmopolitism.

Hop Lee is a worldly stranger. He is compassionate, intuitive, and a respectful guest.

Moreover, these qualities also have their expression through the conventions of the Gothic.

He, like the twins, is able to explain, interact, and communicate with the supernatural by virtue of this ‘goodness’. Theatrically, he is able to see the ‘other’ realities that are implied on-stage that are denied to Constance and her cohort of settlers:

HOP LEE: There are ghosts all around.

CRABBE: Perfectly rational explanation for it.

HOP LEE: The ghosts of empire dying.

CRABBE: For the voices. Like holding a shell to your ear.

HOP LEE: One empire dying and another taking its place.

CRABBE: And hearing the sea.

HOP LEE: White Britain becomes White Australia.

CRABBE: An acoustic hallucination. The power of suggestion?

(88).

This expression of the Gothic supernatural is at odds with the civilised/exogenous moral binary that has been so emphatically established throughout the play thus far. Unlike his white antagonists, which personalize static colonial forces, Lee is able to move beyond mechanical reiterations of personalized ideology and given a psychology of his own. In this way, Lee is an example of what Marjean Purinton describes as ‘Gothic hybridity’ and how subjective ambiguity opens up ‘conceptual and theatrical spaces where conflicting and subversive concepts could be located as they are disguised as supernatural, alienated, or fantastical forms’ (2001:135). Hop Lee and the twins embody this convention, by re- contextualising it with a cosmopolitan articulation of ‘hybridity’, in a way that opens up the

Residence to a contextually informed, allegorical moral occult that balances the latent evil of its colonial symbols within its representation of its deep-seated, Manichean struggle.

In the play, the struggle between the ‘evil’ colonial hegemony and the ‘good’ cosmopolitanism climaxes when Constance’s last surviving daughter, Fortitude, is enticed by

Hop Lee to join him in the garden for a Chinese ceremonial banquet to appease the ‘Hungry

Ghosts’ that haunt the straits that separate Somerset from its Asiatic north. Fortitude hasn’t eaten anything for days because she knows that the homestead’s food – a Devonshire tea of scones and Earl Grey tea – has been contaminated with the poisoned flour that was intended for Captain Drinkwater’s genocide. By this stage in the plot, Constance, Crabbe, and

Angelico are entering the final stages of the peculiar madness that Somerset inflicts upon its white characters.

Fig. 3 Suellen Maunder as Constance Drinkwater and Daniel Cunningham as Fortitude in

Drinkwater, The Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

Upon realising Fortitude is no longer indoors, Constance becomes incensed, ‘pacing incessantly’, and unable to exit the Residence despite the door positioned up-stage centre

(80). The fire of the Chinese ceremony flickers through the window with striking, almost apocalyptic, lighting effects. As she attempts to exit the Residence, the ‘fire illuminates her face’, the ‘window suddenly stands shut’, the ‘door flies open’, and the ‘chair starts rocking’

(80). Constance strangely begins to furiously make scones with the poisoned flowers and,

once again, demonstrates how violence – in this instance a genocidal poison – represents the settler’s pathological attempt to regain control of cosmopolitan interference. She further pathologizes this anxiety by uttering an irrational series of Christian/English non-sequiturs under her breath – ‘(while kneading) desperately Scarecrow. Treacle. Michaelmas. Sled’

(80). Fortitude moves past the window, bathed in orange and red light, moving as if in a trance (Fig. 3).

This scene is a Gothic spectacle that manifests Constance’s worst fears and dramatises the ways in which colonial paranoia is projected, literally, onto the bodies of its cosmopolitan characters. For Constance, the off-stage action reflects an ‘evil’, even primal coalition between the infected Oriental and the uncolonisable landscape co-opting the last of the

Drinkwater girls into its midst. At the height of the spectacle, Fortitude walks past the window in a ritualised trace, the ceremony is interrupted as Crabbe enters dragging the girl by the ear:

Standing out there like Lady Muck, in the arms of a chow. Frolicking with

him around an open fire. Shall we dance? Some depraved oriental

courtship! Hah! Like father like daughter (81).

Within the frame of the spectacle, Crabbe’s overt racism is no longer a historically rational behaviour. Instead, it is now re-described as hysterical and nonsensical. Moreover, while the

Chinese ‘Yulan Jie’ ceremony is an unknown, even exotic, non-Christian ritual, the Gothic does not conspire to create a threat in this moment. When staged in direct juxtaposition to making of scones that has re-framed as the ritualised preparation of genocide, the summoning of spirits in now a rational, even optimistic part of the European/Cosmopolitan Manichean moral struggle. Through a complex dialogue between the uncanny homestead, the personalization of ‘evil’ colonial and ‘good’ cosmopolitan forces, and the intrusion of Gothic

spectacle, Constance’s fear that her daughter will somehow be miscegenated, lost, or even deracinated by contact with the Gothic hybrid is now treated as yet another pathological settler paranoia. As the scene progresses, Crabbe, now possessed by the ghost of Captain

Drinkwater, throws Constance to the ground in a violent rage and castigates her for allowing it all to happen (81-2). In a stark, juxtaposed flurry of stage movement and spectacular tableau, the English homestead, with its poisoned delicacies and increasingly demented authority figures, is now the sinister force within the play’s moral universe. The order of the homely, dominant domestic space and the unhomely, Oriental taboo are completely inverted through the convention of the Gothic spectacle.

One of the final images in the play crystallises this paradiastole of melodrama’s central structural logic. As Hop Lee and Fortitude depart, Constance is left with her cup of tea, which is laced with the ashes of the late Captain and his genocidal poison. Crabbe lolls back on the chaise longue in the throes of a fitful sleep. Her mind is quickly departing and she sits, rocking in her dead husband’s chair. She finds herself unable to recall the names of her cherished daughters and mistakes the sleeping Crabbe for Wilberforce (104). She sips her tea from the fine china cup, slowly poisons herself with the contaminated ash of her dead husband, and utters a confessional monologue in a somnambulistic state:

They say you did this on a much grander scale. I heard all the rumours.

Poisoned waterholes. Poison in the bread. Scores of natives slaughtered.

Bleeding stomachs. Unquenchable thirsts. Lurid hallucinations. The butcher

of the North. I suppose I knew it to be true. On some level. But my vision

was never as grand as yours. It was just our little family that I had to take

responsibility for in the end. The only things. The flour. The ginger jar. An

end to our shameful little chapter … Yes, take some snuff. It is cultured.

And edifying. You take your snuff and I’ll take my tea. And then silence …

And Somerset will just be a blur. A thumbnail sketch on history’s page

(105).

Finally, Constance confronts the truth she has concealed beneath the custom and ritual she has stringently enforced thus far in the narrative whilst still maintaining that these things are

‘cultured [a]nd edifying’ (105). With her confession, Constance descends into a meaningless string of words and finally loses her grasp on the colonial language she once needed to

‘remind you who you are’ – to repeat Wilberforce’s oft quoted refrain – in the far reaches of the Empire where civilisation is supposedly tested against its barbaric racial Others (86). The image is supported by lighting effects that simulate a glowing sunset, theatrical haze, and a rumbling soundscape that erases the Residence’s once ‘cosy’ atmosphere. The scene is now a strange hell-scape in which the personalised coloniser, their settlement, and the cultural signifiers of their authority are all rendered utterly ‘evil’ within the Manichean conflict of the melodrama because its violence and depravity is now fully visible and recognised by its characters. Moreover, it is represented slowly poisoning itself with its own systemic strategies of violence, genocide, and domination.

As the lights fade on the final image of the fitfully sleeping Crabbe and the incoherent

Constance, the once static, contained, and homely Residence are abolished. The threadbare walls now protect the hybrid, morally decent cosmopolitan Gothic exterior from the settlers and not – as the characters and, indeed, the audience may have initially suspected – the other way around. Drinkwater does this through a complete overhaul of inherited hierarchy of colonial signifiers, its dramatic structure, and the representation of their primarily off-stage, non-European Others. Carleton’s use of the Gothic paradiastole is fully visible as it re- describes the successes of colonialism and the foundation of the nation in a completely

antithetical light. It is now a sordid conspiracy. Constance’s dignity, her patriotic fervour, and ambition is now a delusion. Thus, the colonial civilisation the play represents is re-cast as a barbaric pathogen in the particularly ‘un-European’ ecosystem of Somerset.

Metaparody and Grotesque Colonialism in Drinkwater

This analysis of the play’s shifting register of comedy, melodrama, historical drama, and the Gothic gestures towards a more self-reflexive and radical approach to genre. The sheer congestion of its formal conventions can be understood as a parody of a parody or what the literary critic, Gary Saul Morson, calls ‘metaparody’ in his rethinking of Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on genre (1989). Initially, Morson argues that parody consists of three components: a parody must ‘evoke or indicate an utterance [ … ]; it must be, in some respect, antithetical to its target; and the fact that it is intended by its author to have higher semantic authority than the original must be clear’ (1989:67). Thus, a parody can be considered ‘any double-voiced texts or utterances that clearly indicate which of their conflicting voices is to be regarded as authoritative’ (1989:81). Or, rather, it works on the understanding that the ‘audience of a parody [ … ] knows for sure with which voice they are expected to agree’ (1989:81). From this definition, Morson develops the concept of

‘metaparody’ by arguing that it concurrently manufactures tensions between its original text and the parody of it in that ‘each voice may be taken to be parodic of the other; readers are invited to entertain each of the resulting contradictory interpretations in potentially endless succession’ (1989:81). The metaparody is a congested text that establishes each statement and counter-statement concurrently by limiting the cathartic elements of each form. As a result, metaparody is ‘[c]aught between contradictory hermeneutic directives – between “this is a parody” and “this is a parody of a parody”’ (Morson 1989:81). An audience ‘may witness the alternation of statement and counterstatement, interpretation and antithetical

interpretation, up to a conclusion which fails, often ostentatiously, to resolve their hermeneutic perplexity’ (Morson 1989:81). As a result, the goal is to neither endorse nor malign each parodied statement. Instead, the metaparody renders each in opposition to the other.

This section will look at the way Drinkwater deploys the conventions of the melodrama simultaneously with Australian Gothic as a metaparody. The melodrama constructs a world of absolute good and evil, which are arranged into conflicts that are ultimately reconciled with an aesthetic, moral, and conventional rigidity. The Gothic, on the other hand, is inherently antagonistic to this and subverts moral universes. Drinkwater’s strange nexus of competing texts draws its primary statement or ‘original’ texts from the colonial melodrama as an anachronistic, half-remembered, obscure, and altogether disregarded genre that, regardless of its popularity at the time, remains obscure in contemporary Australia. As a result, Drinkwater’s metaparody is premised on the hermeneutic complexity of two anachronistic modes of theatrical expression. As the comedic excess and uncanny supernatural elements of the first act are established then discarded,

Drinkwater’s transformation into a metaparodised Gothic nightmare is fully realised in the latter half of the play through the tyrannical figure of Father Angelico.

In terms of characterisation, the priest receives the same treatment as Crabbe and his quackery, though Angelico’s time in the tropics has taken a greater toll on his mind. Angelico is unstable from the beginning. He is vague, distracted, and blatantly lies about the disappearance of the homestead’s Aboriginal housemaid in a fit of strange and unprecedented amnesia (18). Moreover, he is anxious and irritable and the mere mention of anything cosmopolitan or non-European is instantly considered primitive or blasphemous. Often his

reservations are expressed as spiteful rebukes and violent outbursts of vitriol that are galvanised by the religious institution he personalizes: ‘Embracing liberal views is one thing,

Lady Drinkwater, but replacing the word of God with an Asiatic and his mumbo jumbo? I fear for the girls’ soul … The final descent into total savagery!’ (44). Angelico’s actions are also punctuated by moments of excess and depravity where parody and the grotesque occur simultaneously. A description of two early episodes in juxtaposition with a climactic moment will illustrate this point.

Fig. 4 John du Feu as Crabbe (rear left), Jason Chong as Hop Lee (rear right), Christopher

Glover as Angelico (centre), and Daniel Cunningham as Fortitude (right) in Drinkwater, The

Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

Early in the play, Angelico insults Constance with an uncouth interruption of the civility expected at high tea: ‘drooling [ … ] [h]e pounces on the scones and shovels one after the other hungrily into his mouth’ (30) (Fig. 4). Constance, in a way befitting an English gentlewoman, is utterly appalled and shocked by the behaviour. It is a comedic moment.

However, the priest’s behaviour becomes increasingly obscene when, moments later, he once again breaks form and – to use Carleton’s description – ‘erupts into a paroxysm of inapt verbiage’ (46):

“This is a garrison,” Captain Drinkwater said, (imitating, staring down at

his penis.) “And when I say stand to attention I expect you to stand to

attention, Sir!” which made all the ladies laugh. “Look, Father Angelico.

It’s Ivy the insatiable housemaid, and Clementine the Carnal Governess!

Let’s ride them like the untamed brumbies they are” (46).

The rupture in Drinkwater’s tenuous and self-conscious melodrama highlights how this action constitutes a significant intrusion of grotesque behaviour into the mise en scène. In this particular instance, Angelico becomes a grotesque figure that is reminiscent of a globetrotting

English soldier that is ripped from the pages of The Boy’s Own Paper of the mid-nineteenth century. Laced with vulgar sexual ribaldry, comedy and chaos ensue in a rabid simulation of the half-remembered archetypes and conventions of melodrama.

Fig. 5 Drinkwater, The Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

The convention returns at several key moments of the story in the form of progressively grotesque parodies of Imperial and Catholic zealotry and sexual innuendo. We next see Angelico as he ‘bursts through the front door with a large fish dangling gruesomely at the end of a rod and reel’ (63) (Fig. 5). Within seconds, his frock is ripped off, leaving him completely naked, as he shrieks depravities: ‘like a ripe vagina. A peach-like pudenda [ … ]

A plump young oyster exposing itself as if for the first time’ (63). As the other characters attempt to restrain him, he reels off a bleating parody of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ (1825). The song is accompanied by Fortitude who, in a moment of Gothic spectacle or ‘otherworldly chaos’ that is supported by lighting and sound effects, lets slip a haunting and melancholy prophecy:

I have caught a glimpse of the twentieth century and it is nothing like you

describe! I see carnage. From beginning to end. Beginning with the eruption

that has killed tens of thousands of souls and darkens our skies as we speak

(65).

The prophecy continues by describing the twentieth century through ambiguous, apocalyptic metaphors and culminates in a proclamation: ‘Empires, dreams, and visions. They come and go. Nothing stays. Nothing is realised. Nothing really changes … I know how it ends’ (67).

As the spectacle swells, disembodied hands around the room hurl stones, Hop Lee begins performing a smoking ritual, Constance collapses at the sheer discourteousness of it all as if she were a Victorian melodramatic heroine (67). The comedy abruptly ceases and the confrontation with the supernatural completely alienates the melodrama and interrupts what has, until now, been tepid ribaldry. It is a Gothic moment that paves the way for the horrifying revelation of Somerset’s culture of sexual assault and genocide.

As the scene reaches its dramatic climax, Hope and Fortitude describe their own abject molestation and rape as well as the suicides of the two disappeared Aboriginal maids:

That man [Angelico] has touched me between the legs. He comes into our

room at night and tries to do what he did to Clementine and Ivy … He made

them so unhappy Clementine put rocks in her pocket and walked into the

ocean. Ivy leapt from the cliff at low tide and dashed herself against the

rocks! (67).

With this revelation, Angelico fully embraces the primal evil of the Manichean universe:

‘Beware the Asian usurper! He has usurped me, he will usurp you too!’ (67). As he struts about the stage grinning maniacally, Constance – the sole, white character not succumbed to madness – confesses and confirms that his crimes were ‘[a]n absolute vision of hell’ and the real reason Wilberforce Drinkwater was killed by the Aboriginal tribe: ‘It is the reason they killed him. A spear through the neck. (A beat.) I have been shamed. Cursed and shamed. I can

never return to civilised society. Not even if I want to’ (68). Crabbe, attempting to assuage her guilt, reasons that Wilberforce’s ends justified his means (69). The entire episode concludes with the melodramatic trope of Crabbe proposing marriage to Constance to exonerate her crimes. However, this trope is immediately metaparodised by the Gothic when the young girl, Hope, abruptly dies offstage (70).

Fig. 6 Jason Chong as Hop Lee and Christopher Glover as Angelico in Drinkwater, The

Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

This process of establishing, parodying, and finally transmuting melodrama into

Gothic spectacle is completed in Angelico’s final moments. After being ejected from the homestead, he re-appears late in the play ‘with a spear lodged in his neck’ (83) (Fig. 6). As he splutters and gasps for breath, Angelico remains unrepentant for his crimes:

All through the day and all through the night, you could hear them groaning

in pain. The voices of the dead. They have come back to me. You have

heard them as well. They have come to seek revenge. All the chickens have

come home to roost (84).

And with the confession, the Gothic spectacle once again intervenes. One by one, the ghosts of Constance’s daughters appear – Carleton describes their return as a technical suggestion that advises ‘silhouette’ and ‘soundscape’ – to condemn Angelico to ‘eternal damnation’

(85). His last words warn Constance that she is implicated in the crimes committed against

Somerset’s Aboriginal population: ‘I have not sinned alone. Beware, Constance Drinkwater.

Beware!’ (84). And, thus, he dies with the confidence that there will be no repercussions for his crimes because there is no higher authority that can condemn him: ‘You cannot condemn me to hell! There is no hereafter. No God. No hope. I have peered into the void, and there is only blackness’ (85). He finally perishes with a howl of cynical and histrionic excess: ‘[n]on deus est [there is no God]!’ (85). The words burst forth from the performer and are frenziedly repeated as blood oozes from his neck. The cryptic bastardy of the sacred Catholic Latin is now a heathen dialect that is severed from all the moral authority it once, presumably, signified. The underlying ‘evil’ is released by the last, unrepentant gasps of Angelico as a personalized colonial institution that has no moral position within a cosmopolitan Australian culture. His unrepentant demise and the cathartic moment of existential justice proffered by the childrens’ ghosts do not resolve the Manichean conflict. As a result, this dénouement is

poised between the formal statements of the melodrama and the excess of the Gothic spectacle and neither produced a sense of resolution.

The frenzy here is illustrative of Peter Brooks’ description of the way that melodrama dramatises repression and hysteria. He argues that ‘[t]he dynamics of repression and the return of the repressed figure the plot of melodrama’. As a result, ‘[e]nactment is necessarily excessive: the relation of symbol to symbolised is not controllable or justifiable’ (1976:201).

Indeed, Angelico’s hysterical death by the spear – lodged there, disconcertingly, either by himself in an act of self-destruction or by the ghost of a murdered Aboriginal – is not ‘real’ because the theatrical artifice of the wound is clearly on display (Fig. 6). This is, as

Constance mentioned earlier, how her husband was killed as either an act of revenge or self- defence. The sheer artifice of the hysteria insists that this is not a realist representation of stage-violence but, instead, a symbolic return of the pervasive spectre of Wilberforce. While it could be argued that the macabre death of the villain constitutes the play’s expression of

‘justice’ and the resolution of the Manichean struggle, its artifice and hysterical expression prevents any form of cathectic investment from occurring. Instead, Drinkwater’s competing utterances of the metaparody are able to systematically examine corruption as if it were both an absolute ‘evil’ and an expression of psychological moral excess. As a result, the metaparody treats the hermeneutically complex moment with neither derision nor endorsement. Angelico has died, yet, as a settler, there is no moral authority within the colonial hierarchy that can judge him. Consequently, he is set to die and die again in a hysterical return of repressed evil whenever the play is performed without consequence because the theatre is a haunted receptacle of cultural memory. He will continue to perish resentful, obstinate, and without an admission of guilt reductio ad absurdum until there is a moral authority – beyond the colonial hegemony – that is able to condemn him. Thus, the

expected, reconciliative catharsis of the Manichean struggle remains perpetually deferred and, thus, contained within the ‘ghostly’ mise en scène.

Fig. 7 Drinkwater, The Studio Theatre, 2007. (Photo courtesy of JUTE Theatre Company).

At the conclusion of this pageant of Gothic episodes, Drinkwater climaxes in a complex stage picture of movement, violence, and confrontation. The return of the repressed takes the form of progressively hysterical moments of comedic chaos that all ultimately reveal the culture of institutional child-abuse, rape, and molestation that Somerset’s colonial authority conceals. Beneath this excess, the condition of ‘whiteness’ , which represents that authority, is simultaneously normalised and tyrannical within the play’s Manichean concept of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The colonial regime’s strategies of power are able to operate freely beneath a system of language, behaviour, and through the form of theatrical representation

that is presenting it to an audience. Thus, both form and content are a paradiastole of Gothic nightmare from which Somerset residents cannot escape.

Psychomachia

Drinkwater’s hysterical sense of its own Gothicness moves beyond the camp and into a kind of metatheatrical self-awareness that invites a deconstructive, ironic critique of the way settlers view their own history and theatrical traditions. Carleton, as both playwright and scholar, has worked studiously to establish and recognise a Gothic tradition in the Australian theatre (2012 & 2015). In its excess, Drinkwater re-positions the settler’s prurient vision of history in a way that is tragic and excessive in equal measure. It dissolves the ‘black armband’ / ‘three cheers’ views of history that was controversial in the 1990s and 2000s through the way that it evokes both positions and then obliterates the possibility of endorsing or reconciling with either. In doing so, a third position is established. We might think of

Drinkwater as a dramatization of Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs’ proposition of a solicited, postcolonial uncanny:

We often imagine a (future) condition of "reconciliation", and indeed, a

great deal is invested in the packaging of this image as a means of selling it

to the nation – but the "uncanny" can remind us of just how unreconcilable

this image is with itself. It is not simply that Aboriginal and white

Australians will either be reconciled with each other or they will not; rather,

these two possibilities (reconciliation; the impossibility of reconciliation)

co-exist and flow through each other in what is often a productively

unstable dynamic (1999:112).

This ‘productively unstable dynamic’ is re-created throughout Drinkwater through a Gothic mode that re-describes the settler subject as a grotesque and uncanny product that is

irreconcilable with its own strategies of reconciliation. Concurrently, the melodrama also represents a Manichean precipice in which an emerging cosmopolitan self can and will emerge from it. By the final curtain, what was, at the beginning of the play, a somewhat haunted house, is now a purgatorial cell for these colonial administrators in which the psychomachia forces them to reconcile with their own irreconcilability. We see this exemplified in Drinkwater’s unnerving conclusion and the way it represents an unconcealed colonial tyranny that has not been defeated or condemned. It is still very much ‘on stage’. It is not obliterated from memory, written-over, or its libidinal force reconciled with its many off-stage victims. Instead, it is contained, ever-present, and readily available to an audience in order to re-create another hysterical and terrifying confrontation with Gothic spectacle. This is captured in the play’s final tableaux as the lights fade on Constance who, in her delusion, sits contently and politely sips her self-administered cup of poison.

Absolution for past crimes, or their justification or rationalisation, does not factor into what should be Drinkwater’s cathartic moment because the reassuring spectacle of melodrama has been fully transformed. This conclusion is rendered in such an uncanny way that the deliberate, consensual, and colonial form of Australian theatre that it appropriates is stripped of its stability. What was traditionally a reassuring outlet for the libidinal discharge of its colonial Subject’s fears of ambivalence and alienation is, instead, transformed into a titillating or shockingly pleasurable form of cultural masochism. In doing so, Drinkwater dramatizes the autophagous paradoxes that emerge when non Aboriginal Australians are confronted by different perspectives on the nation’s past and struggle to come to terms with or without its ‘history’ and the art forms that represent it.

Conclusions

Drinkwater’s excessive approach to the Gothic and the conventions of the melodrama are central to the way the play represents contemporary concepts of non-Indigenous guilt and national shame. The Gothic also illustrates an intrinsic aspect of the play’s cosmopolitan vision of contemporary Australia. Rather than a product of the Australian settler-state in a vacuum, Carleton’s vision of colonial Australia turns the Gothic outwards by acknowledging the regional influences and racial tensions that exist beyond the traditional settler/indigenous binary proffered by colonial studies. The use of the Gothic here denies any sense of historicism in terms of an accurate representation of the north of the continent before

Federation. The historical mise en scène is a construct of the contemporary non-Indigenous psyche and is staged amongst the forgotten symbols and theatrical conventions that are inherited from its past. As a result, Drinkwater is not so much about history. It is a psychomachia about the non-Indigenous Subject in history struggling to reconcile with its inherent irreconcilability.

Chapter Two

(Dis)Placement:

Inheritance and Madness in The White Earth

Introduction

This chapter develops the interest in colonial melodrama and metaparody established in Chapter One by looking at Stuart Charles and Andrew McGahan’s stage-adaptation of

McGahan’s novel, The White Earth. The chapter will argue that the play critiques Australian settler culture through the ‘personalization’, to use Christine Gledhill’s term, of a single settler family (2000). The play draws the Gothic into its multi-generational story in order to draw a parallel between colonial violence in the early twentieth century and the contemporary, legal ways in which non-Indigenous communities continue to occupy land that was previously inhabited. The anxiety and guilt that this structural and thematic organisation produces is dramatised as a non-Indigenous psychomachia that torments the play’s settler characters and ultimately ends in self-destruction.

The Play

The White Earth, adapted from Andrew McGahan’s 2004 novel, is set on Kuran

Station in a fictionalised version of the Darling Downs of remote Southern Queensland in the early 1990s. William (Stace Callaghan), a boy of about twelve, witnesses his father’s death out on the family’s wheat fields, caused by the explosion of a faulty fuel valve on his tractor.

Desperate and without a home, William’s mother, Veronica (Katharine Marquet), arranges to have him sent to live with his uncle, John McIvor (Anthony Phelan). McIvor is the current custodian of Kuran Station – a vast estate established by the White family in 1845, complete with a crumbling Victorian-era mansion overlooking the property. Ailing and without an heir,

McIvor wants young William to be the sole inheritor of his estate, thus ensuring his family line continues. The McIvor family has worked on Kuran since Federation. The story shifts between the 1920s and the early 1990s, establishing how the vast Gothic mansion on the estate became the McIvor family’s home and how an impending Land Rights claim is currently threatening to ruin everything. McIvor begins to groom his young heir to inherit what he thinks is his family’s birth-right and reveals his ties to a neo-nationalist group of pastoralists set on defeating a dispossessed Aboriginal family’s claim of traditional ownership.

McIvor lectures the boy on how much the land means to him – how his ancestors had to toil against poverty and humiliation to establish their legacy. However, McIvor’s state of mind is quickly deteriorating and he is visited by ghosts from his past. They assault, accuse, and plague him with guilt. The first of these apparitions are his former business partner

Dudley and his de facto bride Harriet – the daughter of Kuran’s original station boss and heir to the station after the original squatters, the White family, left. Believing Dudley to be killed at Dunkirk during World War Two, McIvor strategically married Harriet and took control of the property that he believes to be his family’s right. Elizabeth White, the original squatter’s daughter, appears throughout the play as the only remaining witness to Daniel’s massacre.

However, the most sinister spectre to visit McIvor is his late-father, Daniel who coerces his son and drives his near-pathological need to own Kuran.

As he grooms the boy, McIvor’s relationship to Kuran and the Downs begins to take on more mystic aspects. He imagines a kind of Anglo version of ‘The Dreaming’ that includes taking the boy to a natural spring hidden in the hinterlands. He believes it is a magical or sacred place that is the spiritual lifeblood of the whole enterprise. The story

concludes with McIvor attempting to burn the bones of an Aboriginal family – murdered by his father as a means to secure their title – that have lain hidden at the bottom of the same secret spring. As the play reaches its catastrophic conclusion, the bones clog the fireplace and the room fills with smoke, the flames spill out, and Kuran burns to the ground with McIvor and the title deed inside. Meanwhile, the decision of ‘The Wik Peoples v The State of

Queensland’ decision passes in the Federal Court of Australia (1996). This decision, more commonly known as The Wik Decision, declared that pastoral leases in the area no longer confer the rights of exclusive ownership to leaseholders. As a result, McIvor’s family are no longer the sole legal owners of Kuran and the land’s dispossessed traditional owners can now make a native title claim on the Downs. Much like the labyrinthine backstory of Drinkwater, the past features heavily in the plot of The White Earth. So much so, that a simple plot description is not capable of capturing the sheer hysteria and spectacle the play invokes.

The White Earth in Performance

The White Earth has only been produced once in a professional context. Directed by the playwrights, McGahan and Charles, it was produced by La Boite in 2009 as a part of its main-stage season at Queensland’s Roundhouse Theatre. While the premiere production of

The White Earth was a major work, it has, to date, received little critical attention. However, the novel on which the play is based was the recipient of several, high-profile awards including The Miles Franklin Award, The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and The Courier

Mail’s Book of the Year Fiction Award all in the year it was published.

Scholarly commentary on the novel, particularly those that focus on its postcolonial

Gothic aspects, is far more profuse than discussions about the play. However, this commentary will not be addressed in this chapter. The focus of the chapter is on the ways in

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which the stage adaptation of The White Earth utilises the conventions of the Australian

Gothic drama in order to construct its psychomachia. Consequently, because the play does this through its presentation of embodied characters and their proxemics, the larger body of literary criticism that deals specifically with the novel falls outside the scope of the inquiry.

Whilst this work by other scholars elucidates and offers striking observations about many of the novel’s plethora of Gothic features, this scholarship is not as relevant to this particular analysis of the story as adapted to the stage. However, a brief overview of the conventions that survived adaptation from fiction to stage will assist in highlighting how central the

Gothic is to the narrative of both novel and play. A. Digger Stolz effectively summarises the ominous ambience:

Surprisingly, The White Earth exhibits many conventions from the

Southern [American] gothic tradition. Kuran House, itself a rotting mansion

set in a remote location, comes fully equipped with dark, deserted hallways,

wild dogs, and creepy servants. Both John and William are haunted by

restless and fiery apparitions. And yes, the ending is appropriately

gruesome as well. This transposition of gothic tradition over the richly

detailed, at times, menacing Australian landscape feels fresh, particularly

because McGahan borrows supernatural aspects from aboriginal lore

(2004:179).

As we will see, many of these elements are transposed from the novel to the stage. The mise en scène of La Boite’s production, designed by Greg Clarke, consists of a bare, aged wooden floor – marked by inconsistent, almost-cartoonish gaps and rises – and framed by hanging panels of white gauze. A rocky outcrop descends into a thrust that stretches into the audience at floor-level. Lighting and sound design signify the shift from location to location, present to past, and from reality to unnerving dream-states in which spectacular natural and supernatural

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phenomena are theatrically staged. The design, when viewed in its entirety, emphasises the central, symbolic nature of the colonial mansion within the narrative – as an anchor tying history to the present and, as the forthcoming analysis will demonstrate, accounting for the behaviours, anxieties, and pathological behaviours its inhabitants exhibit throughout the play.

Fig. 8 Anthony Phelan as John McIvor, Kathryn Marquet as Elizabeth, and Steven Tandy as

Daniel in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole). Image

Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

The Architectural Uncanny

In production, Kuran house is predominantly revealed through dialogue, the impressions of characters, and – in a gesture that points to the play’s literary roots – voice- over narration. Even from the first curtain, Kuran and what is set to occur there is foreshadowed with a particularly Gothic prologue. The play opens at the funeral of William’s

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father. The boy, on stage and isolated, overhears the chatter of shadowy, ominous figures that are projected on to a cyclorama of hanging gauze that surrounds the stage: ‘I’ve heard stories about that house’ (10) (Fig. 8). We are first introduced to Kuran properly via the narrator:

It was colder on the hill, and the day darker somehow. Then at last Kuran

House was revealed through the trees, and William felt a deeper chill of

premonition run through him. It seemed, in that first moment, that it was

not so much a home he saw, as it was a great broken shipwreck, thrown up

on the rocks from the dry ocean of the plains below (10).

To the boy, and the audience by proxy, Kuran emerges in the mind as a paradoxical image – the kind of place that simply should not be there. It is an anomalous, even hostile imposition on its idyllic, pastoral surroundings. Moreover, once the action within the house begins,

Kuran becomes a place of contradictions – described as a big house, yet made up of small rooms – in a way that creates an uncanny sense of claustrophobia. However, this aspect of the house is not shown spatially. Rather, it is expressed through the performance of the actors:

‘WILLIAM: It’s all little rooms. Some of them don’t even have windows. I thought the rooms would be big here. VERONICA: Well, sometimes old houses like this get divided up, so more people can fit in’ (12). As a result, Kuran’s uncanniness is underpinned by fundamental anxieties about the construction of boundaries themselves. In typical Gothic fashion, Kuran also has its forbidden zones, interned tyrants, and repressed secrets. Kuran’s sole staff member – the cantankerous Mrs Griffiths – sternly forbids William from the upper levels: ‘[i]t’s no place for boys’ (13). For William, a single, step in the wrong direction comes with a warning from the house’s authority figures.

In several moments, the characters’ obsession with spatial and psychological boundaries takes on more comic aspects which are dramatic when framed by the oppressive

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atmosphere of the mise en scène. One moment that typifies this trope comes when Mrs.

Griffiths is left alone in the house and coos to it:

So lovely, so smooth. [To the House.] He’s gone away with the boy. He’s

gone away, like he did long ago, when it was just you and me here, alone,

for all those years.

She dances a slow waltz, the House her partner.

You and me, alone, in the dark.

She waltzes off (21).

This ironic parodying of uncanny, personified space makes for a moment of welcome comedy amongst the play’s excessive Gothic foreshadowing. However, it is also one that harmlessly introduces the element of madness into the mix. It emphasises – through both pathos and bathos – The White Earth’s obsession with rendering architecture as both a metaphorical and a psychological space that inspires strange behaviours in its settler characters. In this way, the bare, unheimlich stage that is informed by the narrated and often imaginary details of its Gothicness, opens up the stage as a place in which its characters’ can explore or be confronted by the supernatural expression of their anxieties, desires, and their histories. Indeed, it is because of this ‘bareness’ that the play is able to oscillate, back and forth, through time and into dream-states with only minor, usually technical, changes to the mise en scène. There are long sections of the narrative in which past events – the 1920s, 30s, and 40s – exist alongside the action in the present. The play is primarily set in the 1990s – a time far removed from the play’s pastiche of Victorian-era, Gothic trappings. Kuran, rather than a site where the repressed returns, is a place in which contemporary experience is subsumed into a repressed history and re-constructed through its uncanny return. The political realities of the play’s world, such as the looming ‘Wik Decision’ and the threat of

Native Title, are always present alongside its Gothic vision of rural settlement and colonial

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history. As a result, the stability of the play’s fits of naturalism are never far from Gothic excess in a way that ratchets up a palpable sense of dread.

Personalizing Settler Displacement and Ways of ‘Belonging’

The first appearance of this tension between space, history, allegory, and the Gothic occurs on William’s first night in the house. William, once again on-stage and isolated, hears disembodied footsteps in the night that echo ominously down from the mezzanine in the soundscape (12). The action is provided in the published play’s stage directions: ‘William curls up in his bed as the House creaks and groans around him, and footsteps move above’

(12). This particular invocation of the Gothic, from the outset, signals that this is not a story of external Gothic invasions or the return of vengeful, supernatural victims. These initial moments of Gothic spectacle do not signify the return of the murdered traditional inhabitants of the property. Instead, these hauntings are internal; they are emerging from inside the minds of the play’s settler characters. The boy’s fear stems from the frightening presence of his

Uncle – his ‘blood’, as we are emphatically reminded constantly throughout the play.

This strategy is further established when McIvor appears for the first time. The mise en scène transforms from a domestic space into McIvor’s personal, Gothic dreamscape as

‘[s]moke billows across the stage’ and ‘[v]oices can be heard, urgent yells’ (15):

VOICE: The picnic is over. Take the boy back to the House.

VOICE: We need more wood.

VOICE: There’s so many of them.

VOICE: The picnic is over.

VOICE: We need more wood.

VOICE: There’s so many of them.

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VOICE: I said take the boy back to the House! (15).

The voices describe McIvor’s repressed memory of the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe by his father and a group of pastoralists when he was a boy. The elderly McIvor (Anthony Phelan) enters the scene in a fit of insomnia. He limps and is partially dressed in a bathrobe (15). The ellipses, repetitions, and ambiguity of both the disembodied characters and the moment of spectacle – as a complete theatrical effect – establishes his fragile mental state. McIvor is frightened, disoriented, and unable to recognise the voices and the people behind them because of the seemingly uncontrollable way in which these repressed memories return in moments such as this. He strikes a rather undignified figure – hardly an entrance fit for the sinister Gothic tyrant the play has led its audience to believe in thus far.

McIvor is unable to keep unconscious terrors from invading his thoughts and, by extension, the mise en scène itself. Lighting effects are kept to a minimum as McIvor’s torch swings about illuminating fractions of the dark and burning stage. Charles and McGahan provide a description for the following moment of Gothic spectacle: ‘He shines the flashlight about, straining to see, but there is no one […] After a few moments streaks of green light start falling from the night sky. It’s a meteor shower’ (15). As the meteors rain above him,

McIvor moves to where William is fitfully resting centre stage. He places a hand tenderly on the boy’s shoulder and proceeds to reveal the station’s secrets to him. What follows is an intimate scene with the man and child partially concealed by dim, expressionist lighting effects. It is tainted by an unsettling implication that, like McIvor’s inability to contain his unconscious repression of colonial violence, his mental infirmity might also fail to prevent any other abject, primal, and sexual urges from becoming actions. In this already perverse context, McIvor, in a long, whispered monologue, expresses how, for him, the Darling

Downs is a ‘[t]angled country [ … ] and strange’ (16). It is a place where the ghosts of mad

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pioneers haunt every day Australians and where the ground itself swallows homesteads whole so they ‘vanish without a trace’:

When I was young I used to hear stories about two shepherds who were

sent up there, long ago. Both of them went mad. Something up there just

did it to them. One of them clubbed the other one to death. Only bits of the

body ever turned up. People said his friend ate him. I don’t know if that last

thing is true, but the rest of it happened, sure enough. You believe in ghosts,

Will? (16).

With its sexual subtext, all of this ‘strangeness’ and melancholy reveals McIvor’s deep experience of ‘unhomeliness’ in the Downs. Even though he has spent his entire life on the land, it still keeps secrets from him that are concealed from view. These are mostly bound up with acts of violence, madness, and failure on behalf of white settlers that are his spiritual predecessors. However, this sense of alterity is also contradictory when, moments later, he says to the boy – ‘You live long enough in one place, there’s nothing you won’t know about that place. Me, I was born here’ (17). This imagined version of the landscape is a projection of both McIvor’s anxieties and, through its uncanniness, articulates his deep desire to be

Indigenous within it.

This contradiction – between being both simultaneously native and alien – resembles the ambivalent condition of being a settler colonial. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, in their reflection on settler literary cultures, describe how ‘settler’ colonies and their literatures often express a condition of ‘displacement’ in their modes of expression (1989). Following literary scholar D.E.S. Maxwell, they argue that a common theme of this condition is the experience of ‘exile’ and ‘the problem of defining ‘home’ [and the] physical and emotional confrontations with the ‘new’ land and its ancient and established meanings’ (1989:27). This

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sense of ‘displacement’ emanates from McIvor’s concomitant claims that he has mastered the land and yet fears its disastrous effect on the colonials that attempted to settle it. This ambivalence is problematic for McIvor and is communicated, thus, to his heir in these strange

Gothic tales. As a result, McIvor develops a particular strategy of diffusing and repressing the anxiety that is produced by this settler displacement.

McIvor’s strange, personal mythology is made up of an arbitrary pastiche of colonial concepts of ownership, the melancholic invocation of past disgrace, and the imposition of artificial antiquity onto contested property and land. As the relationship between McIvor and the boy develops, so too does the aggression and conviction with which he proselytises his beliefs. In the next scene, McIvor delivers a proclamation to William as they stand atop a hill on the property (20). The stage is bathed in a burning, yellow light and he develops the spatial co-ordinates that inform his relationship to Kuran:

JOHN: Look – from this hill you can see the whole station at a

glance. How it used to be anyway. Twenty miles north to

south along the mountains there, and then twenty-five

miles west out onto the plains, all the way to the

Condamine River. Five hundred square miles all told.

Magnificent. [Considers.] It was too big to last, of course.

And after the White’s left, well … now there’s just this

little strip remaining, a couple of miles wide, and ten

miles long, running up into these hills. The land I own.

But do you see it, Will? Really see it? It’s nothing like the

farm you grew up on. That place was just a square of flat

dirt, a machine to grow wheat. This place is a piece of

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country. It has trees and scrub and creeks and gullies. It’s

three dimensional. It has its own life, and its own history.

It breathes. It even talks.

WILLIAM: Talks?

JOHN: To the right person.

WILLIAM: I don’t hear anything …

JOHN: Give it time (20-1).

It is a comprehensive and well-rehearsed screed that is clearly designed to appeal to the boy with its promise of a ‘surprise’ if he keeps the secret to himself (21). In it, the sublime aspects of his mythical geography are given a spatial and theatrical referent when McIvor takes

William to the edge of the secret spring that is nestled in the bluffs surrounding the property.

McIvor and William descend down the stage’s thrust, in close proximity to the audience, which establishes an intimate, almost confessional, ambience to the scene. William asks him how deep the secret billabong is and McIvor replies ‘[n]o one knows. Maybe it’s bottomless

… It just goes down and down and down. There’s a spring there, water oozes up from the rock, icy cold and dark’ (22). Here, the play’s allegorical register is activated and Kuran stands in as a metonym for the entire Nation:

It’s true. This is the source of Kuran Creek, and Kuran Creek runs west

from here to the Condamine River. The Condamine flows south to the

Darling, the Darling flows into the Murray, and the Murray runs all the way

on to the sea, thousands and thousands of miles from here. All those rivers

and all that country – why, that’s Australia’s very heartland. This

waterhole, in it’s [sic.] way, is the wellspring of the whole nation (23).

This dramatization of his deeply repressed displacement and the way it is concomitantly staged, literally, within the already established confines of the homestead on-stage represents

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both spaces – the sublime landscape and Kuran as a symbol of white settlement – as uncanny.

They are both ‘homely’, yet both are tenuously controlled – or said to be controlled – by

McIvor.

There is an echo of what Ghassan Hage has called the ‘White imaginary’ in the way in which The White Earth presents McIvor’s beliefs and the way he attempts to indoctrinate the boy. Hage argues that remote landscape – the desert, Outback, or bush – is often treated as empty and unpopulated in the non-Indigenous imagination (1998:149). An Indigenous perspective, however, dictates otherwise with large swathes of ‘remote’ parts of the country being continuously populated by Aboriginal peoples for tens of millennia who have profound spiritual and cultural significance to their communities and their ancestors. This concealed aspect of McIvor’s strategy highlights the violence inherent in his arbitrary system of belonging. As McIvor becomes increasingly desperate to inculcate William into his ‘white imaginary’ system of belief, he imbues Kuran’s sacred spaces with a mimicked or romanticised and wholly exoticised form of Aboriginalism. Another moment, when they return to the spring, sees the stage illuminated in dappled white light as McIvor stands with the boy on the thrust of the stage as they gaze into the water: ‘WILLIAM: Is it a sacred site, uncle John? JOHN: Yes. Yes, I think it is. WILLIAM: Sacred to the Aborigines? JOHN:

Sacred to me, boy. Get along now’ (46). Here, with the juxtaposition now firmly established,

McIvor’s invocation of the sublime is rendered as a wholly reactionary narrative that is based on a sanitised version of his family’s tenuous ownership of Kuran. Rather than a bucolic affinity to the Downs developed in his youth, McIvor’s ‘belonging’ is actually the repression of a resentment that is expressed in a superficial assimilation of an Aboriginal aesthetic.

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This way of ‘belonging’ moves away from an abstract and benign invocation of the sublime towards a colonial system of morals, continuity, and legality that is concealed by its transcendent language. In his next meeting with his protégé, McIvor and his colleague, Dr.

Moffat, expose the more sinister aspects of their plan. They goad William, claiming that if the

Wik Decision passes in parliament the waterhole will be flooded with ‘strangers’ (44). These strangers are, presumably, the Aboriginal claimants who, in McIvor’s twisted mythology, have squandered their connection to the waterhole because of their negligent ‘absence’. They are ‘people who haven’t had anything to do with this place for a century’ (45). The existential ambivalence of McIvor as a settler is folded into the larger structures of politics, the law, and the systems by which non-Indigenous Australians perpetuate colonial continuity in disputed territory. With the advent of Native title in the Downs, the exclusive, mythic, and metaphysical significance it has to its white occupants will be destroyed. As a result,

McIvor’s ‘displacement’ is a paradiastole of the deep resentment that he projects onto the station’s absent traditional owners.

Psychomachia

This revelation is the basis for the construction of McIvor’s unique expression of the

Gothic psychomachia. McIvor, as a personalised expression of the settler’s desire to belong, is not so much ‘displaced’, but rather is beset on all sides by the pressures of modernity. The spectres of capitalism and neoliberal success, the legacy of colonial violence, his aspirational self-association with the figure of the pioneer, and the patriarchy all haunt him. McIvor reveals the extent to which all of these pressures interleave and propagate his anxieties in a monologue that is translated to performance as an increasingly deranged tirade:

But it’s more than just the law. It’s the thinking behind the law. There are

people out there who assume that Aborigines are the only ones who

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understand the land, that they have a mystical, magical connection we can

never have, that we’re just stumbling around the country without any idea

of what it is. But that’s not true. We have connections with the land too, our

own kind of magic … this land talks to me, just as clearly as it ever did to

any blackfella. So I deserve some respect too (45).

Here, The White Earth is not simply unsettling the repressed experience of settler displacement. Rather, it is pathologising it through its constant repetition and the dramatization of McIvor’s failed attempt to contain his unconscious jealousy. For McIvor, it is an exhausting loop of repression and return. As ‘whiteness’ is the definitive racial signifier of ownership within the allegorical geography and symbolic borders of Kuran, so too is this pathological resentment for Aboriginal peoples. This repressed obsession with Kuran’s traditional owners prevents McIvor from fully and unproblematically committing to his way of ‘belonging’. As a result, he is psychologically cut-off from his desired version of subjectivity. This is despite his desperate attempts to simultaneously evoke and undermine the process of identification of those that he has vicariously dispossessed. For McIvor, occupying Kuran – and, by allegorical extension, non-Indigenous settlement itself – is not contingent on the success of his agricultural enterprise and the accumulation of capital. Nor is it for the continuation of the family line and the continuity of the culture that is comprised of families like his. Instead, it is a Gothic metaphor for the incomplete and uncanny Subject that, above all else, desires an uncontested claim to indigeneity.

The Fear of White Supremacy

Further cobbled into McIvor’s network of psychical pressures is another anxiety that exemplifies his internal moral conflict. McIvor unconsciously fears that if he actually does achieve ‘belonging’ at Kuran, the ‘white imaginary’ he clings to will uncontrollably develop

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into a morally reprehensible expression of racial supremacy. While he stridently asserts that the threat to his claim is not about ‘race [ … ] [i]t’s a question of property rights’, McIvor needs the support of a fringe, neo-nationalist group of pastoralists that organise to resist the looming Wik decision in the Supreme Court (45). Their extremist, conservative politics replace McIvor’s relatively benign assimilation of the lost Aboriginal aesthetic in a way that adds a sinister element to William’s indoctrination. In one unsettling scene, McIvor schools

William in his inherited political and xenophobic rhetoric:

WILLIAM: ‘We reject the United Nations and any other body that

seeks to limit Australian sov … sov …’

JOHN: Sovereignty. Good, keep going.

WILLIAM: ‘We reject excessive immigration.’

JOHN: You bet we do.

WILLIAM: ‘We reject the alienation of Australian soil to elite

minorities.’

JOHN: These are grim days, Will. The Mabo judgement. This

new Native Title legislation that they’re trying to bring in.

They’re disasters.

WILLIAM: We believe in an Australia run by all Australians for the

benefit of all Australians … We believe in one flag … In

one people … One nation (37-8).

Drawing on conflict and anxiety generated by the popularity of Pauline Hanson and the ‘One

Nation Party’ in the 1990s and early 2000s, as McGahan and Charles quite obviously are, they arrange their characters and the political forces they represent as a personalized cross section of the nation during the period in which Wik was being heard. Neo-nationalism and racism are represented, in this instance, as inevitable by-products of this pathological form of

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settler ‘displacement’. The play now frames them in both a political and an abstract, metaphysical discourse.

Fig. 9 The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

The Gothic aspect of this anxiety is made explicit in a sequence of spectacle that hysterically closes the first act. McIvor delivers a speech at a picnic/rally near the waterhole:

Welcome to this water hole. It is – as I told my nephew the other day – a

sacred site. Sacred to me, and, I suspect, sacred to the Aborigines too, in

years past. Now, we’re going to be hearing a lot about Aboriginal history

and sacred sites in the coming years, and it might seem strange that we, of

all people, should meet in such a spot. But there’s a message in this. The

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Aborigines are gone. They can’t be brought back. This is my property now,

fairly won. This is all of your properties, your houses, your back yards. The

government is at this very moment debating ways to deny us ownership of

these things. Which is why it is so important that we are here, in this place

that we have claimed. To meet. To talk. And to plan our defence.

More applause.

But for now, just have fun. We’ve got the barbecues going, there’s plenty of

food and there’s games for the kids. Tonight, that’s when we’ll get down to

the business at hand. Thank you (52).

The scene is accompanied by a soundscape of children playing, barbecues sizzling, and families enjoying themselves. It is a composite and somewhat artificial image of non-

Indigenous Australians at play, who are satisfied that Aboriginal people won’t return, and that their pathological ‘displacement’ has been effectively repressed on Kuran Station. The general humour and unthreatening atmosphere of the scene suppresses the both legal and existential threat that looms over the disparate characters on stage. However, as the stage darkens and night comes on, this idyllic scene transforms into a sinister Gothic episode and the tenuously repressed challenge to non-Indigenous ‘belonging’ returns as spectacle.

As William makes his way across the stage, shadowy figures emerge as silhouettes from up-stage. Their technically distorted voices reel off aggressive statements of support for

McIvor:

FIGURE: Any blacks come to take my farm, fucking watch out.

FIGURE: The old settlers had it right. They didn’t get all weepy

about the natives.

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FIGURE: They just did what was necessary, and if that took a gun

…

FIGURE: The pity is they didn’t finish them off when they had the

chance.

JOHN: No! This is not what we do. This is not about Aborigines.

This is about the new laws being stupid. They ignore

reality. They say we stole this country, when in fact we

earned it. They are as wrong as laws can be. But I will not

have racist talk here!

FIGURE: Bullshit, it’s not racist to tell the truth.

FIGURE: The land is wasted on them anyway. They’re barely

civilised.

FIGURE: They were cannibals only a few generations back. (55).

From the darkness, a pastoralist dressed in the white robe and conical hood of a Ku Klux

Klan member enters. He wields an enormous flag that is emblazoned with the Eureka

Stockade’s ‘Southern Cross’ emblem. As the radicalised figures loom around McIvor, the

‘KKK Wizard’ torments William, ‘sweeping the flag back and forth across his head’ as the voices and figures chant ‘[w]hite power [ ... ] [w]hite pride’ (55) (Fig.9). It is a ritualised tableau and a moment of excess that is extremely theatrical and camp, yet framed in a way that is intended to provoke and threaten McIvor and William.

In this moment, the hysterical way radical nationalism and overt racism are theatrically represented – their hyperbolic appearance and grotesque behaviours, in this instance – is a key indicator of the emotional effect brought on by The White Earth’s metaparody. On stage, McIvor cowers, beset, once again, by yet another psychic force – the

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fascistic, violent, morally reprehensible, and resentful neo-nationalism that his strenuously constructed concept of the sublime is, unconsciously, meant to contain and repress. However, his personal mythology is counter-intuitively causing anxiety. In this moment, the full extent of the Gothic autophagy inherent in McIvor’s way of ‘belonging’ and identification is exposed. With excessive expression, displacement and the ways in which these characters’ attempt to expel the anxiety of the uncanny cannot be reconciled with the self-identified category of ‘indigeneity’. Rather The White Earth re-frames displacement as one step in a process that, concealed beneath its bucolic and emotional language, ultimately results in racially oriented violence. The melodramatic style of the episode – the violence, the hysterical movement, and the excesses of the action – personalize the signs of McIvor’s own alienation. They offer a disturbing critique of the extreme expression that appropriation and unrecognised resentment enables within the Gothic psychomachia.

Gothic Inheritances: Families and Communities

This personalization of settler displacement, as an autophagous condition of radical nationalism, is represented through the Gothic trope of a ‘curse’ that is transferred from generation to generation as a degenerating condition of guilt and madness. While expressed explicitly in the relationship between McIvor and William, this ‘curse’ takes on larger, allegorical significance across the play by the way it is propagated by the settler community the play represents. By focusing on McIvor as a victim of this curse, ‘evil’ or responsibility for it is re-framed within a cultural domain. The play’s other authority figures of William’s mother Veronica and the local physician, Dr. Moffat – both act narcissistically and both separately benefit from William’s indoctrination into the family’s radical politics. Their negligence is expressed, for one, by the doctor’s refusal to treat the boy’s worsening ear- infection properly by frivolously prescribing strong opioids to his mother so that the

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radicalisation process can continue uninterrupted. Veronica is heavily medicated for much of the play and, with slurred dialogue, meandering physical movement, and theatrical make-up, she embodies a grotesque cynicism when read in juxtaposition to McIvor’s near-religious fervour. For her, potential ownership of the station is primarily about financial gain. She completely ignores McIvor’s mental instability and possible danger to the boy and often violently forces William into his arms: ‘He’s [McIvor] fine. He’s completely fine. Don’t you ever suggest – not to anyone – that he isn’t fine … In fact, maybe you should go up to him. I know it’s late, but the more he sees of you … ’ (31). With this kind of language, there are further, unsettling analogues made between McIvor’s hopes and a sinister parody of the

‘grooming’ process that is commonly associated with paedophilia. These associations add yet more layers of ambiguous perversity to their relationship.

In their own ways, both Veronica and Moffat play a role in the continuity of settler occupation of Kuran – Moffat abusing his duty as a physician and Veronica in her role as a negligent parent. Superficially, it is a grim picture of the non-Indigenous family and the community that is constituted by it within the moral universe of the play. The very structure of the moral universe is determined by the same forces that haunt McIvor: capitalism, belonging, and the privileging of colonial continuity over the psychological wellbeing of its individual members. This critique of settler displacement is dramatised in one unnerving sequence of excess that augments this symbolic nexus of colonial continuity, white occupation, perverse sexual conduct, professional abuse, impending destruction, and

‘inheritance’. It is expressed through a protracted series of Gothic spectacles.

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Fig. 10 Katharine Marquet as Veronica and Stace Callaghan as William in The White Earth,

Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre

Company.

This first sequence in The White Earth’s longest episode of haunting focuses on

McIvor’s late business partner Dudley, whom he betrayed by marrying the station boss’ daughter, Harriet, after believing him killed at Dunkirk in World War Two. Dudley enters the play as a mute spectre and operates like the ghost of Banquo in William Shakespeare’s

Macbeth by silently providing a dramatic foil for McIvor’s confession:

I was sure you were dead. We were both sure, otherwise we would never

have …

DUDLEY only stares back.

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It was something about the station, too. Coming here that day. The neglect

was so terrible. The House, the fields, the fences, everything was

overgrown or falling down. I saw how much the place had suffered without

me here. [Pause.] But more than that. It was this waterhole. There’s a

presence here. A power here. It calls to me. This particular place. It comes

right up through my feet, into my blood, my lungs. It claims me as its own.

Forever. I don’t know why. [Pause.] But it claimed me that day, and I

couldn’t walk away from the station again after that.

DUDLEY doesn’t speak (47-8).

Even in his hysteria, McIvor refuses to ask for absolution for his deceptions and dishonour.

Instead, his pleas attempt to explain how his betrayal was, in fact, a form of sacrifice. He re- describes the theft as a noble act and as evidence of his indigeneity by claiming that he, as if controlled by a sublime power, had no say in the matter. He was chosen. It is as if any counter-claim to his ownership – either his wronged colleague or the land’s traditional owners – would not only undermine his history, but defy the preternatural order of the universe he has created and, thus, render his sacrifices meaningless. The process of sublimating the land – as expressed metaphorically in the corporeal, often abject process of his feet, blood, and lungs subsuming ‘indigeneity’ – reveals yet another aspect of his assimilated Aboriginal aesthetic. Through the spectacle of the haunting, he is implying that he genuinely believes that his ghosts and trauma are commensurate with the those of Kuran’s dispossessed and murdered original inhabitants.

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Fig. 11 Veronica Neave as Harriet and Anthony Phelan as John McIvor in The White Earth,

Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre

Company.

The personalization of his pathology is rendered increasingly perverse as the sequence of hauntings continues and like many aspects of the play, the relationship between McIvor and Dudley becomes tainted by the repressed stain of perverse sexual activity. By this stage,

John and Harriet have given birth to a daughter named Ruth, who was conceived at the waterhole. Thus, the girl is endowed with a spiritual importance to McIvor and symbolises his dream of future sense of indigeneity. In the next scene, the ghost of Dudley returns to

Kuran, though this time he enters as an abject figure – ‘dirty, ragged, awkward’ (57). As white light shoots across the stage, Dudley attempts to rape the young Ruth in the stage space concealed by the blinding light. Ruth’s disembodied pleas for help echo throughout the

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theatre: ‘RUTH [Offstage.] Dad! Dad make him stop!’ (57). This moment of violence occurs off-stage, concealed from view, as McIvor thrashes uncontrollably about in bed in the present

– desperate to intervene, yet unable to do so. He is impotent to avert the historical moment from being repeated (Fig. 11). His impotence is rendered theatrically by both his physical incapacitation and the metaphoric expression of his repression: ‘No. I don’t want to remember this’ (58). Once the assault concludes and Dudley enters ‘yanking up his pants’,

McIvor expresses his regret that he didn’t kill him and how, instead, he locked him in the shed before sending Ruth away to boarding school (59). This interaction – between the past transgression and McIvor’s compunction in the present – occurs simultaneously. McIvor is both personally addressing the ghosts and expressing his regret in a psychological confession through soliloquy. When asked to justify his decision by the ghost of Harriet, McIvor emphasises the importance of Dudley’s share in Kuran:

HARRIET: Money? You’re worried about money?

JOHN: It isn’t just money, it’s our whole future at stake! Kuran

Station. Kuran House. It’s all about getting them back one

day. You know that.

HARRIET: That hideous old house?

JOHN: It isn’t hideous, don’t say that (60).

Here, the threat of losing the station is enough for McIvor to abandon his responsibility as a parent. In doing so, his fear is profound enough to forsake his relationship with his daughter.

Because she is the victim of attempted rape, Ruth is symbolically ejected from the system of inheritance in order that her father can continue to enact his repressed displacement.

This sequence of spectacle, like the architectural uncanny of Kuran itself, expresses the psychological trauma of settler displacement and the psychical force and moral

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ambivalence required to repress it. In other words, colonial occupation of Kuran exacts a heavy penalty on those that dare attempt it. While the lost and maddened colonials of the past are victims of hubris and the sublimity of the landscape, McIvor’s self-proclaimed and inherited displacement requires the conscious denial of the rape of a family member, a strange and depraved form of frontier justice, and the destruction of the family unit in everything except name. Further layers of perversity are added to The White Earth’s treatment of the settler family by McGahan, Charles, and La Boite’s decision to cast a single performer, Veronica Neave, as both Harriet and Ruth McIvor in production. The play indulges in the transgressive sexual subtext that is established by McIvor’s relationship to

William. The relationship connote the transferral of displacement between generations and sexual abuse as equivalent acts of violence. As a result, displacement and its methods of continuity are treated as systemic crimes rather than abject ones. It is a complex imitation of a family relationship that, in typical Gothic fashion, is organised around the repression of secrets and transgression. The convention yokes sex – particularly rape and a subtext of incest – to ownership and power.

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Fig. 12 Anthony Phelan as John McIvor in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009.

(Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

The inter-generational aspects of this Gothic representation of the settler family are fully revealed when Ruth returns to Kuran. In the next scene, McIvor appears in the ‘White

Room’ – the master bedroom and symbolic centre of the home. As the scene begins, the staging of the previous hauntings is repeated and imbues it with a ritual-like atmosphere. The repetition implies the return of uncomfortable moments of spectacle are a common occurrence at Kuran. The sound of a man and woman consensually ‘moaning in pleasure’ is heard off-stage as poisonous, green lighting evokes a surreal nightmarish vision of the domestic space of the bedroom (64) (Fig. 12). The woman in question is Ruth, as a young adult, and the man is unnamed. Perhaps he is a station-hand in a repetition of the scandalous class-disparity of McIvor’s forbidden romance with Elizabeth White. McIvor listens on disgusted as the two disembodied figures have sex and the spectre of Harriet enters, dressed 124

in mourning attire. She has returned from Dudley’s funeral. Harriet, then, provokes McIvor by telling him that Ruth ‘wants’ him to hear them – ‘[d]isgusting is what Ruth intends’ (64).

McIvor protests by reaffirming that his crimes were committed to ensure that Ruth would inherit the property. Harriet persists and delivers further admonishment: ‘This is what you trained her to do – don’t you know that? Can’t you hear what she’s thinking in there, right now? She’s thinking – I fuck this man to fuck you, Daddy!’ (65). The uncanny juxtaposition between the disembodied screams of pain and pleasure register as an attack upon McIvor’s pathological desire to own Kuran and, by extension, also metaphorically destabilise the continuity of the entire family and community. As a result, McIvor’s failure is presented as generational phenomena. Even with the death of Dudley, the Gothic continues to exert its influence in a way that corrupts innocent children.

As the scene concludes, the story instantly shifts to the present as a heavily drugged

Veronica violently drags William up the stairs towards the ‘White Room’ where this perverse spectacle is currently underway:

WILLIAM: But he’s sick, isn’t he? Should I really go up there?

VERONICA: Of course you should. He needs the company. It’s not

right for him to be alone at a time like this.

WILLIAM: He’s not alone, Mum. He’s never alone.

VERONICA: Don’t talk nonsense. Just go on up … (65).

In staging the past and present simultaneously, Veronica’s willingness to submit her son to this cycle of indoctrination, resentment, and revolt – underpinned with an abject sexual subtext – re-frames this representation of the non-Indigenous, inter-generational nuclear family as emblematic of a transgressive culture of inheritance that deceives, perverts, then destroys the innocence of children and transforms adults into tyrannical agents of colonial

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continuity. However, this rendition is not a totally unsympathetic treatment of the condition because it represents this tyranny as a coerced performance of neo-nationalism and racism upon unsuspecting children by their parents. In all these aspects, The White Earth presents the concept of colonial continuity as the central goal of the settler family to the abject detriment of its individual Subjects’ psychological, sexual, and moral propriety. These ghosts are not a vengeful Aboriginal presence that would mean the return of repressed guilt and shame.

Instead, they are unwitting colonial agents that have, in their obsession with their own abstract self-image, misrecognised the cause of their own anxiety. In this way, these characters are dramatising the failure of the mirror stage of development because, holistically, this representation of the family constitutes the non-recognition of the colonial as Subject as a

Gothic psychomachia. The burden of paternity – ‘blood’ inheritance – and obsession with the

Self as expressed through the metaphor of family as a persistent threat to anyone unlucky enough to be tricked into wishing to occupy Kuran. This representation of the psychomachia realises the Gothic’s unique possibilities for disclosing individual psychologies and the ways in which whole categories of characters can be read metaphorically as entire social and cultural forces.

Gothic Family Romances

While McIvor is beset on all sides by the literal pressures of history, capitalism, neoliberalism, nationalism, racism, his own internal morality, and the Gothic metaphoric horrors that represent them, William also experiences his own haunting. In order to secure his inheritance and symbolically perpetuate colonial hegemony, William must embark on that most generic of narrative conventions – a quest. He must, in almost Campbellian monomythic terms, ‘approach the inmost cave’ and ascend to the secret waterhole that was revealed to him as sacred by McIvor earlier in the play (Campbell 1949:150). William’s

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apotheosis, as we shall discover, is bound up with exhuming the remains of the Aboriginal family – the victims of his grandfather – that are interred in the mud of the spring’s bed (Fig.

13). As previously mentioned, the waterhole is also the symbolic heart of the nation. It is a tripartite symbol – the genesis, the repressed, and the key – of anxieties surrounding settler displacement that are theatrically represented as a single location. Here, The White Earth both evokes and subverts the Gothic’s interest in ‘power residing in place [and the] power of place’, which Inverso argues ‘remains an enduring feature of Gothic architectural space’

(1990:111). However, the architectural uncanny of Kuran is discarded and, instead, substituted for the more terrifying ‘unsettlement’ of the Australian landscape. Power now resides in the sublime, primordial soup of swirling stage-haze and the eerie, phantasmagorical lighting that theatrically represents the spring. Staged amongst the audience on the thrust, it is positioned as remote from the imagined division of the homestead’s settler community as physically possible.

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Fig. 13 Stace Callaghan as William in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009. (Photo:

Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

As William proceeds to the waterhole by moving down the thrust and into the audience, he encounters three spirits whilst trekking alone, in the dark, head throbbing, without aid, and towards the quasi-spiritual goal of hearing ‘what the land has to say’ (80).

These figures are cast as pantomimic doubles with the actors who play the other members of

William’s family. The first spectre is a shepherd who wants to eat him – ‘[i]t’s into the tucker bag with you’ (82). There is a direct citation of the convict cannibal myths of Alexander

Pearce and Clarke’s über-Gothic novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, which highlights the symbolic nature of the interaction. The shepherd’s victim – a groaning body – lies on the ground before being brutally clubbed to death. The second is an old, decrepit explorer, lost in the bush, and desperate to find the mythic inland sea of colonial myth and imagination –

‘Ahoy there. Found you at last, boy. My inland sea’ (83). This is the colonial Mrs. Griffiths spoke of earlier – the one speared by Aboriginals and left ‘to rot in the bush’ (39). The explorer, guided by a rusty compass, then stumbles off into the bush.

While this sequence of events is certainly an example of the play and production’s use of the Gothic spectacle that strategically interrupts domestic naturalism, it also operates on a deeper, symbolic register. Freud’s concept of the ‘family romance’ is central to the way The

White Earth re-creates William’s experience of the psychomachia. Freud argues that a child, as it develops, attempts to liberate itself from the authority of its parents by developing a system of fantasies – often manifested as adoption or orphanages – in order to replace them with other figures of parentage of a higher social standing and value (Complete Psychological

Writings of Sigmund Freud, 237). The family romance serves a conservative function, acting

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to negate episodes of neglect by preserving nostalgic memories of the child’s parental figures as moral and righteous agents (Freud Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud,

238). In this episode, William’s psychomachia subverts this aspect of the child’s family romance. These fantasised parental figures are abject grotesques of key historical Australian figures that are informed by popular myth such as the explorer and the convict. Moreover, they are, in fact, all victims, perpetrators, and symbols of the failure and brutality of colonialism and are rendered here as melancholy relics of it.

There is another inverted aspect of the ‘family romance’ that is central to William’s psychomachia. Freud argues that these fantasies can also be preserved in another way – by being projected outwards, onto alien, hostile, or sinister outsider figures that are ‘derived from entirely real recollections’ (Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud, 240).

The third spectre is a bunyip and it exemplifies the inverted romance by projecting the fantasy outwards onto a remembered figure that is expressed as alien. It is a truly frightening beast to the delirious boy. However, while it appears to be a product of McIvor’s re- appropriation of an Aboriginal aesthetic, the bunyip corrects William’s misrecognition: ‘The white men dreamt those spirits. It was the black men who dreamt me, long ago’ (85). This is beyond the scope of William’s recollection of what McIvor has told him and, instead, is the symbolic manifestation of the boy’s own nascent postcolonialism. To the boy, the bunyip stands in for the lost Aboriginal presence that he knows of the Downs but is yet to fully recognise. With this understanding, William is able to overcome his fear and the creature leads him to the secret waterhole that is now dry from drought. The Bunyip speaks in austere, prophetic tones as William discovers the bones of the Kuran’s original inhabitants:

WILLIAM: My uncle told me about you. But I thought he was making

you up. I thought you were just a story.

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BUNYIP: The old things still wait. In the special places.

WILLIAM: What special places?

BUNYIP: You’re very near. You’ll find what you must find, there.

WILLIAM: Find what? Tell me, please.

BUNYIP: The rivers have run dry. Holes have opened to the sun.

WILLIAM: I don’t understand …

BUNYIP: The dead. The dead are ready for you now (85).

As the bones are uncovered, the bunyip is no longer hostile and alien. It is also not

Aboriginal. All three spirits are assembled from parts of McIvor’s myth of belonging that have been stretched to their symbolic limit. In their excess, each is a symbol of colonial power, re-described as failure or delusion and theatrically expressed through spectacle that is either threatening or abjectly violent. This third spectre, however, presents a different expression of that failure. The bunyip is a symbol of the settler’s misinterpretation of the

Aboriginal aesthetic it is unconsciously mimicking. It characterises the misappropriated and misread concept of frontier violence and the identification of it as an existential threat to settlers and their communities.

The White Earth’s re-interpretation and unique dramatization of the ‘family romance’ dramatises the horrific cycle of abuse that displacement triggers in the settler psyche. William is burdened with the confrontation with the ghosts that haunt his uncle, who, in turn, is also beset by the spirits that haunt his father and so on and so forth. This transferal of trauma is expressed as a system of fantasy that used by the symbolic child – the settler – in order to preserve ‘[t]he happy, vanished days when the father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men’ (Freud Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud 1959:240). However dark, inverted, and Gothic The White Earth’s expression of the family romance is, it still

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fulfils the same function as Freud describes. It dramatises a form of liberation from the control of the paternal figures that insist, upon the child, the stasis and perpetuation of their subjectivity. Staged symbolically and without restraint, this supernatural Gothic spectacle dramatizes the neurotic system of fantasy used to diffuse the psychological burden of displacement within its settler characters psyches. In this instance, it is particularly those without knowledge of what is being repressed – children – that are most acutely beset by the anxieties of inheritance and continuity that constitute the family romance. However, the psychological trauma of confrontation with the fantasy opens up the possibility of Subject development and an authentic antidote to the failed strategies of belonging that constitute the play’s swirling morass of Gothic spectacle.

Psychomachia and the Irreconcilable Terror of Postcolonialism

The arrival of Ruth as an adult in the second act is a jarring moment. As an adult,

Ruth McIvor is a legal advisor for the New South Wales government who has been sent to the property to investigate a potential Native Title claim. There, she meets with William and the two objects of McIvor’s affection – his daughter as the failed heir to his empire and the boy as her replacement – compete over what constitutes history on the uncanny, allegorical space of the homestead. William, by this stage, is in a delusional state because of his untreated inner-ear infection. He also struggles with McIvor’s neo-nationalist rhetoric and the meaning of his fantasy at the waterhole. This internal conflict makes him unhinged as he eerily and resentfully mimics his grandfather as if possessed when questioned by Ruth –

‘People will lose their farms! … The blacks are gone. You can’t bring them back’ (75). The uncanny image of the boy reeling off his Uncle’s racist screeds while the bones are hidden on-stage in his backpack, is dissolved by Ruth who offers a real-world perspective on his

Gothic nightmare:

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It isn’t the truth, you know. They didn’t just vanish. There were Aborigines

living right here on this station until 1911. I looked into it once. There were

several families. They were shipped off to the mission at Cherbourg in the

end, but that’s not so far away … (76).

The juxtaposition of the emerging, new political reality of the Wik decision and the hysteria of the Gothic non-Indigenous Subject in turmoil creates the kind of hysterical paradox of psychic energies that parodies the melodrama’s Manichean conflict. The ‘good’ and the ‘evil’ of postcolonial recognition and displacement are diametrically opposed, yet are problematized by the boy’s state and presumed innocence. In doing so, this socio-political reality adds an unsettling, real-world referent into the solipsistic mix of texts that constitute the play’s nuanced metaparody. Finally, the audience is proffered something in the way of

‘actual’ history rather than the apocryphal recycling of myth, gap, and silence that constitutes

McIvor’s vision of Kuran’s past and his place within it.

Details of the land rights claim provide an alienating counterweight to the swirling,

Gothic spirit-quest that McIvor and his young protégé have embarked on over the course of the narrative. Coming full circle, Ruth finally confronts her father and the apocalyptic intensity of McIvor’s psychomachia becomes fully visible in a staged, literal sense. Ruth delivers an ultimatum and exhumes McIvor’s repressed memory of the massacre he witnessed as a boy. The ghost of the young girl, Elizabeth – the daughter of Kuran’s first settler owner and another one of McIvor’s lost romantic interests – appears dressed in a flowing, white gown. Her presence effects McIvor in performance – drawing his attention, pulling focus, and forcing his irritable behaviour – as a spectre only he can see. To refer at length to this moment in which Ruth acknowledges, in the present, the massacre for the first time as an unrepressed memory:

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RUTH: It’s no surprise really, what happened. The other men

joined in, but everyone agreed that it was Daniel

[McIvor’s father] who fired the first shot.

JOHN comes out of his daze.

JOHN: You actually believe this? It’s a fairytale! If it was real,

my father and the others would have gone to jail.

RUTH: Oh, not if they were careful. Not if they made sure there

were no corpses just lying around. It was 1917.

ELIZABETH: He burnt them. Such a big fire. So much smoke. And

what was left of them, he threw into the waterhole.

JOHN: And why didn’t Elizabeth report this?

RUTH: She was only a child herself.

JOHN: But now she wants to tell the world? That’s very

convenient.

RUTH: There was no point before. It couldn’t hurt you.

ELIZABETH: But with these new laws … it can hurt you now, John

McIvor.

JOHN: How can it matter to me? Even if it was real, I didn’t pull

any trigger. It’s all ancient history.

RUTH: Ah, but consider Native Title. Those people in Cherbourg,

they can’t prove continuous occupation of this land (92-

3).

There are two worlds on-stage – one nightmarish and one literal – and the realist aspects of the drama and the Gothic spectacle merge. The more conventional psychomachia of the

‘angel’ and ‘devil’ binary is eschewed and substituted for a simulation of a series of Lacanian

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‘mirrors’ that are simultaneously reflecting multiple versions of the settler Subject back to

McIvor and the audience. There is the postcolonial perspective of current politics in the form of Ruth, the accusations and admonitions from Elizabeth, and the unsustainable displacement of McIvor. Each is placed in an irreconcilable conflict with the others.

In this moment, opposition to Wik – as a political, off-stage phenomenon – is

Gothicised in a way that re-frames the dissolution of terra nullius and the enshrinement of

Native Title into law as an existential threat to the existence of non-Indigenous culture. These laws and the cultural shift they imply symbolise the complete erasure of McIvor’s raison d'être – his history, his family, and his sense of belonging – within the organising logic of the psychomachia. Within such a hysterically volatile stage-image, Wik and its political implications fade into the background and are re-described as a highly emotional contest that, because of the Gothic histories that have motivated the drama, become laced with the energy of sexual perversity and resentment. McIvor’s resistance to change is psychological and cannot be separated from the Gothic family romance:

JOHN: It’s all William’s now. It’s all on his shoulders. If there’s

any guilt to be had, it’s his [ … ]

RUTH: You … you are a disgusting old man, and you’re the one

who has to pay in the end. This hell you’ve made is for

yourself, not for William (94).

The Gothic of The White Earth re-frames the political disagreement between father and daughter as a hysterical conflict that cannot be reconciled. And with this momentary flash of an external, rational world, the Gothic experience of the tortured settler is re-cast as a psychological experience that has no bearing on a world beyond the confine of the

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psychomachia. This glimpse of reality quickly fades as McIvor descends into absolute madness and the play returns to its Gothic nightmare.

‘Evil’ Patriarchy & the Encapsulation Effect

The emplotment of moments of spectacle such as these creates a particular kind of

‘encapsulation’ structure in The White Earth that anchors its settler fantasies of displacement and destruction. We can understand ‘encapsulation’ – the culmination of stories-within- stories or a ‘Chinese box’ narrative organisation – as a Gothic structural feature that theatricalises the fragmentation of extreme, pathological mindsets within the psychomachia.

This kind of Gothic structure ‘indicates a magnetised core’ or an origin for the depraved acts that spiral out from it (Inverso 1990:26). In doing so, encapsulation reminds audiences that the ‘world we have entered is a purely aesthetic one’ (Inverso 1990:26). In The White Earth, encapsulation privileges the method and reception of theatrical repetition over the basic reiteration of literal narrative events. Indeed, McIvor’s relationship with his ghosts is more concerned with the condition of his fragmented and traumatised psyche than with the

‘truthful’ details of Dudley’s transgression and Ruth’s sexual promiscuity. The specifics of the betrayal, the violence, and the rape act only to add layers of perversion onto what is, undoubtedly, the theatrical presentation of a psyche in a state of moral and psychic turmoil.

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Fig. 14 Steven Tandy as Daniel McIvor in The White Earth, Roundhouse Theatre, 2009.

(Photo: Justin Walpole.) Image Courtesy of La Boite Theatre Company.

The ‘magnetised core’ of The White Earth’s encapsulation is the patriarch of the family or Lacanian ‘phallus’ that is ‘invested with an entirely imagined and undefined power’

(Bailly 2012:36). The ‘phallus’, in this instance, also represents of the melodrama’s ultimate expression of ‘evil’. The apparition of McIvor’s father, Daniel, appears early in the play to establish the dire need to anchor the family’s tenuous relationship in the house (Fig. 14).

When the ghost does appear in the play, it hounds McIvor with intimidating speeches. One monologue in particular, swings erratically between violent language and peculiar pleas for sympathy as the ghost lays out the grand dream for settlement in the Downs. He blames

McIvor for the interruptions to that plan and shames his son for disrespecting his sacrifices:

‘DANIEL: Promise you’ll get back what’s rightfully yours. You don’t understand. The things

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I did … the things I had to do …’ (27). Again, the father dramatises the danger of the parent’s unbridled power over the child. However, in this instance, the literalisation of Daniel – as the physical performer on-stage – operates to demystify the legal authority that grants McIvor ownership of Kuran. Because he is represented physically, the pathos of his spectral commands is undermined and, instead, they are characterised as examples of paternal and emotional coercion: ‘We fought some wars [ … ] to make this land fit for civilised folk’ (19).

Daniel’s point of reference is ambiguous, whether it be service in World War I or frontier disputes with the Aboriginal people of Kuran.

In performance, Daniel’s physical form personalizes the methods by which larger socio-political forces and national myths – the pioneer and the ANZAC legend – can be used to emotionally coerce settlers. However, within this allegorical register, it does not matter.

Both ANZAC mythology and the frontier conflicts of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century are imbued with a kind of nation building grandiloquence that is re-framed by the Gothic spectacle. The presentation of them undermines their mythopoetic cultural resonance. They are no longer unproblematic trials of nationhood. Instead, they are expressed as fables that obfuscate the industrial purpose of Empire. The play dramatises how they can be used, generation to generation, in order to motivate and radicalise settlers against their

Indigenous Other.

At the conclusion of the narrative, The White Earth folds this individual relationship – between son and the ghost of the father – into the psychologies of its characters within the larger, allegorical significance of personalization. The play concludes in Kuran’s master bedroom, the ‘White Room’, as the symbolic centre of settlement. William has decided to remain in the Gothic world of McIvor and decides to hand the bones over to his uncle.

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McIvor becomes increasingly manic during the scene as he places the bones in the fireplace.

The ghost of Daniel enters as ‘the burning man’, literally on fire, as McIvor screams at him:

‘How can you just stand there and burn? … To hell with you then. You’re not my problem anymore. You’re the boy’s nightmare now. I know. He sees you too’ (87). In his mania,

McIvor is castigating the system of colonial inheritance that has doomed him to madness:

‘(Offstage.) Too late! You’re all too late! There’s no proof anymore. They’re all gone. They were never here. It never happened’ (98). And with this final attempt to deny the source of his pathological anxiety, the house goes up in flames. With the house, the fire also destroys

McIvor’s aspirations and his family’s legacy. The remaining characters exit and leave McIvor to perish in the flames of ‘blinding white’ light that engulf the stage (97). It is a contrived

Gothic catastrophe that is marked by hysterical flurries of movement and action, which are imbued with an excess of literal and symbolic meaning in a way that pushes the already strained naturalism beyond excess whilst reinforcing the subjective nature of the Gothic. The inherited shame and the damage wrought by its propitiation are too psychologically damaging to maintain and the thought of passing it onto a new generation of settlers becomes so unconsciously morally reprehensible – even for McIvor – that self-destruction represents the only way in which the psychomachia can be resolved. When this scene is read allegorically, the ongoing disavowal of dispossession and massacre is, literally, too great a burden for the

The White Earth’s representation of the settler psyche to reconcile.

The massacre at Kuran is not historical – names are not mentioned, nor is any particular Aboriginal nation or family. Even the land on which the setting’s traditional owners were murdered is fictional. In locating the interment of the massacre’s victims’ bones in a ‘secret’ billabong that is both fictional and ahistorical, the play crystallises its allegorical gesture. The massacre at the billabong represents all the sites of frontier violence that are said

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to punctuate Australian colonial history. Jane Stadler, Peta Mitchell, and Stephen Carleton, in their interdisciplinary study, Imagined Landscapes (2016), draw on Christopher Tilley’s argument that this kind of representation of landscape forms ‘a signifying system through which the social is reproduced and transformed, explored and structured’ (qtd. Stadler et. al.

2016:1). Stadler, Mitchell, and Carleton go on to argue that,

[r]epresentations of space and place are always ideological, always

implicated in some form of nation-building or identity-formation, and

considering ‘imagined’, fictive, representational, or mythic geographies

allows us to see the ways in which representations of space and place are

intimately bound up in the nexus of power-knowledge (2016:1).

The nexus of power-knowledge bound up in The White Earth’s representation of landscape is ideological because it is constructed through settler resentment for Indigenous claims of sovereignty. The play returns to these imagined sites of resentment to assert that this aspect of displacement will never be remote – not temporally or spatially – until this repressed material can be recognised as one integral part of the mirror stage of the settler psychomachia.

Metaparody and Politics

The Wik Decision is the trigger for all the tensions in the play. The decision affected, and arguably still does, the very foundation of non-Indigenous concepts of home and identity that were centred on the myth of terra nullius. While The White Earth goes to great lengths to ground and account for McIvor’s politics by theatrically representing it as a fraught and under-threat position, which expresses profound emotional connections to the country. This aspect of the play reveals the unintended consequences of a seemingly benign form of re- appropriating Aboriginal systems of sacredness. Moreover, through the lens of a discombobulating Gothic spectacle, it reveals the dangers of failing to recognise displacement

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as an important part of postcolonial self-reflection on behalf of settler Australians. In this regard, the two utterances of The White Earth’s metaparody – the Gothic and the melodrama

– serve different functions. While the Gothic pathologizes settler displacement by representing it through the genre’s horrific and terrifying tropes, the melodrama personalizes and reproduces the patterns of domination that repress colonial violence and dispossession by emphasising the emotional dynamics experienced through displacement.

If the play is read as a metaparody of the Gothic and the melodrama, The White Earth is, then, examining McIvor’s position in a way that does not scorn or endorse his behaviour.

Instead, it facilitates his, and by extension – the audience’s – psychomachic examination of the ways in which resentments and emotional nostalgias are connected to space and the nexus of power-knowledge that endow them with meaning. It also reveals how these meanings can be perpetuated by tribal assertions of the settler ‘family’ and the role it plays in the continuity of colonial ways of thinking in Australian culture. Thus, allegorically, the play culminates in a spatial and physical metaphor for the ways in which existential crises unconsciously influence political attitudes beyond the theatre. That the play ends with a near-verbatim reiteration of former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s speech to parliament and opposition leader, Dr. John Hewson’s refutation, reads as a Brechtian strategy of historicization. The speech, presented by the voice-over narration, violently dragging the political reality within the Gothic frame:

And so it was that at midnight on December the 21st, 1993, even as John

McIvor burned and his House fell into ruin, the Native Title Bill was passed

into law by the Australian senate.

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The Prime Minister, Mr Keating, said it marked ‘the end of the great lie of

terra nullius and the beginning of a new deal.’ He said that it was ‘a turning

point for all Australians.’

The Opposition Leader, Dr Hewson, didn’t agree. He said that ‘it was a day

of shame.’ He said it was ‘an unprincipled piece of legislation which has

lost sight of what Australia is all about – a united, democratic country in

which all our people are equal before the law’ (102).

This intrusion of verbatim history presents the psychomachia of belonging that has beset the settler ego as a literal force that exists outside the theatre. Moreover, it radically re-frames his ideology as a symptom of the enormous socio-political and psychic pressures that are triggered by such an historic and unprecedented moment of legal and social rupture.

Moreover, the play’s narrative structure and the way it is physically and spatially translated to the stage creates an unstable, contradictory, and almost fantastical ambience where ghosts and grounded political discussions of land rights can exist, side by side, in any given theatrical moment. Kuran is a deeply abstract place where the contradictory forces of a socio- political reality and Gothic spectacle can overlap and bleed into one another because of the play’s re-appropriation of a multi-focal theatrical form. As a complete strategy of representation, the stage itself operates as a psychological expression of the nation and the ways it produces and represses anxiety to the detriment of all Australians.

This representational strategy registered with some of the popular commentary on the production, with Jason Whittaker highlighting the epic nature of the text and drawing from it an overt attempt to allegorise the nation and the tensions surrounding land rights: ‘It is a fascinating character study on the grandest scale; the story of Australia itself in many ways

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through the eyes and complex psychologies of one particular family’ (Australian Stage 28

March 2009). Justine Walpole, for ABC Brisbane, echoes this sentiment, writing that ‘The

White Earth is a play about relationships – the relationship between family, between friends, between us and objects, and between us and the land we consider our physical and spiritual home’ (ABC.net.au 21 March 2009). In this way, Kuran is represented as both public and private in the same instance; it is divisive within and unified as a whole. The imagined, uncanny borders, its divisions, and claustrophobic spaces can be read allegorically or symbolically to represent the polarisation and fracturing of Australian politics over the Native

Title debate – between urban-based Australians and rural pastoralists or Indigenous and non-

Indigenous Australians. In this way, The White Earth signposts the play’s political purpose of rendering the psychological effect of Native Title on the non-Indigenous Subject.

The metaparody frames and represents the process by which European settlement remains a continuous force in Australia as, itself, a Gothic entity and represents the experience of the settler within it as beset by the return of the repressed as an eternally painful and theatrical event. Within the symbolic and moral universe of The White Earth, this existence is Gothic to the point of cliché. In composing a play that eternally cites and returns to the conventions of existing, popular forms of Australian theatre and Gothic melodrama,

McGahan and Charles illustrate that those clichés cannot succeed in remaining empty of meaning and exist as mere mimicry. Collectively, they exist as a pointed critique of the ways in which the symptoms of displacement continue to covertly and often controversially influence national debates over history and ownership.

Conclusion

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The Australian Gothic of The White Earth does not reflect the contingent aspirations of historical fiction or theatre. It is, to return to our definition of melodrama, a hysterical form that condenses immense, unseen, socio-political forces into personalized and embodied individual investments. To organise the logic of the melodrama through a metaparody of both the Gothic and its representation of colonial history is to reveal a directed subversion of established and sanitised narrative forms that deal with history itself. Without this subversive register, the Gothic of The White Earth would be an impotent pastiche of existing Gothic conventions, tropes, and atmospheres. Instead, the play is a powerful dramatization of the slow, psychological process of the psychomachia that then, within the moral universe of the play, characterizes the self-reflection required in a period of political anxiety and social rupture in contemporary Australian culture. The White Earth constitutes a critique of the colonial narratives that continue to inform the contemporary state and its problematic tendency to narrativise its history in the limited vocabulary of inherited European modes of theatrical representation.

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Chapter Three

Thresholds:

Amnesia, Madness, and Failure in The Flood

Introduction

This chapter looks at Jackie Smith’s play, The Flood (2012). The chapter will argue that the play uses both realism and the Gothic to create an aesthetic friction in its dramatic register. This friction produces both domestic drama and Gothic spectacle that, in tandem, are able to draw thematic parallels between the trauma of domestic abuse, reconciliation, and colonial history. The Flood re-animates these repressed traumas and dramatises them as a non-Indigenous psychomachia that cannot be reconciled, either morally or textually.

The Play

The Flood debuted at Melbourne’s La Mama in 2009 and was the product of a joint agreement between Critical Stages and Finucane & Smith Productions and re-staged in 2012.

The production, directed by Laurence Strangio, was revived in 2016 by the company and toured to the International Contemporary Theatre Festival in Shanghai. The Flood has not received any specific, scholarly attention. Reviewers Cameron Woodhead and John Baily both refer to the play as an ‘Australian Gothic drama’, though both critics do not offer any in- depth commentary on the claim (The Age 5 December & 20 December 2009).

The action is set in the living room of a dilapidated sheep farm where seventy-year- old, Janet Ball, lives with her daughter Dorothy. One night during a torrential rain storm,

Janet’s youngest daughter, Catherine, arrives after living abroad – in London and Singapore – for the last two decades. Janet unexpectedly reveals to Catherine that her father, Brian, did

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not die in an eerily similar flood thirty years previously. Janet claims that she murdered him in cold blood. As the flood waters slowly rise around them, the two estranged sisters discuss and debate the truth of their mother’s claim. In doing so, they confront the gaps, silences, and discrepancies in their shared memories of their father and their childhood. As each sister teases out lost memories from the other, a different image of their father emerges. As it turns out, Brian Ball was not the pioneering hero or rugged bushman of Australian lore they had been led to believe. Instead, he was a pederast, a violent husband, and the real reason

Catherine was sent away – not to punish her, but to protect her from sexual abuse. The sisters begin to project his image onto the hostile landscape around their small house and reconstruct him as a malevolent spectre that haunts them over the course of the narrative. Indeed, every aspect of the pastoral idyll of their childhood is infected with the repressed memory of his violence in a way that transforms the bush into a Gothic nightmare that exists off-stage and in the minds of those within the domestic space of the house. As the flood waters subside, nothing between them has been resolved and the truth about their father’s death remains elusive. The play concludes with the sisters deciding to commit Janet to a nursing home to live out the life sentence of her encroaching dementia.

The Flood in Performance: Spectacle and Performance Space

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Fig. 15 Shirley Cattunar as Janet Ball in The Flood, La Mama, 2012 (Photo: Finucane &

Smith Productions).

The House

The mise en scène of Finucane & Smith’s 2012 production at La Mama is represented metonymically, with only the claustrophobic lounge room of the country homestead appearing on-stage (Fig. 15). The playing space is dressed as a cluttered and oppressively drab living space. The set, designed by Kathryn Sproul, uses reams of the yellowing magazines which Janet cuts up for collages to loosely buffer the performers and action from the audience. The rubbish is realist, as are the characters’ costumes and the general uncleanliness of the room. The design emphasises the details of the squalor. Weathering effects have been applied to the skirtings, the carpet is stained with damp, the timber is warped, and carpets stained and frayed. It creates a ‘lived’ feeling which highlights how the house, though old and still occupied, appears to have originally been intended to be

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temporary dwelling. The combination of the claustrophobia of the mise en scène that is dimly lit by the designer, Bronwyn Pringle, and a features a soundscape of falling rain created by designer Natasha Anderson to create in a sustained sense of dis-ease. It is an un-ordered and hectic space that each character seems to experience differently with varying degrees of comfort or distress as each begins to reveal secrets about the past.

Gothic and Realism

The Flood frequently oscillates between formal registers. From the outset, the play establishes a form of contrived realism in the mode of domestic drama. This realism both informs and explains elements of the plot such as the floodwaters, the state of the homestead and the family’s business, Catherine’s absence and her return, Janet’s behaviour, and the death of their father. The mother, Janet, is first introduced arranging and dissecting the yellowing pages of by-gone issues of old Woman’s Day magazines for future collages (2).

She is calm, though she twitches with the subtle spasms of her condition and mumbles a string of non-sequiturs as the sound of a car approaches:

White shorts. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. [she

laughs]. Mr White Shorts says: every body close your eyes, close your eyes,

close your eyes now imagine, imagine you’re on a boat. So real, you can

hear the water lap lap lap lap [ ... ] [she laughs and clips from her magazine]

(2).

Though erring on a realist expression of the behaviours commonly associated with dementia, her dialogue introduces a surreal element to the play. The sly reference to Hamlet and his meditation on the limits of human knowledge, the strange allusion to the house as a ‘boat’, and the personification of ‘Mr. White’ are mysterious elements within the domestic mise en scène, reframe the illness – as represented in the actor’s performance – as a convention that

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opens the play up to Gothic tropes that are, at this stage, superficially strange anomalies to the scene. As Janet focuses on her task with an intense focus, she is presented in a shamanistic way. It is as if she is communicating with the house itself. The home is both the site of a realistic theatrical representation of dementia as well as a strange ruin occupied by characters that are – or at least have access to – a world beyond the ‘real’. Many of the play’s Gothic aspects are presented in this way. They are partially concealed beneath a contrived veneer of realism that verges on a parody of the Gothic.

The Flood’s parody occurs when a knock at the door interrupts Janet’s pseudo- prophetic mutterings. Her youngest daughter Catherine arrives unexpectedly after being abroad for two decades:

JANET: That’s not Dotty’s car. Is it a car? Shit a brick (she looks

around panicky) Where’s Dotty. Bugger bum blast.

[ … ]

CATHERINE: (Calling out) Hello. Hello.

(Janet stays on the couch, looking panicked.)

Hello? Mum, you there? Hello? (3).

Considering the already mysterious atmosphere of the room, the appearance of Catherine operates as a surrogate ‘stranger’ figure in a typical Gothic invasion narrative. However, while The Flood gestures towards the threat of invasion, it quickly undermines it with its mischievously vulgar treatment of the mother-daughter relationship: ‘JANET: Fuck off.

CATHERINE: What? Hello? Is anyone there? Dot? Dotty? Mum? JANET: Who’s there?’

(3). The duel troping of Janet’s dementia as both realist and Gothic emphasises the effect.

When Catherine does enter, she is shocked by the state of the homestead and how much her mother’s health has deteriorated – ‘(looks around at the mess) Good God!’ (3). Once again,

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the mood shifts when the eldest sister, Dorothy, is introduced and the scene sheds its mystery.

Awkward pleasantries and the banal details of the everyday operation of the farm are used to undermine the potential of the Gothic: ‘DOROTHY: Well hello stranger. Long time no see.

CATHERINE: Hello Dotty! (They embrace, awkwardly)’ (22). This tension between the domestic and the Gothic is a persistent source of drama in the play and it is used to simultaneously evoke tragedy and comedy. These characters downplay the significance of these stark, dramatic reveals in ways that are too contrived to carry the sort of conviction usually associated with drama in a domestic mode. Indeed, it is the strange inadequacy of the characters’ responses which, instead, becomes the subject of the drama.

This underlying conflict is expressed in the genuine hostility of the banal interactions between Catherine and Dorothy. From the first moments of their reunion, they are subtly combative in ways that foreshadow the deep, irreconcilable conflict at the centre of their relationship. Their impressions of the house establish each daughters’ deeper thematic connections to it. While Catherine is understandably distressed at the ‘lost’ grandeur of the homestead and surrounding property, Dorothy – who has lived there all her life – has survived by ignoring its slow deterioration and become accustomed to decay:

CATHERINE: It's not just that, Dorothy, I mean, the house, look at it, it’s

a mess.

DOROTHY: It gets a bit rotten.

CATHERINE: This is a big shock really, a big shock.

DOROTHY: Well what did you expect?

CATHERINE: I don’t know, but I wasn't expecting such a mess, I mean,

you live here too Dotty...

DOROTHY: (abrupt) You all settled in? (23).

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Catherine’s shock is performed disingenuously; as an affectation designed to shame her sister. Conversely, Dorothy’s response expresses a kind of defeat that verges on surrender or even delusion to the state of the house and – by extension – her life. The moment’s realism establishes the sisters’ relationship by providing vital insights into their resentments, guilt, and how Catherine’s worldliness has affected her perception of their childhood home and the

Australian landscape. However, the scene’s realism is also enabling the Gothic as it relates simultaneously to the representation of the psychological life of the characters.

In this moment, the return of her sister and thus a symbolic connection to the past dredges up an undesired perspective on reality. For Dorothy, surrender to the decay is echoed in her attitude to her mother’s dementia and its preternatural agency. She teases her mother’s behaviour in the same way she belittles her sister’s desire to talk of serious matters:

‘DOROTHY: Travelling sales men and the Mormons, people like that bother her, so she bolts up the house. CATHERINE: Well if you'd told her I was coming. DOROTHY: She would have bolted up for sure. CATHERINE: Dotty! This is so surreal’ (24). Each sister, in this regard, describes a different version of reality through their contradictory ways of dealing with adjustment. Both require some form of surrender or the dissolution of their desired sense of self. This conflict is expressed in every element of the mise en scène: the state of the house, the illness, and the way both seem to effect anyone who spends time there. The theme of deterioration – both psychological and spiritual – is articulated through both the characters and the objects that surround them. As a result, the domestic homestead is represented more as a purgatorial cell than a home. The house slowly and imperceptibly breaks down its inhabitants’ willpower with an uncanny energy that is eerily concealed beneath the banal domestic squalor of the mise en scène.

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Landscape in The Flood

For these sisters – the play’s rational characters – the sense of entrapment takes on further uncanny characteristics when the surrounding landscape is casually but deliberately brought up in conversation in a way that verges on obsessive. The exterior, as described in dialogue, is made up of idyllic sheep paddocks where kangaroos drink from puddles. Yet, what the audience sees – in Sproul’s design – is an artificial backdrop of twisted thickets and looming gums painted in a gloomy, dark green hue (2) (Fig. 15). This uncanny sense of the claustrophobic, theatrical space is the essential indicator of the Gothic in The Flood.

Moreover, it is Catherine and Dorothy’s differing and often dramatically inadequate responses to that sense of restriction that begins to establish the play’s larger, irreconcilable conflict between their memories and reality. Here, the small confines of La Mama’s theatre is deployed as a theatrical tool. The space’s naturally claustrophobic dimensions are further emphasised by the implied encroaching floodwaters outside. The space creates a literal and tangible simulation of captivity.

The homestead’s remoteness also feeds into the latent Gothic aspects of The Flood’s domestic mise en scène. A threatening ambience is added by Janet who, as a further expression of her dementia’s Gothic characteristics, exploits Catherine’s alienation from the life she left behind. Janet constantly alludes to the horrors that are said to exist in the exterior.

Provided here, at length, is a single interaction that is typical of many moments in the play in which the bush is a trope for a haunted and frightening place:

JANET: Some people get spooked out in the middle of nowhere.

You were always spooked when you came back from

boarding school.

CATHERINE: I’m not spooked.

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JANET: There are funny things out here. I’ve never understood

half of what goes on. But there are things, spirits, don’t

you think?

CATHERINE: I suppose.

JANET: You’re never alone, even when there’s not a soul for

miles. You never feel alone out here, there’s always

something, watching. Sometimes, I’m out there by the

river, and I feel like someone’s just behind me, and I turn,

but there’s no one there.

CATHERINE: It gets lonely.

JANET: There’s other things, things you can’t explain. You can

watch, on the surface of the river, how it swirls

sometimes, but there’s nothing, nothing there to make it

swirl. Not a stick, a branch, a tree.

CATHERINE: Maybe underneath the water?

JANET: No, there’s nothing. Or you see just a lump on the branch.

Just a plastic bag, or is it something yellow, a dead thing

all caught up.

CATHERINE: Mum!

JANET: Listen – no sound. Not a buzz or bird, not a breath of

wind. Only the river and the rain on the water.

CATHERINE: It’s a bit wet to go out.

JANET: Scared?

CATHERINE: No, it’s just getting dark (15).

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These fictional digressions are deceptively frightening images that create a theatrical environment in which both worlds – the domestic and the Gothic – are positioned in such a profound juxtaposition that their discrepancies create their own drama.

One particularly unnerving episode illustrates this representational tension. It involves the sisters’ shared memory of a figure called ‘the oleander man’ that is said to lurk beneath the poisonous species of Acacia that line the backroads of the property:

DOROTHY: (she puts on a funny voice) The oleander man’ll get you.

CATHERINE: Stop being a dick head.

DOROTHY: Creak creak creak go the branches – the oleander man’s

coming to get little Catty.

CATHERINE: (sarcastic) I’m really scared Dorothy.

DOROTHY: You used to be – you used to wake up screaming about

the oleander man and the girl they found murdered

underneath the oleander bush (51).

The Flood includes these digressions in order to metaphorically foreshadow the later revelations of their dead father’s abuse. However, while these tales are used to tease and provoke, there is an intensity in the subtext of each character’s earnestly fearful reaction to them that undermines the daughters’ nonchalance is disingenuous or even duplicitous. The frequency and genuine unease that is provoked by these Gothic images in performance constructs an exterior world as a mythic entity that is populated by spectres that may or may not be figments of the characters’ imaginations.

This strategy of provoking but not consummating the ‘reality’ of these Gothic horrors is exemplified in a scene that follows. As the lighting dims and Dorothy provokes her sister

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with further descriptions of the abject ‘oleander man’, they are interrupted by a ‘blood curdling scream’ that tears through the house: ‘(Janet lets out a blood curdling scream. There is a smash as she enters having thrown something.) DOROTHY: What the fuck!’ (54). It is a shocking moment of hysteria and a flurry of movement ensues. However, the tension is immediately undermined as the sound is rationally explained – ‘JANET: I saw a rat. Dorothy:

You don’t throw the frigging china at rats mum, put a fucking trap down!’ (54). The shocking effect of the ‘scream’, in an otherwise domestic situation, is a direct product of the anticipation of Gothic spectacle that have been incorporated into the plot thus far. The play indulges in these moments to such an extent that they suggest – even guarantee – that one of these spectres will be represented physically at some point in the on-stage narrative. This dramatic tension is as central to the structural logic of The Flood as the family drama is to the plot. In other words, The Flood is constructed in a way that simultaneously asserts and denies the existence of the Gothic in order to both invite and parody Gothic spectacle.

Critics of The Flood’s first production in 2009 noticed this effect. Andrew Shaw writes that ‘much of the physical landscape around them is imagined – the bush is a living, malevolent thing (MCV 7 December 2009). Similarly, Erin Courtney Kelly highlights the play’s particularly local horrors, writing that ‘it is a truthful portrayal of a family trying to break free from a frightening Australian landscape and the memories that fester inside each of them’ (ArtsHub 15 December 2009). Through its constant invocation, the threat of landscape is never fully exorcised from the interior, domestic drama. In this way, the Australian Gothic aspects of The Flood co-ordinate to subvert any sense of the rural idyll in its representation of the bush. The play, instead, transforms the landscape into a barrier that is patrolled by the fictive manifestations of the psychological anxieties of the settler Australians who dare attempt to settle it.

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Haunted by the Colonial Past

The Flood does not overtly represent Aboriginal characters. It makes no reference to frontier violence, the history of settlement, or mentions that the characters recognise that the land on which the play is set has ever been inhabited by anyone other than themselves. Rather than an insensitivity, this omission reveals deeper nuance in the way the Australian Gothic is intimately bound up with colonial history and naturally draws on the resonances of its objects of repression – dispossession and convictism – as direct, yet unmentioned tensions that exist, barely concealed, beneath the surface action on-stage. Tompkins’ concept of ‘unsettlement’ is important to the ways the play expresses the subterranean terror that stems from representations of the Australian landscape. The play exemplifies how ‘the latent unease with the concept of ‘settlement’ emerges more covertly’ (Tompkins 2006:6). While the published edition of the play dictates that it takes place ‘in rural NSW’ in 1991, there is nothing particular about the geography, climate, or region that informs the whereabouts of the farm’s physical location (1). Even the torrential rain and the flood is treated anomalously because the last time it rained this ferociously was thirty years previously on the night Brian Ball died

(76). Once again, the flood is both a realist threat and a Gothic convention.

An audience so inclined can assume that the Ball homestead is undoubtedly built on land previously occupied by any number of Indigenous nations that inhabited rural New

South Wales before contact with European settlers. Yet, it is not consciously acknowledged by the play’s characters. While references remain obtuse, The Flood appears to be aware of their absence. In one moment, while discussing the monsters that are said to lurk in the

Australian bush, a sound wails in the distance. Catherine remarks ‘[w]ouldn’t it be more likely to be a Bunyip’ (60). These references to a lost connection – violently, with Janet’s

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claim that they were ‘shot’ – of a pre-settlement culture is distanced through the Gothic trope of the appropriated monster. Indeed, the effect of the distancing is so severe that any acknowledgement of an Aboriginal presence appears and disappears in conversation without the slightest hint of recognition by any of the characters. Instead, the strange appearance of the creature and, by extension, the uncanniness of the bush around them, illustrates Alison

Rudd’s argument of the Australian Gothic and non-Indigenous descriptions of bunyips. She argues that ‘[i]t has become a postcolonial monster, often linked to places that Aboriginal people avoid and about which white settlers are silent, serving to conceal the “darker facts about colonisation,” sites where massacres of Aborigines by colonizers occurred’ (2010:113).

In this way, the station’s ‘extinct’ bunyips symbolize the unspoken acknowledgment of an

Aboriginal presence of the land on which the Ball family settled and subtly gestures towards the family’s repressed role in the dispossession of that presence.

This aspect of The Flood’s expression of the Australian Gothic reveals the covert ways in which the colonial repressed can operate subtextually and still produce a distanced but very much present expression of ‘unsettlement’. Thus, the absence of an Aboriginal presence reads as an ‘open secret’ throughout the play and actively conceals the darker facts of colonisation as a symbol of the ways in which the surviving Balls misrecognize history as it relates to them. While only minor in the play, these moments contribute to the larger, elliptic network of colonial signs that haunt the Gothic landscape of The Flood. Indeed, the thematic thrust of the play is bound up in another, less remote, irreconcilable conflict with a colonial spectre. It is Brian Ball, as we shall see, that is generating the ghostly realm beyond the threshold of the play’s realist register, into which the unassailable elements of both the family’s and the nation’s history are repressed.

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Colonial Tyrants

Brian Ball is represented as a colonial tyrant that occupies so much of the family’s attention that they are unable to recognize, are cut off, or blinded to the authentic source of their ‘unsettlement’ in the bush. His spectral presence creates a causal connection between the ghost of violence that haunts the remaining Balls and the ghosts that remotely haunt the landscape in which they will never feel at ‘home’. As a result, he comes to dominate the ways the play represents trauma and its psychological treatment of colonialism’s legacy within the play’s representation of the non-Indigenous Australian psyche. In order to do this, the play subverts the Gothic’s paradigmatic obsession with the relationship between victims and tyrants.

Inverso argues that there are only two roles in a Gothic play – ‘victim’ and ‘tyrant’ – and that ‘although these roles are often exchanged in a dramatic turnaround, the binary structure of their relationship remains intact’ (1990:7). Australian drama has several Gothic tyrants in this vein. For example, Australians have the lecherous publican, ‘Stumpy’ Johnson, from Louis Esson’s Shipwreck (written in the 1920s, but finally published in 1984); and the controlling, envious and ultimately castrated bourgeois academic, Hugo Sword, from Patrick

White’s Night on Bald Mountain (1964). Louis Nowra has the early mid-twentieth century

Dutch imperial officer, Captain Westerling, in The Language of the Gods (1999). As we have seen, Stephen Carleton’s Angelico and the deceased Captain Wilberforce Drinkwater in

Drinkwater similarly fit the bill. As does Stuart Charles and Andrew McGahan’s child- corrupting John McIvor in The White Earth (2009). Andrew Bovell has also written tyrants into Gothic visions of the colonial Australian scene. The first is in his frontier-set Gothic thriller Holy Day (2001). The tyrant in this case is Nathaniel Goundrey – the convict, rapist, paedophile, and racist bigot that torments an Aboriginal girl on the South Australian frontier.

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The other is another ex-convict settler, William Thornhill, who coordinates the massacre of an Aboriginal family in order to secure land along the Hawkesbury River in his adaptation of

Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River (2014).

What marks this brief but representative list of particularly Australian Gothic tyrants is the way they embody a contextually driven critique of aspects of settlement. In each, to make a general comment, this colonizing figure is characteristically male, prone to violence and madness, emotionally coercive, xenophobic, ambitious, and sexually lecherous and/or impotent. The women that attend these men are often co-opted as accomplices (either actively or passively) in their nefarious plots or are their direct victims. While this list of tyrants includes characters that believe themselves moral and right, context and history often play against them by representing their desires and motivations as highly suspect, bigoted, or pathological when viewed from a contemporary audience’s perspective.

In developing this definition of the tyrant from the perspective of the Australian

Gothic drama, we can look directly to The Flood and the way it similarly bases its construction of the tyrant on the de-romanticising of nostalgic treatments of Australian colonial masculinity. The Ball family’s deceased patriarch, Brian, fulfils an idealised and bucolic archetype of the rural farmer as reported in the myths, stories, and descriptions that are initially attributed to him. He is referred to posthumously (and nostalgically) as huge, healthy, handsome, and manly; all the attributes associated with a white settler perfectly at home on the rural scene (19). He is the kind of man ripped from the pages and stages of late nineteenth-century dramas. He invokes a figure that has, in the past, contributed to what John

McCallum refers to as the ‘bush legend’ in Australian theatre history (2009:6-7). However,

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each of these Romantic narratives is drastically revised throughout the play as secrets are revealed and confessions are extorted by the victims of his violence.

As the womens’ sanitised and romanticised narrative of Brian collapses, they begin to piece together a fractured version of his true nature from their collective memory. For them, he was not the tough pioneer – optimistic, stoic, and tragic – fitting the paradigm of

Australian masculinity that is depicted by the drover, ‘Young Harry Dale’, in Henry

Lawson’s ‘The Ballad of the Drover’ (1889), who is referenced throughout the play. The association with the canonical poem is unmistakeable, later, when the sisters remember how it was read at Brian’s funeral:

DOROTHY: “Across the flooded lowlands / And slopes of sodden

loam / The packhorse struggles bravely / To take dumb

tidings home”. Henry Lawson. Ballad of the Drover.

Mum used to read it to me when I was little. It was one of

my favorites. You were never big on books (87).

Dorothy’s elisions in the poem’s complete form also illustrate the gaps and silences in the memory of her father, which are both strategic and ironic. As the plot moves through Dorothy and Catherine’s conflicting and unverifiable memories of him, a different picture of the man emerges. The first clue reveals the ways these simultaneous memories continue to create conflict between the two women:

CATHERINE: He just went missing. No one ever found him. Or his dog.

You said his horse came back without him. She was wet

from the river.

DOROTHY: That’s right. Very romantic.

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CATHERINE: I remember thinking he’d turn up, for months after. I

thought he’d just turn up. He loved this place, didn’t he?

DOROTHY: No.

CATHERINE: Yes he did!

DOROTHY: You don’t know shit, Catherine (46).

The recollections begin to have a detrimental effect on Dorothy and Catherine’s behaviour.

As these disputes begin to intensify, they resort to more infantile attacks and humiliations –

‘Catherine: You’re gross. Really gross. (she goes to leave)’ (52). They also resort to immature and hostile spurts of vitriol – ‘DOROTHY: You just believe what you want.

You’re such a little girl aren’t you’ (47).

The irreconcilability of these memories, their grasp on reality, and the erosion of the comforting myths surrounding their father causes the return of the play’s most sinister Gothic allusion. At the height of the argument, Dorothy goadingly yells ‘[s]hut up or I’ll throw you in the dog hole!’ (47). Brian’s infamous ‘dog hole’ is a blood smeared pit on the edge of the property into which stray pregnant bitches were flung after having their necks broken. The threat is met with silence and then a moment of honesty from Catherine: ‘I never had the guts to go near the place’ (47). It is a potently abject motif. While the ‘dog hole’ is ‘real’, the threat of being thrown in by the ghost of Brian is not. The moment is an uncanny parody of a childhood conflict. Yet, the confrontation is simultaneously immature and frighteningly threatening. The parody cannot be separated from the return of suppressed violence that constitutes the sisters’ shared experience of abuse and their latent affection for one another.

This moment exemplifies the ways in which the off-stage tyrant continues to enact violence on-stage, as a memory. His victims, Catherine and Dorothy, are transformed back

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into threatening, dangerous children in unexpected shift to the play’s Gothic register. The horrific image of the ‘dog-hole’ is an abject sexual metaphor for his daughters’ embodied sense of arrested maturity in this regard. However, that the ‘dog pit’ is a physical expression of the persistent threat levelled against his daughters and – by extension, all female participants in the patriarchal and rural world of The Flood – reveals the full extent of his tyrannical power. The fear the dog hole creates is a colonising force that is, then, theatrically presented expressed through their inexplicable, realist behaviour.

This is exemplified in one moment later when Catherine attempts to defend her father against Dorothy’s taunts, in spite of being told that he tried to abuse her as a child: ‘He was tough. But that’s how it is out here’ (48). Here, Brian’s capacity to colonise his daughters is once again resurrected by Catherine’s unconscious need to return to the bucolic myth of the

Romantic pioneer. Regrettably, she is, once again, a colonised Subject of her father’s tyranny:

CATHERINE: I’m not trying to be a baby. You’re the one who’s

behaving like a baby. What is your problem? So you

didn’t get on with dad. And now you want him to be a

monster. You’re freaky, Dorothy.

DOROTHY: I’m not the freak. The freak is the one who denies things

(51).

This argument runs beneath the entire narrative in various forms and operates as a fulcrum on which each woman’s alienation, neuroses, and trauma are precariously managed. Brian haunts these women as a repressed object that lurks still, perhaps perpetually, in the women’s violent disagreements, in their spikes of guilt and longing, and their inability to broker any sense of reconciliation between one another.

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Brian’s authority is also exerted over the surrounding landscape, which further augments the physical and psychological incarceration of his daughters. For instance, Brian’s oppressive surveillance of the station and the persistent threat of punishment is psychologically encoded into the bush as an atmospheric and malevolent spectre:

JANET: Look out at the moon, Cathy. It’s like an orange.

CATHERINE: Why would it be that colour?

JANET: From the fires in the west, maybe. They’ll wish they had

our weather.

CATHERINE: It’s like his bloodshot eye. It gets dark quickly (14).

The colonising power, his ‘bloodshot eye’, is further enveloped in the play’s many competing

Gothic motifs. We return to Janet’s love of ‘poetry’. As the flood waters around them rise, her dementia, again, strategically vanishes and she invokes a most terrifying personification of him yet in the form of the ancient Norwegian sea-beast taken from Alfred Tennyson’s sonnet, ‘The Kraken’ (1830):

JANET: (Dramatically) “Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth:”

CATHERINE: Shakespeare?

JANET: Tennyson.

CATHERINE: I didn’t know you liked poetry.

JANET: We had to learn it at school, off by heart. Funny what you

remember.

CATHERINE: It comes from the ocean, the Kraken?

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JANET: It does.

CATHERINE: Then I don’t think it’s out there. We’re a long way from

the ocean.

JANET: What do you know about anything? (60).

With Henry Lawson and his earth-bound Romantic drover now undermined and buried – literally – with Brian, the figure of the Kraken now signifies his supernatural authority over the station. The house is symbolically transformed into the ‘boat’ alluded to in Janet’s opening monologue and, unconsciously, the ghost of Brian is now fully transformed from the tragic ‘drover’ into the sublime monster. Adrift in the flood waters with the creature beneath them, they wait to be devoured and snared, once again, within his nexus of colonial tyranny.

In this way, The Flood’s periodical pivots between realist and the Gothic re-establishes both the domestic drama in the scene and the spectacle in which the ghost of domestic violence and the ghosts of Australian history are intertwined. Brian’s spectre is a metaphor for a grotesque and abject version of settlement. The presence of his ghost transforms the external, unsettled landscape into a smokescreen that obscures the ‘truth’ and protects the romantic narratives that conceal his violence.

The profusion of colonial signs that are exhumed by Brian’s ghost indicates the covert ways Australian Gothic drama is readily able to draw repression into a scene that is temporally remote from historical violence. Indeed, the shame of convictism lurks in the revelation of Brian’s crimes and the ways in which the guilt of his murder metaphorically transforms the uncanny homestead into a sea-faring vessel that is symbolically transporting its captives across the ocean. However, these are moments of partial spectacle that are constructed through dialogue and anomalous reference. Rather than producing an authentically terrifying theatrical scene, they culminate in a strange parody of convict history-

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citing it but not developing it further. Instead, it is interrupted. As the three characters’ dwell on their shared haunting in the lounge, a series of loud ‘bangs’ disrupts them and, no doubt, shocks an audience (62). The rational explanations are quickly dismissed – ‘No one could have driven here. Not with the flood’ (62). And, once again, The Flood presents an instance of theatrical invasion while not consummating it with spectacle, particularly for an audience who has been meticulously positioned to expect the sublime through the play’s Gothic assembly of stage language.

Although the shock comes from a deafening, yet unassuming ‘bang’, the intrusion is yet another unseen and unrecognised presence that is encoded psychologically into the landscape by the play’s settler characters. As Janet finishes her recitation of ‘The Kraken’, she returns to an infirm state. Dorothy enters to further exacerbate the Gothic ambience:

‘(Dorothy comes in – very quickly. She has tray [sic.]. Puts down tray and shudders [sic.].)

DOROTHY: Woooo. You know that weird feeling you get that something is behind you.

When you walk out of a room …’ (61). Their shared trauma – as paradoxically embodied by the absent spectre – contravenes the realist register of the action and Janet, Catherine, and

Dorothy’s fear is expressed across discontinuous space as each woman shivers simultaneously. While talk of ghosts and spectres is always undermined by dramatically inadequate responses, aural shocks like this are treated as threats regardless of whether they are hostile or benign. As a result, we can consider them as, perhaps, an Aboriginal presence on the station that is, once again, completely misrecognised because these characters, too, are victims of a colonial tyrant. In this way, the colonial past, signified by the (dis)embodied spectre of Brian Ball, consumes and replaces all history in The Flood. Because he is always on the threshold between the interior and exterior and threatening to return, any other repressed secrets that happen to lurk in the uncanny landscape are always misinterpreted by

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women who are also victims of his violent domination. In moments such as this, the play is arranging and anticipating the spectacular crossing of the threshold between the real and the

Gothic. The ‘tyrant’ is present, but is not. He exists in a liminal realm between realism and the Gothic in a way that generates fear, anticipation, and then frustration when the two worlds do not intersect. The Flood produces this tension without achieving a complete Gothic metaphor for trauma or by presenting a convincing realist drama. Thus, The Flood uses failure, both dramatically and textually, to interrupt the cathectic pleasure of either register.

Brian Ball is an exemplar Australian Gothic tyrant. The confusion over the details of his legacy means that recognition of a pre-settlement culture remains an eternally remote possibility. The landscape beyond the homestead is perpetually occulted because the remaining family’s trauma is still in dispute. As a result, the land’s Indigenous history is obscured by a superficial misrecognition of its importance. However, The Flood is not about

Brian, directly. Rather, it is about the women left to deal with his traumatic legacy and forced to relive a confrontation with the remote colonial objects of repression, which are always present in their absence.

The Tyrannical Victim

The Flood represents women as both physically and psychologically captive. They are unable to see anything beyond their own trauma. However, the play subverts the concept of victimhood bound up with typical colonial representations of settler woman on the rural scene. As this is the first play in this dissertation that exclusively represents the experience of women in a Gothic version of the Australian bush, it is important to identify if and how this effects the tyrant/victim relationship. The Gothic is a broad genre that is comprised of a plethora of sub-categories. However, there are a range of particular subgenres within the

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Gothic that can refine the focus of this analysis. First, we can refer to Andrew Smith and

Diana Wallace’s definition of the ‘Female Gothic’ to highlight the particular focus on the experience of women in a Gothicised patriarchal nexus of power relations. They develop literary scholar Ellen Moers’ definition of the genre by claiming that it tends to focus on the

‘coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic space and within the female body, most terrifyingly experienced in childbirth’ (2004:1). They go on to suggest that the Female Gothic traditionally articulates ‘women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society and addresse[s] the problematic position of the maternal within that society’ (2004:1).

There are intertextual citations that indicate that The Flood revises this definition of the literary Female Gothic. Janet is ornamented with a series of ironic echoes of the traditional Gothic heroine. She first appears dressed in a nightie and desperate to escape into the night across the geographic equivalent of fog-laden moors – the station’s chicken pens

(22). However, Janet’s hysteria is far subtler than the terrifying sound of midnight scratching through the walls. Her ‘insanity’ both targets her memory and liberates her, to a degree, from the tenets of good behaviour. She uses it to resist acceptability throughout the play by paradoxically remembering too much and too little at any given moment in order to frustrate and worry her daughters. For example: ‘JANET: I’m sure you remember lots of things.

CATHERINE: I do. JANET: That’s comforting for you. CATHERINE: What do you mean?

JANET: To have a memory’ (12). By extension, this also produces behaviour that is often vulgar and unrestrained:

CATHERINE: You must have felt very isolated.

JANET: From what?

CATHERINE: The rest of the world.

JANET: I had Brian. The big Shit.

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CATHERINE: Mum!

JANET: What, you gonna spank me? When it comes to your

father, I swear like a sailor. No one hears me out here

(17).

Janet is presented as comically offensive, combative, manipulative, and sociopathic in a way that deliberately creates tension and comedy simultaneously. Within the domestic register of

The Flood, these behaviours are radically antisocial to the point of cynical farce that, as a verbal strategy, allows Janet to transcend the claustrophobia and repression of the homestead.

Her dementia and its supplementary hysterical outbursts are moments of liberation that effect wry moments of comedy. In fact, they are the only ways she is psychologically liberated from the lingering presence of the husband’s ruthless oppression of her and her daughters. Indeed, it is only through transgression that Janet is able to unshackle herself, in part, from her marginalised role within colonial patriarchy.

Janet also lacks the Gothic hyperbole and agency of her male counterparts in the other

Australian Gothic dramas mentioned previously or analysed in other chapters. She is not a rapist, her xenophobia is harmless, and her spurts of violence are treated as rehearsed statements of defiance – ‘JANET: (Picks up an ornament and throws it at her) DOROTHY:

(exasperated) Jesus Christ! Catherine: (shocked) Mum! DOROTHY: It's okay.

CATHERINE: She could have knocked you out. DOROTHY: She aims to miss’ (27). She has no real agency outside her infantilised position as an infirm, elderly, and cantankerous woman. However, as a female expression of a ‘tyrant’, she also adopts the persona of an unrepentant murderer who uses her potential for violence as a means of enacting power over her traumatised daughters. This aspect of her character is revealed as she casually slips her confession into a rapid and blithering digression in the conversation:

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He hadn’t gone to the war on account of his knees. Weak knees. But he

could ride a horse, and a lot of that’s in the knees, so it makes you wonder,

doesn’t it [sic]. I killed your father ... [i]n 1972 I killed him (19).

She goes on to underline the strange banality of the murder and subverts both paternal and maternal archetypes as she does so – ‘I shot Brian Ball. That’s the sort of thing a mother does’ (20). She is never apologetic and does not attempt to rationalise her actions post-facto.

All she desires is for it to be uttered and understood. The way Janet is constructed marks a revision of the tyrant/victim relationship that can be read as a form of resistance to patriarchal dominance that simultaneously mimics the more colonial aspects of Brian’s tyranny. Janet performs the role of a ‘tyrant’ to resist the patriarchal oppression enforced by Brian and his off-stage spectre. The systems of power enforced by Brian – marital, cultural, and sexual – were so absolute that her hysteria, madness, and murder are her only form of resistance.

These psychological states are also inherited from him and, in the present, she wields them against her daughters.

Indeed, it is this ‘madness’ – the way her inconstant memory seems to skip over the murder – that is troped, on-stage, as the threateningly unreliable aspect of her character.

When considered as a single moment of Gothic excess, Brian’s murder is the crime of a pathological individual. This is echoed in the matter-of-fact way Janet declares it. However,

Janet becomes a heroic figure when his abuse is discussed on-stage. This moral ambiguity informs everything in the play. The tyrant becomes the victim and vice versa. Nothing remains static in The Flood. Adults revert to children, love is expressed by murder and exile, and the ‘truth’ keeps changing as the play progresses. The murder, the return of the estranged daughter, the encroaching flood, and Janet’s dementia all conspire to create the circumstances in which memory – both too little and too much – can be re-described as the central and all-

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consuming Gothic object of the play. Thus, in The Flood, the ‘truth’ – as a lost and unknowable melancholic object that they all desire – is the source of power that separates each of them from one another. And Janet Ball unreliably wields the details of her husband’s death and her culpability as a form of tyranny. In this way, The Flood is problematizing the relationship between perpetrator and victim by naturalising transgressive behaviour within the mise en scène and within the domain of the family unit.

In The Flood, the dichotomous relationship between crime and heroism is not static.

Instead, the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ of the play’s Gothic register are expressed as a cycle of action and reaction that are tempered and defined by the ways in which they are remembered. At any given point in history, the victims of The Flood are left to piece together the fragments of memory that define ‘good’ and ‘evil’ whenever their trauma fails to be repressed. And they use this unreliable information to inform their relationship with other members of their family. For example, by killing Brian, Janet surrenders her role as maternal figure, and replaces him as the patriarch. As a result, Dorothy and Catherine transfer their repressed hatred from him to her. They become unable to reconcile the ambivalent justice proffered by his murder. Dorothy expresses this in a monologue:

Because she never had the guts. She was our mother and she never had the

guts. She wanted to believe she could do something about him but the

problem was neither of us could. We were hopeless. But she was the worst.

I was the one who begged her to send us away to school. I begged her, I

found the boarding school, I was at her and at her to get us away from this

place. She let you go. But she wouldn't let me go. Because she couldn't bear

to be alone with him. Isn't that right mum, isn't that the way? Isn't that right

you mad fucking bitch (83-5).

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This cycle of ambiguous justice and condemnation is perpetually repeated and any sort of reconciliation between the two sisters is continually deferred. The marginalisation of each woman, from one another, their understanding of their family’s past, and the colonial history of the land they grew up on is absolute. Janet, Dorothy, and Catherine each embody the dually-inscribed tyrannical victim that enacts the violence they have inherited in a melancholic cycle of colonisation that simultaneously empowers and incarcerates them.

This cycle is the underlying force that prevents every female character from reconciling with either themselves, their own history, or their ongoing trauma. Arguably, on the charge of colonial violence, Janet is equally as guilty of dispossession as her husband.

She did play a role in the foundation of the settlement and profited from it whether she is aware of it or not. From this perspective, Janet is both a coloniser as well as the colonised.

She is forever trapped in a figurative temporal ouroboros – the mythical Greek serpent that is forever consuming its own tail – of attempting to narrate herself separate from the colonial patriarchy whilst simultaneously embodying it. By instilling the domestic space with an inevitable threat of Gothic spectacle, the play unsettlingly normalises domestic violence and the subjugation of women thereby removing it from its distant place of abjection and deviance. The Flood discloses how violence, in its regularity and frequency, is enmeshed in the wider context of colonial settlement and the families that constitute it in the recent past.

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Fig. 16 Maude Davey as Dorothy (left), Caroline Lee as Catherine (Centre), and Shirley

Cattunar as Dorothy Ball in The Flood, La Mama, 2012 (Photo: Finucane & Smith

Productions).

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Gothic Spatiality and Psychomachia

This complex web of competing representational strategies and ambiguous expressions of the ‘truth’ can be understood as a spatial expression of the Gothic psychomachia. In The Flood, both space and the psychomachia are constructed through the characters’ shared desire to liberate the ‘Self’ from the ambiguity of irreconcilability. This is expressed by the wish to escape the alterity produced by the play’s problematic nexus of the settler family unit, its colonial history, and its experience of landscape, trauma, and violence.

Specifically, each character attempts to liberation themselves from the tyrant, from the memory of him, and from the self that is the tyrannical victim who perpetuates confinement within the psychomachia of memory. Within it, Dorothy, Catherine, and Janet constitute split

Subjects that are divided by the contradictory ways in which each approaches the goal of securing the lost-object of reconciliation. Janet desires to wield it as a weapon that colonises her daughters. Dorothy desires to repress it and weather the way it dissolves the spirit.

Catherine wants to confront it despite the detrimental effect that remembering has on her sister and herself.

This organisational strategy is played out on every level of their relationship. As these irreconcilable differences between them develop, The Flood fully commits to the Gothic structural and spatial organisation of the psychomachia. This is explicitly illustrated in the tensions between Catherine’s Gothic and Dorothy’s realist interpretation of space as they argue about the house:

CATHERINE: Well that’s the thing. Maybe we need to think about the

future, tie it all up, the house, and her. Get it sorted.

DOROTHY: I don't think there's any particular need to rush.

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CATHERINE: She obviously drives you up the wall.

DOROTHY: I’m sure any one [sic.] could get on my nerves after a

while.

CATHERINE: This is very exasperating.

DOROTHY: I’m not getting your point.

CATHERINE: I feel very strange being here, and you seem, well, it's all

strange. So far, I don’t feel I’ve been made very welcome

(37).

This argument is more than a realist or domestic dispute. It is a symbolic conflict that is simultaneously Gothic and realist. It introduces the Manicheanism within The Flood’s psychomachia and expresses it as three separate strategies of reconciliation. They are amnesia, on the part of Dorothy, Catherine’s alienation, and Janet’s madness. This dramatic and spatial organisation illustrates a trifurcated system of summoning up and of holding on to trauma, which is shared across the three separate bodies of the characters and their performers. When read as a Gothic psychomachia, every theatrical element of The Flood becomes a surface onto which the competing desires of the unknown Subject can be sporadically projected in order to achieve an undefinable state reconciliation.

Gothic Spectacle on the Threshold

As The Flood moves closer to its dénouement, the potential to theatricalise this psychological reality begins to dominate and dictate the narrative. In doing so, the once fertile possibility of Brian returning as an embodied spectre is discarded as the psychomachia reveals that the play is not about him. Instead, its parameters are defined by Janet, Dorothy, and Catherine’s competing aspects of the ‘Self’. This is true of the play’s other spectres – the

‘oleander man’, the Kraken, the drover, and the bunyip – as they, too, are kept off-stage as

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grotesque spectres that are now projected inwards as the psychomachia begins to self-abject those trapped within it:

DOROTHY: (pause) You don’t need to know that. You don’t ever need

to know that. Sometimes, at night, I used to imagine that I

was the oleander girl. That he would look for me but I

was, gone. Dead and gone. Sometimes, I just wanted to lie

under a bush and disappear. But then I’d worry that my

teeth were too straight. I’ve only got one filling. Would

that be enough for you and mum, for you to know it was

me? I was so scared you wouldn’t know it was me.

CATHERINE: Dotty. I didn’t know.

DOROTHY: You must remember something.

CATHERINE: I’m sorry.

DOROTHY: Otherwise you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be what

you are.

CATHERINE: What's that? What am I? (84).

These fantasies – of a confrontation and possible reconciliation with the off-stage perpetrator and the tyrant – is re-cast as a form of self-abjection that has, thus far, been directed towards their deceased father. This is a form of anti-spectacle that eradicates the anticipation created by the play’s Gothic register by, instead, conforming to a realist representation of trauma. As a result, the possibility of reconciliation in the symbolic language of either register is thwarted. Indeed, in this moment, Dorothy answers her sister’s pleas with the re-assertion of the binding structure of the psychomachia:

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(To Catherine) You’re an empty thing. Just like me. An empty thing. He

took everything away from me. Everything. But do you know what's worse.

[sic.] The very worst. She let him. That's why I hate her (84-5).

It is Dorothy’s accusation – the ‘empty thing’ – that now characterizes both of them. In doing so, Dorothy re-establishes the ways in which they will always exist as separated aspects of a single Subject that are arranged in a parallel formation to one another by obliterating the desire to see them reconciled as communicable aspects of the Self. Now they are both amnesiacs in every aspect of their construction: as traumatized women expressed in a realist register as well as the ancestors of violent colonial settlers who desire to reconcile their pasts.

There are further attempts at both dramatic and generic reconciliation that are similarly thwarted by the play’s focus on irresolution and the supreme organizing logic of its psychomachia. As Catherine continues to press for the ‘truth’, she is presented with another revelation about the fate of their father as Dorothy continues to stitch together distant memories of her father:

He's still alive. Alive and well. I was in Leeton for some business, and I saw

him. I knew it was him, straight away. After all these years, I could tell his

walk, across the road. Getting into his car. I followed him. He lives there, in

Leeton. With a woman. They had a house, a nice garden, kids running

around, grand kids [sic.] probably, who knows. After that, I didn't know

who I was any more. All I knew was that he was still alive. I think I

believed he had died. Fell off his horse, drowned in the flood. But no. After

all these years, he lives, he's got a family, a house, a car, he lives (85).

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Here, Dorothy transforms the colonial tyrant into an idealised, suburban figure – complete with a reformed nuclear family – in an attempt to disguise and distance him further from the original site of domestic and colonial violence. Consequently, Catherine is presented with a realist model of reconciliation. By re-locating the ghost to a physical location, Catherine now has a way to finally confront the embodied metaphor for of her trauma. Perhaps she is now able to forgive him and let Brian go on living as the concealed tyrant, elsewhere, away from the Gothic psychomachia of the uncanny Australian landscape. However, this avenue to reconciliation, too, is thwarted because it relies on Catherine committing to Dorothy’s strategy of repression. This is unacceptable to Janet who intrudes and she violently prevents it

– ‘CATHERINE: (pause) Does she know this? JANET: I've got ears. DOROTHY: She believes what she wants to believe. JANET: (hysterical and frustrated) I killed Brian Ball. In

1972, he was a brute and I shot him!’ (86). Janet’s madness resists repression and the further acceptance of their father’s patriarchal domination by re-asserting the ghost’s connection to colonial settlement of the sheep farm. For her, the banal suburban figure is too remote, too concealed, and too guilty – perhaps too colonial – for reconciliation or moral compromise to occur with. As a result, the cathectic energy promised by this potential reconciliation is left unreleased, stifled, and undirected in what is another moment of moral and textual failure, which prevents the characters’ reconciliation and the audience’s catharsis.

The following moment highlights this perpetual deferment as The Flood’s central

Gothic strategy of dis-ease. Dorothy sends Janet to bed by infantilising her – ‘Go to the toilet first, you’ve had tea’ (86). Catherine then chastises Dorothy for stifling Janet’s desire to re- assert the colonial truth of her father:

CATHERINE: But it’s over now Dotty. It was a long time ago.

DOROTHY: Sure. Sure it was.

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CATHERINE: What you’ve done, to mum, it’s not right.

DOROTHY: I kept you safe.

CATHERINE: But you didn't keep me safe Dotty.

DOROTHY: So I failed then, with everything.

CATHERINE: No, no you haven't failed. Here we are aren't we? We're

here.

DOROTHY: So we are.

(pause)

Will you see him? Will you go to Leeton?

CATHERINE: (pause) He’s dead Dotty (88-9).

Like her mother, Catherine, too, has come to accept that Brian is a colonial tyrant. Moreover, she does so whilst simultaneously re-establishing the spatial dynamics of the Gothic psychomachia by ensuring that they will never reach a point in which all three can reconcile their versions of the past. As a result, the relationship between the interior and exterior remains uncannily immutable and the tyrant still lurks on the threshold between them. The hope of reconciliation between the sisters, like the threat of spectacle and the possibility of confrontation with the supernatural, is kept constantly at bay. What is left, at the turn of the final act, is a seemingly impossible situation that defies the coherence of both the Gothic and realist conventions that organise the play’s structural logic.

The final act opens with Catherine accepting the reasons why she was sent away.

However, she still resents her mother and sister’s intervention and their relationship embraces the irreconcilability of the psychomachia. Off-stage, the flood has subsided and Dorothy begins tidying up by symbolically removing the physical and psychological detritus thus far

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deployed to shield them from the original trauma. Like her mother making the mess, this activity is also treated as futile and tragic:

JANET: I took a photo of my stick. The waters dropped. [she sees

her piles] What have you done to my stuff?

DOROTHY: I'm rationalising some of this shit

(Janet looks through her piles.)

JANET: You've buggered it all up.

DOROTHY: It’s just a mess!

JANET: I had it organised.

DOROTHY: Well, I want it more organised, not spread all over the

lounge room (89).

Here, Dorothy reveals what has been decided off-stage with her sister: ‘Catherine and I have been talking. She doesn't think you're managing as well as you should. She thought we should go and look at a few different places in town. They've got some good places these days’ (89).

In an undramatic register, the competing outcomes of reconciliation and confrontation have been twisted and contorted into a superficial union of both. Thus, the family’s cycle of treating trauma with paternalistic incarceration is played out again, thirty years after the original crime was committed. Like all the plays discussed thus far, The Flood’s psychomachia – between the incongruous forces of reconciliation and confrontation – provides no panacea to the anxiety created by the different strategies of memory presented by the narrative. Instead, they conspire to construct the play’s most ambiguous and horrifying

Gothic object – the continuation of the cycle of what is genuinely believed to be benevolent exile, incarceration, and the disavowal of the truth.

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Embedded in this cyclical narrative of murder, return, the abuses of filial authority, and family rituals of burial and mourning, there lurks a deeper interpretation of the repetitious compulsions of the settler Australian family represented in the play. Dorothy’s proposed compromise of sending Janet to a nursing home subtly fulfils the kind of cyclic Gothic structure that naturalises despair and the terror of eternal recurrence. However, this is only represented on a symbolic level. These characters will only live once within the realist world of the play and since the psychomachia cannot be constructed again, what we are left with is the symbolic certainty that this tragic, intergenerational cycle will continue. Each character’s fate will forever stand-in as a mockery of the true, cathartic reconciliation that has been partially promised by the play’s realist register. It is an unsatisfying, yet horrifyingly thrilling conclusion that represents the unfulfilled desire to reconcile with a history of violence as a constructive, cyclic failure. We have already seen Janet’s constant returns and recurrences – the throwing of china, the checking of chooks, and the constant re-affirmations of the murder of Brian. Moreover, with the decision to send Janet to a nursing home, the cycle of exile and incarceration is re-asserted, though, this time, the strategy is only partially achieved:

JANET: I don’t need your plans.

DOROTHY: Yes you do. It's all over. Enough is enough. You’re going

somewhere they can care for you.

JANET: (to Catherine) You. You're a destroyer!

DOROTHY: Sit down mum. Sit. Sit. (Janet sits).

JANET: She’s ruined everything.

DOROTHY: No she hasn’t. She’s helping us.

JANET: Are you mad? I can’t leave here. I won’t. I can’t.

CATHERINE: It's the best thing to do, start a fresh.

JANET: How dare you interfere. This is my home.

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CATHERINE: We're looking after you. You're not well (91).

Janet’s dementia is strategic and the truth is always threatening Dorothy’s amnesia. This device is deployed again as the parting threat at the close of the play – ‘Janet: You can't just change everything you stupid girl. It's still in here. (taps her head)’ (91). Forget disembodied

‘bangs’, ‘dog pits’, and ‘oleander men’. The Gothic threat at the centre of The Flood is the uncontrollable and unreliable object of ‘memory’ that is traumatising even when it is repressed, incarcerated, or banished. The Flood represents the return of repressed memories in a way that denies that reconciliation is even an achievable state. Instead, it insists that self- reflection is the only positive outcome when re-claiming painful historical truths within the psychomachia of the non-Indigenous psyche.

The Failure of Cathexis

What makes The Flood particularly Gothic, on this view, is the way that the violent and inescapable power of memory is embodied within an infirm, elderly woman. While revising the trope of the tyrant, The Flood is also re-affirming it, recalling Inverso’s argument that ‘[w]hereas the melodrama trusts completely the sentimental [and] regards it as a viable mode, the Gothic relentlessly parodies it’ (1990:11). Indeed, in containing its most violent threat within a body that traditionally lacks agency – particularly in Australian drama – The

Flood creates moments of dry, comedic action that subvert any aspirations towards creation of emotional category that resembles anything like melodramatic pathos. Indeed, as we have seen, much in the play does this by first emphasising then immediately undermining anything in the way of sentimental behaviours associated with kinship and the dynamics of the family unit. Superficially, Janet’s antisocial outbursts provide some relief from the oppressively bleak atmosphere. However, these also operate on a deeper level of cynical parody, which

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open up larger, more profound aspects of the play that are able to both anticipate moments of cathexis before obliterating the sentiment necessary to make it dramatically satisfying.

This strategy is exemplified in the play’s final image. In troping hysteria as a form of psychological liberation and madness as the panacea to the trauma of repression, Janet’s dementia is antagonistic to Dorothy’s resentment for reconciliation. It is a deeply troubling dénouement that is layered with irony and cynical humour. It yokes the relationship between the two sisters to the play’s representation of the mother/daughter relationship as a single

Subject’s experience of both domestic and colonial violence. Both of these objects of repression are inseparable within the psychomachia. This is expressed in the play’s final exchange of dialogue:

JANET: I shot him didn't I Dotty?

DOROTHY: That's right. Good on you mum.

CATHERINE: Dotty?

JANET: He was a brute.

DOROTHY: You did the right thing.

JANET: It was the right thing to do. (to Catherine) You see. It was

the right thing to do.

DOROTHY: You did good. You did really good. Well done, mum (95).

This moment is captured with a final tableau as the lighting fades to crystallise the grotesque parody of a settler family that is too terrified to remember and too terrified to forget its past, its trauma, its idealised vision of the colonial man, and the ways in which it perpetuates its own anxiety.

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There are always two levels of drama being staged simultaneously in The Flood. The play uses the Gothic to produce two referents at once – amnesia and madness as counterpart responses to trauma. In the end, the play is constructively unsatisfying because, like

Catherine and Dorothy, it wants both objects at the same time and is unable to let go of either.

As a result, interrupted cathexis, like the deferment of reconciliation, creates a psychic tension through the absence of a dramatic equilibrium. This lack of dramatic equilibrium is captured in the image of a family that is reunited through the enabling of the demented fantasies of their mother. Their reconciliation is the subtextual agreement to continue this strange union of both forgetfulness and remembering. As a result, the play exploits Janet as a sympathetic figure, positioning the audience to invest cathectic energy in this expression of her emancipation. In doing so, to achieve the desired cathexis – and then fail to do so – the spectator must also practice this same embodied madness and amnesia as a strange liminal experience that always anticipates catharsis yet never achieve it. Counter-intuitively, The

Flood presents this threshold to the audience as a rather homely place to inhabit. It produces a third option where nothing on-stage will ever change, yet produces the unshakeable feeling that everything has.

Freud theorised this kind of interrupted process of cathexis. He considers interrupted cathexis as a breach in the psyche that is caused by trauma and referred to it as ‘anticathexis’, that is, the ‘set up, for whose benefit all other psychical systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical functions are extensively paralysed or reduced’ (The Freud Reader

1995:607). The ability to shield the self from pain – here, it is the pain of returning trauma that is being resisted – is contingent on the Subject’s ‘quiescent cathexis: the dormant, unconscious desire to bind with the object and release its emotional energy. The weaker this desire is, the more violent the consequence. As a result, Freud argues that,

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it cannot be justly objected that the increase of cathexis round the breach

can be explained far more simply as the direct result of the inflowing

masses of excitation. If that were so, the mental apparatus would merely

receive an increase in its cathexes of energy, and the paralysing character of

pain and the impoverishment of all other systems would remain

unexplained (The Freud Reader 1995:608).

Here, we have a theoretical description of the experience of spectatorship in The Flood.

While, Dorothy and Catherine seem to have reached a stable impasse – between placation and further repression – as a result of the masses of energy they have exerted in remembering and verifying their own oppression, the audience is confronted with neither paralysis nor the sufficiently ‘high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach’ (The Freud Reader

1995:607). The characters are left with neither and the audience is offered a catharsis that facilitates their own self-reflection without the moral assertion that ‘real’ catharsis requires some form of dramatic reconciliation.

By witnessing the sisters’ negotiation of amnesia and madness, memory and the truth, the Ball family are unwittingly engaging in a communal ritual of mourning. They are rehearsing a form of self-reflection that emerges from an irreconcilable trauma. As witnesses, we are similarly on the edge of the uncanny space between pleasure and the dis-ease this creates. We are on the threshold of catharsis and cathexis. Or, perhaps, on the threshold between madness and amnesia. In order to understand The Flood, this condition needs to be normalised by the spectator so that the process cathexis can remain unfinished. The utter strain of binding the uncontrollable energies of reconciliation and resistance is, literally, too much to represent theatrically. The result is to experience an eternal threshold that exists between the positions of victim and tyrant and to explore the ramifications of both. The

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recurrent and unpredictable shifts from a realist to Gothic register render this condition in both the personal and national domains of theatrical representation. As a result, the ghosts of domestic abuse and the ghosts of Australian history produce the same terrifying psychomachia that, for the character’s in The Flood, is a perpetual condition that can only be cathartic when the imagined object of an unproblematic reconciliation is abandoned and the

Gothic nature of this desire is recognised within the non-Indigenous psyche.

Conclusions

As The Flood seduces with promises of confrontation and reconciliation, it also illustrates how memory is a terrifying thing when it is dramatised. Yet, through its Gothic structural logic, the play illustrates how to not forget is to forever exist on the threshold between homeliness and the Gothic psychomachia. It is a deceptively uncomfortable psychological space where the settler Subject is characterised as being too afraid, to paralysed, or simply unwilling to confront exactly what is haunting it. The Flood highlights how, in the Australian Gothic, failure – both moral and textual – can operate as a strategy of terror. Every aspect of the play’s Gothic structure and atmosphere is working co-operatively to create a single, climactic moment in which catharsis is both desired and repelled simultaneously. Of course, the experience of this sort of anti-spectacle is contingent upon an individual spectator’s openness to aesthetic affect and willingness to recognise the positioning strategies of genre and mode.

The Flood is not overtly political like Drinkwater and The White Earth. It does not actively seek to yoke the violence of colonial history to the present. Instead, the Australian

Gothic drama draws on this theme covertly and by generic design. The unheimlich landscape and the subversion of colonial Australia’s most treasured and pervasive myths of masculinity

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and domination are able to effortlessly seep out from the psychomachia at the centre of the play. Ultimately it exists between the irreconcilable yet concomitant forces of feeling unhomely and desiring to feel at home. The Flood does this by uniquely co-opting women into this Gothic image of contemporary Australia.

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Chapter Four

Intervention:

Trauma, Tyranny, Bureaucracy, and Neo-Gothic Enthralment in The Dark Room

Introduction

This chapter will look at Angela Betzien’s The Dark Room (2009). The chapter will argue that the play creates a non-Indigenous psychomachia that is informed by the recent real-world political events of the 2007 Northern Territory National Emergency Response into remote Indigenous communities by the then-Howard Liberal government. By drawing on

Inverso’s concept of ‘enthrallment’ – the suspension of a passive spectacle-audience relationship – this analysis poses that The Dark Room stages a Gothic psychomachia as a communal or ritualised experience through its dramatization of trauma and guilt (1990). This chapter will illustrate how The Dark Room exemplifies further shapes, forms, and styles that the Australian Gothic drama can take in the period that this dissertation explores.

The Play

The Dark Room began life as a commissioned work for the Western Australian state- company, Black Swan Theatre, and its youth-focused program The Hotbed Ensemble in

2009. Directed by Adam Mitchell, the play is an unsettling Outback Noir set in the claustrophobic confines of a motel roadhouse somewhere in the Northern Territory. The play has been produced multiple times by several major companies since its debut. Belvoir Street

Theatre (2011) and The Griffin Theatre (2011) have also produced versions of the play. A quick glance at the volley of popular reviews emphasise the overt genre-trappings of the play’s tone and structure. The Dark Room’s vaguely masked reference to the 2007

Intervention into Aboriginal communities was noticed by the stable of bloggers and reviewers

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that have seen its various incarnations. Like most reviewers, Lloyd Bradford Skye emphasises the play’s sinister tone and setting, acknowledging, to a degree, the ominous political context, ‘it’s stale and poisonous’ atmosphere, and the inescapable connection to

Howard’s ‘ineffectual intervention’ (Crikey.com 2011). Joan Beal comments on the themes of crime and punishment, writing that ‘The Dark Room is like the end of the line for all six characters – no one can escape their own shame’ (ArtsHub.com.au, 14 November 2011).

While the play’s popularity amongst both independent and the experimental arms of

State companies has been strong since being published in 2009, there has been little scholarly discussion of The Dark Room. The playwright, Angela Betzien, is no stranger to the Gothic, having already written a ‘Gothic fairy-tale for children’ in The Children of the Black Skirt

(2005). The play is set in an isolated, bush orphanage where the ‘lost’ children of Australian history meet at night to tell their tales. The play re-appropriates that icon of Australian storytelling – the lost child in the bush – in ways that make unmistakable parallels with the

‘Stolen Generation’, the forced removal of Aboriginal children over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The play’s Gothic devices are clearly on display. Particularly, the play’s antagonist, an authoritarian matriarch equipped with black Victorian garb and a pair of enormous sheep-shearers, who haunts the halls of an isolated bush-orphanage.

The Dark Room’s main action is centred on a youth worker, Anni, who is escorting a disturbed young girl called Grace to a hospital following a traumatic crime involving her parents. They stop over night at a three-star motel in the remote Outback of the Northern

Territory. There are other guests also staying the night. There is a young couple who have just arrived from a rowdy wedding. The pregnant wife, Emma, argues with her low-ranking police officer husband Stephen about his attending a booze-soaked after-party without her.

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The last room is occupied by another police officer named Craig. It is made clear that it is

Craig’s wedding that Emma and Stephen have attended, though it is unclear if he is appearing in the present, the past or the future, relative to them. Craig is responsible for the shooting of a knife-wielding teenager in the recent past. During the night he is visited by a strange fifteen-year-old boy named Joseph.

Each drama occurs in overlapping segments and the playing space simultaneously signifies all three rooms. The presentation of these stories is not restricted to linear time and static space. Characters appear and disappear across space and through time. The Dark Room explicitly foregrounds its own sense of narrative unverifiability. The play opens up a myriad of questions about the way that dramatic horror blurs the lines between spectator and performer, tragedy and pleasure, and the kinaesthetic effect of live-Gothic performance.

Fig. 17 The Dark Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh).

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Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre Company.

The Dark Room in Performance

Black Swan Theatre Company’s 2009 production presents the three individual motel rooms and the dramatic interaction that occur within as a single, mimetic space (Fig. 17). The mise en scène is superficially dressed to resemble a room in a typical motel chain. In scenographer Alicia Clements’ design, costuming is modern and impersonal furnishings are selected to metonymically represent the scene. However, many of the more familiar aspects of the room are derealised. The theatre is undressed, the stage is not raised or raked, and the proscenium separating the audience from the playing space is absent. This derealisation of the motel is further emphasised by multiple lighting sources. They are positioned and designed to create jagged shadows and plumes of unnatural illumination. Though dim lamps and overhead fixtures are sporadically used to represent realist sources, somnambulistic lighting states dominate the stage and special effects often intrude in moments of unanticipated spectacles of Gothic horror. Theatrical haze completes the mise en scène, amplifying the otherworldly ambience by toying with what is visible, what is not, the physical distance between separate scenes, and the actual depth of the performance space itself.

Unlike Drinkwater and The White Earth, The Dark Room is less architectural in its invocation of the uncanny. The exterior – the open space of the Northern Territory’s Outback

– is explicitly juxtaposed with the claustrophobic interior of the roadhouse. Where wings would conventionally appear, the motel’s interior light ebbs off into the darkness. The

Outback sun is replaced by harsh neon lights; the red desert is now represented by an eternal darkness. The effect creates the illusion of an endless space separating the mimetic zone from an infinite non-space off-stage. It creates the impression of an impassable nothingness that

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cannot be breached. It is an ultimate boundary that disconnects this place – the space on stage

– from other places. From the outset, this imbues the mimetic zone with an uncanny aspect while the spatial dialogue between interior and exterior – on-stage and off – emphasises the strange liminality of the motel room. The Outback is present in its offstage absence. The desert is an insurmountable force of nature. In this way, the play’s Gothic threat and fear of invasion is not tied to boundaries – to exterior walls and the locked doors that separate corridors from rooms. Rather, it is the lack of them that creates an underlying sense of dread.

There is an expansiveness that counter-intuitively generates a palpable sense of claustrophobia in the room. This effect is captured in a line of dialogue when the traumatised girl, Grace, nervously asks her state-appointed carer, Anni, ‘[w]hat’s outside?’, to which she responds ‘[n]othing’ (47).

The Intervention

As is central to the following analysis, this section of the chapter discusses the 2007

Northern Territory National Emergency Response or the so-called ‘Intervention’ into remote

Indigenous communities by the then-Howard Liberal government. This context provides the political details that The Dark Room draws on and the cultural context that informs its Gothic vision of contemporary, non-Indigenous attitudes and political morality. The justification for the Intervention was an alleged epidemic of sexual abuse and paedophilia in isolated communities throughout the Northern Territory and Northern Western Australia. A report conducted by the Northern Territory Government, Little Children Are Sacred: Report of the

Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual

Abuse (2007), contained ninety-seven recommendations that were used as the legal basis for the deployment of some six hundred Australian Defence Force personnel to remote areas of

The Northern Territory and far-north Western Australia. The severity and frequency of the

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alleged abuse cases were declared a ‘national emergency’ by former Prime Minister John

Howard and the legislation was rushed through parliament in August of 2007 (The Age, June

22 2007). While the published edition of the play stipulates that it is set in a ‘regional town in the Northern Territory during the first year of the Australian Government’s Intervention’, this piece of contextual information does not feature in Black Swan Theatre’s press materials

(2009:10).

The Intervention was a divisive policy that sparked both support and outrage on many fronts and divided Aboriginal and non-Indigenous commentators and scholars. A version of the debate is dramatised in the play, particularly in scenes involving the young couple –

Emma (Natalie Holmwood) and her husband, the young police officer, Stephen (Will

O’Mawhony). References are often allusive and make no explicit reference to the response as

‘the Intervention’. The most striking remarks highlight the unnerving presence of the military in the Territory and its communities. Stephen describes the soldiers and their behaviour with a ‘blokey’ camaraderie: ‘Soldiers / Off duty this weekend / Booked the whole place out for boozing and bonking’ (28). Emma does not see eye-to-eye with her husband. She subtly implies that the armed forces are a more sinister presence: ‘They’re everywhere / Think they’ve got the run of the town / Think they occupy it’ (28). This disagreement, while appearing to be political, quickly reveals the deep-seated resentment that each has of the other:

STEPHEN: What do you expect?

Cooped up for weeks out at the barracks

They muck up like dogs just let off the chain

EMMA: Like a pack of animals

They’re dangerous

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STEPHEN: Nah they’re harmless enough

EMMA: They your mates?

STEPHEN: Right then

See you (28).

It is interesting that, for Emma, her reservations about the presence of the military have nothing to do with alcohol abuse, the alleged culture of sexual abuse, or the safety of children in remote communities. Rather, it is the inverse. She believes that the military is exacerbating the toxic, macho culture purported to be the problem in the first place. Moreover, it is her husband’s role within that culture that she is appals her. He has a freedom that denied to her, to move and act, and this jealously is expressed in the caustic subtext of their conversation.

Indeed, what matters most to her is her personal well-being, her own safety, and her inherent feeling of exclusion from both the community and from her husband’s business. In this way,

Emma’s alienation and isolation are expressed covertly in ways that are hidden beneath her resentment for her husband’s drinking habits and her frustration with how he seems to be consciously excluding her form the ongoing festivities.

The argument intensifies by moving away from superficial disagreement into an emotionally charged tirade that violently exposes how Emma’s profound feelings of disempowerment and alterity in the Territory influence every aspect of her character. In a later moment, when Stephen declares that he is leaving, Emma confesses to her feelings in a way that unexpectedly injects the Gothic into an otherwise domestic scene – ‘[w]hat if I wake up and you’re not there and I don’t know where I am?’ (30). The question is jarring and the silences that bookend it enunciate its earnestness. However, this non-sequitur stretches the scene’s feigned domesticity by imbuing it with a disarming reference to the mise en scène’s already inherent ghostliness. It is a gesture to a world beyond the realist space of the motel’s

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bed and sideboard, which is shielded from the dark exterior by the squalid curtain of stage lighting.

At these early stages in the play, the intrusion of Gothic moments like this begin to infect every level of Emma and Stephen’s relationship. Their alterity and the unuttered topic of abuse begins to subtextually creep into their dialogue. For instance, when Emma expresses her displeasure with Stephen’s decision to join the other police officers and ‘kick on’ at the pub, he reacts by infantilising her (27). Like the communities in the Territory, his treatment of Emma comes with similarly loaded moral invectives and the image of children in peril, though they come loaded with abject connotation – ‘You know we’re heading to a club? [ …

] Well you can’t have a drink [ … ] You’ve had one today [ … ] Do you want a spastic kid?’

(31). Stephen is able to deploy his systemic privilege – as a man and authority figure – and the moral rights of children – their unborn child – as a powerful tactic to subdue Emma. The invocation of the protection of the child solidifies and legitimatises both Stephen’s power in the Territory and over his wife. As we shall see, this power to invoke the rights of children underpins every personal and interpersonal relationship in the play.

Stephen reveals the sinister extent of this power in a subsequent scene when free from

Emma’s moral scrutiny. He exits the room and bumps into Grace’s carer Anni (Jacinta John) in the hall space designated on the skirt of the performance space. What follows is an awkward conversation that is laced with thinly veiled threats as Stephen goads Anni and questions the relevance of her work (35). In doing so, he lets slip the resentment he harbours for the communities and the children he has pledged to protect:

But I mean you can understand the circumstances of their upbringing / until

you’re shitting blood but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re / vicious

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little shits and they’ll bite you they’ll stab you given half the chance blow

your brains out. They will kill you it’s in their nature / You have to watch

them [ … ] You ever been bit? [ … ] Like rabid dogs they bite the hand that

feeds them (36).

What marks this quiet diatribe of potentially racist slurs – the race of the children remains ambiguous in both the text and in Black Swan’s production – and violence, is the recurring motif of ‘feral dogs’ that is repeated here as a resentful reversal of the accusations levelled at him by his disempowered spouse – ‘STEPHEN: You ever been bit [ … ] Not by a dog no by a human [ … ] Me too hundreds of times you know the human bite is more infectious than an animal’s?’ (37). This meeting with Anni reads as a Gothic parody of flirtation with Stephen lasciviously asking Anni if she’d care to ‘come out clubbing’ with him and if she has a

‘boyfriend’ (35, 36). There is a subtle effusion of Gothic images throughout the scene, with language implying contamination and infection, rabid children, grotesque pregnancy, and sexual assault. However, Stephen maintains a façade of moral responsibility. Though, it is dispersed and undermined by the deep, sub-textual resentment he displays towards those he has pledged to protect and through his displays of paternal aggression. There are connotations that are unmistakeably drawn from the real-world, political context of the Northern Territory

National Emergency Response. However, because of the way in which the dialogue is laden with Gothic images, Stephen – as an authority figure – is the only aspect of reality that is re- described as a hostile entity.

Regardless of the villainy or purported innocence of each of these characters, their role in the Intervention is described by all of them as a civic duty. It is a position that is shared by both husband and wife as an unspoken and unsupported moral assumption –

‘EMMA: Why did we come thousands of miles across the country / To live in the middle of

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the desert?’ STEPHEN: You said we had a responsibility’ (46). However, as secrets are revealed and relationships frayed, each characters’ moral confidence is eroded. For example, in a moment of desperation, Emma explodes and resurrects the motif of the ‘feral dog’ in a tirade that criticises the exclusive pack mentality of the police force – ‘And you’re just a glorified bouncer with a license to kill / Beating up homeless kids shooting small children [

… ] You’re all dogs’ (59). She pushes it further by accusing the police force of being conspiratorial and guilty of concealing institutional abuse – ‘You’re always patting each other on the arse / Protecting each other / What’s your motto on the force? / Fit in or fuck off …

Well I’ll be interested in the results of the inquiry’ (59). The echoes of a political and historical reality, in this instance, are unavoidable.

The issue of the deaths of Aboriginal men in custody are added to the already volatile mixture of references to the Intervention. The Dark Room is drawing in a myriad of issues and concentrating symbolic connections between institutional violence and male behaviour that, from a legal, historic, or political perspective, are independent from one another. In these sequences, Betzien’s critique of the Intervention and the broader issue of social justice in remote Aboriginal communities is an overt source of drama. However, Emma’s emotional objections and political remarks quickly fade into the background as the play descends, further and further, into its Gothic spectacle. In other words, while drawing on these political themes, The Dark Room’s primary purpose is an altogether deeper, more hostile Gothic effect.

It is interesting to note that Black Swan Theatre’s production was presented by its youth program, BSX. While later productions of The Dark Room – namely Belvoir Street

Theatre’s in 2011 – cast mature performers, BSX’s relatively younger cast effects the way

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this particular element of the play resonates. Particularly, the relative youth of the performer playing Stephen – Western Australian actor, Will O’Mahony – adds a further layer of ambiguity to his position within the hierarchy of institutional and individual power relations of the play’s universe (Fig. 19). With these swirling political references looming over the play’s dramatic action, the relative youth of the cast deftly undermines the powers they speak for. In this instance, declarations of authority, coercion, and even threats of violence read as desperate, insincere, or an uncommitted aping of the official party-lines of the government authorities they represent. If is as if there is a further level of bureaucratic authority disembodied off-stage that is coercing and affecting its will upon its agents within the mimetic space. This strange discrepancy – between character and the power they represent – is played out in many of the relational dynamics in The Dark Room.

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Fig. 18 Will O’Mahony as Stephen in The Dark Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts,

2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre Company.

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Trauma

The Dark Room employs a compositional and dramaturgical style that dramatises the return of trauma into the mimetic zone of the mise en scène. In The Dark Room, the characters are arranged into duos. Each separate narrative strand is linked by the common theme of a repressed traumatic event. Indeed, there is a victim and perpetrator in each story.

For Grace, there is the murder of her mother and suicide of her father. Joseph has been abused, assaulted, and humiliated by a gang of youths and left alone in the desert. Craig is haunted by the teenager he shot in the line of duty. Emma and Stephen wrestle with their failing marriage and the sense of alienation wrought by their recent move to the Territory.

The play dramatises how these traumas effect and inform the victims’ identities.

In order to approach the ways in which the play represents trauma, key theories need to be briefly outlined. Patrick Duggan draws on the work of the literary theorist, Cathy

Caruth, to describe trauma as ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’ (qtd. Duggan, 2012:11).

Duggan develops this definition into a theory of performance, arguing that the staging of trauma has to be a fluid, multi-dimensional trope as it is the dramatising of interior phenomena that transcend a literal presentation of its symptoms that are, by definition, un- representable. Trauma is a ‘triangulation of tensions between the desire to forget trauma, the necessity to deliberately relive it to effect a cure and the uninvited intrusive hallucinations of trauma symptoms’ (Duggan 2012:7). From this perspective, live performance can act as a

‘haunted’ event that, like trauma itself, plays itself out, over and over again. As a result, theatre is synchronous with psychological approaches to suffering that ‘can be seen to rehearse, repeat and re-present itself in performed ‘ghosts’ that haunt the sufferer’ (Duggan

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2012:5). This foundation, as we shall see, articulates the layered nature of the way that trauma is represented in The Dark Room’s fantastic and dramatic mechanisms of enthralment.

Gothic Ingestion and the Gothic Cage

The Dark Room deals explicitly with the typical ornaments of the Gothic and traumatic themes – threats of rape, murder, violence, guilt, transgressive sex and sexuality, taboo, and haunting – that signpost the play’s radical approach to the representation of trauma. As a result, the play’s interest in the relationship between tyrants and victims is as evident as in the other plays discussed in this thesis. The strange, troubled girl, Grace, is central to this convention. Grace is presented as a child on the cusp of puberty, though she was played by an adult performer (Arielle Gray) in Black Swan Theatre Company’s production. We are first introduced to Grace in a typical Gothic prologue that is expressed as a disembodied voice in the dark:

There is a dark / It is the darkest of dark / It’s the dark in the dirt under the

house where the dogs lie / It’s the place I hide under the house when the

growling starts / There is a scratching sound and a heartbeat / Feels like fur

in the dark place / Warm like blood / This where I wait / This where I’m

waiting [sic.] (11).

This opening allusion, with Grace as a kind of wraith-like presence who speaks ambiguously, stresses the haunting final line of her soliloquy – ‘This where I wait for you’ [sic.] (added italics, 11). In this initial action, The Dark Room grimly foreshadows its consuming obsession with accusation and guilt. The ‘you’ in question is addressed directly at the audience, yet individual perpetrator and alleged crime are left unnamed. The statement is used here, at the outset, as a potent Gothic threat that underpins and taints all of the forthcoming action.

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The theme and the performed act of accusation works as a framing device by placing assumption and suspicion firmly within the play’s matrix of volatile relationships. Moreover, there is a profusion of Gothic images associated with containment and contamination that exacerbates the already palpable sense of looming threat. However, what marks this prologue as a crucial aspect of the play’s Neo-gothic structure lies beyond its generic strategies of creating dramatic tension. The prologue establishes the ways in which The Dark Room subverts the typical Gothic invasion story. Inverso argues that, in the Gothic, ‘boundary- crossings are commonly constituted as invasions’ (1990:153). To this view, it could be argued that every character is an ‘invader’ of some sort in The Dark Room. Each is a stranger who travelling to or from somewhere else. They are all crossing boundaries of some sort.

However, the uncanny mise en scène problematizes the nature of boundaries themselves by invoking both boundedness and boundlessness. Here, there is a different kind of Gothic threat at work that transforms ‘invasion’ into what Inverso refers to as the Gothic theatricalisation of ‘ingestion’ (1990:153). Of ingestion, Inverso argues that:

[O]ccasionally the Gothic effects a species of colonization of this space by

way of movement that resembles more an ingestion rather than an invasion.

This movement is characterized by elements being pulled in or suctioned

from one realm into another (1990:153).

As already established by the play’s overt reference to the Intervention, the deployment of the military, endemic institutional violence, and Aboriginal deaths in custody, the mimetic zone of the mise en scène is a site in which objects and signs from the outside, political world are being siphoned, perhaps ingested, piece by piece into a place of entrapment.

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Alongside ingestion, we can also consider Inverso’s concept of the ‘Gothic cage’ as the symbolic container into which these materials are being suctioned (1990). She argues that,

like the classic Gothic texts themselves can be said to have lost the sense of

the outdoor realm. [The plays’] worlds seem most akin to the airless,

exitless, interior demesne of Gothic fiction [ … In which characters ]

occupy a theatricalized Gothic cage (1990:120, 122).

Indeed, when the audience first encounter the Gothic cage it is not an empty space. For one, as established in the prologue, Grace’s disembodied voice already exists within it.

Immediately after the prologue, we shift to the motel room in a moment of technical spectacle. Betzien provides the description of it as a stage direction: ‘(An intense white light burns up the room as if the image has been suddenly overexposed) [ … ] (We see an image of the characters in the space like a negative of a photograph) (11). The theatrical analogue of the ‘photographic image’ symbolizes the process of ingestion. It is the engulfment of ‘stuff’ – the characters arranged in a tableau of bodies in space and time – that are now clogged up and captured within a single, static image. Darkness follows. The ghostly effect of this image is then emphasised as Grace then enters as a callow and child-like figure. She is convinced that the room is pre-occupied – ‘GRACE Someone in here / ANNI Just you and me / GRACE

Someone else too’ (14). In this instance, The Dark Room is creating its own form of haunting.

Her dialogue implies that there is something already lurking within the mimetic zone that waits, like a centripetal force, calling those materials in towards itself by ingesting diegetic materials – including its characters – as if it were a giant mouth. The accusatory, direct address of the ‘you’ in Grace’s prologue suggests that, like the political world outside, the audience is also susceptible to the suctioning effect of Gothic ingestion. They are as corporeal

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as performers and are not separated from the action on-stage by the infrastructure of a traditional theatre space.

Objects of Power in the Gothic Cage

Fig. 19 Arielle Gray as Grace and Jacinta John as Anni in The Dark Room, Perth Institute of

Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre

Company.

Once the lights are turned on and the mise en scène is revealed, Grace now has a body to attribute the accusation to. The wraith-like presence vanishes and is replaced by the figure of a traumatized victim. In this moment, The Dark Room gestures towards the fact that Grace is not what she seems; now the traumatised victim can speak beyond herself, to the audience, and level existential threats directly to them. This is emphasised by the distancing device of the mask she wears. Her face is concealed beneath a pillow case that is decorated with the

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grotesque features of a dog – the play’s abject motif of the abused child – that designates

Grace’s self-identification as the monstrous Other to Anni (Fig. 19).

Grace stands in silence as her social worker, Anni, attempts to comfort her. Once again, Grace’s only interjections are accusatory – ‘What’s happening to me?’ [ … ] ‘What took you so long?’ (6) (Fig. 19). Unlike the prologue, these accusations now have their literal target and the initial threat of ingestion retreats into the unconscious and congested strategies of dis-ease already at work within the mimetic space. In moments like this, Grace is a sympathetic figure. She is confused, frightened, and obviously showing signs of a recent trauma. However, this persona does not last long and her behaviour becomes unpredictable as it rapidly shifts from innocent child, to sexualised adult, to a near-supernatural ‘harpy’ figure in unanticipated spurts of energy and stage movement. In one instance, she confronts Anni and accuses her of being a paedophile before perversely goading her into a sexual liaison:

Masturbate / feel much better if I have a wank / So you go in that room and

shut the door … You want to watch? / (GRACE puts her hands down her

pants) / I just wet myself (GRACE licks her fingers) (16).

Anni’s responds in a maternal way and attempt to nullify Grace’s more transgressive attempts to shock and incite with a calm, professional authority – ‘Can’t do that Grace [ … ] Leave the door open Grace [ … ] We’ve been through this’ (16-7). These encounters, with their abruptly explosive language, are bewildering contests of will and status between the traumatized child and her beleaguered state-appointed minder.

As the story progresses, Anni comes to learn that Grace has been assaulted by her father. After his suicide, she has hidden beneath the house alone in the dark with only a pack of stray dogs for company. It is then implied that her father has murdered her mother before

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taking his own life. It is a perverse story, though, like many elements in the play, it is difficult to verify. Indeed, it is difficult to verify anything Grace says as Anni constantly denies

Grace’s extravagant claims and placates her grotesque requests. As a result, Grace uses them to provoke Anni – to shame her, to challenge her maternal language, and to question her professional duty-of-care. Because actual plot events are light on the ground and are kept ambiguous for the most part, action is structured around these stark, uncomfortable revelations and the way Grace uses them to leverage power over her ever well-meaning carer.

Throughout their interactions, the ability to accuse, shame, and transgress become the primary objects of power in The Dark Room.

The power relationship reaches a disturbing climax when Grace goads Anni by describing an interaction she had with an infant. Her speech is simultaneously childish and ambiguously transgressive:

There’s a place here there’s a place at the back of their heads here that’s

soft / Can’t press it hard or you kill them did you know that? Put my fingers

in its [baby] mouth / It sucked on them / Then I licked it / Put my tongue in

its mouth [ … ] So I pulled my shirt and let it suck on me / It did too even

though I got no milk hardly a lump there (40-1).

Anni tries to defuse Grace’s mania by enquiring what the baby’s name was. She instantly responds hostilely with a graphic description of an abortion: ‘They stab em wif a needle inside you / The doctors / Cut em up then and pull em out bit by bit / Arms n legs n head /

Mum says she shoulda aborted me / Wished she had!’ (41). Here, we see Grace as an uncanny teenage figure. She is mature enough to, perhaps, know about the procedure, yet too immature to describe it in anything but its most abject connotations. As a result, the

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experience that she claims to have endured also exists within a similar, liminal space to her character where it sits between the states of verifiability and fiction.

The ability to spontaneously transform into an aggressively abject figure is informed by and emphasises the way the play subverts paternal and maternal signs. Moreover, the murder of Grace’s mother and how the event affects her behaviour, indicates an ingestion of trauma, which she now embodies. The very essence of her character is dramatically in conflict with Anni’s role as her surrogate maternal figure. This relationship perverts Grace’s ability to differentiate between maternal love, hatred, and institutional care as either hostile or protective forces that are forced upon her. Consequently, Grace’s abject nature is exacerbated by both Anni’s professional language – the patronising, the coddling, and her professional duty to reprimand bad behaviour – and her detached role as her social worker. Indeed, throughout this interaction, Anni is unconsciously and punitively regulating Grace’s perverse and transgressive attempts to indirectly narrate her ingested trauma or, indeed, to recognise its reality all together.

Radical Tyrannical Victims

The ingestion of the Intervention, in this instance, adds further excesses to the scene’s representation of the abjected elements of Anni and Grace’s relationship. There is a layering of perverse references into its grotesque parody of maternal care that informs the play’s

Gothic representation of institutional care. Once again, the dynamic between the two characters takes on aspects of the Gothic relationship between tyrants and victims. Grace is the traumatised survivor of an alleged yet unverifiable act of domestic and sexual abuse. She is a victim. However, within the mise en scène, she also exercises the power of a tyrant by inciting and rebuffing Anni’s care. She plays the accuser, the transgressive aggressor, and the

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vengeful spectre that is asserting an alien moral code. These aspects of her character are also, simultaneously, performed symptoms of her abjection. Yet, The Dark Room’s representation of the ‘tyrannical victim’ proves to be more a complex and disquieting entity than Janet from

The Flood. Through the collapse of the boundaries between the character’s identity, its abjection, and the theatrical representation of the victim’s innocence, trauma, and sociopathy, the roles of victim and tyrant become virtually indivisible within the theatrically simulated body of a young girl.

In each of these moments, Grace is able to transform her status as ‘victim’ into a form of tyranny that is a source of power and political agency within the mimetic space. This agency is exemplified in one strikingly caustic moment, early in the play, when Grace – at this stage fully emboldened in a sinisterly mature persona – chastises Anni, as an agent of state welfare, for intervening and performing her professional duty: ‘GRACE: [I was taken to] [a] residential … / Got raped / Did / That’s your fault’ (19). It is a devastating accusation that, whether true or not, admonishes the social worker for vicariously participating in what, from Anni’s perspective, was a moral emergency and a pressing civic responsibility. Her role as state-appointed carer is re-described into that of a vicarious oppressor. Indeed, Grace enacts this form of tyranny by mimicking the rhetoric of the state – welfare, medical, and the police – as a complex Gothic entity of ingested rhetoric.

In this way, Grace is an embodied expression of the imagined figure of the ‘child in peril’ and the victim of endemic sexual abuse that was evoked in order to justify the

Intervention. The anthropologist and political commentator, Peter Sutton, exemplifies how this image was used in the lead up to the Emergency act in a passage from his book, The

Politics of Suffering (2011). Sutton repudiates those who expressed doubts about whether the

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Intervention was necessary by arguing that ‘[t]he unscientific mumbo jumbo beggars belief [

... ] [i]t relies on a kind of magical cause-and-effect relationship, as if a treaty between ‘races’ will keep children safe in their beds at night’ (2011:12). His use of the image of abused

‘children’ is important as Grace might be presented as one of those children lost to political indecision and pointless, nebulous debate. However, now, within the Gothic cage, Grace is transformed into a grotesque parody of those very fears. In this way, whether or not Grace’s story is a fabrication, she embodies the ingestion of this type of critique. If Grace’s accusation about being raped while in the care of institutions resonates emotionally as the painful, spiteful barb against the morally responsible Anni, then it does too with an audience that is invited to make a connection with the action on-stage and the government’s occupation of remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. The moment is a profound example of the structural logic of enthrallment in The Dark Room.

Melancholia, Trauma, and Tragedy

We have already seen elements of The Dark Room’s representation of trauma in the way the play constructs Grace. However, trauma and the ways in which it is produced through the play’s strategy of ingestion is expressed fully when she is read in tandem with

The Dark Room’s other apparition – the teenager, Joseph (Kazimir Sas) (Fig. 20). He is first introduced at the mid-point of the narrative. In another room, he knocks at the door on two separate occasions and is re-buffed by the senior police officer, Craig (Tom O’Sullivan), within (72). It is not until the third knock he is able to enter. Joseph is wearing only his underwear and his body is covered in bruises (Fig. 20). The teenager and the officer engage in a dialogue:

JOSEPH You’re that cop

(Pause)

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CRAIG Saw me arrive did you?

What do you want then?

Not door knocking are you?

What is it?

Spit it out quick

JOSEPH I know what you’ve done

CRAIG What are you talking about?

JOSEPH Know what you did

CRAIG What have I done? (74).

It is an unnerving introduction that is laden with the ambiguous foreshadowing and unanswerable accusations that have routinely punctuated the play thus far. Joseph explains why he is in the desert by forlornly describing how he was kidnapped, stripped, and abandoned in the darkness on the edge of town by a group of school boys (81). However, like Grace’s backstory, the tale is utterly unverifiable. It is primarily used to gain access to the room through sympathy and to coerce Craig. Joseph – like Grace is to Anni – is a composite or projection of Craig’s guilt, anxieties, prejudices, and deepest personal fears. He is, as we shall discover, the returned spectre of the boy Craig killed in the past and the reason there is a death in custody inquiry. All of which is the product of ingested, real-world materials.

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Fig. 20 Tom O’Sullivan as Craig (Left), and Kazimir Sas as Joseph (Right) in The Dark

Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of

Black Swan Theatre Company.

As doppelgängers, Grace and Joseph establish their symbolic and structural connection as they simultaneously terrorise their adult companions and destabilise the linear chronology of the play. One particular motif is a seemingly innocuous question that Grace

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and Joseph routinely utter throughout the play – ‘Don’t you like me?’ (76). It is concomitantly both innocent and accusatory. It is child-like and perversely sexual, particularly when Joseph proposes it to Craig. The officer and the teenager’s scenes are layered with transgressive connotations and sexual tension. In one simultaneous moment,

Anni answers Grace by reassuring her and Craig, without hesitation, flat-out rejects Joseph

(76). This action is synchronised between the scenes and transcends the physical space of the motel to distort the linearity of each narrative. The almost ritualistic nature of these doublings takes the form of a child-like rhyme both characters use to taunt their carers. Joseph sings:

‘Inny minny miney moe catch a faggot by the toe if he squeals cut his / prick off inny minny miney moe / That means you’re a faggot’ (54). The perverse action amplifies the already potent threat of paedophilia in their relationship. These ritualised moments culminate at the play’s catastrophic dénouement and fully reveals the device.

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Fig. 21 Arielle Gray as Grace, Jacinta John as Anni, Tom O’Sullivan as Craig (Left), and

Kazimir Sas as Joseph (Right) in The Dark Room, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts,

2009. (Photo: Gary Marsh). Image Courtesy of Black Swan Theatre Company.

Gothic Catastrophe and the Centre of the Cage

As each story becomes fully interleaved – with each pair inhabiting the stage simultaneously – and each separate interaction becomes indistinguishable to both the characters and the audience, the action coalesces into a single sequence of rising tension.

Lighting effects glow unnaturally and are supported by Ben Collins’ menacingly dissonant soundscape. Joseph enters wearing a wedding dress in an unsubtle reference to the impending/past wedding and provokes Craig by singing the threatening nursery rhyme (80).

Craig responds with hostility – ‘you look like a fairy’ (80). Here, the dress is also operating in the same way as Grace’s dog mask by presenting him as a grotesque parody of the toxic masculine rhetoric that Craig uses to address him. However, rather than focusing predominantly on the grotesque and the abject, the dress on the young man’s body renders him sexually uncanny, which emphasises the latent tension between violence and the homoerotic.

Meanwhile, Emma lights a cigarette in her room as her husband, Stephen, realises that the unborn child he has used to control his wife’s behaviour is dead within her womb – ‘It’s gone isn’t it’ – and thus explains her traumatised behaviour (87). He realises this as Joseph simultaneously sets the wedding dress alight and the ‘inny minny miney moe’ taunt picks up again (88). Grace dons her mask and is, once again, terrified that the room is haunted (75).

Anni attempts to reassure her using the maternal language of her role as social worker – ‘I said you have to come with me / We came here then because it’s safe / You’re safe now …

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Look at me’ (75). Grace obeys and they remove the mask together. It is a touching moment that is instantly undermined as Grace moves to consummate this act of kindness with a romantic ‘kiss’ that is explicitly sexualised through her action (75). It connects and consummates the torrent of abjected maternal, sexual, and traumatic signs that have come to define their relationship within the mimetic space.

When she is rejected, Grace pleads like a child with the motif – ‘Don’t you like me?’

(87). When Anni denies her again, she explodes in a fit of rage and violence. She draws a knife and screams ‘[s]hut up or I’ll fucking stab you’ before thrusting the blade towards her own throat (87). Craig, in another space and time, draws his gun and threatens Joseph as he taunts him with the rhyme:

CRAIG: Drop the knife

ANNI: Give me the knife Grace

JOSEPH: Don’t have a knife

GRACE: Didn’t mean to get the knife

[ .. ]

CRAIG: I saw it

I saw a fucking knife

GRACE: If I give you the knife I have to go

Don’t I?

[ … ]

Drop the knife or I’ll shoot … I’ll fucking shoot (90).

As Joseph moves towards Craig, Grace pleads with Anni not to abandon her. Craig imagines

Grace’s knife in Joseph’s hand and each narrative coalesces into a single tableau implying that all of this – each separate story, each individual trauma, and the ritualised re-enactment

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of it – stems from the same centripetal fulcrum that is ingesting each of these apparitions towards the centre of the Gothic cage.

At this moment, Craig fires his gun ‘six times’ and Grace ‘stabs herself’ (91). Emma watches on and casually smokes a cigarette. She is now free from the ‘innocent’ child her husband was using to pacify her (91). The impact of the image of ‘dead children’ – Grace and

Joseph – is now augmented by the fact that there are three dead ‘children’ now on-stage.

They are joined by the foetus in Emma’s womb. Finally, rather than watching the self- destruction of Grace and Joseph, Stephen is, instead, transfixed by his wife and realises that he is powerless over both her and the unborn child (91). His status within the tableau is now fully undermined by another, all-powerful, ‘innocent child’ that is unborn or dead, perhaps ingested, inside his wife’s body.

When the complete ingestion of character is complete – as they are literally drawn to or killed in the centre of the cage – the stage is engulfed in darkness and we return to the opening image of the play – ‘the [overexposed] negative image’ (91) (Fig. 21). Grace delivers the final lines: ‘This where I want to be [sic.] / Things you can’t remember / Bad things that happened you can’t think off / Lots happened in this room / We’re staying aren’t we?’ (92). The repetition of the opening line implies that the events, as unfolded on-stage, are set to begin again. However, Grace’s open-ended accusation from the prologue is absent. It is now replaced by an inclusive ‘we’ that implies that the audience, now, has also been fully ingested by the Gothic cage. Moreover, the audience is fully aware of each characters’ inability to change and the impossibility of the continuity of the itinerant communities they represent.

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Anni will not neglect her professional duty and assumed moral mandate to protect

Grace by forever denying her confrontation with her own abjection. Craig will not admit that the shooting of the boy was, in fact, a racially motivated hate-crime and justice – either legal or cosmic – will never be served. For Emma, even though she has admitted that ‘[w]e’re the enemy / the occupying army’, there is no distance – through space, time, or memory – that will allow her to ‘un-occupy’ the remote community once she is able to recognize herself as an accomplice to the ritualised violence represented on-stage (78). Although it is not stated explicitly, it is the Intervention – as the characterised, yet unseen centre – that forms the symbolic gaping maw that is ingesting everything into its centre. It is the fulcrum into which all of these representations of horror, moral ambiguity, trauma, and dis-ease are being suctioned. Thus, in an intriguing and novel interpretation of the genre’s conventions, The

Dark Room represents bureaucratic intervention as a Gothic entity.

Psychomachia: Trauma-Tragedy and Melancholia

We can think of this composition in terms of a ‘trauma-tragedy’ that, to return to

Duggan’s definition, is a theatrical representation of ‘an emergent structure of feeling’ that is unique to live performance (2012:57). He argues that ‘[r]ather than looking back at a historical moment of trauma, trauma-tragedy is attempting to bridge or reduce the gap between the historical moment, its witness and (that) experience’ (2012:57). This ‘bridge’ between the repressed traumatic events and their return is facilitated by the narrativised, dramatic reveal of the consequences of unrecognised trauma in The Dark Room. They are plotted through the imposition of frequent tonal shifts into a surreal spectacle, which climaxes in a complete syntheses of each moral emergency. Ultimately, the present – that is, the moments that are occurring on stage in real dramatic time – are inexorably anchored to a repressed historical event. Grace and Joseph transform from child-like states, into aggressive

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sexual entities, before participating in ritualised actions that transgress the temporal and spatial boundaries, which separate the individual stories. Thus, Grace and Joseph are vengeful agents that, through their multi-dimensional construction, dramatically coerce Anni and Craig to witness the effects of that unrecognised history. The pillow-case mask and the wedding dress assist in blurring the line between spurts of reality and the revelation that both

Grace and Joseph are, in fact, apparitions.

The repetitious nature of The Dark Room’s representation of trauma echoes David

Punter and Glennis Byron’s description of the literary Gothic’s strategy of ‘recurrence’

(1999). They argue that recurrence is repetition that creates the ‘sense of imminent doom’ because it gestures to ‘foreknowledge of [one’s] own future’ (1999:284). This is an apt description of The Dark Room itself and the fates of its characters. However, an absolute sense of imminent doom is never fully consummated in the play because we experience recurrence in a Gothic narrative loop – a melancholy reverie – of the symbolic relationship between the state, the individuals it claims to protect, and the literal embodiment of its failures. Indeed, for Emma, the child inside her has been consumed, contained, and never to be removed. This cyclic entrapment is also experienced by Grace and Joseph who, in their self-destruction, are similarly unable to narrate their trauma as detached from the surrogate parental figures of the authorities that pledged to protect them. Consequently, Joseph and

Grace will always be the victims of institutional violence that is ‘innocently’ perpetrated by well-meaning – read, paternal – individual citizens in the name of the state. Their trauma is perpetual and there are no visible means – either through action or inaction – that can prevent it from happening again. The identity of these traumatised characters – both victims and victimisers – is now indivisible from their crimes.

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As a result, through The Dark Room’s strategy of enthralment, the witnessing of imminent doom is re-described in terms of a trial or a test in which the tearing off of layers of psychic repression that conceal past crimes is perpetual. It is a conflict of the soul – the psychomachia – within the non-Indigenous psyche that is metaphorically confronted by the irreconcilable moralities of the Intervention and the sovereignty of Indigenous communities that were effected by its policies. Within it, both are represented as doomed outcomes. The dread, here, is contingent on the risk undertaken by the passive or apathetic voyeur who, under the immense pressure of the psychomachia, may or may not decipher the semiotic encoding of Grace and Joseph as metaphoric expressions of the ‘child in peril’ described by the rhetoric used to justify the Intervention. Indeed, with enthralment lies the potent threat that individuals who attempt to resist the spectacle will be addressed on a personal level.

Consequently, catharsis in The Dark Room is contingent on a number of dire narrative outcomes. Audiences are left with either punishment, revelation, or an endless, unsatisfying liminal combination of both. The irreconcilability of trauma and intervention lends a gloomy atmosphere by the conclusion of the play that, following Duggan echoes an experience of trauma itself:

[I]t is not possible to fully comprehend fully what is happening in the

immediacy of the [trauma] moment, it is only after a period of latency that

we are able to ‘see’ the event, to witness it properly through reliving, re-

staging and narrativizing it (2012:26).

So it is in The Dark Room. The melancholic distortion of time, in which trauma is re-played as theatrical haunting, undermines any hope of succession or continuity because it prevents the unproblematic return to a lost state of ignorance.

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There are echoes of the way Jacobs claims that Australia’s Reconciliation project produced its own kind of melancholia for people who felt compelled to apologise in the first place. She refers to this as ‘gloomy reconciliation’ by arguing that:

Sorry people were, then, settler Australians who, in the face of revelations

about Australia’s hidden (we might say actively forgotten or repressed)

colonial past, came to feel they had lost the Australia they once knew and

loved. They assumed not only feelings of guilt but also the mantle of

responsibility for assuaging the legitimacy of their national subjectivity

being compromised. They began to experience a form of settler

melancholia, an unresolved grief for a lost idea of nation (2010:17).

This kind of ‘gloominess’ draws on the explicit signposting of the play’s political context as a metaphor for the larger trauma of Australia’s Indigenous peoples as colonial Subjects. The play debuted months after former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s official apology and, no doubt, this would have compounded its ‘gloomy’ affect. Indeed, within this context, the lost object in the play might be the notion of forgiveness itself. In The Dark Room, the panacea of reconciliation and its promise of the recognition of historic crimes and moral injustices against Indigenous Australians is meaningless by the end of the narrative as the trauma- tragedy is replayed again.

This aspect of the play evokes a political perspective. The social anthropologist,

Melinda Hinkson, critiques the Intervention, arguing that at ‘the heart of the government’s coercive approach lies a clear intent: to bring to an end the recognition of, and support for,

Aboriginal people living in remote communities pursuing culturally distinctive ways of life’

(2007:5). The strategy of a ‘national emergency’ – one that is able to disguise a neoliberal or perhaps neo-colonial agenda as a moral imperative with an invasive, though ‘necessary’,

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practical solution – is important here. Hinkson argues that ‘[t]he discourse of a national emergency [ … ] works very effectively to ground the crisis firmly in the present, severing issues of child sexual abuse from any consideration of the quagmire of past governmental neglect’ (2007:7). The observation that an emergency such as the Intervention might supersede decades of cultural progress and Indigenous policy in an instance of moral pretension appears, on the surface, a paradox of sorts. In this context, The Dark Room represents the worst of both possible worlds. In its fit of Gothic hysteria, the play asserts that the settler state will always impose itself upon the sovereignty of Aboriginal communities by ensuring that the suffering of innocent children continues, ad infinitum, for both victim and victimiser.

Within The Dark Room, the invocation of a national emergency occults centuries of governmental neglect in a way that blinds its audience from the larger colonial forces that are relevant to it. When read in this way, The Dark Room’s repetitions relentlessly re-assert themselves, as expressed theatrically by the blinding white light of the camera flashes that open and close its action. This melancholy yokes the personal experience of The Dark Room to the collective experience of living in a modern settler state by exemplifying Duggan’s description of the trauma-tragedy’s performative function:

Trauma-tragedy articulates the conjoined relationship between a

traumatised contemporary society, which we might think of [ … ] as the

dominant cultural mode, and its performances. It also suggests a

performance mode with the potential to resolve the de-cathected experience

of existence in contemporary society (2012:175).

Resolving the ‘de-cathected experience’ of contemporary society, in this case the moral and psychological ramifications of the Intervention, is central to the play’s characters and to its

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audience. This type of Gothic performance brings the audience into close, personal proximity with specific expressions of trauma and guilt – bringing it face to face with the dangers of a prolonged coddling of the gloomy, yet misleading pleasures of the psychomachia. The Dark

Room re-assesses the role that melancholy plays in contemporary Australia by staging trauma in a symbolic and representational form.

Through the uncanny, the grotesque, and finally abjection, the de-cathected world of bureaucratic morality that is embodied by the play’s settler characters unconsciously confronting the trauma it inflicts is re-cathected or, perhaps, ruptured by the horror generated by the play’s protracted expression of Gothic spectacle. Through this elaborate structure, the play re-describes the Intervention as a culturally constructed technology of colonial power that is both theatrical and real. In this way, The Dark Room exemplifies Karen Malpede’s argument that ‘theatre seems uniquely suited to portray the complex interpersonal [and intrapersonal] realities of trauma’ (1996:168). Thus, for an audience, regardless of their personal proximity to the Intervention, The Dark Room re-frames the trauma inflicted on their behalf as a tragedy that implicates all Australians. The play invites its audience to see the personal and the public as connected phenomena by positioning them to witness the terrifying cause-and-effect loop of political action, cultural inaction, and the psychological consequences of uncritical participation in state power.

Conclusion

The Dark Room pushes the Australian Gothic drama in novel and radical ways by explicitly dramatizing the guilt caused by the settler state’s intervention into Aboriginal sovereignty. The play dredges up anxieties surrounding the way the settler state uses moral emergencies as justification for imposing itself on Aboriginal peoples. The Dark Room

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constructs the victims as monsters that embody the repressed guilt of the settler and transforms innocent bystanders into a grotesque parody of tyranny. Through a strategy of enthralment, the play conjures a radical political position to the modern settler-state; a warning that is preparing audiences for an intergenerational shame that will ripple out from policy and into a culture that permits actions like the Intervention to occur in the twenty-first century. These inescapable shadows and spectres of colonialism echo throughout the play in both the macro and micro cultural relationships of the drama and outwards into the lived- experience and direct political context of its audience. While The Dark Room can be read as a radical polemic on the efficacy of the Intervention, it conjures a thought-provoking and obsessively Gothic rendering of the moral confidences of both sides of the debate and its legacy in recent Australian history by inviting the audience to consider their own position in relation to this large and far-reaching piece of legislation.

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Forgotten Quarantines

An Introduction to Long Shadows

One of the most striking observations that has emerged over the course of this thesis is the discontinuity in the production of Gothic drama over the last two centuries of

Australian theatre. The plays analysed in this thesis thus far were written and produced over a period of about six years, from 2006 to 2012, and each has been shown to speak directly to their specific political and cultural context. The final section of this thesis is an original script entitled Long Shadows. It has been produced over the course of researching and writing this project. Thus, it is self-reflexively situated within the post-Reconciliation context that is outlined in the critical section of the thesis.

The rationale for the inclusion of a creative component as a practice-led mode of inquiry asks one question about Australian Gothic drama and praxis: does the contemporary

Australian Gothic open up new spaces, as the theatre of the post wave was said to do, from which the marginalised might speak or is it fated to self-implode into a generic blankness and leave no theatrical lineage beyond the post-Reconciliation context in which it was produced?

The praxis of Long Shadows questions whether playwrights who produce work in the genre are complicit in the further misrecognition of their own contribution to propagation of colonial ways of thinking in the field. To put it simply, does the Australian Gothic drama described in this thesis indicate a resurgence for the genre and gesture towards a generic maturity or simply exemplify a contained expression of the moral anxiety and settler panic of the age?

The original concept for Long Shadows was inspired by a keynote speech by historian

Tom Griffiths. It is aptly titled, ‘Is Australia a Haunted Country’ (1997). In it, Griffiths

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describes the colonial pastime of collecting and archiving Aboriginal relics and artefacts that was in-vogue in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Griffiths claims that ‘[a]cross

Australia, almost from the moment of British invasion, cabinets of curiosities were gathered and displayed in the lounge room, porch, garage and garden’ (1997:3). Either unwittingly or consciously, this observation acts as an analogue to the sorts of uncanny images discussed in the plays explored in this thesis. This becomes particularly evident when Griffiths goes on to observe that ‘[s]ettlers dredged their localities for artefacts of nature and culture, for some immediate and meaningful past in an unfamiliar land’ (1997:3). Here, in exploiting

Aboriginal culture, settlers have been attempting to create a sense of antiquity, through the literally performative act of the re-appropriation of objects, by artificially investing the nation with a sense of history or sacredness to combat the inherent uncanniness of their experience.

What is most striking about Griffiths’ observations is the often banal form these kinds of uncanny phenomena took. Recalling one moment while working as a field officer for the

State Library of Victoria, Griffiths describes how the rooms of settler homes, adorned with these Romantically imbued artefacts, could be both ‘homely’ and ‘unhomely’ at once by unconsciously representing the settler’s prosaic hearth and an archive of a stolen culture simultaneously. These are places where, to quote Griffiths’ actual experience in this line of work, ‘boomerangs are often a decorative window accessory’ and ancient ‘Aboriginal milling stones prop open doors’ (1997:3).

Long Shadows draws on historical figures that may have been bound up in such an enterprise. The exemplar of this type of settler is the indefatigable and celebrated figure of the pastoralist, Sir Sidney Kidman. The mythology surrounding the early business successes of

Kidman is a rich tapestry of many Australian archetypes and narratives. The strapping, lone

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bullocky, the man of science with radical approaches to agriculture, the innovative business man, the pragmatic and hardy station boss, and the sympathetic diplomat to Aborigines are all archetypes that have been inserted into or projected onto Kidman’s myth in the popular imagination. Many accounts of his life verge on the hagiographic, with claims of a lineage said to stretch back to Henry VI.

Long Shadows borrows much from the Kidman myth in order to produce its Gothic tyrant, Solomon Betzer. The image of the lone bullocky is pilfered straight from the account offered in Ion Idriess’ seminal, The Cattle King (1936), with many other elements of trivia and anecdote coming from the many other revisions of Kidman’s early years that have followed. However, the play’s central, ingested object that has been suctioned from Kidman’s story is the near verbatim tale of the mysterious figure, ‘Billy the Aboriginal’, who, even in

Idriss’ account, is only mentioned in a single line of commentary. This omission remains strange to this day considering that ‘Billy’s’ influence on Kidman is said to be foundational to both his character and his empire. ‘Billy’, an Aboriginal man who is said to have saved

Kidman from dying of thirst somewhere in the remote South Australian desert and then went on to teach him about water in the outback might be one of the most important, yet un- remembered figures in Australian agricultural and economic history. Moreover, further mention of Kidman’s interaction with Aboriginal peoples is just as superficial and reduced to just a cursory mention of ‘old aboriginal stockman, who dearly loved to yarn about the “old days” and “old man Kidman”’ (in The Cattle King ‘Author’s Note’ 1936). There has been little published since that sheds any more light on who ‘Billy’ was, where he came from, or his ultimate fate.

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Further historical details have been taken from Helena Patricia MacDonald’s,

Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (2011) and Warwick Anderson’s, The

Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (2002) as a way of fleshing out the Kidman-esque character, Solomon Betzer, and draw on the history of the colonial interest in amateur science and medicine. These provide the context and motivations for the horrors that Long Shadows describes. Both studies detail the amateur scientific scene in the colonies and the intense interest in Aboriginal peoples that resulted in a whole industry dedicated to exploitation and desecration that was the medical and anthropological specimen trade. The historical circumstances and treatment of Palawa woman Truganini’s body after she passed away in 1876, the sparsely recorded conditions of the Influenza Quarantine Camps in Barambah after World War One, and the Aboriginal people that were incarcerated and treated there also provided the historic basis of the play. As a result, Long Shadows is interested in these aspects of colonial history and also the ways in which they can be used, remediated, and narrated for a contemporary purpose.

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Creative Component

LONG SHADOWS

A Gothic Melodrama

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CHARACTERS

CONG WONG

ROMILLY VISSER

DELORES BETZER

ROXANNE BETZER / MIRANDA

SOLOMON BETZER / SOL

BILLY / VISSER

SETTING

The play is written to be performed in a large space where the movement of performers and the exploration of space can take place freely. Age and race need not be considered when casting performers.

The entire play takes place inside Aparrerinja House. It is a fictional colonial mansion, in between dusty pastoral land and the sea, in western Victoria. The story takes place during a particularly violent dust storm and the action moves back and forth between the early 1900s and the present.

The space should be cavernous, dark, empty, and formless. Large white canvas sheets can be strung up and used as a scrim with all action set in 1919 taken place behind them in silhouette.

The only set piece should be something representing a Victorian boiler – either literally or abstractly – with interconnecting pipes that run to all the rooms in the house.

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There are also four objects that need to be showcased. The first is a wax cylinder phonograph.

The second is a large portrait of a late-nineteenth century colonial gentlemen, hung in a central location. The third is an aged ledger. The forth is a human skull.

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PART I

A spot of light. ROMILLY holds a child’s school assignment – its cover garishly coloured in with pencils, collage, and browning with age. Her story can be illustrated using puppets, projection, or performers.

ROMILLY: [Reading] The History of Solomon Betzer 1855 to 1930. Solomon Betzer was

born in Bombay in India in 1855. He left home when he was fifteen to go to Australia, to

work as a sheep drover. It is said he had five shillings in his pocket. He called it the soft

country because of the soft, shifting sand that whips your face, slits your eyes, thickens the

tongue. One day, in search of his brother, Mr. Betzer ended up droving cows east from

Adelaide. After losing his horse and almost his life, he learned that water is the most

important thing in the Outback. That’s where he met Billy the Aboriginal who helped him

…

[ROMILLY stops and looks over the page.]

And that’s all Billy did, apparently. [Reading] Battling flood and drought and the dust,

Solomon gradually built a property that allowed him to keep his cows near water all the

time. His marriage to a little Scottish schoolteacher gave him a home in White Gum – at

Aparrerinja House – in rural Victoria, and a family who would eventually succeed him.

With the help of his brothers and sons – many of which proudly served their country in

Galplee …

[ROMILLY chuckles.]

Gallipoli. Solomon developed knowledge and interests in all stages of livestock

production and eventually sold livestock, meat, wool and horses across the world. Life for

Solomon Betzer was a constant battle against the land but never against his fellow

228

man. An enlightened and benevolent learner, he gained much from his relationships with the Aborigines and from supporting both young men seeking a life on the land and battling farmers and their widows. Betzer’s death as a rheumatic, almost deaf old man belies the action his life had seen and the contribution he had made to the development of Australia as a world-renowned cattle country. His family would go on to be captains of industry, building an empire in the construction and media industries. By Romilly Visser. Grade two, White Gum Primary 1992.

[ROMILLY tears the project up. Darkness.]

229

Emptiness. The voice of a man in his 60s bellows, echoing as if in a vast chamber. The speech is strained – the speaker exhausted.

SOLOMON: This is the voice of Solomon Betzer!

[The sound of water dripping on stone. The sound of people whispering in a strange

language from all direction. Somewhere a woman quietly weeps.]

Now my charms are all o’erthrown. And … and what strength I have’s mine own, which is

most faint. Now, ‘tis true, I must be here confined by you, or sent to Naples. Let me now,

since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver, dwell on this bare island by your

spell …But … ahh … release me with your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails

must fill, or else my project fails, which was to please …

[Heavy, exhausted breathing.]

Now I want spirits to enforce, art to enchant, and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved

by prayer which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from

crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free.

[A click and a whirl. The sound of pebbles falling, scattering, and the whispering

slowly disappears. A deafening crack.

A loud startling hum, static and Prospero’s speech begins again, this time covered in

static, skipping, distorting. It is distant, empty.

A crack and a tight beam of light burns in, revealing a phonograph playing a wax

cylinder of the speech with its handle-crank winding away. It is covered in dust and

cobwebs.]

230

SOLOMON: [Recording] Set me free. Set me free. Set me free.

[DELORES, a woman in her early fifties and dressed in modern clothes, stands in the

door way. She enters cautiously and stops the machine. A car horn blares in the

distance. DELORES exits.]

231

Dust billows and two car headlights gleam. CONG, a man in his early 30s, is in silhouette.

The drone of the engine and the dull thud of music – The Beastie Boys’ 1994 hit ‘Sabotage’ – plays on the stereo as the wind whips about.

CONG wears a scarf or bandanna protecting his face from the swirling dust. He honks the horn again.

DELORES appears wielding an old rifle with a bayonet attached.

DOLORES: What do you want?!

CONG: Thank God! I thought I was stuck out here!

DELORES: What do you want?!

CONG: Sorry for the horn! Saw someone upstairs!

DELORES: [Screaming] Why are you here?!

[CONG turns off the car radio. DOLORES points the rifle directly at CONG.]

CONG: Wait!

DELORES: Leave now!

CONG: Mrs. Betzer?

DELORES: Who wants to know?

[DELORES cocks the rifle.]

CONG: It’s me.

DELORES: Who?

CONG: Clarence.

DELORES: From?

232

CONG: Melbourne.

[A moment.]

DELORES: Who sent you? Fairfax? Was it Lehman? Dog! I already told you people – he’s

not here. Leave us alone.

CONG: I’m from the University!

[A moment.]

DELORES: Chinese.

CONG: What?

DELORES: You’re meant to be a Chinese!

CONG: Wong. Clarence Wong.

DOLORES: Not due till Friday.

CONG: I’m sorry, Mrs …

[DELORES moves towards him, removes his scarf, and inspects his face.]

DELORES: Lucky you didn’t veer off the bloody road!

CONG: I’m sorry. A thousand apologies. Blew over while I was already on the highway.

DELORES: Come on!

[DELORES gestures and exits. CONG grabs his bags and exits.]

233

Torch light. DELORES enters, relieves herself of the rifle, goes to the wine, and pours a conservative cup. CONG enters.

CONG: My apologies Mrs. Betzer. But, this dust storm, it’s insane.

DELORES: They come. They go.

CONG: It’s pitch black out there.

DELORES: You get used to it.

CONG: I was scared nobody would be in. It’s … /

[DELORES raise a hand and silences CONG.]

Once again, apologies.

[Without looking, DELORES hands him the glass. She takes the flagon for herself and

drinks/guzzles at will.]

Expecting someone?

DELORES: [Guffaws] Always.

[DELORES swigs her wine.]

Is there a problem?

CONG: Sorry. I just thought meeting my first Betzer would be more … glamorous.

DELORES: Shit happens.

CONG: The way they’re treating you, it’s … I’m sorry.

DELORES: Stop it.

CONG: Sorry?

DELORES: It’s nauseating.

[DELORES gives him eyes. Silence.]

CONG: Down the pub, in town. They’re talking. He was a big man, your husband.

234

DELORES: He meant a lot to this town. To me.

CONG: A statesman.

DELORES: A local.

CONG: Seems they’re all pretty keen to know what gonna’ happen to this place. Now he’s

gone. And the land ... /

DELORES: You’ve been talking?

CONG: No.

DELORES: And our correspondence?

CONG: You’ve got nothing to worry about.

DELORES: If you see anyone – and I mean anyone – even poking their nose through that

front gate. [Indicating] Know how to use a firearm?

CONG: No.

DELORES: Shame.

[A moment.]

The penthouse in South Yarra’s surrounded. Got to Roxanne. A swarm of them. Knocked

the poor girl to the sidewalk. Ticks. This has nothing to do with her.

CONG: Any goon with a camera phone these days … I’ve seen the papers. /

[DELORES interrupts CONG though he continues with his thought.]

DELORES: Which one?

CONG: So it’s true what they’re saying about your brother-in-law.

DELORES: Depends on what newspaper you read.

CONG: Only the one your family owns.

DELORES: [Harsh laugh] It’s lies. Mostly. You understand?

CONG: None of my business.

DELORES: Good.

235

CONG: But … /

DELORES: Yes?

CONG: Your brother-in-law’s missing, yeah? That’s what they’re printing.

[DELORES guffaws.]

There’s a lot of people worried about him, Mrs. Betzer. The Federal Police, for one. If he’s

in danger … /

DELORES: My brother-in-law’s whereabouts are currently unknown by me and every

member of my family. Do you understand?

[A moment.]

[Takes a sip of wine] Drive was a bit hectic. Thanks.

[CONG raises his glass.]

DELORES: I’ve not gone completely native. This house, Aparrerinja, was famous for its

hospitality. Something I was proud of.

CONG: Legendary. You wonder about the people that’s been here. Drunk wine here. Your

great-grandfather … /

DELORES: In-law.

CONG: Boy, was he a piece of work … What he did out here – shaped the whole region. The

nation, even. It means a lot to be here. Life’s passion, if that doesn’t sound too tragic.

Sorry. I just can’t believe I’m here. It’s an honour, really.

[The clanging of steel can be heard within. DELORES begins fidgeting – looking for

something buried in her pockets. She becomes distracted, scanning the room.]

Thanks … for considering me. Over all the others. The second they know you’ve opened

the station for nerds like me, they’ll be pounding on the door.

DELORES: That’s what the rifle’s for.

[CONG forces a laugh. There is a moment.]

236

How quickly can you work?

CONG: Um …

DELORES: I need a time frame.

CONG: Um, well … it depends.

DELORES: On what?

CONG: The inventory. I’ll have to do one. Of what’s in storage. Then there’ll be the handling

of all the materials.

DELORES: Days?

CONG: There are a few details I don’t fully understand ....

DELORES: A week?

CONG: Are we talking about his bedside drawer or a three story library?

DELORES: This part of the building was boarded up in in 1932.

[DELORES produces an enormous set of old keys and clasps them in CONG’S

hands.]

You said you were competent, Doctor Clarence.

[CONG is lost for words.]

You lie to me?

[A moment.]

CONG: I’m the best.

DELORES: You understand what I expect of you, yes?

CONG: You were very clear.

DELORES: Good.

CONG: Your side of the family own Aparrerinja. It’s your claim. Will or no – I’ll make sure

of it.

[DELORES takes the flagon and begins to leave.]

237

DELORES: Thank you, dear. Now, I wish to mourn my late husband in peace. Keep the

noise to a dull roar.

CONG: My thoughts are with you and your family. And Godspeed to your brother-in-law.

DELORES: You’ve got seven days.

[A moment.]

CONG: Lady Betzer, thank you for this opportunity. Properly recording and remembering

your family and their long, immensely prosperous history is something all the whole

country will be grateful for. We will be proud. Together.

[DELORES chuckles.]

DELORES: Not my family.

[DELORES disappears into the darkness, taking the torch with her. Darkness.]

238

CONG lets out an enormous sigh, releasing his concealed tension. The clanging continues and CONG follows the sound to the furnace plate of the boiler. He opens its screen and peers inside. He picks up a pebble from the floor and casts it into the dark hole. The sound of the pebble ricochets as if it were travelling below and above him, before settling somewhere deep and subterranean.

A loud clang of steel echoes in response. Footsteps above. CONG switches on a torch, following the footsteps. Shadowy figures appear. Voices and whispers.

A woman, MIRANDA, emerges from the darkness veiled in white.

MIRANDA: [Muttering throughout] I had a little bird, its name was Enza.

VOICE: [Reading at speed with no punctuation] It is well known that these Aborigines

afforded a pure and perfect type of their race and it therefore becomes doubly necessary of

the greatest interest that this should be preserved.

VOICE: In the eyes of all the civilised and Scientific world it would indeed be accounted

disgraceful and discreditable to Australia were such a type of a now extinct race allowed

to be cast away as a thing of no value at present or of interest to posterity.

VOICE: At times like the present when the study of race occupies so much learned attention,

types of this kind are of high value and it may safely be affirmed that in future years a

specimen in

VOICES: OUR National Museum would possess greater interest for the learned and scientific

traveller from other lands.

239

VOICE: If they were buried in any old cemetery, their remains would not remain there for

long before being pilfered for their great value. The Royal Society taking possession of the

remains hurts no one for there is no one remaining that may wish to mourn for them.

VOICES: No one for there is no one remaining that may wish to mourn for them.

[CONG discovers a wall covered in a large sheet. he pulls it down revealing a large

portrait of a nineteenth century settler.]

CONG: Found ya’. You old bastard.

[CONG’S torch reveals an old ledger open. He lights a cigarette and begins to read

the ledger.]

MIRANDA: [Muttering throughout] I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened a

window and in flew Enza.

[Footsteps approaching.]

240

CONG reads. From the darkness, a voice …

ROMILLY: [Off] Shouldn’t be smoking around the stuff.

[CONG reacts. ROMILLY, a woman in her late-twenties, enters.]

CONG: [Startled] Jesus!

ROMILLY: Romilly. Nice to meet you too.

[An awkward shake of the hand.]

Public Records. From the local office and archives. Can I pinch one of those? Didn’t stock

up before I got here. Was supposed to quit. Something about this place makes you want

one. One after the other.

[CONG begrudgingly offers her a cigarette. She takes own and the lighter.]

She didn’t tell you I was here, huh?

CONG: No.

ROMILLY: She’s a whole kettle of fish at the moment. Pills, I think. And the shiraz. Seems

you can score anything for a spot of grief if you’re mega rich. You that academic? Look

like an academic.

CONG: Thank you.

[ROMILLY begins shuffling through the piles of paper CONG has made.]

[Reading] Twenty-five quarts’ formaldehyde. Ten quarts’ opium …

CONG: Don’t touch those.

ROMILLY: [Looking up at the portrait.] I see you’ve found Ol’ Solomon Betzer. Been

looking for it. George Bell painted it, apparently.

CONG: You’re sure?

241

ROMILLY: Tagged and bagged the receipt this arvo’. Solomon commissioned it after the

painter got back from the Academie in Paris … /

CONG: Well, I’d notify the Gallery as soon as possible.

ROMILLY: What about Bell’s family? Surely they … /

CONG: The gallery, please.

[CONG continues to work.]

ROMILLY: Well, he hated it, apparently. Kept it to spite ‘em. It’s why it’s still here … /

CONG: I’m the only one supposed to be here.

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: Told wrong.

CONG: I have it in writing.

ROMILLY: Delores Betzer’s famous for keeping her promises?

CONG: Family’s lawyers are.

ROMILLY: She tell you to shoot me too, then?

CONG: I don’t believe in violence.

ROMILLY: [Indicating the portrait] Unlike him?

[A moment.]

CONG: Man’s a hero.

ROMILLY: You believe that?

CONG: This site’s mine. All it will take is a phone call to your director ... /

ROMILLY: Phone’s down.

CONG: How long have you been here?

ROMILLY: Been through the Station Master’s Office. Down the South End.

[The south ignites in brilliant light. The sound of cattle and men calling.]

242

Ledgers, if you must know. Hundreds of them. Every person who’s ever worked here.

Names. Wages. Every head of cattle in his early empire was marked and maimed out

there. Then, to the west …

[The west ignites.]

… the Aboriginal camp. Numbers go up and down year to year. Most of the guys worked

with the cattle. No names, unfortunately. Wages, though. At a guess … maybe thirty or

forty. Stayed during the wet while all the whites pissed off to Adelaide or Melbourne.

[The east ignites.]

East wing burned down in the twenties. That’s when everything stops. Drought. It’s when

they changed it all up. Mining. Building and construction. Gave the Hancock’s a run for

their money out in Wittenoom.

[Slight moment. All light fades away.]

Impressed?

CONG: How did you guys even know the house was open? Delores had me jumping through

hoops. Email, letters – physical letters – secret bloody instructions.

ROMILLY: I asked her.

CONG: Not even Newscorp knows where she is.

ROMILLY: Yeah, well, it’s been ages since anyone saw something as nice as an Audi

hoonin’ about these backroads. I just knocked.

[CONG huffs.]

What did she promise you?

CONG: Nothing.

ROMILLY: What did you promised her, then?

CONG: What are you implying?

ROMILLY: That there’s something up.

243

CONG: Find an archive. Call an expert. Simple.

ROMILLY: I read your book, you know.

CONG: All of it?

ROMILLY: Enough of it to know the Betzer’s lawyers don’t know you’re here. Family’s

pretty litigious … /

CONG: [Snapping] Of course I know.

ROMILLY: Fine. There’s stuff in here worth millions. Lost portraits by early Aussie masters

aside. There’s other stuff, too.

[CONG reacts.]

Bad stuff. Should’ve been torched years ago. If I were written into the family will, I

would’ve blown up the cliffs. Let it sink into the sea.

CONG: Records’ only interested in births, deaths ... /

ROMILLY: And marriages mostly. But …

[ROMILLY nods and snatches an old ledger from the table. CONG darts, she holds

up a finger.]

[Reading] Pitch of distilled water. Fifteen crates – faggots of incense. Three gallons of

opium poppy, notice of shipment on the MV Maru Noor. West Indies. March of 1908. I

know exactly what you’re after. This stuff – not gonna’ help ya’.

CONG: I’ve only just got here.

ROMILLY: Well, you’re wasting time. Chemicals’ for taxidermy. Opium’ a bit of fun.

CONG: How’d you know that?

[ROMILLY pulls a piece of paper from her pocket.]

ROMILLY: [Reading mockingly] Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold,

were all spirits and are melted into air … Blah, blah, blah.

[ROMILLY casts the paper into the air. CONG scrambles to return it to the table.]

244

Betzer considered himself a bit of a Byron. Drug-addled, clichéd garbage.

[CONG chuckles.]

What?

CONG: Shakespeare.

ROMILLY: Solomon’s handwriting.

CONG: The Tempest. Act four, scene one. Don’t they teach you that out here?

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: Well, you know he thought the colony was a wasteland. You know. You know.

What did you call him? Some uomo universale or something.

CONG: Renaissance man.

ROMILLY: All that dope in your ledger there – just the old man’s muse. I mean, come on –

the guy frequented every opium den this side of the colony. Everyone knows that. They do

out here, at least. Proving some rich settler got on the bong? Gee whiz, buddy – collect

your Hancock Prize!

[CONG snatches back the ledger.]

CONG: How long have you been here?

ROMILLY: My whole life. We’re not all bogans, ya’ know?

CONG: Bet you’ve already messed-up any chance of a useful catalogue.

ROMILLY: Was me that recommended you to the old lady.

[A moment.]

CONG: Thank you.

ROMILLY: And I risked it ‘cause I’m here for the same reason you are.

CONG: There are stakes here. In this place. It’s my job.

ROMILLY: I know.

CONG: No you don’t.

245

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: I know you don’t use formaldehyde to chemically castrate natives.

CONG: [Startled] Jesus ...

ROMILLY: You use precision instruments.

CONG: Keep your voice down.

ROMILLY: And then there’s the missing children.

CONG: Be quiet!

ROMILLY: And I know that despite one hundred years of sustained occupation, anyone who

happened to be Aboriginal disappeared without a trace after about 1920. And about

twenty-four innocent lives snuffed out without a trace. Give or take.

CONG: All right!

[A moment.]

She said we’ve got a week.

[A moment. ROMILLY nods. A loud clang of steel in the distance.]

246

Weeping in the darkness and the sound of a rattling breath. DELORES enters carrying a bed pan.

DELORES: [Harsh whispering] Enough. Enough. Think you’re the only one who can make

a racket.

[Clang, clang, clang. DELORES begins to bangs away on a nearby pipe.]

You’ll stop it or you won’t get the pan you blind old bitch!

[The clanging stops. DELORES presents the bed pan. The sound of CONG and

ROMILLY speaking in the distance.]

Shush! Hush, hush, hush. Oh – do you hear them? Do you hear them, my dear? Would you

believe it – one’s an Oriental. You would never have allowed it. I know all about Uncle

Ray in the camps. Oh, of course I know it was fucking Burma! For the one hundredth and

sixty-eighth time – I know all about Uncle Ray and fucking Burma. Always did care about

the dead men of the family. More than anyone living. Alive and in need. All those boys.

Thin as rakes. Those slant-eyed bastards. Those nasty, nasty slant-eyed bastards. You see

– there’s just something about all those Oriental languages, Dolli my dear. Not a skerrick

of music in them. A guttural tongue. Harsh. Cruel. Dare I say – barbaric. Think of all those

poor Australian boys suffering. Starving. Think how the last thing some of them ever got

to hear was the sound of some dreadful Jap – a Jap and his dreadful language – barking.

Oh, they’re a hateful people. They hide it well. Oh they hide it beneath their mewling

veneer of manners. Poor Uncle Ray. Used to shiver. Poor boy trembled for a decade just at

the sight of them. Poor thing. Thin as a rake, he was. Now they’re buying houses on the

harbour … What a kick in the teeth to all our skinny, little Australian boys. They’ll out-

number us soon enough. Our boys … Our boys … I don’t blame you, dear. I really don’t.

247

[The sound of liquid hitting a steel pot.]

Still life in you yet.

[DELORES exits.]

248

ROMILLY and CONG.

ROMILLY: [Reading from the dedication of book] ‘No harm. I have done nothing but in care

of thee, Of thee my dear one’. What’s his deal with Shakespeare anyway?

[CONG shrugs. ROMILLY snaps the book shut and reads the spine.]

‘Surgical Observations on the Restoration of the Nose; and the Removal of Polypi and

Other Tumours From the Nostrils’. His handwriting on every page.

CONG: What year?

ROMILLY: 1898. What’s it about?

CONG: Tumours, I reckon.

ROMILLY: The Tempest.

CONG: A magician.

ROMILLY: Oh, yeah?

CONG: He’s smart. Everyone’s jealous of him so they kick him out of Naples. He washes up

on an island and becomes a God and, ah, gets his revenge on the fools that put him there.

ROMILLY: Sounds ‘awesome’.

CONG: [Reading another spine] ‘Anatomy of the Native and His Medical Treatment’.

‘Hysteria and Uterine Prolapse in the Developing Female Negro’. 1865.

ROMILLY: Every room.

CONG: Guys like Betzer – amateurs. Whole of the nineteenth century’s full of ‘em. Nobody

with any real talent bothered to make it out here. It became, kind of, the cool thing to do.

Amateur anatomy. Physiognomy. Alchemy, even. Nineteenth century Australia was a

paradise for quacks. Found his borrowing records from the ‘Dawkins’ Travelling Library’.

Found it amongst some spear tips in a box donated after some old bird ... /

249

ROMILLY: [Disapprovingly] ‘Bird’?

CONG: Former Governor’s wife died. Got an inkling he was into this stuff. But this … this is

an obsession.

[CONG opens the book and things grow darker. SHADOWS emerge in the darkness.]

[Reading] 'A favourable season for an operation is either spring or autumn. In the spring,

the blood is revived with greater heat whilst in the autumn blood is calm … the blood has

not the vivacity required to animate the body’. Australian Association for the

Advancement of Science. 1888.

[CONG slams the book shut. Light returns.]

ROMILLY: What’s it for?

CONG: A hysterectomy.

[CONG tosses the book, ROMILLY collects it. The sound of clanging steel in the

distance. It slowly builds in volume as they speak.]

ROMILLY: Pretty wide reading for a humble bullocky.

CONG: Nothing humble about him.

ROMILLY: Then he met Billy.

CONG: Billy?

ROMILLY: Billy the Aboriginal.

CONG: You really believe Billy was real?

ROMILLY: Everyone knows Billy was real.

CONG: Billy was ten different Anangu guys. Each one them tied up, tortured, force-fed salt

until he showed him where the secret waterholes were. You said you checked the station’s

inventories?

ROMILLY: So far it’s just receipts for the surgical instruments, drugs, and litres of

chemicals.

250

CONG: All fits, doesn’t it?

ROMILLY: Fit what? How?

CONG: If you had to guess what this placed was used for, based on the inventory, what

would you say?

ROMILLY: A kind of hospital.

CONG: No patient records. Certainly no staff. For ‘whom’?

ROMILLY: [Muttering] There were staff.

CONG: No nurses. No doctors.

ROMILLY: Spanish Flu was killing heaps … /

CONG: It wasn’t the Flu!

[A moment.]

That’s clever. But, I can save us some time. Look, it may have knocked out half the

population elsewhere, but the nearest recorded case was two hundred kilometres away.

You’ve read my thesis.

ROMILLY: Most of it.

CONG: I think we can put that theory to bed. The pipes. The station master’s shopping list.

Think.

ROMILLY: I am.

CONG: This is not the first time a case like this has popped up.

ROMILLY: You mean that stuff about those hospitals in Canada. Those Inuit kids you wrote

about?

CONG: They prefer First Nation Canadians, I think.

ROMILLY: Some of those Doctors went to Nuremburg because of what they did.

CONG: So you liked the gruesome bits?

ROMILLY: They were extensive.

251

CONG: They were true.

ROMILLY: Yeha.

CONG: Happened in South Australia too. Flinders Uni. Melbourne. Apology after apology.

And most of it happened in living memory.

ROMILLY: ‘Most of that’? Some of them kids are adults now.

CONG: In 1917 the drought wiped out two thirds of his herd. Yet he managed to keep going.

Must’ve had a nice little earner on the side.

ROMILLY: This’s different … /

CONG: [Slamming book closed] No it’s not.

[A moment.]

It’s just worse. There was an industry. These people … /

[ROMILLY goes to correct him.]

[Correcting himself] To these people. Imagine what you could get away with on the edge

of the world. With a hundred years before anyone paid attention.

ROMILLY: [Muttering] These people … /

CONG: Remember – it was an elected Government that forced people out here in 1897.

Ripping apart families. Smashing together different languages. Makin’ a generation-wide

hole in their culture.

ROMILLY: I know … /

CONG: Total authority. No compassion whatsoever.

ROMILLY: I know … /

CONG: And forcing them straight into open arms of a butcher … /

ROMILLY: I KNOW!

[A beat.]

Was he alone?

252

CONG: What do you mean?

ROMILLY: Aparrerinja House was a big operation. Travelling workers, the pickers, an army

of drovers, a whole house staff even. Surely someone noticed. Someone with some guts

CONG: That’s what I mean by these people.

ROMILLY: Yeah.

CONG: Look at the plumbing. House is full of it. Every room in the wing. All connects to an

enormous boiler downstairs.

ROMILLY: That he got from … /

CONG: Doesn’t matter where it’s from.

ROMILLY: But … /

CONG: Bet its maw glowed like the mouth of hell. An abattoir for the specimen trade. He

may have despised Aboriginal people, but it takes more than one psychopath to commit

mass-murder like this. The evidence is here. All we need to do is find it. Look, if this is

too much …

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: As long as you’re sure.

CONG: This is a dark place, Romilly … /

ROMILLY: I believe you.

CONG: You want the truth too, right?

ROMILLY: I just want to know what happened.

CONG: And this is what happened.

[ROMILLY looks at a sheet of old paper.]

ROMILLY: The boiler was from Birmingham. Excelsior Trading Proprietary Limited … /

CONG: It doesn’t matter where it’s from.

ROMILLY: On May the 7th, 1912.

253

[ROMILLY shoves a piece of paper into CONG’S hand.]

CONG: You’re good, yes, I get it …

ROMILLY: My Great-Grandad signed that invoice.

[A moment.]

My family – we’ve never left this place.

[Clanging increases. ROMILLY looks to the sound, looks to CONG, and exits.]

CONG: Romilly!

254

The following scene is performed in harsh whispers, perhaps amplified from the performers.

Their figures should be difficult to make out, concealed in shadow. Moonlight seeps in from a window. In the far reaches of the space, DELORES stands, gazing out. ROMILLY enters.

DELORES: Just one moment alone with my grief is all I asked ...

ROMILLY: Don’t get to make demands. Not to me.

DELORES: You know – for a bleeding-heart, you’re very cold, dear.

ROMILLY: I want to speak to her.

DELORES: Impossible.

ROMILLY: It’s important.

DELORES: Not to me.

ROMILLY: You’ll let me or … /

DELORES: You know as well as I do that there’s no way through this storm.

ROMILLY: Please, Delores.

DELORES: [Indicating the window] The first break in the dust for days. The moon. Quick or

you’ll miss it.

[DELORES gestures ROMILLY over.]

There, you see? It wasn’t like this when I was a girl. Worse every year.

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: We used to get the week off school.

DELORES: My father built that school.

ROMILLY: When I was little, there was this prize for the best local history project. Trip to

Canberra on your family’s dime.

255

DELORES: Most of you wrote about Solomon. How he started out with five shillings. That

Aboriginal boy and how he learned how to track. Where the secret water holes were. God

– it was garbage.

ROMILLY: Did mine that whole month we got off. After they found the asbestos in the

ceiling.

DELORES: The Fraser Memorial History of White Gum Prize – Jesus, what a mouthful.

Rewarding our town’s brightest, little lights – it was a privilege we all savoured.

ROMILLY: Did mine on my Uncle. Poor guy served in Vietnam. Ended up working for your

dad. Only one that would hire him. Even helped build the school.

DELORES: And how did you fare?

ROMILLY: Debby Collins got to go to Canberra that year. But, I was happy with my book

token.

DELORES: Well done. Though – to tell you the truth – I never read any of the blasted things.

ROMILLY: Wish your dad had.

DELORES: Too late, I’m afraid. His lungs, dear. You’d know. Never smoked, seldom drank.

One day he felt weak. Three months and he turned a pale yellow. You know it, intimately.

But, our grief was not given the luxury of being public. He would have been proud – so

proud – of just how far that book token took one of his bright, little lights.

ROMILLY: You blame them?

DELORES: I’m grateful to the Betzers.

ROMILLY: Let me see her.

DELORES: No.

ROMILLY: This storm will end eventually. It won’t be reporters I speak to first … /

[DELORES draws her rifle and moves quickly towards ROMILLY, pinning the

bayonet to her throat.]

256

[Hushed, near tears] She was there. Why? Why can’t I? Please?

DELORES: You’re here as a kindness.

ROMILLY: I need to know.

[DELORES releases her. ROMILLY exits. With the precision of an experienced

shooter, she disassembles the rifle and casts it aside. The clanging returns.]

DELORES: [Screaming] Shut up!

257

10.

The scream echoes in the darkness, rattling through the empty pipes. CONG is in the room with the phonograph. He reacts to the sound and then places a cylinder in the machine.

SOLOMON: [Recording] Is it turning? You have to … [Clearing throat] Upon casting one’s

eye across … I mean, surely, no: a face so effeminate, so self-admiring, so emaciated as to

be indiscernible to a common fribble could never have descended in a direct line from the

heroes of Poitiers and Agincourt! What? … It is bloody necessary! The bloody bugger has

made me up to be a damned …

[The recording cuts out. Static. CONG looks up at the portrait and laughs.]

CONG: Not that bad, Solomon.

[CONG loads another cylinder. SNAP the lights burn within. SOLOMON’S silhouette

looms large as his voice booms.]

SOLOMON: [Off] We have seized upon the country and shot down the inhabitants, until the

survivors have found it expedient to submit to our rule!

[A hacking cough and blood sprays across the scrim.]

We have acted as Julius Caesar did when he took possession of Britain. We have a right to

our Australian possessions. But … but it is the right of Conquest, and we hold them with

the grasp of Power. Unless we pro … pro … proceed on this foundation … Our conduct

towards the native population can only be considered …

[SOLOMON’S cough sprays more blood. A huge burst of steam within and the scrim

falls, revealing the silhouette of SOLOMON in a chair, left arm violently pointing to

the sky. He breathes heavily, his voice feeble.]

SOLOMON: Our conduct towards the native population can only be considered … a

monstrous absurdity.

258

[BILLY enters in a protective suit.]

Billy – I’m sorry.

[BILLY gently removes SOLOMON’S hand from his face.]

I have asked Visser to carry out the procedure. She’s young. Healthy tissue is what they

need. It pains me greatly, but she’s perfect.

[SOLOMON begins to sob.]

I’m sorry.

[BILLY administers a pain killer. ROMILLY enters and they disappear.]

ROMILLY: Find anything?

CONG: You’re bleeding.

[ROMILLY touches the small wound on her throat. She shakes. CONG stands and

moves towards her. They embrace.]

259

11.

ROMILLY is sprawled out with books and papers around her. CONG enters with a flagon of wine.

ROMILLY: [Reading from the dedication] ‘To do a great right, do a little wrong’. Merchant

of Venice. Act one, scene nine.

[CONG pours himself a glass.]

Does that belong to Delores Betzer?

[CONG shrugs.]

Be careful around her.

CONG: She’s just an old lady.

ROMILLY: I know you were already convinced, but are you even, at all, surprised there’s

this much stuff, Evidence.

CONG: We are ‘ah-mazing’.

ROMILLY: It’s useless until we find their names.

CONG: Records were pretty lax when it came to itinerant Aboriginals.

ROMILLY: These people … they’re real people.

CONG: Save it for the book tour.

ROMILLY: I’ll bet there’s great-grandkids running around. Some of the old folks in town …

they talk. But nothin’ really. Seems everyone wants to forget.

[ROMILLY stares at CONG. He nods ever so slightly.]

CONG: I know. The jokes … distract me from the details. But, it’s the truth. And it’s gonna’

change things.

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: All he did was sign an invoice.

260

CONG: You’re not your Great-Great Grandfather.

ROMILLY: I know that.

CONG: Don’t snap at me.

[A moment. They go back to work.]

ROMILLY: Family’s Jewish. Or at least we were. So, Dr. Geert Visser leaves Holland in the

late nineteenth century. That’s Dad’s side. Mum’s side stays.

[ROMILLY looks to see if CONG is listening.]

Two generations. Two completely different families. One side fights up in the Indies, Java,

Indonesia. Then he’s a settler here. Then a murderer. The other side loses three brothers

and two sisters to the Germans. Two at Dachau. Shit memories, shit jobs, shit everything.

Lost it all – even their bloody Jewish name. Makes em’ get out of Europe. Oma meets Opa

in a shitty, little town called White Gum on the edge of a hostel, through the fence, in the

middle of nowhere.

[CONG is aware that ROMILLY is trying to subtlety get his attention. He feigns

interest.]

And they never leave. I never leave. Maybe she gave it up – being a Jew. I dunno. So I’m

a Catholic now. Would you have signed that invoice as well?

CONG: We … can’t judge. Different time.

ROMILLY: Right.

[A moment. CONG is glad the moment is over.]

Started sayin’ ‘Shalom’ this ‘Shalom’ at the end, my Oma. Mum says it’s because of being

all … demented.

[A long moment.]

Oma means grandma … /

CONG: I get it.

261

[CONG places a glass in front of ROMILLY.]

A bit disappointed Roxanne Betzer didn’t come out here with her mum,

ROMILLY: Don’t be gross.

CONG: Yeah – I find her pretty repulsive, too.

ROMILLY: I’ll bet.

CONG: She’s pretty. But in an ‘obvious’ kind of way. Know what I mean?

ROMILLY: No, I don’t.

CONG: It’s the privilege that shits me.

ROMILLY: You’re just jealous.

CONG: And all of it built on genocide. It’s the kind of inequality that should drive you to

drink as well.

[ROMILLY eyes the glass and then sculls her wine.]

ROMILLY: I’m white.

CONG: You’re a woman.

ROMILLY: Fuck you.

CONG: Bleeding heart.

ROMILLY: Well, you’re an immigrant. Typical. Refusing to assimilate. Patriarchy’s a

national treasure.

CONG: Patriarchy’s pretty celebrated back home as well.

ROMILLY: Home? What: Geelong?

CONG: You haven’t done pretty badly in the man’s world. You’re successful. Smart. Pretty.

ROMILLY: In an obvious way?

CONG: Makes you wonder why we even needed feminism.

ROMILLY: Because there are women out there that haven’t had opportunities like me.

Smash the patriarchy. Fuck the patriarchy. Every sheila’s duty.

262

CONG: Most of them aren’t as smart as you.

ROMILLY: Fuck you.

CONG: Say what you like about patriarchy. Least it existed.

ROMILLY: Oh, fuck off!

CONG: I’m a poor, impoverished ethnic …

ROMILLY: Hardly fresh off the boat.

CONG: [Muttering] I’ve learned to get over your country’s casual racism.

ROMILLY: [Muttering and chuckling] My country …

CONG : But me – I can only dream of enjoying the same privileges as you: a successful white

lady. Get patronised simply ordering a beer.

ROMILLY: That’s what pisses you off the most?

CONG: [Speaking loudly and patronisingly] ‘Would you like a big beer or a little beer,

mate’?

ROMILLY: Ha!

CONG: Should’ve heard them down in White Gum. Fucking infuriating.

ROMILLY: Ah, that’s just White Gum. You ever spent time out here?

CONG: Talk and look at me like I’m disabled or something.

ROMILLY: Well, you’re all as disabled as us feminists then.

CONG: Practically demented.

ROMILLY: Shalom.

[A moment. ROMILLY nods to BETZER’S portrait.]

ROMILLY: Wonder how he would feel about two demented lefties going through all his shit.

CONG: Calling him out.

ROMILLY: Fighting for justice.

CONG: The demented girl …

263

ROMILLY: And the poor ass chink.

[They clink glasses.]

CONG: Chink?

ROMILLY: Yep – Chinky-poo. Just what my Dad’s mates say.

CONG: Still?

ROMILLY: It’s a joke ....

[ROMILLY laughs, faux punches CONG’S arm.]

Sorry. It’s just White Gum. They don’t mean it. I mean, it’s just an innocent racial slur.

Ugh – this place!

CONG: Don’t even think my parents got called ‘chinky poo’. Maybe during the War.

ROMILLY: Which war?

CONG: The opium one.

[A moment. ROMILLY sculls her wine and collects herself.]

ROMILLY: I’m sorry, Cong.

CONG: Could’ve just called me Asian.

ROMILLY: Sometimes it just comes out.

CONG: Asian is fine.

ROMILLY: Really, I’m sorry.

CONG: It’s okay.

ROMILLY: Asian’s just a description.

CONG: Racial slurs are descriptive. In Australia, at least.

ROMILLY: We’re the worst out here, but we don’t mean it.

CONG: Whole country’s got no imagination when it comes to being bigots.

ROMILLY: We so do.

CONG: Not the white bit.

264

ROMILLY: The bit that matters.

CONG: No, no, no. Hear me out. [Sculls his drink, stands] So, the Prime Minister stands up

for a press conference. Camera, there, there, there and here. [Clearing throat, mimicking a

politician] ‘We Australians must work together – White Australians, Indigenous

Australians … Asians … Muslim Australians, etcetera, etcetera ‘. Just a teeny bit of a

pause, bit of consideration on the word – ‘Asians’ … That’ll do it.

ROMILLY: [Mimicking CONG] Asians.

CONG: Asians.

ROMILLY: Asians.

CONG: Asians.

ROMILLY: Asians.

CONG: Asians.

ROMILLY: Asians.

CONG: Asians.

ROMILLY: Asians.

[CONG and ROMILLY are very close.]

I don’t think I would’ve signed that invoice.

CONG: More wine?

[Rain drops.]

265

12.

CONG enters. He hums, maybe sings. Rain droplets hit the iron roof. The sound of clanking and a person crying. SOLOMON enters covered in blood.

SOLOMON: You hear that, boy? Like some wild dog who’s got herself caught in a rabbit

trap. That noise they make. She’s done in. Doesn’t know it yet. She’ll keep at it. [Nodding

to the portrait] What do you reckon boy – reckon it makes me look like a poofter?

CONG: [Chuckling] Poofter.

SOLOMON: Master of the French arts, my arse!

[SOLOMON pulls the painting down, undoes his fly and begins urinating on it.

CONG laughs and also begins urinating.

CONG chuckles.

SOLOMON chuckles.

They both begin laughing that develops into maniacal laughter.]

SOLOMON: Always need a good laugh after a hard day. A hard day of cutting!

CONG: Uh-huh!

[The rain gets heavier.]

SOLOMON &

CONG: [Burbling and yelling] Now my charms are all o’erthrown. And … and what strength

I have’s mine own, which is most faint. Now, ‘tis true, I must be here confined by you, or

sent to Naples. Let me now, since I have my dukedom got and pardoned the deceiver,

dwell on this bare island by your spell. But release me with your good hands. Gentle

266

breath of yours my sails must fill, or else my project fails, which was to please. Now I

want spirits to enforce, art to enchant, and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by

prayer which pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from

crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free!

[Lightning strikes. Long shadows shoot up the walls. The silhouettes of bodies –

SHADOWS – writhe and shiver. Shouting within. The clank of chains and wailing.

SOLOMON conducts the elements with his hands with long, melodramatic gestures.

The rain pelts down and thunder bellows.

Harsh gusts of steam shoot from within.

CONG and SOLOMON laugh maniacally.

Enter DELORES, pissed-as, with the bayonet from the rifle. SOLOMON and the

bodies freeze, watching them.]

DELORES: How do you find the Shiraz?

[SNAP. Darkness. CONG freezes. Throughout, the SHADOWS and SOLOMON listen

and react to the information as it is revealed.]

CONG: Good grapes out here.

DELORES: Name? What’s its name?

[DELORES checks the label of the bottle through her drunk cock-eye. She ditches it.]

Californian. Names. Names. Names. [Noticing CONG] You know you’re very tall, Dr.

Wong. Sorry, Dr. Clarence. Oh, good grief. Clarence Smith doesn’t suit you. Names, oh

yes. [Stroking CONG’S cheek] I understand, though, sweetie. We both share terribly

267

inaccurate names. Delores. Muriel. Dawn. Adelaide … Betzer. It’s ridiculous. A never

ending procession of names and names and … and ancestors.

[DELORES swings the bayonet about. SHADOWS cackle.]

CONG: Long name.

DELORES: Titles – did you know we have titles?! How gloriously antiquated.

CONG: Good works, you’ve done. The best.

DELORES: Ah, but it’s my husband’s name that’s done the ‘good works’. The distinguished

one. Mine – mine’s merely descriptive. [Cooing] Oh – what have we done Cong? What

have we done that’s good?

CONG: Lots of money.

DELORES: I wanted to marry a man with a sweet name. Something out of a fairy-tale. Lady

Delores-Muriel-Dawn-Adelaide … Betzer – a little girl doesn’t want that name. Do they,

huh?

CONG: Little girls like nice names.

DELORES: Little girls with nice names get whisked away. In the night-time. For adventures.

Beautiful dark hair. Pearl-white skin. Deep brown eyes ... You are very tall!

CONG: Is everything all right, Lady Betz ... /

DELORES: Say my name!

CONG: Too distinguished. Long …

DELORES: Go on – you’re perceptive. Clever. I want you to recite my descriptive name.

Like it’s a Latin name … /

CONG: No, no, no

DELORES: Of some exotic guinea hen. Describe me. Describe me with my distinguished

Saxonnic nomenclature. Ha! Big, smart word.

CONG: Too late for games

268

DELORES: Oh, I simply adore games! Do it. And I’ll tell you a secret. A little suspicious

secret.

CONG: Noooo.

DELORES: Oh go on, Clarence. Don’t be such a dreg.

CONG: Delores …

[SHADOWS watch on as if it were a sports match.]

DELORES: Check. Ticks across the board.

CONG: Muriel.

DELORES: [Giggling] Muriel comes before the … !

CONG: Dawn.

DELORES: Oh, goody!

CONG: It’s ... it’s … /

DELORES: Don’t let me down!

CONG: Adelaide …

[A moment. The SHADOWS cheer. DELORES bursts out laughing.]

DELORES: Oh, you are good.

CONG: KG, PC, GCB, OM. E-I-E-I-O, dot Lady of the Order of Australia … MA.

DELORES: Oh, he really is the expert!

[DELORES claps and CONG bows.]

But Fraser – FRASER – is my real name, Cong.

CONG: S … Sorry.

DELORES: Say it.

CONG: Sorry.

DELORES: Come on. Mr Betzer’s dead. Say it. Say my real name!

CONG: F … Fraser.

269

DELORES: Louder. FRASER!

CONG: Feaser!

DELORES: FRASER!

CONG: FRASER! FRASER! FRASER! FRASER!

[The SHADOWS get caught up in the frenzy. CONG wears himself out. A moment.

DELORES sips from her wine.]

I know you’ve uncovered something scandalous about Solomon Betzer.

CONG: Don’t know what you’re talking about.

DELORES: Tell me or I will give you a thousand reasons to fear me again. With the snap of

my …

[DELORES attempts to snap her fingers. She fails and drops the bayonet. CONG

collects it.]

Tell me!

CONG: You know what? I’m not sorry. Not this time. I’ve found things that’d make your

dead husband squirm. Make everyone squirm. Legend.

DELORES: Finally, darling.

CONG: What?

DELORES: Finally giving up this ‘sorry’ nonsense.

CONG: Don’t patronise me.

DELORES: I am not ... /

CONG: Betzer’s got blood all over em’.

DELORES: How?

CONG: Lots of killing out here.

[A moment. SHADOWS gasp.]

DELORES: [Scoffing] Oh, please …

270

[SHADOWS disregard and snigger.]

CONG: Aboriginal blood.

[DELORES’S stops. SHADOWS gasp and natter. A look of shock slowly stretches

over her face. CONG stands up straight.]

Got dates. Numbers.

[Silence. DELORES erupts into laughter, spitting wine everywhere.]

SHADOWS &

CONG: Don’t laugh us!

DELORES: That’s it?

[CONG remains silent. DELORES continues laughing.]

Oh, for the Devil’s fucking sake! You children get so much money. Millions of tax payer

dollars and … /

CONG: That you don’t pay.

DELORES: And this is what our best Universities churn out? Loose stool. My beloved

husband’s family’s legacy tainted but a couple of dead blacks?

CONG: I’ll publish it in the papers. People won’t find it very funny.

DELORES: [Mocking] ‘The people’? Ha! ‘The paper’? Ha! Trivia. Remember way-back

when people really cared about this sort of garbage? Remember the hoo-rah? Of course

not. Doesn’t remember a damn thing. Ooo, let’s hope he doesn’t find out what dear old

Dad said in the fucking Australian. It was right there on the front-page. Sterilising ‘all

those problem blacks’? Might just blow his tiny, little mind.

CONG: S’not a tiny mind.

DELORES: Oh, please.

CONG: This’s big! It’s really big!

DELORES: [Grabbing CONG’S crotch] Least something is!

271

[SHADOWS cackle at her lame gag.]

CONG: Didn’t mention the torture! God damned experiments!

DELORES: The what, dear?

[CONG snaps his head around to make sure no one is listening.]

CONG: Can’t tell.

[Shadows groan.]

DELORES: Good try. Explain.

CONG: Would make Himmler blush.

SHADOWS: Oooooooo!

DELORES: Tantalising. But, when?

[A moment.]

CONG: 1919.

DELORES: You’re sure it’s blacks?

[A moment. CONG nods.]

Locals. Not ones shipped in?

[A moment. CONG nods.]

And you’re sure – absolutely – that it wasn’t the flu.

[A moment.]

CONG: No one at Aparrerinja died of the flu.

SHADOWS: Ahhhhhhchhhoooo!

[Black shadow blood can spray.]

DELORES: Finally – something to hold on to. Another glass of wine, dear? You deserve it.

[DELORES pinches CONG’S cheek and pours him a glass.]

CONG: More work to be done.

DELORES: Of course, dear.

272

CONG: Look, I can hurt you ...

DELORES: Proof?

SHADOWS: [Bellowing] PROOF!!

CONG: Enough to destroy you.

[DELORES smiles.]

You should be afraid.

DELORES: Oh, you’re very dangerous.

[DELORES pours more wine and inspects the glass.]

This, my boy, costs more than your education ... al institution.

[DELORES pours a fresh glass. Lightning flashes.]

You know – this country’s the most beautiful on Earth. And even after so long, you never

know what might crawl out of the ooze and grab you by the ankle. You’ve done very well.

You’ve no idea what it’s like to hold an empire together. I know you’re a clever boy …

but these things are living, breathing beasts. They are everywhere. If you really want to

take on Goliath … Ahh …

CONG: David?

[As DELORES speaks, lightning flashes and SHADOWS begin to dig in unison,

creating a pounding beat that begins to pick up.]

DELORES: Fuck David. And fuck his tiny stones. To slay a giant, you need to be organised.

Do you really think a few dead natives will change anything? My dear Doctor – sad

academics fill your young minds with all this bloody-minded courage. You organise

marches … [Laughing] Marches! Oh, darling – very, very scary matching screen prints. A

whole generation. All it costs is a lifetime of debt. So much debt! You want to know how

to really bring down an evil empire? Marry into one. My boy – we’ll make history

together!

273

[They clink glasses and both take a long sip of liquor. CONG spews. SHADOWS whoop and holler. Darkness.

END OF PART ONE

274

PART II

13.

Darkness. ROMILLY is alone. She lights a candle. The flickering light reveals FIGURE in a protective suit. He is cutting up what looks like chicken gizzards and inspecting them scientifically.

SOLOMON stands in a central position in shadow.

SOLOMON: What’s it like out there?

[FIGURE removes his mask revealing a white man in his 40s. He has a Dutch

accent.]

VISSER: Six men arrived. Tell your men to wear their masks when doing the rounds. If I

catch them they’ll be straight in with the blacks at the first sign of a runny nose.

SOLOMON: Word out of Melbourne is that there’s no new cases. What are we doing wrong?

VISSER: Nothing.

SOLOMON: Three this morning makes it seven this week.

VISSER: It’s a temper.

SOLOMON: Temper?

VISSER: A ‘funk’? There’s no other way to describe it. They’re a miserable, fatalistic bunch.

White men in the camp – yes, they get sick. But they stave it off. They fight. These blacks

– they lie down and accept it.

SOLOMON: It’s their fortitude. Every second comes in already half-gone with scrofula.

Those boys that came in from Barambah – riddled with beri-beri.

VISSER: And they crossed half the country before your men rounded them up. They

managed to cross at the border, through Albury – a border patrolled by armed New South

275

Welshmen! It’s something else. It’s like they court death. If we do not act – it will take

them all.

SOLOMON: What do we do?

VISSER: The fences aren’t working. Move them to East Wing.

[A moment.]

SOLOMON: Billy! Stoke the boiler!

[ROXANNE, a young woman in her early twenties, enters. She has cast on her left

arm. She casts the shutters open. Warm orange light creeps in. SOLOMON and

VISSER disappear. ROMILLY and ROXANNE see each other and are both startled.]

ROMILLY: Fuck!

ROXANNE: Jesus!

ROMILLY: Thought I was the only one here.

ROXANNE: Me too. Sorry to scare you.

ROMILLY: Likewise.

ROXANNE: I’m … /

ROMILLY: Seen you on the tele.

[ROMILLY fakes being star struck. A moment.]

Storm’s over then? ... /

ROXANNE: Who are you?

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: Been in to see your Mum?

ROXANNE: Why’re you here?

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: Just an amateur, into the history of the place. Don’t worry, I’m from town.

[ROMILLY struggles for a reason.]

276

It’s funny, really. When I was a kid, your folks ran this, like, essay prize. You know?

ROXANNE: The Fraser Memorial … /

ROXANNE &

ROMILLY: History Prize for White Gum Valley.

ROMILLY: That old mouth-full, right? And when I saw your Mum come back. Back to

White Gum, well, you see, the kids never ever got their projects back. They hung them up,

I think. At the library in Canberra. And I thought, the town’s kids might like – I mean

really like to see ‘em again. Remember the history of the award. And celebrate the

passing… /

ROXANNE: Celebrate?

ROMILLY: Commemorate …

[A moment.]

I’m really sorry about your Dad, Roxanne.

[ROXANNE smiles.]

ROXANNE: Thank you.

ROMILLY: We all loved him out here.

ROXANNE: Yep.

ROMILLY: Heck, did my project on him.

[ROXANNE goes through her bag.]

Didn’t win, though. Debby Collins took gold that year. Moll. Wrote about your Great

Grandad. Like everyone did… /

ROXANNE: You mean, like, this one?

[ROXANNE produces pieces of ROMILLY’S torn up assignment.]

ROMILLY: Ah, yes.

ROXANNE: You’re Romilly Visser, right?

277

ROMILLY: From town, yes.

ROXANNE: What are you reading?

[A moment. ROXANNE moves in.]

ROMILLY: It’s about my Great Grandad, actually.

ROXANNE: What about him?

ROMILLY: Used to work here. Like I said – into history and that.

ROXANNE: What did he do?

ROMILLY: It’s boring.

ROXANNE: Medicine.

ROMILLY: I beg your pardon?

ROXANNE: The Station’s doctor. See?

[ROXANNE indicates a line in the diary.]

ROMILLY: Well, that makes sense. What keen eyes, you have. Turns out a lot of people

were sick in 1919. So you’re into history?

[ROXANNE stares deeply into ROMILLY’S eyes.]

ROXANNE: My uncle’s coming. He asked me to find out about who’s here and what’s going

on.

[CONG enters hurriedly.]

CONG: Romilly, I … !

ROMILLY: Ah – this is my research partner. Cong – this is Roxanne Betzer.

CONG: Thank God, I was expecting …

[A moment.]

Oh, is it? Roxanne. Wow, lovely to meet you

[CONG awkwardly shakes ROXANNE’S hand.]

Clarence. Doctor Clarence. How’s things?

278

ROXANNE: Your Great-Great Grandad do, like, anything about these people getting sick?.

ROMILLY: Aw, not much I reckon.

[A moment.]

Usually make you look a bit dumb on the TV.

CONG: Romilly?

ROXANNE: [Earnestly] Really?

ROMILLY: No – just jokes. But, I’ve got a bit of work to do … /

[ROMILLY places her hand on ROXANNE’S arm. She winces in pain.]

CONG: He’s a hero. No one on Aparrerinja died of the flu.

ROMILLY: [Muttering] You’d be surprised, Cong.

ROXANNE: Can I have it now?

CONG: Have what?

ROMILLY: Pardon?

ROXANNE: The diary.

ROMILLY: Diary?

ROMILLY: If you’d like to look at it – I’ll get it copied … /

CONG: Whose diary?

ROMILLY: It’s quite important to me at the moment.

ROXANNE: It doesn’t matter.

ROMILLY: It does to me.

ROXANNE: It’s my family’s.

ROMILLY: It’s about my family.

ROXANNE: I’m busy. Hurry up.

ROMILLY: You’re kidding, right … /

ROXANNE: It belongs to me.

279

ROMILLY: Where’s your mother?

CONG: She’s right. It belongs to her.

ROMILLY: [Indicating the diary] The quarantine camp’s in here!

CONG: It’s okay.

ROMILLY: Please, Roxanne.

ROXANNE: That work on mum? Begging?

ROMILLY: I beg your pardon! I have a permit to be here. Your family haven’t lived here for

years. I mean – your dear old dad let the place languish.

[ROXANNE wells up.]

African grass’ spread across half the bloody paddocks and into town. Where do you think

the bloody top-soil in the atmosphere came from! Asbestos in the fucking school. The

bypass that sent every bloody city fucker round through Yoggathi? Closed the bakery, that

did! Your family’s been nothing but bad news for this town and I, for one, am fuckin’ sick

… /

ROXANNE: I’m sorry!

[ROXANNE begins to cry.]

I’m sorry. It’s just my Dad … There are too many memories here for …

[CONG places his arm around ROXANNE. She curls up into his arms.]

CONG: It’s okay. We understand. Romilly …

[CONG clicks his fingers.]

ROMILLY: I’m sorry … /

CONG: You’ve said enough.

ROMILLY: Can I at least … /

CONG: You promised you’d do whatever I asked.

[ROMILLY hands CONG the diary who hands it to ROXANNE.]

280

[To ROXANNE] You’ll be okay?

ROXANNE: Yes. Thank you.

ROMILLY: If this is about last night. I drank too much wine. I was too drunk to do anything

... /

CONG: I thought … /

[CONG and ROMILLY begin to leave.]

ROMILLY: It wasn’t you. I swear.

CONG: I thought we’d agreed that no one died of the flu at Aparrerinja ...

[CONG and ROMILLY exit. ROXANNE wipes her eyes.]

281

14.

The rain ceases and the sound of native birds breaks the silence. Orange light seeps into the building for the first time as the dust outside begins to settle.

DELORES is sprawled on the table asleep. Surrounded by chicken gizzards. The bayonet sticks out of it. ROMILLY and CONG shout at each other within. ROXANNE enter and

DELORES snaps to attention.

DELORES: Your Uncle?!

ROXANNE: [Indicating arm] I’m fine, by the way.

DELORES: Where is he?

[ROXANNE begins to well up.]

ROXANNE: Service for Dad in the city. Said no to a state-funeral. They were marching

again. So angry.

DELORES: He deserved better.

ROXANNE: But then the guys wrapped in the flags came. Police where spraying people.

DELORES: It’s not your father’s fault. And it’s not your fault either. You understand?

[DELORES takes ROXANNE’S face in her hands. ROXANNE nods.]

Look at me – your family needs you to be strong. I need you to be. Can you do that, my

love?

[ROXANNE nods.]

We miss him. We all miss him.

[DELORES goes to embrace her.]

ROXANNE: You don’t need to lie.

282

DELORES: Too clever for your own good.

ROXANNE: You shouldn’t have left me like you did?

DELORES: It’s complicated.

ROXANNE: It would’ve been nice to have you back home.

DELORES: I know, dear.

ROXANNE: It was shit.

DELORES: [Sternly] I know! He went so quickly … It all became a bit much … /

ROXANNE: Where’s Nanna?

[A moment. DELORES struggles to smile.]

DELORES: Now, Roxanne … /

ROXANNE: I just want to see her.

DELORES: I don’t … /

ROXANE: Does she even get that Dad’s dead? It’s a shit thing you did to her. Mean to take a

blind, old lady.

DELORES: Oh, she’s not blind … /

ROXANNE: Does she even know where she is?

DELORES: Don’t talk about your Grandmother that way. She’d hate it.

ROXANNE: Where’d you put her?

[A moment.]

I’m just worried.

DELORES: Your Uncle’s been speaking to you. [Muttering] I told him … /

ROXANNE: Who cares about Uncle Sol? He’s got his own stuff goin’ on anyway. I just

want to see her. That’s all I promise.

DELORES: Roxanne, darling … /

ROXANNE: Ugh, every time …

283

DELORES: It’s a long way out here. Go and have a lie down.

ROXANNE: I’m fine.

DELORES: What did he say to you?

ROXANNE: Nothing.

DELORES: So he’s in custody.

ROXANNE: [Muttering] No …

DELORES: Tell me.

ROXANNE: They were happy with him saying sorry and that.

[DELORES silently curses and begins collecting her things.]

The cops got that he was just really sad. He loved dad. It’s why he pissed off. That he had

nothing to do with the coma and that. There’s nothing to worry about.

[ROXANNE fiddles with the bayonet.]

DELORES: First time anyone ever believed Solomon.

ROXANNE: Jesus! People change, mum. He’s changed.

[ROXANNE pulls the bayonet from the table.]

Look – I know she’s here, Mum.

[A moment. ROXANNE casually plays with the bayonet.]

DELORES: Let me make you some Kiev. I was keen on a batch myself. Must’ve got

distracted.

[DELORES looks around hurriedly and begins scraping up the leftovers of VISSER’S

experiment and placing it in a bowl. ROXANNE pokes an empty wine bottle.]

You love your mum’s Kiev.

[DELORES rakes her fingers through the muck.]

ROXANNE: Mum.

284

[DELORES keeps at it, brushing her hair from her face, smearing some mirk on her

face.]

DELORES: Just like when you were a kid.

ROXANNE: Mum!

[DELORES stops.]

You know I love you, Roxy.

ROXANNE: I don’t like Kiev. And don’t call me ‘Roxy’.

DELORES: Do you remember coming out here when you were little?

ROXANNE: The bogans.

[ROXANNE looks towards the sound of ROMILLY and CONG fighting.]

DELORES: The wild camels? Through the binoculars? You used to love the swing by the

creek.

ROXANNE: You did. I hate this place with all my heart. I want to see it wiped off the face of

the Earth. I told Dad that. Told him before he died.

DELORES: Did he ask about me?

[A moment.]

ROXANNE: He was just worried about Nanna.

DELORES: Oh …

[DELORES begins to exit.]

I miss him. We all miss him …

[DELORES exits. ROXANNE slams the bayonet into the table.]

285

15.

CONG moves about the house collecting items. ROMILLY follows him.

CONG: Guugu Yimidhirr men. Interned when the Japanese entered the war. Up in Arnhem

Land. Government thought they’d have an IRA type situation on their hands. Thought they

might help the Japanese in a guerrilla-style land war if we were invaded. Locked ‘em up.

ROMILLY: I’m not disagreeing with you.

CONG: Paranoid government reckons Aborigines might’ve preferred fascism to the crown!

ROMILLY: Yes – war makes people, governments, everyone crazy.

CONG: And it happened during World War One. New South Wales. Any chance to lock up

Aboriginal men.

ROMILLY: Maybe.

CONG: And that’s what they did here

ROMILLY: [Muttering] Or this place was used as a quarantine camp because of the flu.

Could have proved it before you gave her that diary.

CONG: Garbage.

ROMILLY: It’s more believable than this Doctor Moreau-type stuff you’re spouting.

CONG: Well, I’ll put it on the list.

ROMILLY: What? What list?

CONG: The list of crazies. Solomon Betzer was a mad man!

ROMILLY: Only if you don’t consider the business side, the legal side, the political side. Not

to mention the medical-bloody-side. Thousands were dying …

CONG: All up, just proves that white supremacy is a mental disorder. A thing that worms

itself ‘round the brain.

[A moment, ROMILLY sighs.]

286

Sorry, but I just think that you can be crazy and a white supremacist at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s perfectly feasible for someone to just be crazy. Just like

someone being just a white supremacist. You know – with all its history. But, on that rare

occasion when all the batshit stars align – once in a blue moon – someone might just be

born a crazy, white supremacist. It can make them doing anything.

ROMILLY: As well as being an over-enthusiastic gaoler with a nasty drug habit. All the

while secretly moonlighting as a mass-murdering-butcher.

CONG: I’m not making it up!

ROMILLY: When do you think he found the time to drove his few million head of cattle?

CONG: Insomniac.

ROMILLY: Oh, for fuck’s sake.

CONG: You have a vested interest.

ROMILLY: What?

CONG: You heard what I said.

ROMILLY: You think I want him to be innocent.

CONG: I know how sensitive you are. I didn’t want to show you this … /

ROMILLY: Show me what?

[CONG drops everything and pulls out a sheet of paper.]

CONG: This girl right here. Your Great-Great, whatever, Granddad cut her head off. Long,

firm strokes with the saw. Then her head fell into the … trough … thing …

ROMILLY: The pannikin.

CONG: His hands – greasy with blood. Know how heavy a human head is? ‘Bout five

kilograms. Hers was two. Plonk. Sure it slid around a bit.

ROMILLY: These are notes on an autopsy.

287

CONG: Everything those people were, had and could’ve been – slopping against the stainless

steel. Two, little kilos.

ROMILLY: Where’d you get this?

[A moment.]

CONG: Delores Betzer believes me. She can get me a front page story.

ROMILLY: You’re going public?

CONG: Sorry about your Great-Grandfather. Perhaps he should’ve stayed in Java. Cause’

that turned out super for the Indonesians.

ROMILLY: You’re enjoying this.

CONG: Got enough to bury the bastard.

ROMILLY: Dead bastard.

CONG: Doesn’t matter.

ROMILLY: Neither does he.

CONG: [Furiously pointing to the ground beneath him] But they do.

ROMILLY: This Aboriginal girl is somebody’s Grandmother.

CONG: She was four.

ROMILLY: Aunty, then.

CONG: And she was murdered. I’m not afraid of the truth.

ROMILLY: Then find her head.

CONG: What?

ROMILLY: Then find her body. Why don’t you dig it up, wrap it up in a bed sheet? Walk in

on her surviving relatives Sunday roast. Set it on the table. ‘See! Look children – Auntie’s

head!’ ‘Aren’t you glad Dr. Wong was here to mess with your ancestors’ remains’. Be a

hero. [Muttering] These people aren’t fucking objects … I mean – you’re not even

Australian.

288

CONG: There you go – that’s something real.

ROMILLY: They’re real people, Cong. Do the work. Too busy rehearsing your Nobel Prize

speech. Digging up bits of body in a country you don’t even care about.

CONG: Typical. People like you ...

ROMILLY: Like me?

CONG: All into it till you have to get your hands dirty. March and sign petitions.

ROMILLY: Not enough people to march out here!

CONG: Truth is – thousands dead on the frontier. Stealing children. Medical experiments in

universities! I know what it feels like. The Japanese raped and murdered their way ‘cross

where I’m from. Across the whole damned country before any of you ... /

ROMILLY: That’s a lot of unconnected things you’ve just said really quickly.

CONG: Power, Romilly. It’s all the same. You’re all the same.

ROMILLY: Who are ‘we’?

CONG: You know.

ROMILLY: Your family’s never stolen land here. Never been a part of the massacre of an

entire people. You’ve never worked with communities. With people who that are trying to

make things better. To make sense of it all. It slows you down. Makes you think.

CONG: I’m glad you feel guilty.

ROMILLY: Let’s talk about ‘The Great Leap Forward’.

CONG: Here we go … /

ROMILLY: Not Chinese when it matters. Not an Aussie when it counts. What the hell are

you? Can’t believe I made out with you.

CONG: That’s what this is about.

ROMILLY: Call me a racist again.

[A moment.]

289

Look me in the eye and tell me the only reason I think plague is the reason behind all of

this is because I’m trying to protect my Great Grandad. That these guys were … scared by

something scary. Fuckin’ deadly. And they did what they did ‘cause no one could see what

they were doing out here. Not like anyone ever does.

[CONG struggles.]

I’m sorry what a horrible, racist country Australia is. Must be nice being the victim.

Always.

CONG: I’m not a victim.

ROMILLY: You’re just like me.

[CONG exits.]

290

16.

MIRANDA enters.

MIRANDA: [Singing] I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened a window and in flew

Enza.

[Steam bellows from within. VISSER enters.]

VISSER: The un-embalmed body is well preserved and cool to touch. Rigor-mortis is fully

developed in the major muscle groups. Livor-mortis is fixed and purple posteriorly except

above pressure points. The neck is symmetrical and shows no masses or injuries. The

trachea is in the midline. The shoulders are symmetrical and are free of scars. The muscles

of the chest and abdominal wall are normal in colour and consistency. The lungs weigh

one hundred and fifty grams and one hundred grams, right and left, respectively. There are

large amounts of subpleural anthracotic pigment within all the lobes … The cause of death

was not infection. She drowned. She drowned in a desert.

[A moment. Fire ignites within.]

As of the third of April, the transportation of contaminated specimens has been outlawed

by the Victorian senate. They shot the man carrying them to Barambah near the border. I’d

say because he’s native. He was carrying nothing that would connect him to Aparrerinja.

This has all been … for nothing.

[DELORES and ROMILLY. VISSER begins loading bags of material into the boiler.]

ROMILLY: You’re scared of her.

DELORES: I’m sorry if I hurt you, dear. My husband died intestate. You understand, dear?

[ROMILLY looks up.]

291

She despised my family. Thought her precious darling married beneath him. My husband

loved me. Pitied me. Promised me that this house would be … protected. He died so

quickly. Breath. Then fluid. Then all yellow …

[A moment.]

[Screaming] But this is my house! Not anyone else’s! There’s nothing illegal about what I

did.

ROMILLY: Then why did you let me in?

DELORES: My father’s buried here. Like yours. This land. My land – it would never be the

same again if I didn’t … act.

ROMILLY: Are you lookin’ for Native Title or what? That would take years.

DELORES: Alas … Tell me: did you find what you were looking for?

ROMILLY: He’s guilty as sin. Cong told me about that little girl he cut up. Supposedly … /

DELORES: Ah, and there’s the rub. What we did out here – it’s always been about business.

I’ll confect just one more horror if I need to. The more brutal, I dare say – the better.

ROMILLY: But it’s not the truth.

DELORES: All I care about is my home.

ROMILLY: I want the truth.

DELORES: Let’s hope the halo doesn’t slip a few inches … and choke that scrawny neck of

yours. The truth? Soon enough, the last person does know something will be dead.

[Pointing upwards] There’s a plague upon her family’s name. Well, she needs to believe

there is. If that means a mass grave of Aboriginals, so be it.

[VISSER slams the boiler shut.]

292

17.

CONG and ROXANNE.

CONG: I’m sorry about her.

ROXANNE: That’s all right. I’m just sick of people thinking that it’s perfectly alright to

invade my privacy. You know – because of who we are.

CONG: It’s unfair. Barbaric.

ROXANNE: It’s like we’re always on trial.

CONG: It’s resentment. I mean, you should hear her. Jewish grandparents … It’s obvious she

hates herself.

ROXANNE: I know, right? She was reading my Great-Grandfather’s inner-most thoughts.

When I was little, my father warned me to never ask Nanna about Aboriginal things. He

said it made her sad. Stressed her out. That she had a weak heart. That we had to be nice to

Nanna.

CONG: Your Nanna’s probably had a pretty hard life.

ROXANNE: But that’s what you’re here for. You wanna’ know what happened?

CONG: It’s what’s in that diary. You know what happened here, right?

[ROXANNE opens the diary. CONG moves to her and gently shuts it.]

What do you think people will do when they find out? What do you reckon it would take

for, I don’t know, some Noongar man? One that been mocked his whole life. Racists on

trains, in pubs. His Dad probably spent most of his childhood – from the age of six, seven

– in some brutal Christian Brother’s mission. Probably abused. Means rape, Roxanne. Just

a little boy. Happened all the time in those places. I know – I’ve got proof. But, this guy –

this Noongar Man – what do you think it would take for this guy, on just your average

293

Perth day, to walk into the foyer of Parliament. Just walk in with a bomb strapped to his

chest made of cheap fertiliser and diesel?

[ROXANNE shrugs.]

You think I’m crazy? This government … Your government has, for two centuries, beat

these people down. First with gun powder. Freakin’ Small Pox-smeared blankets. Oldest

living culture on the planet? Nothin’ but a bunch of primitives on uninhabited lands.

Twentieth century ticks over and they literally steal these people’s kids. In living memory.

In living-fucking-memory! People say bygones, bygones, bygones, and all that. But, if this

shit happened to your mother. To your father. I’d be down the back shed. Pumpin’ rap and

making dirty bombs. It never ended. They call them rapists. Paedophile pissheads. Wife-

beating, unevolved primates. What about assimilation?

ROXANNE: What’s ‘assimilation’?

CONG: For these guys – it’s a genocidal, sexually transmitted disease! Nah, bugger it. It’s a

‘lifestyle choice’. So don’t look at me like I’m a mental when I reckon it’s only a matter of

time before some guy, some young, disenfranchised dude decides to do like the Panthers

did. Like the Irish did. Like Mandela did. Hearts and minds of an entire, White-washed

nation. BOOM!

[CONG startles ROXANNE who giggles ecstatically.]

ROXANNE: Oh my God, you’re intense!

[CONG takes the diary and tosses in a waste paper bin. ROXANNE ignites the

cigarette light, tosses it into the bin, and the diary burns.]

CONG: Dead-set legend.

294

18.

Night comes on and ROMILLY is going through boxes. The sound of CONG and ROXANNE giggling can be heard echoing through the pipes.

ROMILLY: What were you doing?!

[BILLY enters concealed, broken, robotic – his voice twitching, screaming, changing.

His face is bandaged and blood bleeds beneath. Chains hang like puppet strings]

BILLY: Hi there. My name’s Billy the Aboriginal and if it weren’t for me, Solomon Betzer

wouldn’t perished out on them plains. See – it hadn’t rained for months on end. I was out

walkabout. I find him. Some bleary-eyed whitefella. Five shillings in his pocket. Nothing

but a one-eyed horse. I helped him find them secret waterholes. I taught him how to track

… /

ROMILLY: What was your name, Billy?

BILLY: Five shillings in his pocket. Nothing but a one-eyed horse. I helped him find them

secret waterholes … /

[SOLOMON enters.]

SOLOMON: Now, if there’s one person outside the Betzer family I owe empire to – it’s a

boy named Billy.

ROMILLY: By the end of the War, he owned a bit of land larger than Great Britain. Cut

through dozens of Indigenous Nations. Why here?

SOLOMON: [Welling up] Was morning, like. Dawn. Sun coming up over the hinter. Makes

em’ shadows look like bats with wings. I was a dead man. Too stupid, too proud to know

he’s beat. That was when he found me. It was the water, see. That was always the key.

BILLY: He was a fierce man. But, he paid his blackfellas right.

295

SOLOMON: Put them to work. Fair. Only ever fired ‘em for giving up. You should have

seen it, Billy my boy. Stretches forever. Whole teams of fellas. But, there was this one

bloke. This one Spaniard. Lopez was his name. Tommy Lopez, all them Chinese fellas’

called him. He was in-charge. Never would I dare tell him what to do. Nobody dared to.

I’ll tell you something funny. A funny story. You see, one morning I was out walking by

that teamster’s hut down on the fence. All peaceful-like. Soaking it all in. Then, ‘bang’!

Window shatters. Get this – some old typewriter comes flying through. Then … then his

thick Spanish pipes – ‘zis zing iz az bad at fucking English az I em!’

[They both burst into maniacal laughter.]

ROMILLY: Everyone’s heard the story of Lopez and his typewriter.

SOLOMON: And there she was – the queen station. Aparrerinja! I knew this place was

home. So, I purchased her straight-way from the crown.

BILLY: Got it for a steal, mate!

SOLOMON: A hard land. A land of endless possibility.

BILLY: [Struggling] But none of those blackfellas wanted to leave.

SOLOMON: That’s right – a black man loves this country. It’s his most prized possession.

BILLY: Most of us wouldn’t leave if you asked us.

SOLOMON: And you mob wouldn’t move on. So what did I do? What did I do, Billy-boy?

BILLY: You put us to work!

SOLOMON: You see – whitefellas don’t make the best droving hands. But, the blacks – it’s

in their nature to care for beasts of the earth.

BILLY: Could drove a cow. Break a horse.

SOLOMON: And you blokes were happy to sit out the wet season!

BILLY: [Screaming] This is my country!

296

SOLOMON: And that’s why you did it. Out here – everyman is his own copper. You’ve got

to be. It’s the nature of the beast. I own this place and you wouldn’t leave. I mean – it’s

your country. You all worked hard because you loved it like I did. Without you, Australia

wouldn’t be the world-renowned cattle country it is. [Yelling] THICK BIT OF MEAT ON

EVERY PLATE! I was just happy I didn’t need to shoot ya’. Within a decade, you just

worked. It’s all you ever knew. And I paid you. Paid you well. I’LL NEVER LET ‘EM

FORGET THAT!

BILLY: [Withdrawn] We couldn’t leave.

SOLOMON: We gave them what they want because we need them to work for us. We let you

have your ceremonies. Even let you hunt. If you ran … not like you would.

BILLY: Not like we would.

SOLOMON: What did those coppers say, Billy?

BILLY: You go to gaol or you go back home.

SOLOMON: Our home. And you always came home. Didn’t ya’, Billy?

BILLY: Always came home, boss.

SOLOMON: We’re attached to you and you’re attached to us. Working together. What do

you say about that, my boy?

[A moment. SOLOMON removes the bandages, revealing VISSER beneath them]

VISSER: [Dutch accent] Hi there. My name’s Billy the Aboriginal and if it weren’t for me,

Solomon Betzer wouldn’t perished out on them plains …

[Slam! VISSER’S chains become taut and he is lifted into the air, screaming as if he

were on a trial for war crimes.]

AND IF IT WASN’T FOR ME EVERY BLACK MAN ON THIS STATION WOULD

HAVE PERISHED IN AGONY, DROWNING IN THE PUS, BLOOD, AND STENCH

FROM THEIR OWN LUNGS! PLAGUE! YOU SIT THERE AND JUDGE ME! THEY

297

WOULD NOT LEAVE! THEY HAVE TO BE INTERNED! THE FENCES WERE FOR

THEIR OWN GOOD! YOU SIT THERE AND JUDGE ME!

[ROMILLY pushes over a box and a tonne of items spill out across the floor. VISSER

goes dark.]

CONG: What are you doing?

ROMILLY: I’m working.

CONG: I’m sorry I told you about that girl. In that way.

ROMILLY: It doesn’t matter.

CONG: Blood runs deep and I apologise.

ROMILLY: I think you’re right about Billy the Aboriginal.

CONG: That he was tortured?

ROMILLY: That he didn’t exist.

CONG: It’s not the … /

[A moment.]

Thank you.

ROMILLY: There’d be some guy dressed up as him. Every year at the school fete. He … ah

… he wouldn’t be an Aboriginal guy. They’d do the whole …

[ROMILLY indicates her face.]

CONG: You’re right: White Gum’s revolting ... /

ROMILLY: My Uncle was the best at it. Did a pretty good impression, too. ‘Hi there. I’m

Billy the Aboriginal and I … ’ Year after year. They’d do the whole story. Like it was the

baby in the manger. But, I don’t think he existed. Always just a footnote. In every kid’s

school projects. A footnote in the play at the fete. A footnote in The Bulletin’s story on

Solomon’s life. A footnote in every dusty, piece of shit, worshipping biography ever

written about him. I don’t think he existed because …

298

[ROMILLY holds up an old ledger.]

There were sixty Aboriginal men that worked here during the War. But, it gets worse, I’m

afraid. You think you can prove that Betzer did medical experiments on his plot’s

traditional owners. And I would agree with you – the evidence’s pretty suspicious. But, in

turn, totally vague and utterly inconclusive. And premature. But you already convinced

yourself. This is the thing though … You don’t actually have all the permits you’ll need to

do a full investigation. No way. I can see …

[ROMILLY gazes around the room.]

Literally rooms of potentially uncategorised artefacts. Could be anything. Not to say I’m

happy with it, but it’s one of my jobs. Might actually be the most important reason I’m

here: to ascertain if Heritage needs to come in here with a full team from … ah …

CONG: Preservation and Repatriation.

ROMILLY: So that some of this stuff might make its way back to, you know, their traditional

owners. The bureaucratic process sucks, I know. So bloody long and bloody tedious. But,

you know what? It’s necessary. Remember that business ten years ago? With all them …

Gunitjmara folks up in Queensland. All the fuss? That was over a couple of toe bones. Just

locked away in an old draw. But, they’re back in scared ground. There’s a whole heap

more here than just some old fella’s big toe. Well, what I mean is; we’ll know if there’s

more to fuss over in about … three to five years.

CONG: That’s bullshit.

ROMILLY: Thank goodness for The Advisory Committee for Indigenous Repatriation.

[A moment.]

CONG: That won’t matter when we find that little girl’s head.

ROMILLY: You can’t destroy an entire archive.

CONG: I can do what I want.

299

[The sound of smashing glass. CONG exits.]

300

19.

The boiler’s furnace burns. SOL, a man in his fifties, sits at the table. He holds a bloodied cloth to his shoulder. DELORES sits flitting in an out on consciousness with a cold compress against her head. CONG’S work and a bottle of pills sits in front of SOL. CONG enters.

SOL: G’day, mate.

[A moment. CONG notices his research.]

CONG: Hello. Um, what happened?

SOL: Aw, God knows. Was just tryin’ to get in. And there she was. Some maniac. Charged

me. Flapping about with – I dunno – what was it? War knife or something?

ROXANNE: Bayonet.

SOL: A bloody bayonet. Was pissed out of her head.

DELORES: [Muttering] Not pissed … /

[SOL stands and points at her.]

SOL: Yes. Yes you were. Pissed out of your head. [Winces and sits] Took a chunk out of my

bloody shoulder. Did you give her that knife? [To Roxanne] Was it you?

ROXANNE: Been fiddling with it all day, Uncle Sol.

SOL: Christ! It fuckin’ kills. [To ROXANNE] Sorry. My language. I know, love.

ROXANNE: You swear all the time, Uncle Sol.

SOL: [To ROXANNE] Who’s your friend?

ROXANNE: Some guy.

[DELORES stirs.]

SOL: [To DELORES] Oi! You stay where you are. Done enough harm. [To ROXANNE]

She’s done enough harm, love. Let her be.

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[ROXANNE begins assembling materials for a fire. She strips bits off kindling with a

hatchet. SOL continues flipping through CONG’S work.]

Hey – this shit’s pretty hectic.

[DELORES stirs.]

Roxy, give her some more of Mum’s pills.

CONG: Is she okay?

SOL: Huh, Dolli? Yeah – she’s just pissed.

DELORES: [Muttering] Not pissed.

SOL: Yes you are! [To CONG] Could never hold her booze.

CONG: Someone checked her tongue? Might be choking on it.

SOL: Be my guest, son.

[CONG goes to DELORES.]

CONG: Delores. Delores. I need you to wake up.

[CONG tries to open DELORES’ eyes and she snaps at him. CONG flies back.

ROXANNE and SOL burst out laughing.]

SOL: Ha!

ROXANNE: You’re brave, Clarence.

SOL: Should’ve seen ya’. Jumped a mile.

[DELORES stirs and tries to stand. ROXANNE goes to her.]

Let her go, Roxy. As I was saying: this stuff – hectic shit.

[With one hand, SOL opens the bottom of pills.]

ROXANNE: [To SOL] They’re for Nanna!

SOL: I’m in pain, love. Sufferin’. Better me have ‘em then her. Poor duck don’t know where

she is.

[ROXANNE snatches the pills away.]

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[Muttering] As nasty as her mother.

CONG: What’s hectic, Mr … Betzer?

SOL: [Indicating the file] Reckon its true?

CONG: Depends what bit you read.

SOL: The whole hog.

ROXANNE: He reckons it’s true, Uncle Sol.

[Clanging within.]

SOL: [To ROXANNE] Good one love. [To CONG] Whoa. The whole lot?

[ROXANNE nods. SOL pours a glass of wine.]

Wanna’ drink? Roxy, would you go and see what she wants?

ROXANNE: I went last time.

SOL: I’m talking to your guy.

ROXANNE: I’ve got Mum to look after.

SOL: Just go, would ya’?!

ROXANNE: [Muttering] Always telling me what to do.

[ROXANNE exits.]

CONG: I’m not thirsty.

SOL: Don’t have to be thirsty to want a drink. Just look at her.

[DELORES falls. Her hand lands near the hatchet. She begins trying to reach for it.

CONG makes a move for her. SOL intercepts him with a firm hand to the arm.]

Just let her be, mate.

[A moment. SOL takes a sip.]

I believe you, you know?

CONG: The file.

SOL: [Savouring his drink] The whole lot.

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CONG: I’ve been getting that a lot … from people in your family.

SOL: Well, us Betzers – we don’t get along too good, see? Always lookin’ for ways to piss

each other off.

[SOL gets up and pulls the hatchet from DELORES’ fingers. He slams it into the

table. The egg timer rings.]

Even the dead ones. It was my brother that was into – you know – keeping us all together.

Now he’s gone …

CONG: I’m sorry for your loss.

[SOL gets up and goes to the furnace. He opens it and retrieves a parcel of aluminium

foil.]

SOL: Bloody hippies won’t let him be buried proper. By the state. But, he … he would’ve

hated you saying this stuff about his Grandad. God rest him.

[SOL sits and unwraps a gross looking Kiev. He takes a big bite.]

Bloody famished. Long drive, eh’?

[SOL offers some to CONG who politely refuses.]

CONG: That file – it’s all original documents. If you destroy it – they’re gone forever.

SOL: I’m not into history and that. But, I tell you what …

DELORES: Don’t!

SOL: Christ – she been like this the whole time?

CONG: Did you poison her?

[A moment. SOL bursts out laughing.]

SOL: Poisoned herself with the old man’s booze …

DELORES: Not pissed!

SOL: [Spraying food] Yes, you are! You gotta’ be tough with em’. Digs her own grave, see.

You know she’s a crook?

304

CONG: No I didn’t.

SOL: So, get this. Night my brother had his turn. Just your average, run of the mill stroke and

that. You know – that one finally knocked him off. So, before we had time to even tell the

grandkids – the little ones. She’s straight up the nursing home. Bundles mum straight into

the car. Bloody catheter’s still dangling. Would’ve looked a sight. Launches straight up

down the ring road. Whole family’s in a state.

DELORES: Lies …

SOL: It’s not. It’s not lies.

DELORES: [Muttering] Cunts.

SOL: [To DELORES] Well, they all hate you too.

DELORES: Nooooo.

SOL: They do to. [To CONG] They do all hate her. She knows the second he crosses over,

she’s cut. Out on her fat Scottish arse. Nothing – and I mean nothing – moves faster than a

fat Scott who knows the clock’s ticking. Yeah?

CONG: Look, Mr. Betzer –

SOL: Call me Sol.

CONG: I apologise for your family’s troubles but … I’m just a bit nervous – dead-set

terrified –

SOL: Funny seein’ an Asian bloke say ‘dead-set … /

CONG: That you’re going to throw all that work on the fire.

[SOL feigns a shocked expression. He goes through a series of mock-emotions.]

SOL: Go on then.

[CONG looks to the folder then to the hatchet. He pauses, before snatching the folder.

SOL bursts out laughing.]

Such a pussy! Think I’d go the hack? Hey – I’m an old man with a bung shoulder.

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[SOL laughs before his shoulder hurts. He whimpers.]

That girl. She reckons it was that Spanish Flu. Tore through here after the war.

[DELORES groans.]

Dolli disagrees, obviously. But that’s right, right?

[CONG holds his work tight. A moment.]

CONG: Did you kill your brother, Mr. Kalhbetzer?

[A moment.]

SOL: It was his prostate. Idiot didn’t get checked out proper. Spread to his bones.

DELORES: [Slurring] Asbestos!

SOL: She’s a nutter.

CONG: You ran.

[ROXANNE enters.]

SOL: [Indicating DELORES] Yeah – after her. If it’s anyone that should’ve been looked into

– it’s her.

ROXANNE: What’s going on?

SOL: [To ROXANNE] Sorry, love.

[SOL silently signals to CONG to drop the subject.]

What did Nanna want?

ROXANNE: Forgot the keys.

[ROXANNE grabs the keys from DELORES how struggles. Clanging within.]

[Muttering] All these stairs. I’m coming!

SOL: [To CONG] So, don’t talk about my dead brother that way. Not in front of my niece.

You get me? Call me a crim again and I’ll fucking end you.

CONG: A simple mistake.

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SOL: So, here’s the thing – two of my Great-Uncles served this country. It’s been pretty good

to me. Them being war heroes and all. So, make it not about the flu. That’s all I ask. Both

those men are champions. Were then and are forever. You get me?

CONG: I’ve spent six years making this not about the flu.

SOL: You do get me! But it’s totally about the flu.

CONG: It’s not about the flu.

SOL: People were sick. He tried to stop it. The flu.

CONG: Your Grandad was riddled with syphilis. Went crazy and told people to cut up

Aboriginals.

SOL: You have proof of that?

CONG: Can I have that drink.

[SOL pours a glass.]

SOL: Mi casa es su whatever.

CONG: There’s records. Instruments. Invoices. The last thing’s a body or two.

[Clanging.]

SOL: Was never told about the syphilis thing. Was a deaf old man. Arthritis and stuff.

[Screaming] Shut up, Mum!

CONG: So the story goes.

SOL: Everyone knows the story.

CONG: Not the whole story. Give me a second.

[CONG exits.]

SOL: What do you reckon, Dolli?

DELORES: Please … Please, Solomon …

SOL: Look – I’ll consider it. You should be in bed. Wanna’ go to bed?

DELORES: Please … /

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SOL: Stop whinging or I’ll get Roxy to put you in bed.

DELORES: No … /

SOL: Yep – right up in bed. Smack-bang next to Mum.

DELORES: No … /

SOL: Then we’ll just be quiet.

[Silence. Clanging within.]

Ignore her.

[Clanging within.]

DELORES: Please … /

SOL: Right!

[SOL jumps up and begins to stalk over to DELORES. CONG enters with the portrait

of SOLOMON and casts it on the table.]

CONG: Typical painting of a colonial gent, right? Perfect example of turn of the century

fashion.

SOL: Why does it smell like piss?

CONG: You can see how he’s posed – body, side. Face straight on. Barrelling stare, straight

down the camera. But, look at his face. You think he looks like you?

SOL: He looks like my brother.

CONG: But what’s strange?

SOL: Not really interested in art. Worth anything?

CONG: Solomon thought it made him look queer. See his nose? That’s a Baroque nose. In

the French style. The painter filled it in. He was an Australian but studied abroad, in

France on a big trust fund. Like the ones you guys live off.

SOL: Ease up.

CONG: Solomon’s own nose dropped off years before.

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SOL: Serious?

CONG: He got a surgeon on staff. Dutch guy. Paid him loads just so he could do this thing

where they stitched his arm flab up on his face like this …

[CONG demonstrates the procedure.]

And skin could be grafted onto his face. Would’ve looked terrifying. Ever wonder why

there were no photos of him after about 1910? Why he was never seen in public after?

SOL: Clap got him?

CONG: Syphilis – third stage syphilis – melts the brain. Turns it to goo. If you look through

these documents – Solomon struggled with dates. He even struggled to remember which

station he was on. Drought was squeezing everyone. He fell off the side of the world.

Spent all day quoting Shakespeare. But, it gets weirder ... /

SOL: Wait!

[A moment.]

So you want him to have syphilis? Like, in a way that sent him bat-shit?

CONG: Well … Yes. But he did have syphilis … /

SOL: Look, son. I make deals. I’m a deal maker. You wanna prove that my Grandad went

crazy. Right?

CONG: He did go crazy.

SOL: But you want to prove it. Bit of court intrigue?

CONG: But it’s the truth.

SOL: What do you reckon, Dolli?

[Silence.]

Dolli?!

[Silence.]

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I’ll make a deal. He’s mental because he’s a … You know – just say he’s mental ‘cause

he’s the guy who locked the sickos up.

CONG: What about the little girl’s head?

SOL: Ah … you see that’s a banger. Worth a bit. What’re you gonna’ bring to the table?

CONG: I …

SOL: How ‘bout this – all those Aboriginal fellas. The ones that worked for him. He paid ‘em

well. As much as any whitefella, right?

CONG: Yes.

SOL: You give me their names. And we can all just forget about those names. What’s in a

name anyway?

CONG: And you help me prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the Solomon Betzer died,

riddled with pox. And he had the brain of a child. And he ordered the cutting up of a little

girl.

SOL: White girl?

CONG: Black girl.

SOL: Pushing it.

CONG: Black girl without a name.

SOL: Black girl without a name’s still … /

CONG: She could be anyone. From anywhere.

SOL: You drive a hard bargain, boy.

CONG: Syphilis does this weird thing where it scars bone. Particularly the skull. To be sure

… I mean, to really prove it … You know he loved this place. He felt connected to it. It

was his country. Well …

[A moment.]

He’s buried outside.

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[SOL reaches out his hand and CONG takes it.]

SOL: I’ll get the shovels.

[SOL and CONG scull their wine. They exit. Clanging within.

END OF PART II

311

PART III

20.

In long, looming shadows, CONG digs in the hard dirt. SOL watches on, nursing his arm, and drinking. They are enormous silhouettes.

As CONG digs, SOL can begin to take on aspects of SOLOMON as the tyrant. He can whip him, goad him, insult him.

The digging gets into a robust rhythm. It is industrial and can be accompanied by music.

They exhume an ancient pine coffin. As they open it, BILLY jumps out and they engage in a twisted vaudeville act of comic action and prat falls. BILLY outsmarts them. The scene is accompanied by burlesque music and sound effects.

BILLY: [Voice booming and distorted] I’m Billy the Aboriginal!!

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21.

The attic. A searing beam of light reveals ROMILLY in the doorway. In the shadows, a sullen figure dressed in white stirs.

ROMILLY: Hello Miranda.

[Breathing.]

Are you feeling okay this evening?

MIRANDA: Who? Who are you? Help!

ROMILLY: It’s okay. It’s alright. I’m here to help.

MIRANDA: Dolli!

ROMILLY: Delores is down stairs.

MIRANDA: Please …

[MIRANDA fidgets.]

Dolli, she wouldn’t … Please. Please, she’s so cruel

ROMILLY: What do you want?

MIRANDA: Please. My father’s voice …

[MIRANDA gestures to the phonograph. ROMILLY moves the needle. MIRANDA’S

voice as a child can be heard. MIRANDA orates alongside the recording of herself,

her quiet voice breaking with emotion. The following recording can be done live, with

SOL behind the scrim if needs be.]

SOLOMON: [Recording] Go on, my dear. Don’t be afraid.

MIRANDA: [Recording] Fr … Fraught …

SOLOMON: [Recording, whispering] Fraughting.

MIRANDA: [Recording] Fraughting souls within her.

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SOLOMON: [Recording] Be collected: No more amazement: tell your piteous heart there's

no harm done.

MIRANDA: [Recording, excitedly.] O, woe the day!

[SOLOMON laughs, MIRANDA chuckles.]

SOLOMON: [Recording] No harm. I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who art ignorant of what thou art ...

[The sound begins to warp and bend. Silence. MIRANDA begins to sob quietly.]

MIRANDA: She’s so cruel, that Scottish woman. She said she’d destroy them. It’s all I have

left.

[A moment.]

He’s dead, my son, isn’t he?

ROMILLY: Yes.

[A small sound in the darkness.]

I’m sorry … /

MIRANDA: Why? Is it your fault?

ROMILLY: No.

MIRANDA: He was the last one.

ROMILLY: There’s still Solomon.

[MIRANDA melodramatically scoffs. It is a haggard rebuff. She begins to cough

uncontrollably. ROMILLY goes to help, MIRANDA stops her with a stern gesture.]

MIRANDA: They can all rot in hell.

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: You were sick, weren’t you? When you were a girl.

MIRANDA: I was punished.

ROMILLY: Do you remember a medical officer? The one that came when you were a child?

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MIRANDA: Ah, yes.

ROMILLY: Your father ordered him to take fresh tissue. Send it back to Melbourne.

[MIRANDA sniggers.]

MIRANDA: Do you know what I’ve seen? The nation’s first cattle empire, free from

drought.

ROMILLY: I’ve heard the story many times.

MIRANDA: I was there for the laying of its foundation stones.

ROMILLY: Too many times.

MIRANDA: I’ve seen the end of war. Two wars. Millions of men. Their bodies torn apart.

For their home. For country and for God.

[MIRANDA sucks in a horrible gust of air.]

And you want to know about the body of a girl?

ROMILLY: How did you … ? /

MIRANDA: You could never keep secrets in this house. The pipes. See?

ROMILLY: Who?

MIRANDA: Why bring that up?

ROMILLY: It is true.

MIRANDA: So long ago. Useless. Forgotten

ROMILLY: Was she alive?

MIRANDA: Ha!

[A moment.]

I ‘ve … forgotten.

[MIRANDA becomes increasingly distraught, ROMILLY grabs her.]

I was an innocent little girl. That fever got my eyes, girl …

[A moment.]

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ROMILLY: I just want a name.

MIRANDA: Whatever he did, it was for their own good.

[A moment. ROMILLY lets her go.]

There was a family. I remember the men working with the horses. I remember their little

girls. The only little girls, other than me, for miles.

ROMILLY: Their name.

MIRANDA: Nungoray.

[A moment. MIRANDA makes a noise.]

No one’s said that name at Aparrerinja for a long time.

[A moment.]

They’re all gone. There’s no one that would recognise that name anymore.

[ROMILLY registers this. A moment.]

ROMILLY: You should have died in that camp with them.

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22.

BILLY, CONG, and SOL can continue their charade. Though, now, they are everywhere.

The action can become increasingly debauched and violent. It can move in slow motion before speeding up. Multiple BILLYS can appear. They can morph and transmute.

It ends as BILLY produces the skull and hands it to SOL in a ritual of bequeathment.

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23.

The sound of a breathing apparatus can be heard. The breaths are long and deep, accompanied by the unmistakable rattle of a throat behind a closed door. ROXANNE shakes the pill bottle, ROMILLY emerges from the shadows.

ROXANNE: [Hushed] You’re not allowed. Uncle Sol will be furious.

ROMILLY: Calm down. I just like watching old ladies sleep.

ROXANNE: Doesn’t sleep. Eyes stay wide. Always thinking.

[ROMILLY begins to leave. ROXANNE blocks her.]

ROMILLY: She’s moving about enough.

ROXANNE: Mum says it’s just something with her nervous system. Uncle Sol says it’s the

bed sores getting’ infected.

ROMILLY: Who do you believe?

ROXANNE: Don’t care.

ROMILLY: Well, she didn’t mention anything.

ROXANNE: So she talked?

ROMILLY: It’s hard to tell.

[ROMILLY continues trying to leave. ROXANNE blocks her with his body.]

Wheezed. I don’t know. Roxanne, I just want to go.

ROXANNE: Doesn’t talk to me. She think you’re special or something?

ROMILLY: I’m sure she thinks you’re special, too … /

ROXANNE: Talked about me, then?

ROMILLY: No, she didn’t. Please … /

ROXANNE: I’m getting sick of this. All this attention.

ROMILLY: Attention?

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ROXANNE: Just some attention seeking mole.

ROMILLY: I beg your pardon?

ROXANNE: Sick of everyone talking ‘bout you. It’s all they talk about. It’s boring. First it

was that Asian guy. Now it’s you. All about you. Haven’t seen Uncle Sol in weeks and all

he cares about is what you’re up to. Bullshit. Now you’ve got Nanna?! What about me?

Why does everyone care about you?

ROMILLY: I’m leaving. Don’t worry.

[ROXANNE grabs ROMILLY’S arms.]

ROXANNE: It’s my Dad that’s dead!

ROMILLY: Let go of me or … /

ROXANNE: ‘Or’ what? ‘Or’ what? Won’t scream. Uncle Sol’ll hear you.

[ROXANNE twists ROMILLY’S arm.]

He’s done things to people before.

ROMILLY: I know. I read it in a newspaper.

ROXANNE: Talk tough. But, you’re actually scared of him.

ROMILLY: You wanna know what she said?

ROXANNE: Tell me, she’s my Nanna!

[ROMILLY violently grabs ROXANNE’S neck.]

ROMILLY: [Hushed] She said that you were a psycho. That you come from a line of fucking

psychos! And that after what your family’s done, God should’ve cursed her entire family

line! Your Great Grandad was riddled with herpes. And, according to ya’ Nanna, curse’s

drove every other creep with your name mental as well. And you know what? She’s

praying that it gets you too. Kind of glad she’ll die believing in her vengeful God that

hates you all enough to curse every generation to come. That’s what she said. That, if she

319

could, she would take every single, evil dollar you every squeezed out of this country, and

destroy it all. You’ll get nothing.

[ROMILLY exits. ROXANNE rubs her neck.]

ROXANNE: [Feebly] Nanna?

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24.

In the house. ROMILLY moves and is intercepted by CONG and SOL. They still hold their shovels. SOL has the skull.

CONG: Give him the ledger, Romilly.

ROMILLY: No.

CONG: I found him, Romilly.

SOL: He wasn’t a butcher.

ROMILLY: Owned a couple of abattoirs, didn’t he?

SOL: Those businesses employed hundreds of Aboriginal blokes. Why don’t you write that?

Just a sick, old, lovely man.

ROMILLY: Employed tens of blokes, actually.

SOL: Libel! Fair and simple.

CONG: Give him the ledger.

ROMILLY: Cong, can we talk about it.

CONG: You said we were looking for the same thing

SOL: Turned out it wasn’t some dismembered blackfellas. Was just a sick old man.

ROMILLY: There were sixty men in Blackwell’s quarantine.

SOL: So: flu killed everyone. Lucky to be there.

ROMILLY: Not if you happened to be Aboriginal. A third of all everyone killed by it were

black. More than half treated died.

SOL: So, the man’s a hero then.

ROMILLY: No blacks walked out of the depot your Grandad set up.

CONG: Yours too.

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ROMILLY: I know. The word he used was ‘a simple funk’. That the blacks ‘made little

resistance’ to the virus. He thought the Aboriginals were fatalistic, wanting to die in

droves.

SOL: Different times.

ROMILLY: You think the ten metre cyclone fence had anything to do with it? Barbed wire?

CONG: Your Great-Grandfather.

ROMILLY: Land’s much easier to hold on to when its original inhabitants … /

SOL: Are wiped out by an act of God.

ROMILLY: You know your Grandad wrote reams of letters condemning land possession to

the Argus.

SOL: Well, there you go.

ROMILLY: It’s what spread the rumour brain was soft. Or a cunning plan. Did you tell Cong

about your cunning plan?

[A moment.]

SOL: Look – it was a tragedy. Fair and simple. Man tried to do everything. Couldn’t be

helped.

ROMILLY: Kept other drovers from moving into his territory

[A moment.]

SOL: We used to come here as kids. Roxy took her first steps out on that porch. This place

means so much to me. To us. More than any uppity, whining, blackfella’ …

[A moment. SOL catches himself.]

It’s not racist to put it that way. They were a problem the whole time growing up. Hanging

around. Getting up to mischief. Every Betzer man can testify to that. Now, if it’s racist to

love your country, where you’re from – then let me be the biggest racist this country has

ever seen.

322

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: Cong – he’s worried about Native Title. Now his brother’s dead, they gotta’

carve up the empire. All those Aboriginal men, women, and children want in. Have a right

to its wealth.

SOL: Worked hard for everything I ever got.

ROMILLY: Inherited everything you ever got.

SOL: But, this is my place. My land. As ‘sacred’ to me as any other blackfella. And it’s mine

to do whatever I like with ... I … We …

[SOL struggles.]

And they’re all fucking dead anyway!

[A moment.]

ROMILLY: You know – Saddam Hussein, on his way out of Kuwait in ’91, ordered his

forces to smash the bulkheads on all the oil wells. Spilling galleons of the crude stuff into

The Gulf as a result. They’re still cleaning it up. Had to invent a new word for this kind of

crime – ecocide. But, then … he ordered his men to light those oil wells up. The thick

flames were so bright; the damn space shuttle saw it – the burning.

SOL: So?

ROMILLY: The guy had nothing else to lose.

SOL: The world’s a complicated place.

ROMILLY: Turns out little Roxanne took her first steps on the graves of sixty corpses. Ones

that your Grandad probably intended to die like sick animals in a cage. The men, women,

and children that built your empire.

[SOL goes in to a delirious state, as if he has seen a ghost.]

SOL: Mumma?

[MIRANDA enters from within, moving slowly and deliberately.]

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ROMILLY: That’s what he’s afraid of, Cong. And you’re just letting him do it.

[SOL begins to following MIRANDA.]

CONG: The monster is all that matters.

ROMILLY: I’m related to one.

CONG: No one has to know.

[CONG holds out his hand. ROMILLY hands him the ledger.]

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25.

MIRANDA enters, feeling with her hands as she does. SOLOMON follows her.

SOLOMON: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight

and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and

sometime voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again: and

then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon

me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again. Caliban, the noble monster. May beauty

give you some joy in this darkness. Hear my voice, my darling. You always loved the

view from here.

MIRANDA: What was is it about, father?

SOLOMON: Ah! It is about a father, just like me. He would do anything for his daughter.

Even change the world.

[Large curtains begin to open. Blinding sunlight burns into the room.]

If only you could see them, my love. If you could see the marvel. The camp stretches for a

mile. Tents and beds. Do you see them? It is … marvellous. An empire. Fences. Beautiful.

Men and women and children. All in throes of this horrible illness. We’ll make them well.

We’ll make them well again. All we have to do is believe. Do you see? What, in truth,

have we done for these coloured natives, my dear? Robbed them of their land and of their

food; made them drunkards; debauched, and diseased their women to a state bordering

upon barrenness; driven them to murder their offspring to an extent promising a speedy

extermination of the race: and this our Christian guardianship. Do you see how I right this

wrong? Do you see?

[A moment.]

Tell me I did the right thing.

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[A moment.]

MIRANDA: No.

[Darkness. SOLOMON disappears.]

No. No. No. No. No. No!

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26.

Outside. CONG sits, exhausted, with the ledger. SOL enters holding his Grandfather’s skull.

The car headlights are switched through the fog.

SOL: Roxy! Roxy! Look in on your Nanna! She’s acting all weird!

[SOL notices the ledger.]

Would ya’ look at that. Didn’t need to use any of the ol’ Betzer charm. Still think you’re a

prick.

CONG: We had a deal.

SOL: It’s strange, you know. Now I’ve seen him like this, I can’t help but feel like … I don’t

know. Like it’s some kind of desecration. Oh, well.

CONG: Well, that skull belongs to me now.

[A moment.]

You know I’ll make him a monster. No more commemorative coins. Might even tear

down that monument in Canberra.

SOL: We all have to eat it once in a while.

[A moment. CONG and SOL laugh. ROXANNE enters.]

ROXANNE: Take me home.

SOL: What about Nanna?

ROXANNE: You talk to her? She’s messed up. Mouthing off. You know she’s giving you

nothing. I’m getting nothing! This has been a complete waste of time! You lied to me!

SOL: It’s all right!

ROXANNE: I am not going back to live in Toowoomba!

SOL: Bloody youth. [To CONG] Why’s he important to you?

[ROXANNE lights a cigarette.]

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CONG: I … I don’t know. Your Grandad ... he’s everything wrong with the world. Rich, old,

white … man.

SOL: Ease up. I never did nothin’ wrong.

ROXANNE: You’ve been to gaol four times for tax fraud.

SOL: Yep.

ROXANNE: Messin’ with witnesses.

SOL: Alright.

ROXANNE: And lying to me about Dad’s money!

SOL: Look at what they get! Those that gave everything! [Indicates the skull] Like him. Not

a word of thanks. Sure, they made mistakes. But they kept going. [To CONG] I understand

where you’re coming from, mate. I really do. Just remember that … [Welling up] Sorry,

but it’s still pretty raw with me. Even after all these years. All those people … Look, mate

– just remember that he cared. Before you turn him into a fiend. He cared.

CONG: She can still hurt you. She can still get the Reparation Board to come in and claim

the house for themselves.

ROXANNE: Another bloody thing.

SOL: Don’t worry ‘bout that.

CONG: It’s serious. Once we trade – you ain’t getting your skull back.

SOL: I said don’t worry! [To ROXANNE] I made a promise, my dear. I always keep my

promises. Would both of you ease up?

[A moment. SOL looks at the skull.]

The ol’ bastard was no saint, but he gave a shit. Two shits, in fact. Now that all this time

has passed. We can move on. History’s over.

[CONG hands the ledger to SOL who exchanges it for the skull.]

No one need get hurt. Not anymore.

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[In an instant, a bed pan clatters to the floor from a great height. Shards of glass fall.

They all look up, straining to see where it came from.

A BODY, dressed in white falls from a great height. This can be done abstractly or

brutally, in a literal way. As a result, the fall can be done in slow motion or in real

time. If literal, the body should be heavy so the impact makes the appropriate sound.

Gore might also be included – lots of it. Perhaps bits of body can be represented by a

billow dust on impact. Regardless, MIRANDA is dead.

Everyone screams.]

ROMILLY enters with her suitcase and a folder under her arm.]

ROMILLY: I’m leaving. I’ve got what I came for.

[ROMILLY sees the body and exits. Darkness.]

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27.

The BODY lies in the darkness. VISSER enters with the rifle and begins wrapping it up in sheets.

VISSER: Doctor Visser, visiting medical officer at Aparrerinja Aboriginal settlement, has

supplied a telegraphic report to the Home Department emphasising the state of panic and

the dire effects of the epidemic among the natives at the settlement. The report states that

five hundred and ninety-six natives were affected, and only ten remained unaffected.

Sixty-nine deaths occurred, including forty-five males and twenty-two females. Eleven

males and two females died of beri-beri complications and two males and five females

have syphilitic complications. Of the remainder it is thought that a great many died of

simple ‘funk,’ while some through grief and panic made little resistance, and courted

death. ‘There can be no doubt as to the result of this fatalistic creed among Australian

Aborigines, as amongst the Kanakas,’ but, fortunately, without loss of life. The first wave

of the epidemic affected half the officials and about thirty or forty natives.

[VISSER finishes and places one foot on the corpse and raises the rifle.]

The majority of the remaining natives were panic-stricken, and fled into the bush; two

hundred or three hundred took ill while in the bush, and officials found the greatest

difficulty …

[VISSER cocks the rifle.]

The greatest difficulty was in getting them back. Back to the camp for treatment.

[A long silence. VISSER stares.]

The Argus, June fourteen, 1919.

[VISSER collects the body over his shoulder and carries it off.]

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28.

DELORES and SOL enter. ROXANNE smokes a cigarette in the background. SOL is burning the pages of the ledger one by one.

DELORES: So, that’s it then.

SOL: Yes.

DELORES: Nothing to stop you selling our big, beautiful, drought-free Empire.

SOL: We’ll be rich, Delores.

DELORES: You’ve always mistrusted my methods. I couldn’t have left you to your own

devices. Not on a matter so grave. You know how muddled you become. Especially when

under … stress.

SOL: I’m not all that bad.

DELORES: I know you better than any other person on the planet.

SOL: My blessing and my curse.

DELORES: I had to act. We’re free now. Vindicated. Because of me.

SOL: I always was free.

DELORES: You should be happy.

SOL: I know you love this place. But, there comes a time when a lady must let go of the past.

Take her rightful place in the family. Marry me, Dolli. You always said I looked just like

him … Only uglier.

[A long silence. Pained, DELORES considers.]

DELORES: Thought you’d never ask.

[A moment. SOL remains staring fiercely at DELORES.]

SOL: [To ROXANNE] I know I’ve been a bit of a hard case, love.

ROXANNE: Yeah.

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SOL: [To ROXANNE] Just like your Mother says – I get all muddled when I’m under stress.

But, I think it’s about time we gave you what I promised.

ROXANNE: For real?

SOL: For real.

[A moment. DELORES is noticeably anxious. She remains still, fixed on SOL.]

Brought up twelve cans of gas from the shed. In the back of the Hi-lux.

ROXANNE: For real?

DELORES: Roxanne … /

ROXANNE: Shush, Mum. No more lies this time, Uncle Sol?

SOL: I reckon if we set ‘em up in the basement, the air will suck and vacuum it all up, like.

The whole thing will go up. BOOM. Learned it from a bikee-mate of mine. What do ya’

reckon?

[DELORES pleads with her eyes.]

ROXANNE: Aw, for sure Uncle Sol! Mum – anything you wanna’ keep?

SOL: Any keepsakes, darling?

[A moment.]

DELORES: We’ll always have the memories.

ROXANNE: You will.

[ROXANNE kisses DELORES on the cheek before exiting. DELORES remains staring

at SOL.]

SOL: It seems our daughter’s got a strong head on her.

DELORES: Like her father.

SOL: I’d better go and help Roxanne. Don’t want her blowing himself up.

DELORES: No.

[A moment.]

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SOL: You’re either a coward or you love me more than I thought.

[A moment.]

DELORES: I ... I’ve always been grateful to the Betzers.

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29.

In the desert. A vast and empty space. Fog billows and the moon shines bright. CONG enters.

CONG: [Yelling] Romilly!

[The sound of her footsteps in the distance.]

ROMILLY: [Off] It was Doctor Visser’s plan to quarantine everyone – two birds one stone.

Solomon was just the mouth. Chief Protector didn’t order an investigation. Not at

Aparrerinja. Not anywhere. They argued that the number of dead was about equal with the

numbers in the other Commonwealth colonies.

[ROMILLY appears through the fog.]

This is not a story about Aboriginal people who were murdered. This is the story of two

white men. It’s in my blood. Someone that could look those people in the eye and lock

them up to die. I came here to prove what I already knew. I’m not afraid of the truth.

[A moment.]

CONG: I just wanted to help.

ROMILLY: No you didn’t.

[BILLY enters.]

CONG: I just want to know what they saw.

[CONG looks at the skull.]

I know this man. I know the power. You think about all this history. This weight. It gives

you a secret. Something to hate. There are bad guys and you can see them in your head.

Rich, powerful, selfish. Instead, more … complicated. Mundane. Everything’s dug over.

Not some ancient grave – some buried cathedral. More like a suburban tip. Give ‘em piles

of dead. Guys like me - they hate, Romilly. It gives us a reason to exist. To fight. To have

something to say. What happened to all these people … Too much time has passed. Not

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enough either. Nothing to do with me. I mean – everything to do with me. I just wanted to

say to ‘em … I’m sorry that your history is so dark. That I …

[A moment.]

That I know …

ROMILLY: It really happened.

[A moment.]

Nungoray. That’s the name of the family. The name of the girl. Find her family.

[A moment.]

I’m going home. Don’t worry about me. I know my way in the dark. I’ve lived here all my

life.

[ROMILLY disappears. CONG and BILLY stand in the desert looking at each other.]

CONG: [Calling to ROMILLY] I’m sorry!

[A moment. BILLY does nothing.]

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

[CONG continues, getting louder and louder till he’s screaming. BILLY does

nothing.]

The sound of an explosion in the distance.]

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30.

Smoke billows and fire flickers like the site of a dark ritual. DELORES, SOL, and ROXANNE stand holding hands watching. CONG enters.

CONG stares at it with them for a time.

The three of them look at him as he gets in the car and turns the ignition.

The Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ blares.

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Epilogue

CONG waits in a hospital waiting room. The sound of a medical environment bleep and whirl in the background. The atmosphere is open and clinical. Nothing like the homestead.

TOMMY enters. He wears the scrubs of an orderly or nurse. CONG is nervous, wiping perspiration off his palms.

CONG: G’day. Um, Mr. Nungoray?

TOMMY: Tommy.

CONG: Ah, yes. I’m Doctor Wong.

[They shake hands. It goes on a tad too long.]

TOMMY: From Orthopaedics?

CONG: No, no, no. From the University. History Department.

TOMMY: What are you after?

CONG: Well …

[CONG struggles with his briefcase and pulls out a red file.]

I’ve been working out at a station North-West of here. Near White Gum. I stumbled across

some stuff about your … family. Might be of interest.

TOMMY: Grew up in Prahran, mate.

CONG: Extended family, then, I think, probably.

TOMMY: They were talking about that place on the news. Fella’ that owned it – he died

upstairs.

CONG: Well ...

[CONG presents some documents.]

TOMMY: That them then?

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CONG: Yep.

[CONG hands TOMMY the file. He suspiciously takes and flips through it.]

We’re still working on the details.

[TOMMY feigns reading the documents.]

It’s all there, I promise. Look, you don’t have to …

TOMMY: [Reading] … As you from crimes would pardoned be …

[CONG snatches the page.]

CONG: ‘let your indulgence set me free’. Ah, yes – sorry – that shouldn’t be in there.

TOMMY: What is it?

CONG: Bits of a play. Shakespeare’s.

TOMMY: What’s it about?

CONG: A duke, he’s smart, in exile … It’s actually quite an interesting meditation on … /

TOMMY: Not sure if I’ve got time … /

CONG: A dickhead. On an island. Everything’s in there. Everything I know.

TOMMY: [Laughing] Nothing bad, I hope.

CONG: Just information.

TOMMY: You want me to take this, then?

CONG: If you’d like to talk about it … my contact’s in there.

TOMMY: Maybe a coffee later?

[An awkward moment.]

So, why you guys interested in old blackfellas for?

CONG: I’ll leave you to it.

TOMMY: Thanks, Doctor … ?

CONG: Cong.

[They shakes hands.]

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CONG: Mr. Nungoray?

TOMMY: Yes.

CONG: Um … I don’t know how to say this …

[A moment. TOMMY checks his watch.]

Never mind.

[TOMMY nods awkwardly and then exits. CONG stands alone. The white light shines

on him as he thinks about what he was going to say ... ]

[Whispers] Sorry.

[A moment.]

[Different inflections] Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry …

[A long silence.

The END.

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Conclusions and Implications

(Un)Forgiveness:

Imagined Identities, the Future, and the Australian Gothic Drama

This thesis has argued that the four plays it has discussed and the original play it presents signal a self-conscious turn in Australian Gothic theatre. This turn is characterised by the tendency to subvert an imagined, postcolonial national identity that is reconciled with the crimes and violence of Australia’s colonial past. These plays are responding to a decade long reconciliation project that has failed to recognise Indigenous claims of sovereignty and, thus, ultimately resist a process that might authentically decolonise the nation. Furthermore, this dissertation reads the conflict between the modern settler-state and the unanswered call for sovereignty in terms of a differend by claiming that the Gothic, as it has in the past, reacts to irreconcilability in often violent, counter-discursive ways. The twenty-first century has seen the Australian Gothic become an increasingly popular, political mode of dramatic writing in what is both a measured evolution of and a striking departure from the Gothic of the post wave of Australian theatre, which was characterised by Gow, Nowra, Sewell, and

Bovell. As a result, Drinkwater, The White Earth, The Flood, The Dark Room, and Long

Shadows constitute a subtle, yet conspicuous revision of the speaking position occupied by the settler playwright within the larger schema of twenty-first century Australian theatre through their use of the non-Indigenous psychomachia.

All of these Gothic plays are tightly yoked to themes, histories, and metaphoric expressions of the frightening return of the colonial repressed in the form of the gradual uncovering of the violent dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, not recognizing their sovereignty, and exploring the psychological impact of these revelations within theatrical

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representations of the non-Indigenous psyche. Furthermore, the plays exacerbate the ambivalence of the settler subject within postcolonial Australia. In adopting a specialised, psychoanalytic approach to the Australian Gothic drama that has incorporated a nuanced, historically situated critique of the connection between anxiety, fear, and the possible effects that the dramatization of these psychic forces exert upon a contemporary national audience, this dissertation has emphasised on the genre’s crucial subversive index. As a result, this intense focus on the return of the colonial repressed opens up new approaches to the Gothic that are often sidelined within the field of postcolonial theatre studies. It is a field that, until recently, has often marginalised the exceptional cultural currency that the Gothic tenders, particularly in Australian theatre scholarship.

The Australian Gothic Drama through Practise-Led Research

Like the dissertation, the research question for the creative component of this thesis focused on how a sustained use of the Gothic drama – committed to its subversive index – reveal about representations of Australian colonial history in a contemporary context? This question created several issues when explored through practice-led research. The first and most pressing was the issue of representation surrounding the narrative’s interest in

Aboriginal people, their culture, the potential for appropriation of their history, and their experience of early twentieth century Australia. This issue has been widely discussed in

Australian theatre studies and has been a prominent topic of discussion within the discipline of playwriting over the past decade. Approaches to ethical responsibility bound up in the cross-cultural narration of Indigenous experiences of colonisation seem to be in perpetual revision and re-negotiation. Indeed, in the years following the formal apology of 2008, the issue has taken on a renewed significance now that a discourse of recognition has entered into

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mainstream discussion and the hope of sovereignty and treaty is actively debated across the country.

When it comes to non-Indigenous playwrights and the postcolonial desire to facilitate diverse speaking positions within the subgenre of ‘settler/invader’ theatre, the Aboriginal playwright, scholar, and commentator, Jane Harrison, observes ‘that there is a fascination and curiosity from non-Aboriginal people who want to draw upon the rich cultural traditions of

Aboriginal Australia, and express them through storytelling, dance, art, music or performance’ (2009:42). Harrison’s comments had a prescience in 2009 in a way that has becomes more culturally significant over the last few years with the growing body of non-

Indigenous or settler playwrights that have drawn on Aboriginal experience, culture, and history to explore the still disputed aspects of a shared colonial past. Moreover, Harrison points out a glaring issue at the centre of non-Indigenous creative practice when she argues that ‘there can be a strong sense of exploitation when non Aboriginal people ‘use’ Aboriginal cultural heritage as if it was their right to do so’ (2009:42).

Throughout the practice-led research process of Long Shadows, I similarly exhibited a strong desire to speak to the discourse of recognition and represent aspects of the Aboriginal experience of Victoria in the early twentieth century in ways that emulated and extended the post wave, ‘settler/invader’ plays of the late 1990s and early twentieth century. Long

Shadows explored these complicated anxieties through a praxis that invokes the most aggressive and confronting theatrical language at its disposal – the Australian Gothic. The process illustrates – for its playwright at least – the overwhelming desire, but deeply problematic praxis of theatrically representing the nation’s deep fissures and the wounds of its past, present, and reconciled future within a cross-cultural discourse. Like the plays

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discussed in the dissertation, this ethical crisis formed a psychomachia of its own and revealed further autophagous characteristics of the Australian Gothic drama. The findings produced by the practice-led research suggest that the structural logic of the contemporary

Australian Gothic drama discussed in the critical component of this thesis cannot be untethered from the post-Reconciliation context in which it is produced. While the intergenerational narrative Long Shadows presents is constructed to appear transhistorical, its strategies of Gothic effect are purely contextual. This aspect of the research suggests that the plays expression of Australian Gothic drama is contingent on whether or not the differend created through the discourse of sovereignty is ever reconciled or, indeed, can be reconciled.

It suggests that, like other cultural moments of rupture in the nation’s past which created

Gothic work, it might also disappear from view once more.

Settler Gothic

Through a sustained Gothic lens, we have seen that Drinkwater shows us a fictional

Northern township on the eve of Federation that is caught up in a widespread paranoia surrounding a mysterious Asian plague. What follows is a bricolage of Gothic conventions – the ghosts of dead children return, past crimes are exhumed, and European settlement crumbles in the remotest parts of the fledgling nation. The play is a miasma of traditional images and theatrical forms that deliberately critiques the contemporary scene and the ways in which settler Australians represent history.

The White Earth shows us a young boy, William, sent to live with his tyrannical and maddened uncle in a Gothic mansion in the New South Wales hinterlands. The play exposes deep-seated anxieties surrounding settler notions of displacement that unequivocally assert that to be ‘at home’ is to exist, literally, on the bones of murdered Indigenous peoples and

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within a debilitating moral universe of horror. Moreover, The Flood, reveals how repressed secrets and colonial trauma tear settler families apart by coming to define their entire existence. These revelations occur in a landscape that is haunted by a colonial figure that was once romanticised in the Australian theatre.

The Dark Room stages violence perpetrated by white Australians on Indigenous people, albeit in far more recent circumstance. Set against the backdrop of the government’s

Intervention into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, the play follows three pairings of haunted people that are trapped – figuratively and often literally – in a motel somewhere in the Territory’s desert. The stories swirl and overlap on the single-roomed stage as characters move like ghosts from room to room and across time as they take on frightening and increasingly demented guises who enthral and accuse. They are eternally trapped together and forced to relive the trauma the settler-state enacts upon its subjects.

Long Shadows expresses the moral Manichean struggle of the psychomachia as predicated on the desire to both narrate and unconsciously silence Aboriginal speaking positions simultaneously. For its playwright, this moral excess resonates strongly with

Harrison’s comments on appropriation and exemplifies the unique relationship that has been shown to exist between historical contexts and the Australian Gothic.

All of these plays focus on non-Indigenous Australian characters. Vulgarity, paternalism, racism, sexism, profoundly xenophobic paranoias, and a fierce resentment towards Aboriginal peoples all feature in their behaviours as a kind of grotesque vocabulary of actions and motivations that are all embodied by white players on-stage. The frequency of these kinds of behaviours – in both historical and contemporary settings – radically

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contradicts the kinds of romantic representations of ‘settler’ Australians that are considered traditional in the nation’s theatre. These are the kinds of settlers that feature prominently in the plays on John McCallum’s list ‘Celebrations of the Past’ (qtd. Gilbert 1998:98).

Moreover, the sources of these transgressive behaviours are situated within institutions – the government, the church, the law, the police, and the family – rather than the anomalous pathology of individual psychopaths.

These characters are not serial killers or depraved lunatics. Populating these plays are settler landowners, farmers, colonial governors, priests, social workers, police officers, scholars, mothers, and daughters. We see this throughout with the central, shared thematic conflict being either an overt confrontation with or the recognition of the concealed execution of institutional power upon Aboriginal peoples in the past. This violence often takes the form of literal murder or domination. However, it is the inheritance of the responsibility of that violence, or the return of the suppressed knowledge of past crimes and the privileges that the nation continues to bestow upon those that occupy stolen land that are the truly frightening objects in these plays. Drinkwater does this off stage, in the play’s immediate past, and in the degenerating minds of its white authority figures. The White Earth locates the source of its non-Indigenous anxiety in the relatively recent past and illustrates its effect upon a single, non-Indigenous family. The Flood silences trauma by keeping it off-stage in the rural exterior

– adding yet another toxic element that taints the play’s treatment of white, rural settlement.

The Dark Room stages both the trauma caused by government policy and the anxiety it causes in its non-Indigenous characters simultaneously in the past and the present.

These plays are also set in an Australian landscape that is literally and metaphorically a haunted and threatening space. Drinkwater’s frontier violence is compounded by the threat

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of Aboriginal retaliation and the fear of the Asian plague killing the settlement’s children.

Quarantine, stridently policed borders, and the fear of miscegenation amongst the Anglo population are inseparable threats in Somerset that are equivalent to environmental perils such as tempests and volcanic eruptions. The White Earth re-produces the ghosts of lost explorers, cannibal convicts, betrayed ANZAC soldiers, and even the figure of an appropriated bunyip. Retribution for a long forgotten massacre of Aboriginal people is made further remote, but kept just as potent, in the form of a Native Title claim that threatens white ownership of the property. The Flood keeps its ghosts offstage – trapped in the minds of its three women – as a traumatic memory of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of a colonial tyrant who is always threatening to return. In The Dark Room, there is a case to be made that all the characters are lost and resentful spectres. However, the creepy, spectral figures of the play’s abused children – Grace and Joseph – are profoundly haunting figures in and of themselves.

In each of these plays the spectre of the past and the crimes committed by white

Australians therein is always present in ways that augment the palpable sense of Gothic dread on stage. Moreover, these haunted landscapes also, in their own unique ways, contain ruins.

The worlds they present are littered with traces of British buildings in alien and hostile terrain. The deserted motel that is trapped in time, the ramshackle farm house on the flooded plain, the burnt remains of the colonial mansion, and the boarded-up Governor’s Residence are all leftovers of their White inhabitants’ lost hopes and dreams.

As a result, it can be said that these theatrical works constitute a unique expression of the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ of the postcolonial development of the non-Indigenous Subject that is incarcerated in a psychomachia of moral excess. The inclusion of the psychomachia

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problematizes the characters’ psychological well-being and the discontinuity and unfeasibility of the communities they propagate. In these plays, there is an intense interest in not only undermining imperial authority but – by extension – an evocation of an intensely morose treatment of individual settler Australians and their culture. This interest is expressed in ways that are excessive, vulgar, racist, sexist, xenophobic, resentful, emasculated, guilty, ineffective, and wholly alienated from any sense of optimism and hope.

If this aspect of twenty-first century Australian Gothic drama is to be interpreted as expressions of white Australian subjectivity, then they proffer a cynically ironic re- description of the more easily identifiable nationalist representations of Australian history and the figures that are said to have populated it. The plays do so by constructing and representing the Gothic aspect of the Australian settler. One that desires to be postcolonial, to be forgiven, and to right wrongs, but is, instead, defined by its guilt, its resentment, and its unwillingness to change. Whether or not this archive of plays can be considered as representative of a new wave of dramatic writing in Australia or if broad statements about epochs and movements are even as relevant in the contemporary field as they have been in the past is a topic for further debate. They do, however, indicate that the fluid, corporeal, and spontaneous nature of the Australian Gothic has developed into a stable and contingent genre in the theatre that is effective at staging, perhaps purging, non-Indigenous fears and anxieties about belonging on what is, ostensibly, ground that was never ceded to the Commonwealth by First Nations people.

Indeed, these plays exemplify the strange and eclectic expressions the fear of failed reconciliation inspires in regards to the ongoing ways in which colonial ways of thinking influence the Australian theatre. However, they do so by subverting any assertion that

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progress to reconcile the nation’s colonial past with Indigenous Australians or with the consciences of non-Indigenous Australians has been achieved. Claims of progress – such as the opening up of a discursive space for marginalised voices proffered by the post wave – is, instead, treated suspiciously by the ways each of these plays pruriently reanimate the colonial traumas of convictism and the invasion of the country’s original inhabitants and re-frames them as essential, deeply repressed, and inescapable objects of horror, which are firmly lodged in the settler Unconscious. These plays are reanimating the dormant objects of repression precisely at the historical moment in which the process of de-colonisation is being rendered problematic and the ethical state of the nation is being challenged by competing,

Aboriginal speaking positions. As a result, this body of plays can be interpreted as dragging their audiences back to a version of the primal base of origin in which the original sins of the past never – or will ever – be forgiven.

This vision of the nation’s European genesis is not an historical place or moment.

Instead, it is a purely aesthetic location that is constructed through the plays’ prurient visions of contested history. They insist that the past was, for very different reasons, a nightmare for both the colonised and coloniser. However, in focusing on and undermining the white speaking position within these theatrical versions of history, the playwrights invite us to see it through the lens of a Gothic psychomachia whose frightening visage unequivocally addresses the morality of both active and passive non-Indigenous resistance to Aboriginal sovereignty.

The ubiquitous presence of the psychomachia in all of these plays suggests that non

Indigeneity exists on a threshold that looks both ways – outwards to the postcolonial culture in which it exists and inwards at the specious image of subjective wholeness and legitimacy that continues to deny the recognition of its Indigenous Other. As a result, it produces a terror that is stimulated by the profound challenge to the entrenched universal liberalism that has,

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for these playwrights at least, failed to achieve a postcolonial identity which re-enfranchises all Australians into an imagined concept of the ‘unified’ nation.

I have argued that the Australian Gothic of the plays discussed in this thesis is not postcolonial. Instead, the Gothic in these plays is retreating from an assumed and empowered postcolonial speaking position and regressing to a Gothicised, colonial state of affairs, albeit in a heightened, self-conscious, and excessive manner. What might appear as a type of theatre that is solely fixated on the expression of self-hatred or a perpetually masochistic self-critique of settler Australian history becomes something different when viewed through this thesis’ consistent and historically situated Gothic lens. While the Gothic at work in these plays is excessive, prurient, and overtly strategic in its allegorical gestures, these plays do not seek to exhume repressed history. Instead, they are fully aware of what has been repressed and insist as much to their audiences. They posit that repression is no longer the frightening and disturbing object that the Gothic has, in the past, returned to trouble the non-Indigenous

Subject’s sense of ‘Self’. They contend that the desire to reconcile, even after an apology on such a grand scale, now constitutes a contemporary form of disavowal and that there is no longer any tangible concept of ‘innocence’ that is able to defend any claim to the contrary.

These plays posit that if the spectres of colonialism cannot be exorcised and the future un- haunted by symbolic gestures, then this wilful historical and cultural trachoma must be replayed as a punishing white melancholia ad infinitum as expressed by a psychomachia in which the non-Indigenous ‘Self’ remains in a perpetually unfinished and unreconciled state.

This is the central object of the contemporary Australian Gothic drama.

I shall consider this trend in reference to the ways in which the colonial repressed returns in the twenty-first century as ‘Settler Gothic drama’. This is identified as a separate

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genre from an ‘Indigenous Gothic’ or the ‘Aboriginal Gothic’ that other scholars, namely the postcolonial literary theorist, Katrin Althans, consider a legitimate postcolonial discourse because it ‘ultimately rejects the one reconciling instance of the Gothic, the inevitable restoration of order, thus finally defying a linear narrative of closure and once more emphasising the regained power of Aboriginal culture and identity’ (2010:18). Instead, this

‘Settler Gothic drama’ is, by and large, produced for the country’s non-Indigenous population and reacts, as demonstrated in the chapters and practice-led research of this thesis, to the pressures and anxieties generated in the settler psyche through the misrecognition of

Aboriginal sovereignty. The Gothic drama, thus, theatricalises the fears that underpin concepts of a desired and imagined national identity through its depiction of the conquering yet decaying and guilty history of white violence against Aboriginal peoples over the last two hundred years of settlement.

Insofar as the Other has always been foundational to the Gothic, it is no longer

Indigenous in the Settler Gothic drama as it had been in the plays of the post wave. Recalling

Gilbert, there is no clearing ‘a space from which the marginalised might speak’ in these plays as had been in their forebears (1998:8). Instead, what is Othered in these twenty-first century

Gothic dramas is that illusive aspect of the settler psyche that can, still, and so quickly, attempt to disavow over fifty years of postcolonial identity work and instead coddle a problematic concept of being at ‘home’ with an ‘imagined’ or forgiven sense of national identity. In the twenty-first century Settler Gothic, non-Indigenous playwrights are attempting the paradoxical and strenuous task of alienating themselves within the larger, cross-cultural discourse about Australian history by focusing solely on the settler’s psychology and fear.

Consequently, these plays represent a marked critique of settler subjectivity and offer a deep, solipsistic reflection on the resentments and insecurities that persist in the early twenty-first

350

century regardless of whether non-Indigenous playwrights can be considered postcolonial or not. These plays uphold Veronica Kelly’s argument that ‘the impossibility of white

Australian dramatists ever occupying a convincingly unitary and credibly “historical” speaking position continues to generate both creative energy and renovation of our theatre’

(2000:143). These plays illustrate how, for the Australian Gothic drama, this ‘impossibility’ is not a limiting discourse. Rather, it has created an entirely novel speaking position that attempts to eschew the credibility of a settler historical speaking position altogether and excessively critiques the continuity of an imagined sense of national identity in which the entire nation is reconciled with its violent history.

The Future

A decade has passed since Kevin Rudd delivered the Apology to Indigenous

Australians in 2008. It was a key moment in Australian postcolonial relations, and before it many settler descendent Australians expressed intense feelings of shame and remorse. As a result, the apology came to be framed as a kind of cathartic moment in which forgiveness could be bestowed on non-Indigenous people who felt compelled to say ‘sorry’. In 2018, the political climate around Indigenous affairs appears to directly contradict that lost desire for exculpation that so animated non-Indigenous Australians to ask for forgiveness only a decade ago. Against a hostile backdrop of regular protest marches, the only recently Former-Abbott government’s plans to cut funding to remote communities, the half-billion dollar cuts to

Indigenous services, the still decade-wide gap in life expectancy, and soaring Indigenous incarceration rates, that utopian dream of a united nation continues to appear an unattainable desire.

351

In considering this trend from a non-Indigenous perspective, we can return to Jacobs’ concept of ‘gloomy’ reconciliation, in which she argues that ‘the drive to create an “on record” apology is proof of a settler subject actively transforming him or herself from

“colonialist” into that fantasised subject of the postcolonial nation (2010:13). Indeed, looking at the contemporary political scene, what exactly constitutes this ‘fantasised’ non-Indigenous identity remains woefully unclear and is still the subject of much progressive and conservative debate. Jacobs goes on to suggest that in hindsight the motivation behind the

Apology might not have been exclusively about healing the misery of The Stolen Generation, but rather the desire of those settler Australians to seek ‘absolution for past sins’ (2010:13).

For contemporary non-Indigenous Australians, this lingering anxiety occupies a strange place in the national psyche which exists somewhere between a desperately desired concept of forgiveness and the political reality of current Indigenous policy.

This complex problem is exposed in the self-reflexive, sado-masochistic way that these plays stage the resultant psychic pressure as a solipsistic Gothic nightmare from which there is no escape. The profundity of it in Drinkwater, The White Earth, The Flood, The Dark

Room, and Long Shadows can only be fully comprehended when read in juxtaposition to the response of First Nations people and their ongoing calls for constitutional recognition. In

May of 2017, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from across Australia gathered for the

National Constitutional Convention at Uluru on Anangu country in the Northern Territory.

Delegates were drawn from twelve locations across the country and the convention was called to discuss, deliberate, and establish a plan to appeal to the federal government and the

Referendum Council with a declaration of for constitutional change.

352

The convention delivered the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ (2017). It is an impassioned and emboldened proclamation of Indigenous sovereignty and re-iterates the indissoluble, ‘ancestral tie between the land [ … ] and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors’ (‘The Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 2017). The central request of the statement stridently criticises the purported effectiveness of any form of

‘symbolic recognition’ and instead asserts that political outcomes remain the only satisfactory form of sovereignty: ‘With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ (‘The Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 2017). Amongst the suggestions, pleas, and demands in the statement, there is a pointed call to establish a commission to negotiate

Makarrata – a Yolngu word for a ceremonial ritual that symbolises the restoration of peace following a dispute – between the Aboriginal people and the Commonwealth government.

The statement clarifies the purpose of Makarrata, averring that it ‘captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia’ (‘The Uluru Statement from the

Heart’, 2017).

The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ concludes with an optimistic vision of the future and an offer of inter-cultural cooperation while moving forward to the ultimate goal of a recognised sovereignty. It does so in a way that simultaneously recalls and re-affirms the long history of the fight for recognition:

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp

and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in

a movement of the Australian people for a better future (‘The Uluru

Statement from the Heart’, 2017).

353

With a mainstream Indigenous position defined, we can look at these Australian Gothic plays as their own attempt to strategically excise the white perspective from the conversation and by comprehensively undermining their speaking positions within the discourse of the nation.

They look, not at history but at the traumatic yet progressive psychological experience of listening and recognising the political sovereignty of Indigenous Australians. As a result, they are paradoxically performing a solipsistic theatrical representation of being perpetually

‘unforgiven’. They embrace this position, treating it as neither positive nor negative but at as a necessary step in a process of self-reflection. Indeed, they advocate that recognition is not something that non-Indigenous Australians are capable of bestowing upon Indigenous peoples. Instead they express a desire to step back, retreat, and disappear into a perpetual state of melancholia in which an absent moral hegemony is re-cast as the lost object of the colonial enterprise rather than the lost innocence of their ancestors. These plays do so by creating an un-real vision of that imagined privilege, by dwelling on, and exacerbating the psychological forces that will, in perpetuity, prevent it from being realised.

These psychological effects, regardless of the postcolonial desire or ethical will to reconcile the differend of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationships, continue to be problematic in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Indeed, as demonstrated through the practice-led research of Long Shadows, this differend cannot be un-haunted through the emotional effects of the Australian Gothic drama. If it could be, then the need for such an elaborate and historically specific form of the Gothic would be minor and the culturally masochistic thrills the genre promises would be no more than mere pastiches of titillating dramatic images. Whilst plays like Long Shadows can be readily produced and the

Gothicisation of repressed history still registers emotionally when presented through sublime theatrical spectacle, the prolonged non-Indigenous self-reckoning that is at the centre of the

354

Settler Gothic will continue to haunt newer, non-Indigenous dramatic aesthetics which attempt to offer different perspectives on the colonial influence in the Australian theatre.

Stuart Hall famously writes that ‘we always knew that the dismantling of the colonial paradigm would release strange demons from the deep, and that these monsters might come trailing all sorts of subterranean material’ (1996:259). It would seem – based on this initial survey of the plays analysed in this dissertation – that Drinkwater, The White Earth, The

Flood, The Dark Room, and Long Shadows find it pertinent, instead, to give theatrical form to the strange demons that decolonisation has released within the coloniser. These ‘demons’, as it were, appear in the early twenty-first century in the form of Gothic plays that seek to theatrically document the precise historical context in which this moral crisis has facilitated a moment – however fleeting – in which self-reflection on the behalf of non-Indigenous

Australians may just shape a future in which past crimes can be reconciled.

355

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Author/s: Harmsen, Andrew Frederik

Title: Performing (Un)forgiveness: the psychomachia of recognition and the return of the colonial repressed in 21st century settler gothic drama

Date: 2018

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