Introduction Staging the North Midway through Xavier Herbert’s novel Capricornia, the young Norman Shillingsworth boards a ship in Batman, heading up the Eastern Australian coast to rejoin his family in the far northern capital of Port Zodiac. Norman believes himself to be the son of a Javanese princess. In what we would now read as classic Orientalist terms, Herbert describes how the first-class liner passengers are initially intrigued by Norman, whom they “had to thank for giving them something new and strange to talk about, and something exciting too, suggesting lust – lust in the sun, or before the moon’s hot face, amid the scent of the frangipani and the throb of heathen drums” (210). The further north the ship heads, the more tenuous the romantic delusions become, and it is with the symbolic crossing of the ship from South to North – the crossing of the Tropic of Capricorn – that the fantasy dissolves altogether. Norman is recognised by a publican boarding the ship at Port Magnetic, who reveals him to be the illegitimate offspring of a “Capricornia gin” (211). Norman is ostracised by the first class and saloon passengers, forced by journey’s end to cohort with the “dagoes and roughs of second class” (211). It is as though the further Norman heads into the Northern tropics, the harsher the glare of scrutiny becomes, and the harder it is for fantasy and self-invention to take hold. The North forces a brutal version of “truth” to prevail. Louis Nowra uses this passage as the starting point for his 1988 dramatic interpretation of the novel, and similarly, the scene has acted as some kind of galvanising trigger for this thesis and what the Australian North is, if in fact it “is,” and how this vast geographical and discursive space has been enacted. I say “enacted” 1 because this study is especially interested in the way the North has been invented on the Australian stage, and how theatre in turn has had, and continues to have, a significant cultural relevance in the shaping and perpetuation of national tropes and visions, rather than just reflecting them obediently in a form of theatrical mimesis. This thesis offers a reading of the North through a theatrical lens. Such a reading might sit usefully alongside studies that focus on representations of the North in film, visual art, literature or music. Certainly the readings of the symbolic functions of the Australian North offered in this thesis are designed to open up ways of understanding the nation that might be applied beyond the bounds of this theatrical investigation. I frame an analysis of representations of the North in theatre within the critical lens of spatial inquiry. Spatial theory is a burgeoning field of critical and cultural analysis that applies especially well to theatre studies which is, of course, based on “space.” It is the cultural, political and symbolic analysis – the representation – of specific Australian spaces with which this thesis is primarily concerned. Theatre not only represents space, it enacts space. It reads, politicises and activates the ways in which we imagine cultural geographies. It brings Australian landscapes to the fore, and populates and physicalises them in conscious and frequently metaphoric or metonymic ways. In bringing together a study of theatre with an application of spatial inquiry to the theatre, this thesis offers a unique and specific reading of the Australian North over the past century in order to better understand what this hitherto under-investigated and under-analysed region might represent symbolically to the nation as a whole. This curiosity about an Australian North is not mine alone, it would seem. Julianne Schultz describes Australia’s associations with the North in her introduction to a Griffith Review edition devoted entirely to the topic of unravelling the region’s mystique. Her overview of the North’s “myths, threats and enchantments” states: 2 It may be the product of living in the second most southerly continent, but every generation of Australians has had iconic images of threats from the north. Flip through your memory of popular history and there they are – Chinamen in pigtails set to overrun the goldfields, Japanese aggressors poised to invade, dominoes tumbling on a Cold War map, Indochinese boat people searching for a safe haven and refugees stumbling out of leaky boats onto isolated beaches. Most of the images feature people with dark hair and Asiatic features whose intent is clear: to occupy the vast, virtually empty spaces between the northern coastline and the southern capitals. (7) Schultz’s equation of the North with anxieties about invasion and infiltration from a demonised Asian “Other” is a salient one, and I return to it throughout the course of this thesis. The other association embedded within this fear of what lies further to the North is a construction of the North as being “empty” and acting as a buffer between Asia and the Southern capitals. Those “vast, virtually empty spaces” along the Northern coastline to which Schultz refers are considered tacitly devoid of human population, despite the fact that the region is inhabited – even if comparatively sparsely – by tens of thousands of people. Schultz touches upon the perception that the majority Australian population unconsciously associates the North with emptiness because it is not deeply populated by white occupants. Schultz identifies another “mythic” contradiction when she writes: Now add to the mental mix the allure of the north, of warm tropical nights, coral reefs and palm-fringed beaches, of open roads surging through dramatic country, of millennia of indigenous settlement, of people who follow their dreams and find a home, or themselves, in the most unlikely places, of crocodiles in remote waterways and captivating exotica of Asia. Our imaginative sense of the north is a complicated one: full of contradictions and fascination tinged with fear, like submerged crocodiles. (7) This thesis is preoccupied with the range of symbolic and seemingly contradictory mythic associations with which Schultz and Australians generally endow the North. I elaborate upon the ways in which this range of mythic configurations might be theorised within a historiographical and theatrical context shortly. Suffice it to say that the North is resonating strongly as a source of debate in Australian public life in this 3 first decade of the twenty-first century. The Northern states are leading the mining and natural resources boom that is underpinning national economic growth. House prices and population growth projections are spiralling upwards in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.1 As the harsh realities of global warming and climate change settle in and large tracts of South-eastern Australia become seemingly permanently entrenched in drought, rainfall in the North remains high. “Go North, young man!” is the refrain of politicians hesitant to actively remove farmers from the land in regions of the country that were once fertile. The future sustainability of the nation, it would seem, lies in an exploitation of the North’s vast and hitherto untapped resources. Despite this explosion of interest in the North for its resources and economic opportunity on the one hand, and for its symbolic and cultural cachet on the other, theatre representing the North has been long overlooked in terms of scholarly analysis. Certainly a fresh interest in the North is reflected in a burgeoning field of analysis in other artistic and academic fields, to which I see this theatre-focussed study as being both complementary and indebted. Australian cinema is frequently associated with Outback and Bush locales and their swag of mythic associations. Despite a spate of films dealing with specifically northern locations, including Japanese Story (2003), Yolngu Boy (2001), Ten Canoes (2006), Lucky Miles (2007) Rogue (2007) and, preceding these recent releases, the seminal Crocodile Dundee (1986), little academic analysis is devoted to viewing these films as a distinctively northern oeuvre. The rise of an Aboriginal presence and influence in film cannot be ignored, but the Outback, the 1 The Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests that in September 2006, annual house prices in Perth and Darwin had risen by 45% and 17% respectively. The national average was 9.5%. Whilst Perth is not a Northern population centre as far as this thesis is concerned, there is little doubting that it is benefiting by association from Western Australia’s northern resource boom. (http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/6416.0Main+Features1Sep%202006?OpenDoc ument) 4 Bush and the North all seem to roll in to one undifferentiated category as far as cinematography is concerned. A spate of recent academic cinematic writing has focussed, for instance, on the emphasis on representations of first contact, early frontier negotiations and reflections of the colonial past from an Aboriginal perspective in contemporary indigenous cinema (see articles and interviews by Jane Lydon, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Anne Brewster by way of recent-most example). None of it looks at the North, specifically, as a cinematic sub-genre or subject. The focus on this scholarly journal writing on indigenous cinema is very much concerned with reconsidering the Australian colonial era from an indigenous perspective, or on acknowledging past injustices such as the Stolen Generations.2 Whilst set mostly in the North, these films are being analysed as metonymy for the entirety of Australia, and for the nation’s colonial history as a whole. This thesis therefore seeks to address an under- theorisation of the North via the medium of theatre that is also lacking in, but can be applied to, the field of cinema studies. It is in the field of visual art that such discrete investigation of an Australian North seems presently to be strongest.