Drama and the Dreaming framing the play West of West Wirrawong
by Paul Anthony Sherman M.A. B.Ed. Studies, Dip, Journalism (UQ)
submitted in application for the Research Masters Degree
in the Faculty of Creative Industries
Queensland University of Technology
2009
i Keywords:
Drama, the dreaming, Nietzsche, playwrighting, playwriting, stageplay, creative practice as research
ii Contents Keywords: ...... ii Statement of Original Authorship ...... iv Dedication ...... v West of West Wirrawong ...... 1 Drama and the Dreaming - Exegesis ...... 103 Bibliography and Published Works Consulted ...... 124 Conferences Attended in 2006 ...... 127 Conference Presentation ...... 127 Relevant Roles played in stage productions ...... 127 Some Activity Sources of Indigenous Culture ...... 128 Sound Recordings (vinyl) ...... 128 Audio Cassettes ...... 128 Sound Recordings (CD) ...... 128 Live Performance ...... 128 Appendix A: Relevant Poems ...... 129 Somewhere under the Rainbow Serpent ...... 129 Beerwah-on-Seine ...... 130 Southern Burnett Sentinel ...... 132 Amah Rock ...... 134 Reading the Rocks ...... 135 gifts for gubbas ...... 137 Appendix B: A Chapter Summary, with comments, of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche ...... 139
iii Statement of Original Authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signature ______
Date ______
iv Dedication
To the creators of all legends and myths, including Australian Indigenous songmen and song women
Special thanks for David Unaipon (the man on the Australian $50 note), to Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, to Bernard Hickey of Australia’s Maryborough and Italy’s Lecce, to Aldo Nagagnino, of Presicce, to Maryvonne Nedeljkovic and her students in the University of Le Havre, to Queensland storyteller and poet Herby Wharton, to Cheryl Buchanan and the JageraJarjum song and dance Troupe, to Wesley Enoch, Robin Wells, John Dugdalee Jones, Robert Stuurman, Val Vallis, Judith Wright.
To Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner and his cronies such as Wotan, Erda, Fricka, Freia, Siegfried, Siegmund, Sieglinde, Brunnhilde,Fasolt, Fafner, Loge, Donner, Mime, Alberich, the Rhinemaidens, The Norns and the Valkyrie.
To Mother Beerwah, Father Tibrogargan, Son Coonowrin, to Wantima, and in North Queensland he Spangled Drongo Byjimjillah, to Sunshine Coast’s Coolum, Ninderry, Maroochy and Mudjimba, to theBlue Mountain’s Three Sisters, to Kangaroo Island’s Two Sisters.
To Dionysus, Apollo, Zeus, Semele, Niobe, Artemis, Orpheus and Eurydice…
v Drama and The Dreaming 1
West of West Wirrawong
A play by Paul Sherman
PO Box 387,
Lutwyche , Q4030.
Characters
Young male actor in Prologue, who plays Stoney in play
Merle town librarian, a poet
Lilypilly town’s oldest resident
Anthony retired school teacher
Billy acting editor of The West Wirrawong Bugle
1 Drama and The Dreaming 2
Scene
Suggestion of a public square in the centre of a country town. Upstage right, a series of rostra, climbable, suggestive of a war memorial.
Downstage left a couple of small bushes.
Here and there, other, movable rostra to suggest benches and an open air picnic table.
Dedication
To the creators of all legends and myths, especially Australian indigenous songmen and songwomen.
2 Drama and The Dreaming 3
Prologue
Spoken by young male actor who, as he talks, puts on grey, statue-style military uniform of
World War One.
Gidday, guys. Heard of Henry Reynolds, historian? You musta. Well,
Henry wrote about us Statue Soldiers on war memorials all over the
country. City squares, suburbs, country towns – me and me mates pop
up everywhere. Come Anzac Day, Remembrance Day, we’re the centre
of attention. Rest of year, most of youse don’t notice us much. Well,
Henry Reynolds, he asked why there’s nothing about the Aboriginal
dead on the stones under us. Oh, of course the Aboriginal soldiers who
died in the two World Wars and the other ones, they get their names up
sometimes. But Henry asks where’s the acknowledgement of the fallen
Aboriginal tribesmen who died for their country in the other wars, the
battles fought here, on this soil? Just thought I’d pop Henry’s question
before I turn into stone, so to speak. And blowed if I know the answer.
I’m just gunna be a Gallipoli-and-after guy.
Oh, ‘nother reason why I’m chattin’ to youse now before I go into
character, so to speak, I’m just an ordinary actor. Flesh an’ blood. Can’t
keep statue-still all the time. An’ you won’t be wantin’ to watch me
fidget. So now an’ again I’ll come down orf me perch. An’ if I skedaddle
into the wings for a bit, you’ll let your imaginations fill me in up on me
stone block there, won’t youse? Thanks. Knew yer would.
Checks gear
3 Drama and The Dreaming 4
Reckon that’s about it. Old Stoney. Young Stoney. Well, as Laurence
Binyon wrote – Binyon, you know him, wrote The Ode – I’m one of that lot who grow not old. An’ I reckon it’s about time for SLOW FADE ON
WEST WIRRAWONG as I climbs me perch.
4 Drama and The Dreaming 5
ACT ONE
Slow fade as actor climbs rostrum. Blackout as he freezes, rifle
beside him. Lights up for morning.
Enter Merle, with briefcase whose contents she checks. She
calls to offstage.
Merle Sorry, son, the library’s closed. Hmmm? Don’t worry. We’ve put
it on hold, that local history one your mum wants. What? Ten
o’clock tomorrow. Oh, you’ve got school. Well, after school then.
Bye, Blake.
She waves. Sits down.
Blake’s mum’ll be disappointed. Not much Indigenous stuff in
that. Half a chapter at most .
(Opens briefcase. Takes out notebook and pen.)
(Smiles) The poet’s pen – (writes, pauses) This one’s a toughie.
Not like the pram poem.
Enter Lilypilly, who watches Merle.
5 Drama and The Dreaming 6
Lily (Laughs) Pram poem. The one you pinched off me.
Merle Well you found the pram, Lilypilly. And you told me the tale. But
the writing’s the hard part.
Lily So you say, Merley-girlie.
Merle Late for you, Lil.
Lily Yeah.
Merle Thought Sunsetholme’s brekky all done by 8.30.
Lily My turn for washin-up. What’s this one about?
(Merle points up to Stoney).
Lily ‘Bout ‘im again? Did ‘im last week, didncha?
Merle First draft. I scrapped it. Too….too heroic.
Lily I liked it.
Merle Too generous, Lily. You like everything I show you. Anyway last
week’s Sonnet to Stoney…too forced.
Lily You and your fourteen liners. Merley’s pearlies, eh?
Merle Well, that one’s in the bin.
Lily Aw, you too fussy. Speakin’of bin, look at that rubbish.
Merle What?
Lily Those kids an’ their empties.
6 Drama and The Dreaming 7
Goes over, picks up rubbish, drops in bin.
Told ‘em once. I told ‘em a thousand times. Seeya, Merlie. (on
way out, turns back) An’ doncha chuck this one out. You bring it
up to Sunsetholme. Read it to me an’ all us oldies.
Goes.
Merle (Reading bits as she writes) “sonorous motor bikes…sober or
staggering…”
Stoney, miming binoculars at eyes. Looks down over her
shoulder.
Stoney Where’d we be without Merle, eh? West Wirrawong’s Poet
Laureate. and she’s stuck with Old Stoney for current subject.
Well, from here it reads better than her first bite at me. That
starchy sonnet. Glad she chucked that one.
Merle moves up to stone under the statue. Touches name on
memorial list.
Merle My grandad. Didn’t come back from the Somme.
7 Drama and The Dreaming 8
Goes back to where she’s left her writing. Picks it up. Reads.
“He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier
centreing the civic square, taking no sides
as round his perch the traffic flows –
the four-wheel drives, farmers’ utilities,
the beat-up heaps, sonorous motor bikes,
the feet in boots, or rubber thongs, or bare
---this way and that, sober or staggering
on bitumen plain where once the bullocks strained
and, backwards of bullock days. The Dreaming’s dust…”
Stoney “Dreaming’s dust…” Wow!
Merle Hmmm….”Dreaming’s dust”. I’m in your territory once again,
Lilypilly.
Goes.
Stoney Ask Lilypill. Sure, Lilypill knows. But half the time, Lilypilly
won’t say. My Dreaming’s different, you see. Comparatively
recent. Yes, I’m a 1915-eener. You out there. You knows all
that Gallipoli stuff, don’t youse? Yeah, thinks youse do. But I
was there, see. I was there. Isle of Imbros nearby, where that
Pommy General Hamilton had his HQ. He wasn’t in the boats
8 Drama and The Dreaming 9
come invasion morning. Oops! “Invasion”. “Landing” we had
to call it. Lost lots of brothers on the beach. Then the ridges.
Lone Pine and trenches. Want me ter go on? Don’ like ter say
“no” eh?
Blackout. Lights up on morning. The same but Stoney has
gone. Enter Anthony.
Anthony (Sings) “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua.”
(Grins) “I’ve come to write my memoirs in Wirrawong.” My
fingers itch. I’m keen to type my memoirs in Wirrawong. Yes,
I’m an old fart, as no doubt you can see. Not one of the laptop
brigade. But in New-Millenium Wirrawong not one
typewriter to be had for love or money, it seems. Up and down
Paperbark Street I’ve been since Rafferty’s bus pulled in
yesterday at high noon but not even the Salvos with a
typewriter on sale. But, luck at last comes Anthony’s way.
Who should I run into at the corner of Paperbark and Possum
Streets but my old West Wirrawong High School student,
Merle – Merle who won the Senior English prize in …in 1980
something with her sonnet sequence on … on something. Yes,
9 Drama and The Dreaming 10
Merle’s promised to give her old English teacher a veteran
Olivetti typewriter they’re throwing out of the West
Wirrawong Town Library.
Enter Lilypilly
Lily Bet she never.
Anthony turns and sees her. They hug.
Anthony Panthony! You back again, eh?
Anthony Every year.
Lily Not last year, yer wasn’t.
Anthony Every other.
Lily Found it yet?
Anthony Found it?
Lily Birth of Blade Mountain
Anthony (Pointing offstage) Up there. Only gotta climb Mount Muller, you
can’t miss big Blade.
Lily Ar, you know what I mean. All that bullshit you been squeezin’
me for years. “Mythological origin of mountain’s name.” As if I
could tell you that.
10 Drama and The Dreaming 11
Pause. There’s something unspoken between them.
Anthony Seen Merle?
Lily Las’ night I seen her. She was writin’ a poem. What’s that
bullshit about ole typewriter?
Anthony Come again?
Lily Heard you spoutin’ it. Said she was gunna give you chuck-out
typewriter so’s you could do your true confessions. Whatever.
Anthony OK. Confession number one: how Lilypilly saved my life.
Lily (Laughing) Bullshit!
Anthony When I was just a little nipper.
Lily Knee high to a grasshopper.
Anthony Saved my life, you did.
Lily (Laughing) Never.
Anthony Too right you did. You know. That day the floor broke. Floor of
that great big old wooden house used to be round the corner there
down Lehmann Road. Me and my little brother were playing
marbles in the dust under the house. Mum and everyone was up in
the house for the big auction. We could hear people shouting out
bids.
11 Drama and The Dreaming 12
He starts to act it out – he’s a little boy again, playing marbles
in the dust.
Lily Yes, an’right beside you was all these bubs in their prams, parked
under the house to keep them bubbas outa the sun. All the mums
up in the house watchin’ the men biddin’ like crazy.
Anthony Then you noticed it.
Lily Yeah, then I did. Those lil’ bitsa sawdust droppin’ down through
the cracks in the ole wood floor.
Anthony My little brother looked up and a bit of sawdust got him in the eye.
That’s when you started screaming.
Lily I could see the whole floor startin’ ter buckle an’ bend.
Anthony You yelled to me and my brother to push all the prams out.
Lily Too right I did. Just got ‘em out in time, we did.
Anthony The whole floor came down. Men and women screaming
as down they came.
Lily Bit the dust. The whole bang lot. Just as we got the last pram out.
Anthony Cuts and bruises. Bleeding legs. Round came the ambulance.
Had to stop mum crying. Then it hit them. None of the babies
killed or hurt. Nor us neither. We’d got them all out. Thanks to
you, Lilpill.
12 Drama and The Dreaming 13
Lily Aw it was nothin’.
Anthony If you hadn’t been there on duty. Nursemaid to rich Mrs Jackson’s
twins. If you hadn’t pushed the panic button, all those babies’d
have been crushed to death, my brother and me too.
Lily Codswallop! You’d have got onto the danger yourselves soon
enough. Once your brother copped that sawdust in’s eye…
Enter Merle.
Merle G’day, Lilypilly. Well, I’ve found it, Anthony. Out the back of
the library under a pile of throw-outs. You can take over that back
room long as you like and mine your ole memory nuggets deep
as you like.
Anthony Back room’s not my scene. Thought you’d be bringing the
typewriter down here.
Merle That dinosaur Olivetti! Weighs a ton.
Anthony Don’t you have a trolley or something?.
Lily Yeah, that ole books trolley I useta shove round the kiddies’ room
in me salad days.
Merle Can’t shove it down the street, Anthony.
Anthony Well I’ll go up and lug it down.
13 Drama and The Dreaming 14
Merle Can’t come out the library doors without my permission.
Anthony But I want to work away here. On the park bench up there.
Between Old Stoney and the stringybarks.
Lily Ironbarks.
Anthony Well where I can smell the stringybarks down past Peter’s Creek.
Council haven’t ringbarked them yet. I checked them out, out the
bus window as we came in this morning.
(Sings) “I think that I shall never see…”
Merle (Joins him) “A poem lovely as a tree…”
Lilypilly laughs.
Anthony (Leaving) “A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast…
Lily Glad I got him and his brother out from under that house.
Merle What house?
Lily Long story, Merley-contrerlie. Guess you’ll read it in his memoirs.
Merle Anthony’s memoirs! All we got round here’s the West Wirralong
Bugle printery. They won’t even print my poems.
Lily ‘Bout time our bugle editor turned up, eh?
Merle Oh Aub’s always late. Specially for Centenary Committee
14 Drama and The Dreaming 15
meetings.
Lily Yeah well I’ve got other fish to fry. Just ‘cos Aub’s asked me to
be on the committee so’s I can give – what’s he call it?
Merle “Indigenous input”.
Lily (Laughing) “Indigenous input”. The way he said it! Made it
sound like he wanted me ter pour a bucketta mud inter
Wirrawong’s billabong.
Merle Now, Lily. You know Aub’s always well-intentioned.
Lily ‘Course he’s well intentioned. He’s got well intentions enough to
bust the wall of your dad’s stormwater dam. But we’re gunna need
more than good intentions if we’re not ter see this Centenary thing
turn into a local version of all that Federation bullshit we went
through years ago.
Merle That’s why we want you on the Committee, Lilypilly. To
contribute to the Time Capsule and all.
Lily Contribute to the what?
Merle Time Capsule. It’s something we’ll bury in the ground, containing
samples of every aspect of West Wirrawong life and culture, and
we’ll dig it up in 50 years.
15 Drama and The Dreaming 16
Lily Will we now?
Merle Metaphorically speaking.
Lily Oh yeah. As they say, “our sons and daughters” will. Well, I’ve
only got Nerrida. Not my daughter. Not really my niece, your
way a’ talkin’. Calls me Aunty, though. You know.
Merle I know. Nerrida’s a darling. Wish I was her Aunty.
Lily So who’s these sons and daughters of ours gunna dig up this Time
Capsule crap come fifty years, eh?
Merle I meant…metaphorically speaking.
Lily Look, Merly mine, just ‘cos you’s a poet doesn’ mean you gotta be
mouthin’ metaphors every second breath.
Merle OK, Lily. You win. Guess I’ll leave it to Aub to outline his ideas
for the contents of the West Wirrawong Centenary Time Capsule.
But I do know he’s sincere when he says he wants you to decide
the indigenous input into the samples of our life and culture which
it will contain.
Lily (Smiling wryly) “Samples of our life and culture”. Hmm.
Remember the mission school we used to have past Peter’s Creek?
Merle Willesey’s Waterhole?
16 Drama and The Dreaming 17
Lily Near Willesey’s. Pastor and his wife. She was…well, meant well,
I suppose….Useta get us to sing stuff….(Remembering)
“Samples of our life and culture…” (Starts to sing)
“All things bright and beautiful…”
Enter Billy, done up as a caricature of a bush poet, even to
corks hanging from the brim of his overdosed bush brown hat.
He has a bugle at his side. He carries a grotesque time
capsule, resembling a cross between an explosive shell and a
mini space-rocket.
Merle and Lily are stunned. But Lily, after a few seconds’
silence, resumes her song, partly in self-defence. As she
repeats “All things bright and beautiful”, Billy puts the bugle
to his lips and plays the hymn along with her,. As if in support
of Lily, Merle joins in.
Lily, Merle “All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small…”
Billy Oh yes, mon enfants, ye bright and beautiful innocents of
West Wirrawong, oh yea, it is those very bright and beautiful
samples of your simple yet uplifting Austral bush culture that
we wish to include in this….(Lifting the Capsule)….. in this
17 Drama and The Dreaming 18
impregnable, modest yet commodious and inclusive
encapsulation…your….your very own…(Blows his bugle in
fanfare….Time Capsule!
As Merle and Lily gape at Billy and the Capsule, Stoney, drawn
by the bugle blast, rushes in unnoticed by the others, and
climbs his rostrum, taking up his military pose, but gaping
down at Billy.
Billy Well, now I’ve shown you this magnificent encapsulation,
allow me to introduce myself. Billy the Boy, newly appointed
editor of your esteemed local newspaper.
Merle Where’s Aub?
Lily Yeah. Where’s our Aub? He’s the editor of The Bugle.
Billy Grieve ye not. Your esteemed Aub’s in good hands.
Lily (Alarmed) He’s…he’s not…
Billy No, no, no, good woman…….
Lily Don’t you “good woman” me, condescending shit!
Billy Forgive a stranger his formal tone. I assure you your Aub was
driven to the city last night by the new proprietor of the West
Wirrawong Bugle, Fred Brannigan, my father, who has
18 Drama and The Dreaming 19
appointed me acting editor until your…your, it would seem,
well-loved Aub is deemed fit to return to newspaper journalism.
Stoney (Loud shout) Bloody hell!
Billy looks up alarmed. Merle and Lily look up at Stoney, then
confidentially at one another.
Lily Crows pretty vocal this time o’year.
Billy Daddy told me to be ready for anything.
Lily Just as well.
Merle Now look here, Mr Billy…
Billy Billy Brannigan.
Merle Billy Brannigan. Now, we all knew The Bugle, founded (may
I say) 62 years ago..
Billy I know.
Merle 62 years ago by Aub’s grandfather with money from the
sale of part of his pastoral run…
Billy I know. His grandfather’s pastoral run called Osterley after
where his ancestors worked on an estate in England
Lily Shit!
Billy Daddy is always thorough in his research.
19 Drama and The Dreaming 20
Merle Into people whose property he purchases.
Billy You don’t have to get nasty.
Merle Look, lad. We all knew The Bugle was losing money and we
were very relieved when Aub told us your father had bought it
and paid the debts. But Aub is an outstanding editor, and…
Billy Aub may well be outstanding. But to put it bluntly, he’s old-
World. Outmoded. Sales of The Bugle have been dropping
alarmingly. It needs new-generation journalists, forward-
thinking innovative journalists like me to regenerate our rural
weeklies…
Merle The Bugle’s a bi-weekly, you idiot!!
Lily Sock it to ‘im, Merley-whirlie! Sock it to ‘im!
Billy I know it’s a bi-weekly. But I think that’s the core, the very
heart and core, of the problem we’re facing. Now, Dad and I,
we want to re-market Wirrawong’s beloved Bugle as a big,
bright, bionic WEEKLY.
Lily Youse just gotta be jokin’.
Billy No, we’ve done our market research. After all, it’s ridiculous
to compete with the metropolitan dailies. People don’t go to
their locals to read about the war in Iraq –
20 Drama and The Dreaming 21
Merle Maybe not, but local coverage of national cultural issues is
essential –
Billy (Stumped) What?
Merle I thought I was being crystal clear. We want our locals to provide
a forum for nation-wide issues of cultural significance.
Anthony, pushing a trolley with a typewriter on it, enters.
Anthony I agree.
Billy Maybe, but Dad and I maintain that daily news is not the core
concern of a rural journal.
The others ignore him, giving Anthony their attention.
Merle However’d you manage it, Anthony?
Anthony (Playing cool) Manage what, now?
Lily Getting’ that dinosaur out the library door?
Anthony No big deal, just slammed it aboard and shoved it out.
Merle Dot Crichton’s on the door today. She’s a stickler for
regulations. How’d you talk her round?
Anthony Oh, the old school charm, you know. She was one of my past
students.
Lily (Looking at typewriter) Does it still work? Me ole aunty had
21 Drama and The Dreaming 22
one like that. Give it away to the Salvos centuries back.
Anthony Ah, does it work? Good question, Lilypilly. Let’s see now. You
there – (Glances at Billy, who is fuming at being side-lined by
Anthony’s entrance) – got any spare paper in that little
monstrosity of yours?
(Seeing some paper protruding from inside the capsule, he
snatches a page, to Billy’s fury, then sets typewriter on a rostrum,
twists sheet of paper in and types noisily)….Hmmm…First line of
Anthony’s memoirs, commenced this day of days in the epicenter
of West Wirrawong ”THE…QUICK…BROWN…FOX…JUMPED…
OVER…THE…LAZY…DOG…” Done it!
Merle “Lazy dog”! Lazy log.
Anthony Just testing.
Lily Aunty Jilly always typed “lazy dog.”
Anthony You sure, Lilly?
Lily Sure I’m sure. Always dog. Always.
Billy (Fuming at the lack of attention he’s getting) Look, when you lot
have finished clowning around over logs and foxes or whatever
you’re feeding that outdated dinosaur with, perhaps we could
get into our Centenary Committee meeting.
22 Drama and The Dreaming 23
Anthony Centenary Committee? Without our Aub? Without our
chairman?
Billy Not the chairman now. Aub’s not. I am.
Anthony You? Will someone fill me in?
Billy The chairman is …ex officio. Whoever’s boss of The Bugle. As
from today, that’s me.
Merle (Awkward cough) Aub’s gone.
Anthony (Alarmed) Gone?
Merle Aub’s been…been deposed. Meet Billy the Boy…
Billy Billy Brannigan.
Merle Billy’s The Bugle’s new editor.
Billy Acting editor. Aub’s been taken by Daddy to Brizzie for re-
training.
Anthony Daddy?
Lily Billy’s dad has bought The Bugle.
Anthony Come again?
Merle It’s a long story.
Anthony I can wait.
Merle (Looking at audience) Yes, but can they?
23 Drama and The Dreaming 24
Anthony But Aub phoned me only last week. Asked me to come up
and judge the one-act play competition. For the centenary.
Merle Did he now? I thought that was to be my job.
Anthony Aub told me he thought an outsider would be better for judge.
Lily You’re no outsider, Anthony.
Anthony Am now. Don’t live here anymore. Aub reckoned I’d be impartial.
Merle (Half-annoyed, half-amused) That bugger, Aub. Can’t beat him.
Giving me the chop for outsider Anthony.
Lily (Strongly) Anthony’s no outsider.
Billy Anyway, no problem. I’m the new chairman and I’ll back Aub on
that.
Merle (Teasing) Will you now, Billy Boy?
Billy Best to have an outsider to judge local comps.
Lily (Louder still) Anthony’s no outsider.
Billy Look…look, Jilly….
Lily Lily!
Merle Lilypilly’s our oldest resident.
Billy Well, Lilypilly, you’ve made your point. But Aub wanted
Anthony for judge and I, as new chair of the centenary
24 Drama and The Dreaming 25
committee, endorse that. Anyway, Anthony, there stacks of
centenary stuff in Aub’s old office. And there’s a pile of plays
a mile high waiting for judgey-wudgey to just get stuck into.
Lily (Laughing) “Judgey-wudgey”.
Merle He’s learning our lingo, eh Lilypilly?
Lily Sure is, Merley-whirlie.
Billy (Smugly) Dad did tell me to listen to local idiom.
Anthony Oh, bless you, Big Daddy!
Merle and Lily are close to hysterics. Billy looks puzzledly
pleased.
I’ll do my best to be a judge, and a good judge too. But first, may
I be so bold as to enquire as to the origins of that space rocket
there?
Billy (Patting his baby) It’s my Time Capsule.
Anthony Yes, I can read, Billy. But may I ask where on earth you picked up
that particular example of the species?
Billy Dad designed it. I made it.
Anthony In your very own backyard shed in Brizzie?
Billy Yes.
25 Drama and The Dreaming 26
Merle (Half-hiding her laugh) We believe you.
Lily explodes with laughter.
Billy (Unconscious of Merle’s sarcasm) You see, once Dad told me
we’d taken over The Bugle, I started reading all the back numbers.
Got onto the Time Capsule proposals and couldn’t resist getting to
work on a prototype at once. Checked out all the different
designs I could find from here and there - - school centenaries,
town centenaries –
Lily Bushfire centenaries –
Billy You sending me up?
Lily (Masking up) No way, Billy boy.
Billy Anyway, all the centenary time capsules I could check out,
Internet and all –
Merle You surfed them, eh?
Lily Great balls o’fire!
Anthony The capsule to cap all capsules.
Billy Solid, yet symmetrical. Capacious, yet capable of being interred
in –
Lily In what?
26 Drama and The Dreaming 27
Billy Well, in the ground.
Anthony Where?
Merle What ground?
Lily Whose ground?
Billy West Wirrawong’s ground.
Lily Got permission?
Billy From whom?
Lily Original owners.
Billy Do we have to get Council permission to dig a capsule into the
ground?
Lily Not talkin’ ‘bout Council. Talkin’ ‘bout original owners.
Billy Oh, you mean the local tribe?
Lily Not just one tribe round ‘ere. Come from lotsa places. My people
weren’t original tribe. I could put you onto right people, though.
Billy Look, all I want to do – all we want to do –
Merle We?
Billy Well, this whole Time Capsule idea…I’ve read the letters to the
editor after Aub first brought it up in The Bugle. I thought the
whole Centenary Committee was behind it.
27 Drama and The Dreaming 28
Merle Behind the idea, yes. But the details….yet to be decided. Like…
Like where we want to put it.
Billy How’s about over there…in the town centre…just dig into the
bush plot under the Statue Soldier.
Stoney (Startled) Hang on a jiff!
All look up. Stoney freezes. Merle and Lily exchange a wink.
Lily Carn the crows!
Anthony Not sure that’d be the right spot. Lots of people round here
feel that’s sacred ground.
Lily All sacred ground.
Anthony Yes…but, Lily, I mean that’s the war memorial.
Lily War sacred, eh?
Anthony Not war sacred. But…the sacrifice…the lads who never came back.
All on the ground freeze.
Stoney intones.
Stoney They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
28 Drama and The Dreaming 29
We will remember them…
The others unfreeze.
Anthony Funny. I was remembering when I first came back to West
Wirrawong to teach here. Must have been…it was, thirteen
years after I left here as a boy. First year teaching here I had
a room in the Royal… just across the road there. Came Anzac
morning and I was woken by the sound of a bugle. Last Post
it was. Stumbled out onto the verandah, tucking my sleeping
singlet into my undies, and there I looked down on the people
standing silent under the statue. Then the bugle changed to
Reveille…
Billy tries to blow a reveille.
…stop it. That’s awful.
Lily He tried.
Anthony Then some old ex-digger started to say the Ode. Got the words
a bit wrong, of course. “Condemn” for “contemn”. “Not grow
old” for “grow not old”..
Merle They all do that.
29 Drama and The Dreaming 30
Lily Bugger it up, eh?
Merle Never mind what poor old Laurence Binyon really wrote.
Billy Poor old who?
Anthony You can’t be serious.
Merle Editors! The Ode’s author was Laurence Binyon, Billy Boy.
Anthony When does this One Act Play competition have to be judged?
Merle Next Monday.
Anthony You’ve got to be joking.
Merle The West Wirrawong Bacchantes are champing at the bit to
start rehearsals.
Billy West Wirrawong Bacchantes?
Anthony Used to be West Wirrawong Amateur Dramatic Society – the
WADS - in my day.
Billy WADS? What?
Anthony West Wirrawong Amateur Dramatic Society. Get it?
Billy (Sheepish grin) Sorta.
Merle Anthony, you weren’t back last year when we had this way out
drama teacher up the High School. Talked the local Thespies into
doing that weird one by Euripedes.
30 Drama and The Dreaming 31
Anthony Not Medea!
Merle No. The Bacchantes. You know, where the chorus women go
crazy and rip up all the animals. Said it’d relate to what goes on
down our meatworks. Anyway, good for publicity. The Bugle
gave it the colour centrefold. Even got a few paragraphs and a
piccy in The Courier Mail.
Billy Courier Mail!
Lily Shit, eh!
Merle Anyway, the local lads and lassies are just itching to start
rehearsing whatever wins the one-act centenary comp.
Anthony And the result’s to be in by next Monday. Bloody Aub never told
me that.
Billy Don’t wish to be critical. But Aub was starting to get a bit lax on
details. Better get stuck into that pile of plays up The Bugle office.
Sooner the better.
Anthony (Going) Only way I can do it by Monday. You’ll have to be my
co-judge, Merle.
Merle On one condition.
Lily Onya, Merley-girlie.
Merle We’ll get this trolley up The Bugle office. Put the plays in this.
31 Drama and The Dreaming 32
Get them all up to the library.
Billy You’ll need ten trolley trips I reckon.
Merle Whatever. But we’ll do the judging up in the Library. Down the
Bugle office, we’d be stifled by the absence of Aub.
Billy You mean by the presence of me.
Merle No need to take it close and personal, Billy. Now Lily. How about
you join us for the judging?
Anthony Great idea. Come on, Lil.
Lily No way. Have to get back up to Sunsetholme. Three batches of
scones to make for mornin’ tea for all us oldies up there.
Anthony Well, save a few for the oldies down here.
Lily No way. All I can do to save the crumbs for the cats.
Lily, Anthony, Merle and Billy leave.
Stoney How’ll we manage, eh? Have to wait till Monday for the
winner of the West Wirrawong Centenary One-Act Play
Comp. Ten trolleyloads of entries pouring in from all over the
nation – and perchance from across the Great Waters – and there
can be only one winner to rouse the Bacchantes. Hmmm…how’s
32 Drama and The Dreaming 33 your Geography, folks? The Bacchantes. Methinks the
Bacchantes came from near where I’ve been … Turkey. The
Bacchantes are… well, Grecian from the mountains of
Thebes…mountain women. Oh so lovely when they’re in their peaceful mode. But oh so savage when they get stirred up and striking the ground with their THYRSUSES. You know… the thyrsus? It’s …sorta…
(lifts rifle and stabs it down)….sorta like this. A thrysus ain’t a rifle but it’s a bit like a rifle ‘cos it can scare the living daylights outa people. Those Bacchantes, they’d strike the ground with thyrsus sticks with vine leaves round ‘em and sometimes wine would spout outa the earth. And sometimes they’d drink the wine and start singin’ and dancin’ like ..
Waves an arm and a leg.
and they’d start to rave and get savage and tear poor little lambs and moo cows to bits. Fair dinkum. But what about me? When they first gave me this …
Shakes rifle.
33 Drama and The Dreaming 34
on the boat to Egypt back in 1914. First World War. Only we never knew there’d be a Second, did we, eh? When they first give me this before we caught the troopship to Egypt, they said, “This is your rifle, soldier. The rifle is the soldier’s best friend.” Then when we got to Egypt we had to do bayonet drill.
Fixes bayonet on rifle.
and had to run down these trenches dug in the sand and rip the guts outa bags of straw hangin’ from ropes at the end of the trench.
Starts to demonstrate.
Can’t do it up here. Have to come down.
Climbs down.
You won’t tell on me, will youse? There we were in Egypt, never knowing nothing about what was to happen the year after 1914.
There we were, doing these runs down the trenches with bayonets at the ends of our rifles. An’ we had to yell like banshees. The Sar-
Majors forced us to.
34 Drama and The Dreaming 35
Does a run, yelling loudly, stabs over rostrum and knocks type-
writer off.
Oh shit, got Anthony’s old Olivetti right in the guts.
Drops rifle. Picks up typewriter.
Looks like I’ve made a real good job of it, too. Poor ole Anthony.
Where’ll you type your memoirs now, eh?
Pushes some typewriter keys.
Now Murdoch. You had a typewriter like this, didn’t you Keith?
On that Isle of Imbros, off Gallipoli, 1915. Keith Murdoch. Thank
God you got that Gallipoli letter to the British Prime Minister exposing the hopelessness of it all. The senseless slaughter.
Otherwise…God knows how long it might have gone on. But, thanks to you Murdoch, there was a withdrawal ordered…..
Finds the Time Capsule.
And this old buddy, eh. You take me back too. Those shells
35 Drama and The Dreaming 36
exploding at night… over the beach, over the cliffs, over the sea.
Shrapnel falling down. Into the trenches, into the moonlit surf,
onto the decks of the hospital ships. Shrapnel falling, steel
striking steel, horrible hail…
Clutches his forehead.
“Lest we forget, lest we…”
Blackout.
Lights Up. Stoney has gone.
Enter Merle and Anthony.
Anthony Do you think there’s any hope, Merle?
Merle By Monday? Frankly, no.
Anthony The Bacchantes will have to be patient.
Merle You don’t know the Bacchantes, Anthony. They’ll tear us limb
from limb.
Anthony Well, let’s go for the Under Milk Wood.
Merle Pardon?
Anthony The Under Milk Wood lookalike – soundalike.
36 Drama and The Dreaming 37
Merle Beg yours?
Anthony Wasn’t it in your short list?
Merle Dylan Thomas isn’t eligible for Wirrawong’s One Act comp.
Anthony More’s the pity. You know, I distinctly remember passing you
under our ghost Gums or whatever she called it.
Merle She?
Anthony Emily Austen was the nom-de-plume, I seem to recall.
Merle Nom-de-plumes are notorious for cross-dressing. I once helped
judge the state-wide regional library poetry comp. The winner,
posing as Sylvia Plathway, turned out to be Theodore Hughes.
Anthony Well, even if our Emily Austen turns out to be Branwell Bronte, I
still reckon Under Our Ghost Gums is our best bet.
Merle Oh, that one! I think it was Blue Gums.
Improvising from memory of the Script and also sending it up.
Night-time in Blue Gum Town. Once again
blackout comes, deeper than billabong.
Careful-stored candles plucked out of cupboards
flicker from window-panes, betraying each occupant.
Old Major Marmalade, retired from military
37 Drama and The Dreaming 38
dreams of the comrades now Middle East sand-duned.
“I hope you remembered to pass on those messages,
letter and love-tokens, for Susy McLean.”
Percy the Postman, passing each letter-box,
regretting he failed to steam open the secrets,
imagines what meanings the hand-writing hides…
Anthony Come on, it wasn’t as bad as that.
Merle Well, given that a condition for the competition was, that
each play had to have a focus on an aspect of small-town life in
Australia, I suppose Dylan Thomas’s poetic perve on a Welsh
sea-side village is a relevant model. But is there one original
character?
Anthony I think that young paramedic breaks new ground. That scene
where she resuscitates the old dairy farmer who’s been struck by
lightning.
Merle Too melodramatic for me.
Anthony Dairy farmers have been known to be struck by lightning. My
first year teaching up here I got asked out to a dairy farm some
weekends. First time I ever milked a cow, the boys (one of them
was in my Grade Nine class) played a joke on me by putting a
bull into the bails –
38 Drama and The Dreaming 39
Merle I’m waiting.
Anthony What for?
Merle The farmer struck by lightning.
Anthony Oh, that?
Merle You’re losing it a bit, Anthony.
Anthony Wait till you’re seventy plus. No. I mean the boys on that farm
told me about the farmer struck by lightning on another farm –
Merle And did the lady paramedic save him?
Anthony West Wirrawong didn’t have a paramedic, male or female,
back then.
Merle You really think that resuscitation scene could be staged
credibly?
Anthony Hmm…It’d be a challenge. I suppose.
Merle Anyway, it needs updating.
Anthony What?
Merle The CPR Resus! It’s two initial quick breaths now. Not five.
Anthony Nitpicker.
Merle And…look. I’ll show you. I’ve had to update my Resus.
Starts doing resuscitation on Anthony.
39 Drama and The Dreaming 40
Enter Billy.
Billy Ullo…ullo…ullo. What’s –
Anthony Nothing’s going on here.
Merle I’m just resuscitating this old fella, according to new CPR and
EAR.
Billy Got a winner yet?
Anthony What?
Billy The One Act play comp?
Merle We’re attempting to shorten the short list.
Air Raid cum Fire Brigade siren sounds.
Billy What the heck’s that?
Anthony City slicker. Cut your ear-teeth on West Wirrawong’s Fire
Brigade, laddy.
Billy (Looking round) Where’s the fire?
Merle Don’t you know?
Billy What?
Merle Thought you told us you’d read The Bugle’s back numbers. It was
in last week’s.
Billy What was?
40 Drama and The Dreaming 41
Merle About the Fire Brigade’s siren practice due this very day to the
minute.
Anthony Takes me back.
Merle Back to what?
Anthony Air raid siren.
Billy Air raid!
Anthony Stand by for history lesson, Mr Acting Editor. West Wirrawong’s
Fire Brigade siren is a bit of well-preserved ancient history. In
World War Two, when I was –
Enter Lily.
Lily Knee-high to a grasshopper –
Anthony Yes. Way back in 1942, this very melody now enchanting your
ears – well it was our air raid siren.
Billy Air raids? Out here?
Merle Teach him some history, Teach. Like you taught us.
Anthony You see, Acting Editor. That siren takes me back. Reminds me
why I came here as a nipper. Me Mum and Dad thought Brizzy
was gunna be bombed by the Japs. So did most of Queensland’s
coastal population think their cities and towns was gunna be.
41 Drama and The Dreaming 42
Well, Mum, me, and me young brother Mick hopped on the
Westlander –
Lily Train wasn’t called Westlander then, Teach.
Anthony Thanks, Teacher Aide. Well, with a whole mob of scaredy cats,
we got on this train heading west and went choof-choofing up
the Great Dividing Range and nor-west to here. Thought we’d
be safe from those big bad bombs. But one day, in the convent
school where me and Mick were scratching away on our slates,
this shit-scary great siren went off and kept going and going. And
Sister Benignus, this nun who’d just handed out all the slate
pencils, said –
Lily “Out yers all go and into the slit trenches the men dug last
weekend.”
Anthony More or less.
Lily Sister Benignus never said “yers”, of course. That’s my
contribution.
Anthony Well, you were there helping her, weren’t you?
Lily Yeah. With the pegs.
Anthony Pegs for our toothy-pegs.
Lily I was helpin’ out the nuns as a domestic round the convent,
42 Drama and The Dreaming 43
two days a week it was. And Sister Benignus, this real good gun
nun, she said, “Grab all the pegs, please, Lilypilly, and help me
dole them out.” “Course they was wooden pegs. No plastic back
them days. An’ when all you little cheekie-weekies was deep
down those slit trenches out the convent backyard –
Anthony hops between two rostra, acting out the trench
business.
Anthony Mucky-yucky they were, too, down the bottom, those slit
trenches. There was lots of mud left still greasy from the summer
rain a fortnight back. And all our feet were stuck in the mud.
Lily (Laughing) Yeah, and there was me helping Sister Benignus to
hand out a peg to each of youse.
Anthony (Laughing) Yes. And we said, “What’s the pegs for, Sister?”
Lily Yes. An’ she said, “Shove ‘em between your teeth, children.” And
youse all said –
Anthony “What for, Sister?” And Sister said –
Lily “So’s your teeth won’t chomp together and break to bits from the
bombs’ vibrations when they rain down on West Wirrawong.
That’s why, children.” And youse all laughed. And Sister
43 Drama and The Dreaming 44
Benignus said –
Anthony “It’s not funny. You’ll laugh the other side of your face when those
Zero dive-bombers come.”
Lily Yes, that’s what Sister said. But – gun-nun an’ all, she got it wrong
about those Zeros. Zeros was fighter-planes, not bomb-
droppers.
Anthony Anyway, Zeros or not, they never flew over West Wirrawong. We
looked up and all we saw was clouds and crows.
Lily An’ an eagle goin’ roun’ and roun”, high over Mount Muller.
Anthony But I did see a couple of hawks diving down on Blade Mountain.
Then the “All Clear” siren came. Trench drill all over for the day.
Lily An’ youse all climbed outa the trenches. An’ I helped Sister
Benignus hose the mud off your feet before you went back up the
the steps into class.
Anthony Sister Benignus…remember when she got us all praying after the
Centaur was torpedoed?
Lily Hospital ship Centaur… Went down off Moreton Bay and we was
all crying when Sister Benignus told us ‘bout Sister Savage.
Anthony “Sister Savage, the sole nurse saved.” And I remember thinking,
“Sister Savage. Funny name for a nurse.”
44 Drama and The Dreaming 45
Lily Lost her rosary beads. Slipped out of her fingers on the raft where
she was praying with the survivors for those gone down.
Anthony And Archbishop Duhig, so the Catholic Leader said, gave her
his own rosary beads.
Lily Made of mother of pearl.
Billy (During most of this, he’s been tinkering with the Capsule).
Any chance this history lesson grinding to a halt?
Merle There’s acting editors for you! No respect for a nation’s heritage.
Billy Well, about time we decide what’s to go inside this Capsule. Plus,
who’s going to bury it?
Merle My vote goes to our Lilypilly.
Lily Me? You just gotta be jokin’.
Merle You’re our oldest resident.
Lily “Spose I am. But that’s why I reckon you should get one of the
kiddies to do it. One of them should still be around whenever it
gets dug up.
Anthony When will it get dug up?
Billy I think the plaque will say, “To be brought to the surface in 50
years”.
45 Drama and The Dreaming 46
Lily Crikey!
Anthony Two thousand and fifty-six.
Merle Teach can add up.
Billy Now, about time we finalised the contents. Aub’s left a list
in the office. It’s quite satisfactory, on the whole…
Merle (Sarcastic cough) Fancy!
Billy Representative samples of local cultural and sporting bodies,
agricultural statistics, names of current councillors…
Lily yawns.
Merle (Hopefully) Local literature?
Billy Funny you should ask that. Now, don’t want to be pushy, but I
thought you all just might like a preview of a poem I completed
last night, while you were busy judging those one-act plays.
Anthony Billy the Boy…you, a poet?
Lily Crikey-wikie!
Billy Oh it’s just a little thing. But I hope it reflects the ethos of a place
I’m just getting to know. (Takes out seet) Care to hear it?
Merle Be our guest.
46 Drama and The Dreaming 47
(Billy hands her the sheet).
You want me to read it?
Billy Frankly, no.
(Merle gives show of mock despair)
Well, it’s mine, you see. And I stayed up half the night learning it.
I’d be grateful if you’d be so good as to prompt me, Merle.
(Strikes a pose. Ready to recite).
Merle What’s the title?
Billy Title? Oh, forgot to give it one.
Lily Gotta have a title.
Anthony Every good deed has a name, Billy.
Billy Well… how about … how about …”Our Town”.
Merle Afraid Thornton Wilder pipped you at the post.
Billy Thornton…?
Anthony Wilder. Playwright. Americano. Wrote “Our Town”.
Billy How…how about… I call mine: “Bugle Billy’s Ballad..”
Merle applauds.
Thanks Merle. But… poem first, you know.
47 Drama and The Dreaming 48
He declaims, needing a few prompts. Improvise these.
Now there’s movement round West Wirrawong for the
time is drawing near
When we’ll celebrate our town’s centenary
And we’ll do it with the best of them, of that you needn’t fear
And the banners will be out for all to see.
When Bill Berthelsen and his brothers took up their cattle run
And pitched their tents beside old Peter’s Creek
The going wasn’t easy, it wasn’t just fun in the sun
But they battled through the bright times and the bleak.
And many others followed from those pioneers’ first ploughs
They planted fields of corn that towered tall.
They raised the big beef cattle and the herds of jersey cows
They battled on, they triumphed over all.
From the heights of our Mount Muller to the lucerne on the flats
The land is yielding sorghum and sweet corn
And we get along just famous except for friendly spats
And the pioneers who’ve passed we sadly mourn.
All applaud. Billy bows.
Merle Yes. I think we must make room for that.
48 Drama and The Dreaming 49
She puts it in the Capsule.
Billy Of course, it’s just my first draft.
Lily (Mock innocence) Really?
Billy And it’s only in the Bush Poetry category.
Merle No time to get bogged down with genres. But, Billy, you know
there’s other local poets busting to get into the capsule. There’s
our pumpkin-sconner Glenda Farrington, you know. She’s
been runner-up twice running in the Countrywomen’s poetry
comp.
Billy Glenda?
Merle Farringdon. Not quite in your league but I think we should
squeeze her in. She’s great on goannas.
Billy By all means.
Merle And there’s someone else, too, who has written a poem, though
it’s not quite finished yet. About our town icon.
Billy Town icon?
Merle Old Stoney. We call him old but that’s just ‘cos he’s been round
for ages. You see, he grows not old.
They freeze.
49 Drama and The Dreaming 50
Enter Stoney, mounts his perch, freezes.
They unfreeze.
He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier
centreing the civic square, taking no sides
as round his perch the traffic flows –
the four-wheel drives, farmers’ utilities,
the beat-up heaps, the sonorous motor bikes,
the feet in boots, or rubber thongs, or bare
this way and that, sober or staggering
on bitumen plain where once the bullocks strained
and, backwards of bullock days, the Dreaming’s dust.
All applaud.
Lily The Dreamin’, eh?
Billy (Guardedly) Hmmm… Yes I think we should find a spot in the
Time Capsule for that one. Who wrote it?
Merle I think it’s one of Ann’s.
Billy Anne. Anne who?
Merle I think she’s Anne-Onymous.
All freeze.
Stoney steps down, kisses Merle and leaves.
All unfreeze.
50 Drama and The Dreaming 51
Billy Well, when you’re next in touch with this poetess –
Merle (Firmly) Poet!
Billy - this Anne-Onymous, you might ask her to post a copy of her
poem down to my Bugle office.
Goes to Capsule.
Merle I don’t think the poem’s finished yet.
Lily Neither’s The Dreaming.
Billy goes, taking Capsule.
Merle Bloody idiot!
Lily You tell him, Annie-Onommie.
Anthony (Sarcastically) Means well.
Merle Wirrawong Bugle Boy! Not sure if I want my poem in with his
jingle.
Anthony Heard worse.
Merle Yes, but I mean! Been here a couple of days, soaks up a summary of
local history, churns out his clichés of “pioneers’ first ploughs” and
books it prime space in our Centenary Time Capsule.
Anthony It’s the nature of the beast. Every editor thinks he’s a poet
51 Drama and The Dreaming 52
misplaced.
Lily Yer know, I bin thinkin’.
Anthony Haven’t we all, Lily?
Lily No. I bin thinkin’ all this Centenary stuff’s just a –
Anthony Load of shit?
Lily No.
Anthony No?
Lily No. It’s a cartload of ole crap.
Merle (Pretending shock horror) Pioneers, plug your ears!
Anthony I’m with you in a way, Lilypilly. In fact, this whole anniversary
thing – wedding anniversaries, silver anniversaries, golden and
diamond anniversaries, centenaries, bi-centenaries..
Lily One day, tri-centenaries…
Anthony It’s all so … well, frankly, Euro-centric, Anglo-centric…
Merle Anglo-Saxon-centric..
Anthony In a nutshell, this whole centenary thing’s cutting things a bit
short.
Lily Too right it is. Adds up to an insult…
Anthony To the original people here. Yes, it does. We’re so linear with our
history. So trim with our time zones, so definitive with our
52 Drama and The Dreaming 53
dates. On this day to the dot, blah-blah- blah bloody years ago,
Captain Rear Vice Admiral Arthur-Charles-Georgie-Porgie-Phillip
raised the BRITISH flag above the sandy-wandy shell-scattered
seaweedy waters of Port Jackson, Botany Bay… God save mad
King George the Turd…rah, rah, rah.
Merle I think you’ve made your point.
Anthony Come again?
Merle I think I get you.
Anthony You should, Annie Onymous, with that poem of yours,
restrospecting to the Dreaming and so on.
Merle The Dreaming’s not just the past, is it Lilypill?
Lillypilly shakes her head.
Anthony No. Yet the way we go on as if our past here started when brave
Bill Berthelsen and his three brothers, settled…
…settled, as we say, as if they were butterflies that suddenly
alighted on Terra Firma. Or we say they took up…took up land
along what we call Peter’s Creek because Bill Berthelsen’s wife’s
sister’s firstborn happened to be christened Peter…
Merle All very well, teach. But…
53 Drama and The Dreaming 54
Lily Was waitin’ for the but, Merlie…
Merle Well, here it comes. Sorry if it hurts…
Lily I can take it. Had plenty of practice, you know…
Merle To be fair…
Lily I know the next bit.
Merle Please, Lilypilly. To be fair, we’re only saying we’re about to
celebrate the centenary of the town. We’re not claiming for a
moment that it’s the centenary of all human life in this part of
the world. Our pioneers built this town, that’s for sure.
Lily Built it on what?
Anthony Built it out of what?
Lily Built it with what? What stones? What trees? Look, Merlie,
hope this doesn’t hurt…but…look around, girlie. Look, we never
had no fences…when I say we, well, wasn’ really my people here
first, my gran’ was forcibly moved here, shoved in the Community
the Gov’ment set up down Willesey’s.
Merle Willesey’s.
Lily Willesey’s Waterhole. You know. Peter’s Creek. The other side.
Merle I know.
54 Drama and The Dreaming 55
Lily Bet you don’ know ‘bout them stones. Marked the tribal
boundaries, they did. No need fer fences. Then the white
fellers moved ‘em. Split ‘em up fer buildin’ blocks. Oh yeah,
“only stones” you say, “only stones…”
Merle moves to hug her. After token resistance, Lilypilly
accepts.
Enter Billy.
Brushes his hands.
Billy Safely stowed.
Anthony What?
Billy Safely stowed. The Capspule. Back of The Bugle front room.
Ready for next month.
Anthony (Pointing to the women) Shut up about capsule. Shut up about whole
bloody centenary, you take my advice.
Lily (Moving away from Merle) I can take it. Bin West Wirrawong
bloody time longer any youse. Lily can bleat like Centenary
sheep.
Billy I’d like to make it clear that The Bugle will be happy to publicise
any indigenous attitudes to the Centenary, including those that
may be critical of the concept.
Lily (Laughing) “Critical of the concept!” Gift of the gab, eh Merle?
55 Drama and The Dreaming 56
Billy Now, there’s not only the Time Capsule to be thought of. There’s
the whole order of the procession to be worked out.
Lily Procession? Shit, thought we’d worked that out long ago.
Merle Aub showed us the plan for the procession last week.
Billy The plan…ah yes. But…best laid plans…
Lily …”Mice an’ men”, we know.
Billy It’s alright about the first float. Indigenous artefacts.
Lily (Mock tears) Pity we gave Captain Cook the kybosh for prime
spot.
Anthony Captain Cook! Did he make the short list? Jimmy Cook never
came within cooee of West Wirrawong. All he ever did was mis-
name the Glasshouse Mountains. Thought they looked like
bleedin’ glass furnaces back where he was born in bleedin’
Yorkshire.
Lily Pity never landed near ‘em. Might have cottoned onto those beaut
Gubbi Gubbi names. Beerwah –
Merle - - - Tibrogargan –
Billy (Crooking his neck) -- and coward son, “Crookneck” Coonowrin.
Lily (Laughing) Even Billy Boy knows Crookneck.
Billy Read it on the postcard, mate. Bought one in Landsborough.
56 Drama and The Dreaming 57
Anthony Bully for you then.
Lily Read it on the postcard, you say. So, you can read the rocks, then?
Billy Come again. Read the rocks?
Lily Musta been past Beerwah-Tibrogargan-Coonowrin lots times
drivin’ Brizzie-Sunshine coast, eh? I went by train. You an’ big
Daddy drove, I bet.
Billy (Guardedly) Yes.
Lily So, you know which mountain’s which, eh?
Billy Well, know Coonowrin. Got the …
(Apes it)… crook neck from his dad’s nullah-nullah.
Lily Why?
Billy Er – not sure. Wasn’t it something tribal?
Lily Something tribal! I give up.
Anthony Said you read the postcard. Remember how his father got angry
because the son wouldn’t save the mother from the flood?
Billy Oh yeah. That’s it. Father got angry…because…
Merle …the son…
Lily …wouldn’ save …
Anthony …the mother…
57 Drama and The Dreaming 58
Billy From the flood. I know.
Lily Musta read that postcard real good, eh anthropologist!
Billy You don’t have to rub it in.
Lily Which mountain’s the mum?
Billy Oh, that’s the big one, Tibrogargan. The one closest to the
highway.
Lily Nup. Tibrogargan’s the dad. Beerwah’s the mumma. Surely you
saw her pregnant bulge?
Billy (Kidding) Yeah. Sure.
Lily So. Reckon you can read the mountains, eh?
Billy (Smirking) With a bit of help.
Anthony What about West Wirrawong’s mountains? How’s about you
help me, Lilypil, eh” Help me read the rocks, read the mountains
round this neck of the woods.
Lily You got good eyes. Do your own readin’
Anthony Bit on the fade now, these eye lamps of mine.
Lily Better than mine.
Anthony Mind if I chuck you a question or two?
Lily Depends.
58 Drama and The Dreaming 59
Anthony Hmmm… What do I see from here when I look…when I look up
there along Brown’s Road?
Lily Royal Hotel, Merlie’s ole library, West Wirrawong council
offices, then High School.
Anthony And, after the High School, when Brown’s Road becomes a
winding track and climbs higher?
Lily You know. Mount Muller.
Anthony Oh. And why’s it called Mount Muller?
Lily “Cos that’s where Rolf Muller and his family planted corn after
they came out from Bavaria in 1911, or 12, or whenever it was.
Anthony True. But what did the original inhabitants call it? Your people?
Lily Thought I made it clear. Original people weren’t my people. My
gran…
Anthony Forced to come here. I know.
Lily Then why you keep asking questions? Sound like Centrelink.
Anthony (Pretending Casual) Oh, I just thought you might have heard..
stories, you know.
Lily So I have. But not my stories. Not for me to pass ‘em on.
Anthony Not even to me? Not even to Anthony?
59 Drama and The Dreaming 60
Lily Not even to Anthony.
Anthony There must have been an old story about what’s marked down as
Mount Muller on our map.
Merle Like there was about what we call the Glasshouses.
Billy Like…(Does his neck jerk)… Coonowrin.
Lily Yes.
Anthony (Eagerly) Yes?
Lily Yes. There was. They told it to me. But not for me to tell it to you.
(Looks at Billy) Not for postcard either. You not the person.
Now not the time.
Billy But Lily…
Lily Lilypilly to you, Billy.
Billy What better time than now. Centenary time.
Lily Centenary time shit time. “Centenary”…”Centenary”…
hundred years (Flicks fingers)…nothing. Plenty more time.
Plenty lotta water…time’s deep creek.
Merle But, Lily love. When will we find out? There’s practically
nothing up the library…local legends, I mean. Shouldn’t
somebody be writing down these stories? Writing down the
60 Drama and The Dreaming 61
original myths? Be giving us the authentic names?
Lily More than stories. More than names.
Anthony (Daringly) You mean Biami business, eh?
Lily What you mean?
Anthony Biami.
Lily Hey, look out!
Merle Rainbow Serpent.
Billy That stuff, eh?
Lily (Despairingly) What’s the use? Sometimes I think…think you
can’t even begin to understand.
Anthony We’re trying, though.
Lily Some of youse are.
Billy Look, Lilypilly, I’ll promise you this. I’ll start an Indigenous
Column in The Bugle, as soon as I can get a guarantee of a
regular contributor.
Lily Will you now, Billy?
Billy How about that?
Merle Sounds like a step in the right direction.
Lily Might be. Depends how it’s done. Who does it.
Billy How about you, for starters?
Lily Me? I’m too busy. Cookin’ an all that up Sunsetholme.
Anthony I could help you. You talk. I pound away on my old Olivetti.
Hey, where’s my old typewriter dinosaurus? (Goes to it)
61 Drama and The Dreaming 62
It’s a mess. Looks like someone shoved a bayonet up its guts.
Billy Sure does.
Merle We’ve got great Microsoft on the PC’s up the Library.
Lily Stuff your Microsofties!
Anthony There’s my Lilypil! How’s about you tell me about Blade
Mountain and I’ll make you immortal on me ole Olivetti if it’s
still working.
Lily (Alarmed) Blade Mountain? Thought you wanted Mount
Muller.
Anthony You pulled out on that, remember? Anyway, it’s brother Blade
nearby turns me on.
Lily “Brother Blade?” Who told you “Brother”?
Anthony Figure of speech.
Lily I gotta go. (Leaves)
Merle Leave her alone. Stick to your own memories, you take my advice.
Leave this place to do its own dreaming.
Anthony Trouble is…(Touches chest) something tells me it’s my place too.
My dreaming too.
Billy Boy, you got it bad. See you down The Bugle. (Goes.)
Anthony Well, Anne-Onymous. When you going to finish your poem?
62 Drama and The Dreaming 63
Merle I’ll ask her. She only comes out at night.
Anthony Given it a title yet?
Merle I believe she wants to call it, “Turning to stone”.
Anthony “Turning to stone”. Hey, that’s good. That’s good. You might call
it mystic.
Merle Remember when you taught us Coleridge? You said, “That’s why
I like him. He dared to be mystic.”
Anthony Did I say that?
Merle Sure did.
Anthony I said lots of things. Mostly rubbish.
Merle (Smiling) Mostly. Not entirely.
Anthony I’d like a copy of “Turning to stone”. Persuade Annie to part with
one.
Merle It’s not finished yet.
Anthony How do you know?
Merle Annie tells me everything.
Anthony Good girl…Annie must be.
Merle (Hand in pocket) Fancy that. I’ve a copy here after all. And that
strange new verse Annie told me she’s having trouble writing.
63 Drama and The Dreaming 64
Anthony Why?
Merle Well it’s about guilt, you see. Inherited guilt.
Anthony Deep.
Merle Has to be. Remember what Lily was saying about our people
smashing the trees and the stones?
Anthony Lily says lots of things.
Merle Yes. (Hands paper to Anthony. Turns to leave.) Perhaps we can
persuade her to say more. (Goes)
Anthony puts Merle’s poem in pocket. Anthony goes to
typewriter. Gets it working. Pounds away noisily. Stoney
comes in, looks over Anthony’s shoulder, then climbs up on
perch and freezes. Anthony takes paper out of typewriter,
silently reads it, then tears it up in disgust.
He takes Merle’s poem from his pocket, stands up to read it
and sees old Stoney.
Anthony (Reading, with looks up)
“He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier
centreing the the civic square, taking no sides
as round his perch the traffic flows…”
Good on you, Merlie-girlie. Yes, you get the traffic and the night
64 Drama and The Dreaming 65
time roughies to a tee…ah, here we are
“—bitumen plain, where once the bullocks crawled
and backwards of bullock drays, the Dreaming’s dust…”
Aha… and now this new verse. Well, start of it…
“At night the bush creeps closer, iron roofs soften.”
“Ironbark eyes”… never got that from my poetry lessons,
Merlie, nor from Coleridge neither…
“ under the lace of stars
those silver leaves crossing the chasm of time,
ironbark eyes, burn into mine, accusing…”
(He looks up offstage towards Blade Mountain. So does Stoney)
Ironbark eyes … ironbark eyes … accusing. ACCUSING!
Blackout.
Lights up on Anthony typing memoirs a day later. Stops. Takes
out paper. Silently reads.
Anthony Self-indulgent crap!
Tears up paper. Types another burst. Silently reads.
65 Drama and The Dreaming 66
Hmm… Not so bad. How I got to sing with the Australian Opera
Chorus in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Wasn’t paid to sing. Just supposed
to be a prison guard but had to join in the Prisoners’ Chorus.
German stuff and all.
(Sings) “O welche lust
in freier Luft
den Athem einzuheben…”
Anthony What’s it all mean. Oh, sorta…
“O welcome joy
this friendly air
I’m freely breathing.”
Well, when I saw this ad in the Courier Mail a while later –
“Basses needed for chorus of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the
Queensland Con, and told the bloke I’d sung with the Australia
Opera Chorus, didn’t even have to audition. So there I was,
singing in Don Giovanni, dancing the minuet and all in the big
party scene.
Does some minuet steps. Stoney mockingly applauds.
Anthony looks round, puzzled.
Oh but my favourite bit in The Don! When the Statue comes to
66 Drama and The Dreaming 67
life. The Statue of the man Don Giovanni’s killed. Don
Giovanni mockingly invites the Statue to supper.
Gestures casually at Stoney.
And the Statue accepts.
(Sings) “Don Giovanni, I come
in response to your call.
And the Statue shakes Don Giovanni’s hand and the Don
nearly freezes to death. (Laughs) (Resumes Typing)
Stoney (Singing) Don Giovanni, I come
in response to your call.
Anthony looks round, alarmed, as Stoney strides down from
his perch and extends his hand.
Anthony I was only in the chorus.
Stoney I was only in the trenches. What’s Italian for “Anthony”?
Anthony Errr…”Antonio.”
Stoney (Sings) Don Antonio, I come in response to your call.
Extends hand. Anthony shakes it. Freeze.
Blackout.
End Act One.
67 Drama and The Dreaming 68
ACT TWO
Stoney and Anthony holding handshake.
Anthony Is this some hoax?
Stoney Not that I know of, Anthony.
Anthony You know my name.
Stoney I have ears. You’ve been blabbering on for days. Reckon I know
right inside you by now. God, those memoirs of yours. And now,
this stuff about the Stone Statue coming to life. I couldn’t resist
that.
Anthony That’s in an opera. Stuff happens in operas. This is real life.
Stoney Oh yeah.
Anthony Don Giovanni jokes with a statue, invites it to supper…
Stoney It? Him, surely.
Anthony And the statue comes to supper. Actually, it’s Don Giovanni’s
LAST supper. ‘cos when he shakes the Statue’s hand, he turns
cold as stone.
Stoney And…do you?
Anthony No…I don’t.
68 Drama and The Dreaming 69
Stoney So maybe we’re birds of a feather.
Anthony Can’t you do any better than that?
Stoney Cast in the same mould?
Anthony Ah, now you’re talking. (Stoney breaks handshake).
Stoney Remember?
Anthony Remember what?
Stoney That dawn service. Forty-eight years ago. When you came back
to West Wirrawong to be a teacher.
Anthony The Last Post bugle woke me, and I looked down from the
Royal’s verandah and saw you.
Stoney You’d seen me before. You were here that year you lived here as
a boy.
Anthony Never noticed you then. I was just a kid.
Stoney But there was a war on. World War Two, for God’s sake.
Anthony Never noticed you. Different when I got older. Starts to sink in.
War and peace. Not much peace.
Stoney So, you’ve become a philosopher?
Anthony Sorta.
Stoney Have to be a philosopher to write your memoirs. “Life and loves
69 Drama and The Dreaming 70
of Anthony Teacherman, Anthony Panthony, would-be opera
singer, seeker for meaning in mountains and myths…”
Anthony What was that first bit? About my memoirs.
Stoney “Life and loves of…”
Anthony “Loves of…” You shouldn’t have.
Stoney Shouldn’t have what?
Anthony Reminded me.
Stoney Reminded? You mean you’d forgotten her?
Anthony Oh, you must have a heart of stone.
Stoney What? For reminding you that you have?
Anthony Stop it! (Starts to search among torn-up papers)
Stoney Mate, what exactly are you looking for?
Anthony Mind your own bloody business.
Stoney (Picking up papers) Mate, I could help you. Is it this one?
(Looks at paper) About how you nearly drowned when
Peter’s Creek flooded but you hooked your foot in a half-
submerged tree. (Reads) “My youthful obsession. Must
cross every creek. My old-age obsession: must cross cultural
creeks.” Shit mate, that’s philosophical.
70 Drama and The Dreaming 71
Anthony No. Not that one. The one about her.
Stoney Her?
Anthony Trish.
Stoney You never read that one out loud.
Anthony It’s private.
Stoney Private? In memoirs you plan to publish?
Anthony Who’d publish this stuff?
Stoney Ever heard of self-publish?
Anthony Ah, here it is. “There was this dirt road through a corn field.
Heading down to Peter’s Creek.” Sorry Stoney, you hold the
fort, eh mate?
Stoney Do as a rule.
Anthony Gotta walk that road again. (Goes)
Stoney Strike me pink. Sometimes I’m glad I grow not old. (Climbs
rostrum. Freeze.)
Enter Merle.
Merle What’s all this mess?
She picks up and reads some pages.
71 Drama and The Dreaming 72
Memoirs. Harder to market. Harder than poems.
(Remembering) ..”The editor thanks you for your contribution
but regrets that he is unable at the present time to accept it for
publication…” Bloody editors!
Enter Billy.
Speak of the devil!
Billy (Waving a sheet) What am I gunna do?
Merle Publish and be damned.
Billy Damned if I do. Damned if I don’t.
Merle You serious?
Billy Read this (Shoves sheet at her) Came in on the texto this
morning. Media release from the Federal Minister for Indig –
Merle Mal Whatsis? Minister for Indigenous Affairs?
Billy Oh, whatever it’s called. Hot stuff, eh?
Merle Give me a minute to read it, eh…oh, this was all on the TV last
night. Didn’t you see it?
Billy Well, tell the truth, I was brushing up my Wirrawong ballad.
72 Drama and The Dreaming 73
Adding a few stanzas.
Merle Mustn’t cram the capsule, Banjo.
Billy Just another twenty lines or so.
Merle Why you showing me this stuff?
Billy Well, it’s a bulletin to the Media. For general release. What
should I do?
Merle Do?
Billy Should I run it in The Bugle?
Merle Why not?
Billy Why not? Aboriginal men raping children, beating women
near Alice Springs.
Merle Not near Alice Springs. A remote community way north of Alice
Springs.
Billy Wherever. This article gives the impression Aboriginal culture is
to blame for these outrages. Running this could be hell to pay,
now I’m committed to the indigenous culture column. I’ll look a
right proper ass.
Merle loudly brays.
Billy Are you listening to me?
73 Drama and The Dreaming 74
Merle I’m trying to read what you gave me. There’s some positives here,
you know.
Billy Positives? Are you crazy? It says this monster drowned a little girl
he was raping.
Merle Yes, and they said Jack the Ripper was Queen Victoria’s son.
Billy Are you trying to tell me this didn’t happen?
Merle No I’m not. But everyone who will read this will know you can’t
blame a whole society’s culture because a few members of it
behave like monsters. There’s positive stuff here.
Billy What you mean that “Send in the army” rubbish someone offers
as a solution?
Merle No, I mean about support for this women’s self-protection
group. They’re after Federal funding for more children’s
services. (Hands the sheet to him)
Billy (Reading it) Hmmm…good can come out of evil, you mean?
Merle That poor little mite. Life snuffed out. But now she’s found a
loud voice, you see. No, Jack the Ripper was never Queen
Victoria’s son, or whatever. But what about all those abandoned
children in England’s Nineteenth Century slums? Child
74 Drama and The Dreaming 75
prostitution? Battered women? And the upper classes turning a
blind eye. A blind eye for many of them because they were blind.
They didn’t know. Because the media mostly didn’t tell them. It
took a Charles Dickens to tell them, didn’t it, eh?
Billy I suppose so. I’m just a humble local regional news editor.
Merle Billy, there’s not a humble bone in your big toe. So you’re
scared to print this, eh?
Billy Well…a bit.
Merle You’re like Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister.
Billy Flattery will get you everywhere with me.
Merle No flattery intended. The creature tried to dissuade people from
reading Oliver Twist.
Billy So your advice is that I publish?
Merle It is. These items are horrific and maybe they misplace the blame,
but publishing them could be a step towards getting something
done.
Billy What will Lilypilly think? She’ll be deeply hurt.
Merle She’s tougher than you think.
Billy How will she feel when she reads it?
75 Drama and The Dreaming 76
Merle Ask her. After you’ve run it.
Blackout.
Enter Anthony reading The Bugle.
Anthony Hmmm… from the Magistrate in Alice Springs. Well, I suppose
she knows what she’s talking about. How did I put it in my
memoirs? “More creeks to be crossed…”
Enter Lilypilly, unsteadily.
Anthony helps her to sit down on rostrum, moving the
newspaper which he has put down.
How are we battling, Lilypill?
Lily Seen better days, Anthony.
He picks up paper.
Anthony This?
Lily Oh, I’ve read that.
Anthony Must have hurt.
Lily Lilypill’s bin hurt before, long time, many time.
Anthony You? Something like this? When you were a girl?
76 Drama and The Dreaming 77
Lily No. Not me. Nothing like that. But somethin’ bad about
little baby. Something could have happened. (Hits her heart)
Got me here. Remember that time…that time with the pram?
Anthony Under the house that time? When we got the prams out before
the roof caved in?
Lily No, not that time. I mean time with jus’ one pram.
Anthony One pram.
Lily Maybe I never told you.
Anthony Not much you never told me, Lil, back when I was a nipper.
Enter Merle.
Lily This wasn’ when you was a nipper. No, it was years after you left
with your Mum and brother. I told Merle about it, though.
Merle Told me what, Lily?
Lily ‘bout that pram left on the riverbank. Empty pram where the
bank runs steep. You wrote poem about it, didn’t you?
Merle (Remembering) “Empty pram where the bank runs steep
Empty pram where the creek runs deep…”
Lily Changed me into you, didn’t you, Merlie?
77 Drama and The Dreaming 78
Merle Oh, us poets do that all the time. Curse us, curse us.
Anthony If you insist.
Merle Pinched your persona, I did, Lily.
Lily Ouch!
Merle “Walking river bank I froze.
Feet froze up. I saw this pram,
empty pram on steep-slope bank…”
Lily Brings it back. Found this little crumpled-up blanket. Ole
brown teddy bear dangling its paw from the shade-cover.
Me pretty active then. Just outa me teens. Then and there,
dived right in. Swam up and down, swam round the bend.
Dived down real deep, checked out the bottom, mud and all.
Found nothin’ there. Nothin’ at all.
Anthony Great, Lilypill. I can just see you doing that. But what’s all that
got to do with (Showing newspaper) this?
Lily Can’t you see? You dumb or somethin’? (Grabs paper) This stuff
says Northern Territory tribal mothers not tell cops ‘bout men
abusin’ kids. You believe that?
Anthony Don’t know what to believe.
Lily Believe me. Swam round and round that creek, dived down to
78 Drama and The Dreaming 79
bottom, over an’ over, lookin’ for that baby missin’ from pram.
An my ole man – long gone ‘e is – if he’d been with me that day,
which he wasn’t, ‘cos that was before we’d even met, if he’d
been with me, he’d have done the same thing. Anyway, when I
couldn’t swim no more, an’ me arms felt like dead tree roots, I
went straight into town to the cop-shop, made them ring up, root
around. But … no baby missing, they said. Maybe some idiots –
whitefellas, blackfellas, I don’t know – just dumped old pram
beside the river, like they couldn’t be bothered pushing it the
three miles out to the dump. Never entered their stupid heads
someone like me’d break my heart over it. Remember, Merlie?
Broke down, didn’t I, that day I told you all about it.?
Merle Remember? Oh, yes. Your breaking down made me write the
poem.
Lily Never wrote nothing, though, about me swimmin’ round hours,
searching and searching.
Merle Sorry. Somehow I just couldn’t work that into the poem’s
persona.
Lily “Poem’s persona”. Gee, youse writers talk bullshit sometimes.
Merle Oh, we do. We do. But maybe sometimes we touch a nerve.
79 Drama and The Dreaming 80
“My feet freeze up. How can I pass..”
Went something like that, I think…No
Yes had it before…
“Walking river bank I froze.
Feet froze up. I saw this pram,
empty pram on steep-slope bank.
The teddy hangs, no tiny fingers
tickle the teddy’s tousled hair,
no baby rumples the folded blanket.
This way, that, I turn and stare.
No parents claim the childless pram.
I dredge with downward eyes the slope
that slips into the silent river.
Dead leaves drip from low-slung branch,
cold leaves cut the river’s skin…”
Enter Billy.
Billy What’s going on? Poetry recital?
Merle You might say that.
Billy Sorry to disturb.
Merle That’s alright.
Uneasy silence.
80 Drama and The Dreaming 81
Anthony Cat got your tongue, Billy?
Billy Well, frankly, I was wondering how you felt, Lilypilly.
Lily ‘bout what?
Billy That article about…about the Northern Territory troubles.
Lily You the editor. Bugle your bloody paper.
Billy How you feeling?
Lily Have known better days.
Billy I’m still hoping you’ll write that indigenous cultural column
for The Bugle.
Lily Thanks a lot. Keep on hoping, then. (Hugs Merle) Love your
poem, Merlie-girlie.
Merle Thanks.
Lily Just love it. (Smiles) Persona and all. ‘Bye, Anthony. Come up
Sunsetholme for a cuppa with the oldies, eh?
Anthony hugs her.
Oh, an’ bye-bye, acting editor.
Billy So you’ll drop your column in soon, eh?
Lily Wait and see. (Exits)
81 Drama and The Dreaming 82
Billy Where’s that niece of hers?
Anthony What niece?
Merle Nerrida.
Billy Yes, that’s the name.
Merle What do you mean?
Billy Seen her round?
Merle Not for ages. Oh, she popped in at Sunsetholme last year
for Lilypilly’s birthday. She lives over South Wirrawong,
I think.
Billy Well, she rang The Bugle this morning. Thought I was Aub
at first. Asked if I’d seen her Aunty. Said Sunsetholme had
rung her to say they were a bit worried about Lilypilly lately.
Hasn’t been a hundred percent.
Merle Look, I think I’ll just head up the hill after her.
Anthony Good idea.
Merle Just to be on the safe side. (Goes)
Billy What was all that poetry about when I came in?
Anthony A pram.
Billy Poetry about a pram?
82 Drama and The Dreaming 83
Anthony Yes.
Billy You having me on?
Anthony No.
Billy The Bacchantes have been on my back again.
Anthony I’d be happy to give them “Under Milk Wood Meets West
Wirrawong” but…
Billy Funny. I read through the list of titles. There’s none called
that.
Anthony No. There’s none called that.
Billy Then how come…
Anthony Theatre’s not quite your scene, is it, Billy?
Billy No.
Anthony What is?
Billy Can’t you guess?
Anthony I’d rather you tell me.
Billy I’d hoped you’d all gathered that I have…well, I have… a passionate
belief in the revival, through New Age journalism, of Australia’s
rural reality, of our nation’s internal intensity, of our too-long-
concealed cultural core…
Anthony Is there any truth in the rumour currently sweeping The Bugle
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office that you have replaced Editor Aub’s framed photo with
your own degree?
Billy What degree?
Anthony Oh. They say…they say you have a Toogoolawah TAFE degree in
Accumulated Cliché.
Billy You know…before I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance
I heard of your reputation for dry wit.
Anthony I believe you. Still, poles apart as we are…
Billy (Grinning) Surely not!
Anthony …poles apart as we are, we do have one thing in common.
Billy Only one?
Anthony That I know of. And that is an incurable affection for this funny
little outpost. I revisit nearly every year. You’ve just arrived. But
I sense you’re not keen to leave.
Billy Not till I’ve rebuilt The Bugle and put this town on the map.
Now.. (Moving confidentially towards Anthony) Ever heard of
negative gearing, Anthony?
Anthony Yes, actually.
Billy Well, negative gearing’s what I see as the solution to West
84 Drama and The Dreaming 85
Wirrawong’s problem.
Anthony What problem?
Billy The problem of our lack of … our lack of established identity.
Let’s face it, nobody knows us.
Anthony We do. You do. Aub – I speak it respectfully in his absence –
loves us. Merle loves us. Lily loves us. The Bacchantes love us.
Billy But… but the nation as a whole… the nation knows us not.
Anthony And could I ask you to reveal me your little secret.
Billy What little secret?
Anthony Your secret as to the manner in which what you call Negative
Gearing will make us known.
Billy Look at it this way. We’re like a novelist who’s never won the
Booker Prize, never been short-listed for the Booker, never been
long-listed for the Booker. So what can he or she (or she or he)
claim? “I’ve been unlisted for the Booker, not once, but three,
four or more times.” Get it?
Anthony I’m beginning to…
Billy Never be fearing of negative gearing.
Anthony I like it.
85 Drama and The Dreaming 86
Billy A bush poem with no rhymes…Let’s get with the times.
Anthony I’m not so sure that I…
Billy Well, my Capsule contribution has rhymes, so maybe I’m eroding
my own case. But if the exception proves the rule…you with me?
Anthony Not entirely.
Billy Here’s another aspect. West Wirrawong has no Big Mac’s,
so you have to go to South Wirrawong for Big Mac’s. West
Wirrawong has no Kentucky Fry so you have to go to North
Wirrawong for Kentucky Fry. West Wirrawong has no Sizzlers
so you have to go to East Wirrawong for…but there isn’t any
East Wirrawong…see the picture?
Anthony Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Billy Can you name me one fact, figure or feature for which West
Wirrawong is famous?
Anthony Not on the spur of the moment.
Billy Hey, maybe that’s it.
Anthony That’s what?
Billy Our slogan. “Come ye, come ye, come ye. Celebrate the Centenary
of West Wirrawong, the town that’s not on the spur of the
moment.”
86 Drama and The Dreaming 87
Anthony You know, Billy. I really think you should have a talk to your Dad.
Billy Dad’s sent me here while he’s re-educating Aub in Brizzie.
Anthony Does your Dad share your enthusiasm for Negative Gearing?
Billy Negative.
Anthony Are you being deliberately ambiguous?
Billy I hope so.
Anthony What would you feel if I proposed introducing you to a stone
statue?
Billy Apprehensive.
Anthony Would you care to shake hands with our only identifiable icon?
Billy That would depend.
Anthony On what?
Billy On whether the icon wished to shake hands with me.
Anthony Oh, he’s very understanding. He’s seen and heard a lot since
…since… Hey, Billy, your Dad. Did he…was he ever a soldier?
Billy No. But his father was a prisoner of war in Changi…Singapore.
Anthony I know where Changi is, Billy.
Billy And great-grandad lost a leg in a trench over Anzac Cove.
Anthony Gallipoli?
87 Drama and The Dreaming 88
Billy Great-grandad was there. That’s why…
Anthony That’s why you try to… that’s why you like to play the Last Post?
Billy How’dya guess?
Anthony Where’s your bugle now?
Billy Down The Bugle office.
Anthony Now Billy…please. Do me a favour. Do yourself a favour. Do
somebody else a favour. Scoot off now and grab that little
bugle of yours and beat it back here. Go on!
Billy goes.
Anthony Negative gearing. Well, as Wittgenstein never said, “Takes all
types.”
Stoney You should know.
Anthony Know what?
Stoney Takes all types.
Anthony You should know.
Stoney Know what?
Anthony Well you’re a type, aren’t you?
Stoney Come again?
Anthony In a way. Prototype,…sort of ….sort of, may I say, Platonic
88 Drama and The Dreaming 89
form? Perfect form?
Stoney You crazy, man?
Anthony I wonder if Plato would agree with Wittgenstein.
Stoney You off your rocker? (Coming down)
Anthony You off your perch. (Points up)
Stoney Look, Anthony. There’s a limit.
Anthony So Wittgenstein was wrong about you, eh?
Stoney Wittgen…?
Anthony …stein. Austrian philosopher. Peaked in England. Uni of
Cambridge and all.
Stoney What’s this Wittgenstein been saying about me?
Anthony Pity you never met him. I think you’d have proved him wrong.
Stoney What?
Anthony Wittgenstein said that when a body turns to stone it can’t feel
pain. Of course he was philosophically speculating…
Stoney The bloody idiot!
Anthony Anyway, you’re not a body that’s turned to stone. You were never
a body in the first place. You’re a man-made myth, a stone symbol
of…of…
89 Drama and The Dreaming 90
Stoney (Shoving him) Feel that?
Anthony (Shoves him back) Watch it, full-back.
Stoney Feel it, full-forward.
They jostle, Aussie Rules style.
Anthony Not bad for a myth. Must have had a good stone-mason.
Stoney Not bad for a teach. Guess you played Aussie Rules.
Anthony Fifty years back I was in Qld Uni Aussie Rules first team.
Stoney Ninety-one years back I was in Anzac’s first boatload.
Anthony No you weren’t.
Stoney Metaphorically speaking. Metaphors matter.
Anthony Where’d you pick that up?
Stoney It’s in your memoirs. Been reading your stuff.
Anthony Perving over my shoulder, eh? (Shoves him playfully)
Stoney (Shouldering him, Aussie Rules style. Going for mark) This
mark’s mine, dickhead!
Anthony reels. Falls over. Grabs foot in pain.
Can’t take it, eh?
90 Drama and The Dreaming 91
Anthony pulls shoe and sock off. His foot is bleeding.
What the heck..?
Anthony I’ve broke me big toe.
Stoney What? From my little shoulder shove?
Anthony Not you, you idiot. Down the creek.
Stoney Down the creek?
Anthony You know. I told you. I was after her.
Stoney Her?
Anthony Her? TRISH! I told you. That one I was keen on. All that time
ago. She wore a jumper in winter. Brown and gold stripes. Like
the corn by the road down to the creek.
Stoney Memories don’t break big toes, mate.
Anthony Look. I was walking the old dirt road. Took me shoes off like I
used to do when I was young. Then, across the road to the creek,
found this fence with a gate. Sign on the gate: “Road closed”.
So I kicked it.
Stoney Bloody idiot.
Anthony OK. But I lost it. Bloody fence blocking road to the creek.
Blocking up memories.
91 Drama and The Dreaming 92
Stoney (Sympathetically) Memory lane!
Anthony Don’t you send me up, Stoney!
Stoney Wasn’t.
Anthony So I started kicking the bloody gate. Just about broke me big toe.
Stoney Don’t blame me.
Anthony You shoved me.
Stoney Didn’t break your toe. Just a shove.
Anthony Shoved me over. Why?
Stoney (Hands up to grab imaginary ball) Going for a mark. Bloody
stupid question.
Anthony Fucking stupid answer. (Grabs toe) Ow!
Stoney Put a sock on it. Here, let me.
Stoney sits on ground beside Anthony. Tries to fix his
sock round his toe. Last Post heard off stage.
Anthony Shit, it’s that idiot of an editor.
Stoney Not Billy the Boy?
Anthony Billy the Boy in person. And he’s blowing his bugle.
Stoney He’s playing my tune.
92 Drama and The Dreaming 93
Anthony Quick! Up to attention! No…up on your perch. Come on,
Stoney. This is serious, mate. I want the full monty
Stoney, puzzled, climbs his perch, grabs his rifle, freezes.
Enter Billy, blowing the Last Post.
Anthony stands to attention. When Billy finishes,
Anthony applauds.
Billy You’re not supposed to applaud the Last Post. It’s to introduce
the Minute’s Silence.
Anthony I know.
Stoney (Booming) I know.
Billy looks up, alarmed.
Billy Who was that?
Anthony It’s the echo.
Billy OK. Where is he?
Anthony Who?
Billy The ikon, of course. You said you’d get me to shake hands with
our only identifiable ikon.
Anthony You’ll be a great editor, Billy. You’ve sure got one hell of an
93 Drama and The Dreaming 94
imagination.
Billy (Smiling) Aw, shucks.
Anthony But you have. Like that Time Capsule you’ve made. And the poem
you’ve written. And that bugle you blow so beautifully.
Billy You’re just saying that.
Anthony Tell you what.
Billy What?
Anthony You promise to go back to your office, do some careful proof
reading, polish the Time Capsule, and I’ll get Merle to arrange for
you to be the bugler next Anzac Day…no, sooner than that, next
Remembrance Day in West Wirrawong.
Billy Aw shucks! (Goes).
Stoney He for real?
Anthony Surreal. Billy the Boy’s the bright hope of new age Aussie
regional journalism.
Stoney (Getting down) Now, about this Wittgensetin bloke. Said stone
don’t feel pain. (Waves bayonet)
Anthony Steadeee…
Stoney Feel my blade, eh! Well…(Taps breast) Metaphorically speaking.
94 Drama and The Dreaming 95
In here…I’ve felt blade.
Anthony Blade! Blade! (Taps head) You’ve got me, Stoney. Got me going.
(Grabs notebook and pen, sits down, starts writing)
Stoney (Looking over Anthony’s shoulder) What’s this? “Birth of
Blade Mountain.”
Anthony Yes. Bless you, Lilypilly.
Stoney What Lilypilly got to do with bayonet?
Anthony Shush…(Scribbles) Not bayonet. Blade! You see?
Stoney I see this. Egypt, 1914. Year before Gallipoli. Bayonet practice in
sand trenches. Ripping guts out of straw dummies.
Bayonet drill.
Rips me still.
Anthony Jigging rhymes. Worse than Billy’s ballads.
Stoney (Hits stomach) Got me here! Gets me here! (Mimes Bayonet
charge. Anthony watches, runs to him).
Anthony (Grabbing rifle) Me too. Nasho days. National Service. Wacol.
Thought they’d send us to Korea. Had this old red-faced,
beer-gutted Warrant Officer with a bayonet charge obsession.
Reckoned he’d done the real thing. Lots. Went on like he had
95 Drama and The Dreaming 96
a divine mission to turn all us Wacol Nashos into demons with the
blade. We had to run along this trench with stuffed straw
dummies –
Stoney Had them in Egypt –
Anthony Shuddup! –stuffed straw dummies hanging from ropes down the
far end. Had to yell and scream and banshee like crazy as we ran.
Like this…”YAAH……EEE”, thrusting the bayonet in and turning
the blade like a bloody corkscrew. Ah…
Sags down, near tears.
Stoney comes and pats him on shoulder.
Stoney Me too.
Anthony (Looks into him) Pain in the stone.
Stoney You know…at Gallipoli. Among all the bodies they found..they
found…I found….I still find. There were these two. One in Aussie
uniform. One Turk. They had bayoneted each other. “According
to orders.” But they died embracing.
Anthony You sure?
Stoney I was there.
96 Drama and The Dreaming 97
Anthony Metaphorically speaking.
Stoney Metaphors matter.
Stoney resumes his freeze on perch.
Anthony (Reading as he writes)
The birth of Blade Mountain
I’m bursting to know.
Was it named for a memory
of long-buried woe?
It’s blade like a bayonet
lances the sky.
It’s name cuts the question
but what’s the reply?
Oh, rock-edge that rises
shape sharp as a spear
name like a razor
formed out of a fear.
While Anthony is busy writing, Merle and Billy enter.
Merle has two sheets of paper.
Billy touches Anthony on shoulder.
97 Drama and The Dreaming 98
Anthony Please, Billy. Must finish this poem.
Billy For the capsule?
Anthony No! Not for the capsule. It’s for me.
Merle So’s this. (Gives paper)
Anthony Lilypilly. Funny, never read her hand-writing before. It’s a bit like
mum’s was. (Reads) Oh, I see.
Merle Didn’t they ring you at the pub?
Anthony Who?
Merle Sunsetholme. They said they’d ring you.
Anthony I’ve been out. Down the creek. (Anthony reads) Was it quick?
Merle A stroke. Just after she finished these notes.
Billy One to me too. For The bugle.
Merle I was with her. Nerrida too.
Anthony That niece of hers.
Merle Nerrida more than a niece. Had a bit of an inkling, she did.
Billy The one that rang me at The Bugle. Thought I was Aub.
Anthony We’d better ring Aub. Had a soft spot for Lil.
Merle Who didn’t?
98 Drama and The Dreaming 99
Billy We’ll run it in The Bugle. Just as she wrote it. Then we’ll put that
issue at the top of the stuff in the Time Capsule. Have to find
someone else to inter it.
Anthony Lily wouldn’t have done it anyway. Remember, “Get one of the
kids,” she said.
Merle I’ll get onto Ted, the Principal. They all loved her up the school
Come on, Billy. I’ll introduce you.
Billy and Merle leave.
Anthony (Reading Lilypilly’s letter) True to your word, old Lily. Saved my
life but can’t tell me secrets…
(Reads on. Smiles) “Read the rock, read it for yourself…stone tells
own story…”
Looks up at Stoney, who remains frozen.
Anthony (Looking off towards mountain. Writing, struggling with words.
Sometimes he gropes for them. Sometimes they come in a rush)
The birth of Blade Mountain’s
a mystery still
though it’s four decades down
since I first climbed the hill.
99 Drama and The Dreaming 100
A rookie school teacher
by timetables bound
but weekends were free
to grapple the ground.
Your birth, your beginning
I sought for the source
of your surge to the surface
with some deep legend’s force.
Geology’s guidelkines
failed my heart’s test.
Their formalised phrases
lacked all interest.
All that starch about “strata”,
text-terms set in ice,
for my heart’s heavy hunger
just couldn’t suffice.
Goes to scrunch paper and put it in bin.
Stoney (Loud) No! You finish it.
Anthony writes on.
100 Drama and The Dreaming 101
No, I reached for the rainbow
Spirit-Serpent once spun
when in old Alcheringa
all forms first begun.
Leaves preached sweet sermons
on many a walk
when I listened to language
no grammar book taught.
Now I’m weathered and wiser
got the itch for old song
like Maroochy’s lamenting
Where Mount Coolum “bilong”.
But you, old Blade Mountain,
you spear my soul’s sky,
cut open my cloudscape
and I’m wondering why.
Anthony walks off towards mountain. Lights fade except
for focus on Stoney, who looks out to audience.
Stoney (Smiles) Spose you could call me a sort of Time Capsule. Well,
you put a lot of your stuff into me, don’t you? Every Anzac,
every Remembrance Day. “I shall grow not old as…” you know.
101 Drama and The Dreaming 102
Think you know. I’m this uneasy ikon, aren’t I? Disturbing yet reassuring. War memorial for generations that weep over wreaths yet endorse the invasions that seed the inevitable wreaths. Ah, shut up, Old Stoney, Young Stoney. What would you know?
Stoneys don’t feel painsies, eh?
(Looks off) Next week they’ll be cramming their stuff into the
West Wirrawong Centenary Time Capsule. Big deal, eh? Not too many of that lot will be round to dig it up. Not too many of them.
But sure as stone-eggs, I will. Eh?
End.
102 Drama and The Dreaming 103
Drama and the Dreaming - Exegesis
Shape making perilous way from shapelessness1. Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow 2
One day, as she searched, the woman came upon the ashes of a fire her own tribe had kindled long ago… And as she looked at the ashes, she called to Biami the Good Spirit to help her find her tribe3.
This essay is prefaced by thoughts of three poets (one of them also a noted dramatist) who indicate that their creativity involves personal explorations of shadowy uncertainties as in uneasy smoulderings, stirrings of ashes. So has it been with me. All my life I have been slow finding my feet. Now in old age, I stumble much as I did when I was young. I grope within and without.
I have been an actor since Kindergarten when, in 1938, I gave a spontaneous one- man-show to my companions based on my images of the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which I had seen a few days before. I have been writing poems since high school in the 1950s and plays since university in the same decade. The content of my play, West of West Wirrawong, is an imaginative response to my own life. Its technique is a result of my experience in the theatre as actor and director, both amateur and professional. In researching, both for the play and this essay, I have been helped by reading (mostly of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) by my personal association with such writers as Judith
1 Wright, Judith. from “The Morning of the Dead”. 1994. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 209. 2 Elliot, T.S. from “The Hollow Men”. 1954. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, p80. 3 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. Then Walker, Kath. 1972. Stradbroke Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p100.
103 Drama and The Dreaming 104
Wright and Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, and by playwrights such as David Brown and the members of my QUT Cohort (chaired by Errol Bray) during 2006. I have also been influenced by the work and comments of actors who have read and performed my various drafts, and by audiences who have seen these performances.
Two comments which I treasure are: “Nothing much happens in this play” and “you should turn it into a one-man show and perform it yourself”. That which follows is a response to these comments, an interrogation of my creative response to the readings, and a personal reflection on my experiential and creative process.
When I embarked on the process of this Creative Writing Masters degree I was advised that I should define my Research Methodology and indicate whether it was inductive or deductive. I have found this to be challenging, as I have never been comfortable with notions of formal logic. In exploring my influences and sources of inspiration it seems to me that a chance comment by a two-year-old child may influence me as much as a pronouncement by a sage in a lecture hall. If I am on my way to a school to act Macbeth (being a retired teacher, now a volunteer guest), the sight of a dead yellow leaf on the pavement may inspire me more than my recollection of what Granville Barker said in one of his Prefaces to Shakespeare. In other words, my methodology is that of a magpie. I was delighted when, at a QUT seminar on Critical Realism, the guru of that theory, Roy Bhaskar, spoke of “magpie methodology 4.
In those early days of this research project, in an attempt to encourage me to develop analytical tools, I was given six questions to answer. Now, in my introduction, I will give brief answers to these questions.
What am I researching? Why?
- this is my response to personal mystery, including Indigenous myth; because a spirit in me says I must.
Who am I as a researcher?
- an old fart whose feet have taken him from the foot of Mount Tibrogargan to the slopes of Etna, whose voice has taken him from performing in the chorus of Don
4 Bhaskar, Roy. Comment made in Seminar on Critical Realism, sponsored by the Institute for Indigenous Leadership in Education and by the Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, April, 2006.
104 Drama and The Dreaming 105
Giovanni to performing the work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (sometimes with the author present); in other words, someone with a rich experiential background in the effects of myth across a range of cultures.
How will I design my research?
- my design has taken the form of a meandering, rather than a longitudinal/latitudinal map. I have imaginatively climbed every myth mountain I could, from the Gubbi Gubbis’ Beerwah to the Jirrbals’ Byjinjillah (“Split Rock” in North Queensland, south of Tully)5.
How will I conduct my research?
- by continuing to perform in as many plays as I can (since March 2006, I have acted in ten plays, from those by local writers to Shakespeare and Euripides); by reading and re-reading Nietzsche, reading Indigenous myths and legends, watching the Indigenous song-dance troupe Jagera Jarjum; attending the plays of Kooemba Jdarra…; and of course by continuous reflection on the plays I have written and on those in which I am currently acting or which I am rehearsing.
How will my research contribute to knowledge?
- it will contribute to the writing of my play, which may or may not be performed; as for contribution to knowledge, my aim for the play is to provide new audiences, particularly in regional Australia, with a different perspective on the relationships human beings have with each other’s mythology.
How will I communicate my contribution to knowledge?
- the main way, obviously, in which a playwright can communicate, is through the performance of his, or her play, which may confirm or challenge the audience’s perceptions. Or, if reviewed, it may provoke discussion among those who read the review, whether or not those readers have seen the performance. If the play is published, or even if it receives publicity, it may influence the reading public. Even this essay may be read and thus achieve communication to some other playwright/student.
5 “Fire from Walgooey the Taipan”, the Legend of Byinjillah. Collected by Gladys Henry. In Giroo Gurrll. 1967. Brisbane: Fortitude Press, p4-5.
105 Drama and The Dreaming 106
So – that concludes my introduction. I trust the reader will read on at her or his peril.
Now… where does that “peril” come from? Well, as it happens, I am, as I write this, trying also to remember my lines as the cynical ape-man Apemantus (Diogenes-based) in Shakespeare’s rarely acted Timon of Athens, in which I say to Timon (who, in his populist phase, has invited me and trendy Athenians to his feast): “Let me stay at thine apperil, Timon: I come to observe…” 6. Apemantus is a highly critical, yea verbally abusive observer. As I prepare to play this role, I am looking (being a Stanislavsky-tuned actor) to those aspects of myself that I can use. In my life I (I hope) have mostly been an encourager but I often find myself critical of those who (as Timon) fail to see through false praise, who fail to see the falsity of so-called civilization. In my immediate situation I am confronted with what I see as the pretentious emptiness of life when it plays the role of promoter of creativity.
I have sat in on (and sometimes contributed to) group seminars. Where these have followed play readings, I have found them very helpful. Where the focus has been on abstract concepts, not illustrated by the reading or performance of dramatic, poetic or prose works, I have sensed that others have seemed stirred and even stimulated; however, I have frequently found myself at a loss to connect the concept with the concrete experience. Some layers of academic thought and language seem constipated by obsessions with concepts. This must have been so in the nineteenth century at the University of Basle where Nietzsche, though professor of classical philology, had artistic yearnings:
A particularly modern weakness inclines us to see the primal aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a way. For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him in place of a concept 7.
The closest I have come to the concept-arousal is by personal recollection (during my long struggles to write this essay) of what might be called a concept but which I
6 Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Act One Scene Two, 33-34. p 22 in Arden Shakespeare, Oliver, H.J. (ed). 1959. London: Methuen. 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Tanner, Michael (ed). Whiteside, Shaun (tr). 1993. London: Penguin, p 42.
106 Drama and The Dreaming 107 would prefer to call a poetic image, one which chimed with my own in-life arousal, the image of an insect passing through the chrysalis phase.
The image comes from a poem I first read fifty-one years ago, the same year in which I met (and, as a young poet was encouraged by) Judith Wright, the editor of the Oxford Book of Australian Verse, in which she included a poem by Furnley Maurice, the pen name of Frank Wilmot. Part of this poem incised itself in me:
There breaks upon my sight A low magnificent light Green as the core that in a green fire burns…
There is a spirit bound Within this holy round; A chrysalis cares not what freedom brings, But, without love or sight, Breaks its way into light Not knowing it will some day move with wings8.
I gradually came to realize that, as I persisted with my play, this image of the chrysalis was strengthening me, and that the fabric of the chrysalis was related to my practice-based research, involving personal reflection as well as literary study. In terms of linear time (later in this essay I shall look at Indigenous perspectives on cyclical time), the need for the chrysalis-cocoon is brief, as the pupa matures from lava to moth; but my personal chrysalis need was over years, indeed decades, as I came to reflect on why my Western-educated certainties were assailed by inner doubts and fears which came to be desires; why my Eurocentric artistic urges (first night in London in 1969 I was in Covent Garden desperate to hear Beethoven’s Fidelio) were both challenged and complemented by disturbingly delicious myth- music calling me back to Australia.
But now, there is that Hamlet of Denmark (whom I first played in a heavily-cut version at the age of fifteen) pinching my ear, though the words are those of his
8 Maurice, Furnley (Wilmot, Frank). from “The Gully”. A Book of Australian Verse. Wright, Judith (ed). 1956. London: Oxford University Press, pp 46-47.
107 Drama and The Dreaming 108 father: “But, soft! Methinks I scent the morning’s air; / Brief let me be” 9.
I shan’t be very brief but I am conscious that this essay should not exceed ten thousand words and I know I must take my reader back to the (comparative) “morning’s air” of my life, if I am to fully frame this play’s pupa-larva stage.
In 1958, after four years as a cadet reporter on The Courier Mail and two years studying for teaching in both the University of Queensland and the then Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College, I was posted as a first year teacher to the Murgon Rural School (which a year later became the Murgon State High School). My mother brought to my attention something I had never known – that at the age of six months she had brought me as a baby to Murgon to visit my aunt and uncle who were working in the Bank of New South Wales.
As soon as I received my letter of appointment, I looked up Murgon in the Guide to Queensland and discovered it was the centre of a dairying and corn-growing area, that it was near Barambah Creek and that nearby was a mountain called Boat Mountain. I immediately felt the urge to discover why the mountain was so-called. The locals’ comment, that it resembled in shape a boat turned upside-down, never satisfied me. I persuaded myself that the name must be related to an Indigenous myth. The pursuit of such a myth became an obsession with me. My pursuit in this specific instance has failed, but it has led to related awarenesses.
At Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College and at the University of Queensland in 1956 and 1957 I received no instruction in Australian Indigenous culture. However, through my contact with Judith Wright and through such of her poems as “Bora Ring”, my curiosity grew.
In 1958 in Murgon I had Aboriginal students (from nearby Cherbourg) in my classes. On day, calling the class roll, I found that a student called Henry was absent. When I asked his mates where he was, one answered, “Henry, he go walkabout, sir.” I wondered if his walkabout included the slopes of Boat Mountain. The relevance of this incident will become clear in due course.
I spent four years teaching in Murgon. My subjects included geography, which then
9 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act One Scene Five, 58-59. Oxford Shakespeare, Hibbard, G.R. (ed). 1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 188.
108 Drama and The Dreaming 109 had a strong geological content. I taught, from the textbook, geological data about the volcanic origins of mountains. This data never satisfied me, and I was found myself recalling a childhood memory. In 1943 an American war correspondent and artist, posted to Brisbane, had painted for my father a vivid image of what we then called The Glasshouse Mountains. This was the name given by Captain Cook as he observed them from his telescope far at sea, when he was reminded of glass-making furnaces in his native Yorkshire. Later I learned the names Tibrogargan, Beerwah and Coonowrin given to these mountains by the local Gubbi Gubbi people. I also was told an outline of the legend.
Now, in 1958 in Murgon, I looked on the dark, rumpled slopes of Boat Mountain and came to believe this mountain also had a mythic origin. Teaching (as part of my English classes) Judith Wright’s poem “South My Days”, I came across: “...high, delicate outline / of bony slopes, wincing under the winter…” 10. Judith Wright, returning to the countryside of her birth after tertiary education at the University of Sydney and after months in Europe, found the New England tableland to be “full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep” 11. These were not Indigenous stories. It was not till years later that she became friendly with Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then Kath Walker) and came to feel an affinity with Indigenous culture. But even in 1959 in Murgon I was starting to make links between mountain and myth, though I had no understanding of concept-based approaches. At this time, my response was all a result of intuitive experience.
Indeed, even what is the book-core of my Literature Review, namely Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, came to me initially as the result of a life experience. I never knew I had a need for Nietzsche when in 1986 I arrived in Venice to take up a six-week occupancy of the Australian Writers’ Studio there (the Australian Writers’ Studio in Italy has since been moved to Rome). My brief in Venice was to research for, and to begin writing a play about Richard Wagner in Venice writing part of his music drama (he loathed the word ‘opera’) Tristan und Isolde. His text (he shunned the word ‘libretto’) was drawn from Celtic myth, a divergence from the Nordic myths which inspired many of his music dramas.
10 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 20. 11 Ibid. p 21.
109 Drama and The Dreaming 110
There I was in the city of falling angels (some stone carvings had dropped down from the church of Santa Maria dell’ Salute) where the Maryborough-born Bernard Hickey, who was lecturing at the Ca Foscari University in Venice at the time, was my mentor and guide. He was later to be Professor of English in the University of Lecce in southern Italy. I had just completed my MA on Xavier Herbert at the University of Queensland, my thesis there having incorporated the non-Indigenous Herbert’s exposition of Indigenous myth. Myth was far from my mind as I walked the canals where Wagner had walked, and listened to a brilliant pianist playing the Liszt transcription of Wagner’s Tristan score. I found a large biography of Wagner, translated from the German into Italian but my Italian was halting. In this volume was a reference to a one-time Wagner acolyte called Friedrich Nietzsche.
Since I was myself a Wagner acolyte, I tried to find out more about Nietzsche. At last, in the English section of a second-hand bookshop near the Grand Canal, I found a paperback on philosophers which had a chapter on him. I am afraid I cannot recall who edited the book, or who published it or even what was its exact title; but, reading it that night in a room overlooking a back canal, I came for the first time in my life upon the notion of those differing yet creatively-unifying drives, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. At the time it mattered not at all that the presentation of those two forces was an over-simplification of Nietzsche’s presentation The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, which I was not to read in full until nearly two decades later. Nietzsche evades precise definitions of his terms but the editor of the book I read in Venice provided crystal-clear definitions: the Dionysian was the dangerous vertical, rising from the depths of ecstatic experience; the Apollonian was the safely-ordering horizontal, bringing harmony and a measure of clarity to the Dionysian bubbling from below.
Since then, the vertical-horizontal intersection, the creative wrestling of the intuitive with the disciplined, has always worked for me as a way of comprehending my own internal wrestling of the sense-image with the linguistic, of the mythic mystery with the patterned music. I have now read The Birth of Tragedy twice and find myself responding to Nietzsche’s non-defining association of the Dionysian with a sort of Bacchic intoxication (I say “a sort of” because Nietzsche’s language is elusive) and of Apollonian with an illumined dream that relates to (but is not entirely bound to)
110 Drama and The Dreaming 111 clarity and harmony12.
Though my favourite poet Judith Wright was not a Nietzsche fan, I feel she was on his wave length at times: for example “Darkness where I find my sight…”13. This image recurs in the last poem of her last collection: “Perhaps the dark itself is the source of meaning…” and the Dionysian-Apollonian interplay is, I suggest, implied in other lines from that same poem, “Patterns”: “The play of opposites, their interpenetration - / there’s the reality, the fission and the fusion…”14
I believe it is an awareness of the dramatic and poetic tension achieved by the opposing of like characters with unlike that led to the positioning in my play of the acting editor Billy Brannigan in relation to the characters who are at home in West Wirrawong. Likewise within the ex-teacher Anthony there is the ongoing wrestling between the allegedly factual content of the geography-geology syllabus which he has been required to teach, and his personal, inner, imaginative response to the mountain which rises over the town. (Boat Mountain in Murgon becomes Blade Mountain in West Wirrawong.) Here too, Nietzsche, on my second reading of The Birth of Tragedy, endorsed my characterization of Anthony: “Now the Olympian magic-mountain opens up before us, revealing all its roots”15.
Anthony imaginatively glimpses those roots and wants to trace them to their mythic sources. My play is essentially about his failure to do this. He is getting ahead of himself. He wants to write his own poetry in response to the landscape. That is valid; but he wants to feel with non-Indigenous fingers the pulse of the Alcheringa, the Dreaming, of the original inhabitants. This he cannot do. He tries to attain his goal by questioning Lilypilly. Lilypilly is closer to Alcheringa than Anthony can ever be, but even Lilypilly cannot provide him with what he needs, whether she wished to or not, and she loves him well enough to know his limitations. Lilypilly has not come from the original people of this locality.
This is where Nietzsche’s and Judith Wright’s pointing to the creativity of the dark, the unknowing, the irrational has supported me in the writing of my play and of this essay. As Nietzsche put it (and when he speaks of “modern” he means the 1870s),
12 Ibid. 13 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 59. 14 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 426. 15 Nietzsche, Op. Cit., p 22.
111 Drama and The Dreaming 112 creativity is not aroused by rational or conceptual certainty:
A particularly modern weakness inclines us to see the primal aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a way. For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really hovers before him on place of a concept 16.
So I show Anthony in pursuit of the roots of his mythic mountain, a pursuit that is never rewarded by fully grasping the image that hovers before him. However, Anthony is not the only poet in the play; there is also Merle, the town’s librarian, Anthony’s former student. Merle, like Anthony, is aroused by myth; but Merle, though she is bonded in friendship with the Indigenous Lilypilly, is roused, not by Indigenous myth but by the myth symbolized by the Statue Soldier. Within the frame of my play, Merle comes closer to poetic success than Anthony does. Her response to Lilypilly’s story of finding the empty pram is to assume a poetic persona. But her response to Old Stoney is complex: though she writes her poem in the third person, she is projecting herself in the persona of Stoney, using his Apollonian dream-clarity to intersect with her own Dionysian uneasiness about West Wirrawong’s present and past, that past incorporating a fibre of guilt which also nudges Anthony as he reads her line: “ironbark eyes burn into mine, accusing” 17.
The creation of Old Stoney as a character in the play is the most risky of my dramatic devices. Were it not that I had sung in the chorus of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the murdered Commendatore’s statue comes to life (as in the related Don Juan play of Moliere), I would not have dared to draft him in my Dramatis Personae. However, once I had placed him there, he became a spokesman for issues which I felt I could not otherwise have projected. War’s horrific negativities demand a Dionysian release in celebrations of valorous sacrifice. These celebrations, recurring annually in the Anzac rituals, can only be reconciled with the concept of civilization if imaged through Apollonian grace as in the statue of the young soldier, the concrete or marble columns solemnly engraved with names, the use of aphorisms such as “Lest we forget” and of artistic embellishments such as the bugle’s Last Post and the recitation of the Binyon “Ode”.
16 Ibid, p 42. 17 from the play West of Wirrawong, by Paul Sherman, MS, p 48.
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I have tried in my play to use the suggestive possibilities of silence. Lilypilly has plenty to say but she is not eager, or able to give the information Anthony seeks. Merle intuits that present dwellers in West Wirrawong have some guilt about those they have supplanted; but she images only “ironbark eyes… accusing”. This derives from a personal uneasiness I have felt when walking through Sawpit Gully, near Murgon. But I had no factual information about any massacre. Stoney, the statue soldier has by virtue of his non-naturalistic image, both the freedom to comment and the aura of tacit restraint. Hence (I hope) those times when he does comment (as, for example, upon the ritualizing that idealizes uneasiness about war) will have a special potency. In an early draft I had the long-standing editor of The Bugle present as an informed commentator on most issues. However, I came to feel that his editorializing was non-dramatic. I replaced him with the young, verbose, acting- editor Billy who is ever ready to pronounce on almost all issues. I hoped that his (mostly) superficial verbosity would enhance the restraint of the others and also give counter-posing resonance to the silences.
So I trust the pupa of my play has emerged from the cocoon-chrysalis state as a moving moth. I say “moth” rather than “butterfly”, for I am aware that this play moves roughly and clumsily, with little smoothness or grace. That is how it must be. It is not a play for sophisticated, or cosmopolitan tastes. Perhaps I can persuade an Arts Council to tour it through country towns, for I know it is true to them. Indeed, with a resurgence of awareness of the identity of country towns – now in Queensland highly resentful of attempts to make them merge with one another - it may have some appeal. I have toured country towns for the Arts Councils of Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory so I think I know my market. Country towns can surprise one. For example I’ll never forget how croak-croakily alive The Frogs of Aristophanes was when I saw it performed by the local theatre in Mt Isa. Perhaps my play stands a chance of arousing (or resonating with) rural self- awareness, of smiting city smugness that culture’s chief abode is in the subsidized Cultural Centres of capital cities.
I hope someone in some audiences will see through my Billy the Boy Brannigan’s obsession with rationally-definable (“enlightened”) goals. Conversely, I hope some audience members will be consoled by an awareness that they share, or may grow to share, the gentle branch-bearing of the non-assertive (except in crucial moments)
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Lilypilly. I also hope I may help some people to look at our Statue Soldiers at some other times than Anzac and Remembrance Day, and that I may help challenge the current politicizing of sacrifice and the current pollution of human tragedy in the service of a nationalistic false-Crusade. As a writer of poetry, I hope that the efforts of Merle and Anthony to write poems are not wasted efforts – and here I recall the comment of a co-Cohort member that “nothing much happens in this play”. Because I know what the writing of a poem means to the writer (and may mean to the reader), I cannot conceive of such as being “nothing much”.
A clue to my central concern (central problem perhaps, but I use problem in its sense of ‘issue’ rather than of ‘obstacle’) is the distinction between the sophisticated linear sense of time and the primitive (not in any inferior sense) cyclical sense of time.
It was the Noongar (from West Australia) artist Robert Stuurman, at the Indigenous Knowledge conference, organized by QUT’s Oodgeroo Unit in 2006, who verbalized for me my awareness of cyclical time:
When time is cyclical it tends to stand still and a sense of eternity pervades the ever present now18.
Commenting on Jack Davis’ play The Dreamers, Joanne Tompkins has pointed out:
While European written language and history operate in a linear chronology, the aboriginal understanding of the past is less fixed19.
I have recently found myself reacting critically to Governmental concerns that history in schools be constituted formally as “linear”, history which, whatever its appearance as factual history, might easily be aligned with Rudge’s notion of history in Alan Bennett’s play (and film) The History Boys as “just one fucking thing after another”20. Of course there is a place for linear history but I believe that Lilypilly, Anthony, Merle and Old Stoney in my play are moved by images of time as recurring, overlapping – cyclical.
The urge to escape from the confines of linear chronology has been expressed
18 Stuurman, Robert. Paper presented in Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies. June 2006. Papers published by Oodgeroo Unit, QUT, Brisbane, p 74 19 Tompkins, Joanne. 1994. “Jack Davis’s Plays”. Jack Davis, the maker of history, Turcotte, Gerry (ed). Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 55 20 Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. 2004. London: Faber and Faber, p 85.
114 Drama and The Dreaming 115 strongly in non-Indigenous culture. In my youth I found it a challenge to wrestle with T.S. Eliot’s opening of his Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past. . .21
But then Judith Wright, in her The Moving Image, came to my rescue with her imaging of the keys to unlock linear time’s tentacles:
We are caught in the endless circle of time and star that never chime with the blood; we weary, we grow lame, stumbling after their incessant pace that slackens for us only when we are caught deep in sleep, or music, or a lover’s face… 22
Judith clinches the issue in her quotation from Plato which opens her first volume:
Time is a moving image of eternity23.
The Anthony of my play is old, yet he encapsulates the Wordsworthian wonderment that is associated with childhood. That is also a mark of Indigenous Australian awareness of the continuity of Creation. As Wordsworth puts it: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy”. Later he refers to the persistence of the “vision splendid” through young age until “[a]t length the Man perceives it die away.” Near the end of the Ode he states that, at certain times even in mature age there are moments when gleams of what has been return to us. He concludes by pointing to moments of apotheosis, such as when nature’s beauty is revealed to us through a flower 24. In writing my play and this essay I have found it essential to seek and to grasp such revelations in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing. I am fully aware that such people as Anthony, the scholarly teacher in life-long pursuit of non-scholastic
21 Eliot, T.S. 1944. Four Quartets. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 3 22 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 3. 23 Ibid, p2. 24 Wordsworth, William. from “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood”. In The Penguin Book of English Verse. Hayward, John (ed). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp 264-65.
115 Drama and The Dreaming 116 wisdom, can be the subject of incredulity and ridicule. Often I notice, as I pass by train my (I dare to call them ‘my’, though it was the Gubbi Gubbi people who first embraced them) beloved Tibrogargan-Beerwah-Coonowrin Mountains, that my unending wonder at their form, texture and colour is not shared by most other passengers. Indeed, most do not look up from their newspapers, magazines or novels; or even turn their eyes out of the glaze responding to their plugged-in iPods or CDs. This concern is the core of my poem “Somewhere under the Rainbow Serpent”25.
My quest for legends in this land has been a long one. It is nearly a decade since, returning from Hong Kong where I had seen and pondered the Amah Rock, source of a local legend, I came across a group of rocks on Horseshoe Bay, Bowen. In Hong Kong, at the Yuen Long Merchants’ School, I had worked on a poem (subsequently published there) based on the legend of a girl with her baby waiting in vain for her husband to return from the sea. I was glad that the students knew the legend, one of them helping me with his drawing. A few days later I was in Bowen, doing outdoor drama at the bay with local students but none of them had heard of any legend concerning the origin of these rocks. As a result, I wrote the poem, “Amah Rock”26.
In the decade of my birth, a highly significant collection of Australian Indigenous mythology was published. This was Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals, published in 1930 by George G. Harrap. The book was published under the name of William Ramsay Smith, who was Chief Medical Officer of South Australia. David Unaipon, the Indigenous author, had done all the work of collecting and writing two drafts under the sponsorship of Angus and Robertson, until they assigned the David Unaipon copyright to Ramsay Smith in 1927. Ramsay Smith then edited the work, re-writing parts of it, and it was published with no mention of David Unaipon’s part in it. This publishing scandal has at last been partly sanitized with the publication (in 2001, by the Miegunyah Press of the University of Melbourne) of the legends as David Unaipon wrote them, edited with a preface by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker27.
25 See Appendix A. 26 Appendix A. p28. 27 Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Muecke, Stephen and Shoemaker, Adam (eds). 2001. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press.
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I did not read either the Ramsay Smith version or the David Unaipon original until I was well into the final drafts of my play. Apart from my early acquaintance with the Tibrogargan-Beerwah-Coonowrin legend28, my knowledge of Indigenous lore was perfunctory until I met Kath Walker (late Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal) after performing one of her poems in her presence on Minbjerribay (Stradbroke Island) in the 1980s. In the period 1958-61, when I was teaching in Murgon, the ‘set books’ for the subject English included only one story based on Indigenous lore – this was “Nintaka the Lizard” published in Essays and Adventures by Jacaranda Press, edited by two of my lecturers at the University of Queensland in 1956, A.K. Thomson and C.H. Hadcraft. Of the twenty-eight essays and stories, half were by English writers. None of the Australian writers was Indigenous. C.P. Mountford’s was the only one drawn from Indigenous legend. His piece was based on the human origin of a group of rocks in Central Australia, and it came to be seminal for me in my creative development. However, I quote from the editors’ note: “Legends of the Australian aborigines are fairly numerous… But they are not at all well known, and very little use has been made of them in Australian literature”29. That latter comment impelled me to make use of such legends myself, when I could find them, and to make use of what other Australian writers had made of them. In my University student days I had merely skimmed through the Jindyworobaks such as Ian Mudie and Rex Ingamells30. I found their use of Indigenous words and attitudes somewhat forced and artificial, though I felt they were making a healthy onslaught on the obsessively Eurocentric poems of the Vision school of the Twenties, led by the Lindsays. I then had no idea that the Vision poets had seized on Nietzche as their philosophic torchbearer. Later, when I came to know this and also to know Nietzsche’s views on the creative possibilities of myth, especially as expressed in Chapter 23 of The Birth of Tragedy, I came to an understanding of their ‘visionary’ dilemma. Nietzsche did not mince words: “Without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power; only a
28 Authentic version in Wells, Robin. In te Tracks of a Rainbow. 2003. 18 Nebula Street, Sunshine Beath, Queensland: Gullirae Books. pp 81-83. 29 Thomson, A.K. and Hadgraft, C.H. (eds). Essays and Adventures. 1956. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, p 181.
30 The Jindyworobaks were a group of white Australian poets, including Rex Ingamells, Nancy Cato, Ian Mudie and Les Murray who “sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry... active from the 1930s to around the 1950s...intended to combat the influx of "alien" culture, which was threatening local art” (Wikipaedia, 2007). “Jindyworobak Movement”. Sept 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindyworobak_Movement.
117 Drama and The Dreaming 118 horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement…”31. Australia’s visionaries of the 1920s took this to heart. But, not knowing Indigenous myths (few by then had been recounted or published) they turned to the gods and goddesses, the sacred mountains, the spirits and sprites, the Pan-prancers of Greece and Rome. A poem included in the 1923 Vision anthology is this one by Pamela Travers. She called it “Ecce Homo” and, lest anyone miss the genuflection to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, she wrote below her poem’s title, “God is dead.” Her poem is more than fifty lines long. I do not think it is meant to be satirical or a self- parody, but this is how it ends:
God is dead, then who’s afraid To steal the lips of a prancing maid? Come, old Pan, for the time is mellow. Plums of love are ripely yellow; The little apples of love are red, Pluck them, pluck them, for God is dead32.
I see this as an artificial poem; but even such genuine poets as Hugh McCrae fell into the trap of the transplanting mythic obsession of the visionaries.
Judith Wright felt that the visionaries’ cup was essentially empty. She agreed with R.D. Fitzgerald that “centaurs” in a Hugh McRae poem was artificial but she blamed the Vision creed as a whole, rather than McCrae in particular:
But I think it is permissible to believe that Fitzgerald had made an attributive error. It was not McCrae’s centaurs that were rocking-horses; it was the theories that Vision based on McCrae’s practice… McCrae had already drained from the Greek imagery all that for him was drinkable; Vision insisted on re-offering him the empty cup33.
I appreciate that the aims of both Jindyworabaks and the Vision poets were derived
31 Nietzsche, Op.cit., p 109.
32 Travers, Pamela. Poetry in Australia. 1923. Sydney: Vision Press, p 115. 33 Wright, Judith. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 1965. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p 133.
118 Drama and The Dreaming 119 from the culture and state of knowledge of their period, however in writing my play I am trying to show that Australian landscape is not an empty cup, not merely a picturesque background or a commercial stage for Eco-Tourism, but an imaginative stimulus for primary creativity.
For me, 1957 was a creative turning-point. It was the first time I had a poem published with payment. This was when Douglas Stewart, then literary editor of The Bulletin, posted me a cheque for a guinea and published my poem, “Old Brisbane Quarry”. He had rejected earlier poems of mine which had flowed more from theories than from experiences. But “Old Brisbane Quarry” was a poem I did not plan to write. I wrote it from my feet up, so to speak, unconscious of form or process. I was on my way through the old bush track down through the steep path an old quarry at Albion. On my back was a pack of my football gear, as I headed to catch a bus to the University of Queensland for Aussie Rules training, Suddenly, a bulldozer stopped me in my tracks. The threatened demolition (for smart new housing developments) of my Brizzy bush boyhood playground had begun. Angrily and sadly, I forgot about footy training and headed back for home. I started pounding at my typewriter, and by midnight I had the first draft of a poem which ended:
Here there is silence for the seed to push Its permanent impress of primal love That sets the soft palm feathering on the stone That sets the sweet grass springing in the stream. Quietly the recent river’s undertone Crystals the stirring of a blurring dream34.
A year later I was teaching in Murgon (a local Indigenous word, so they say, for Lilypond – the inspiration for the name of the character Lilypilly) with Indigenous students from Cherbourg in my classes. I came to know some of them, and to listen to them. But I did not visit Cherbourg. To do so, I would have needed (in accordance with the ‘protection’ laws of those days) to seek written permission, just as the Indigenous people there had then to obtain official permission to visit
34 Sherman, Paul. ”Old Brisbane Quarry”. August, 1957. The Bulletin. Stewart, Douglas (ed).
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Murgon. I refused to submit to what I regarded as un-Australian.
It was not until the mid 1990s that I actually visited Cherbourg. By then, all barriers to entering or leaving were down. I was there to teach drama in the brand new theatre-in-the-round, built as part of the Narrunderi TAFE in Cherbourg. Most of my teaching colleagues were Indigenous and so were all my drama students. I was able to sit in on sessions about Indigenous culture, of which by then I had acquired some limited knowledge. However, it was a chance meeting that provided yet another piece in the puzzle of my creative journey.
As I have indicated, I learn best from the feet up, not from the brain down. During my teaching sojourn (not long) in Cherbourg I was staying at night with an old friend in Murgon. I had no car. One afternoon I was walking the miles from Cherbourg back to Murgon. I had crossed the creek, once a formal barrier not passable without official permission. I was listening to the wind through the gum tree branches when a car suddenly stopped. A friendly, late middle-aged face of someone I had not seen for decades smiled at me, offering me a lift. Yes, it was that very Henry who in 1958 had ‘gone walkabout’ from my class when I was calling the roll. By the 1990s I at least knew what ‘walkabout’ was.
In 1999 I had a unique opportunity to work creatively with Indigenous people. I played Gonzalo in the Queensland Theatre Company production of The Tempest, directed by Simon Phillips, who was also director of the Melbourne Theatre Company. I began rehearsal on the same day as did the members of the Jagera Jarjum troupe, an Indigenous song-dance company from west of Brisbane. Simon had assigned Caliban to an Aboriginal actor from west of Melbourne and Ariel was a Torres Strait Islander girl. The Jagera Jarjums were The Tempest’s islanders, with whom Gonzalo has some significant interactions and about whom he makes some (partly appreciative, partly condescending) comments. We had great discussions, helped by the Indigenous Associate Director, Wesley Enoch, who is now directing for Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre.
My experiences such as the TAFE drama tutoring in Cherbourg (which led to the re- meeting with my former aboriginal student) and the association with an Indigenous song-dance troupe in Shakespeare’s The Tempest were but two instances of cultural convergence in me. And I think it is obvious that movements towards cultural
120 Drama and The Dreaming 121 convergence are central to my play, West of West Wirrawong. For the term ‘convergence’ I am indebted to our major poet, Les Murray. As he writes in his essay, “The Human-Hair Thread”:
It is to the credit of the Jindyworobak poets that they were the first white artists to try to make assimilation a two-way street. Convergence is a better word here, though; assimilation carries too deep a stain of conquest, of expecting Aborigines to make all the accommodations while white people make none35.
Having had, as a non-Indigenous person, great opportunities to interface with Indigenous culture, I must state that I appreciate Indigenous suspicion of those who try to commit what I call Cultural Invasion. Nowhere has this suspicion, nay, resentment, been better expressed than in a poem in last year’s Blak Times edition of Meanjin. As Anita Heiss wrote:
I do not want to hear about your spiritual experiences at Uluru… 36
However, myth, though locally created, has a way of finding universal resonance. As David Unaipon wrote in the beginning of his seminal collection: “Perhaps some day Australian writers will use Aboriginal myths and weave literature from them, the same as other writers have done with the Roman, Greek, Norse, and Arthurian legends…”37
And internationalization of Indigenous art has already begun. On visits to Italy and France I have found great interest in Australian Indigenous narrative and poetry. Aldo Magagnino, a school teacher colleague in southern Italy has now published his Italian translation of Indigenous legends. He first heard these from Australian archeologists active near the school where he taught – in the Italian city of Gallipoli
35 Murray, Les. “The Human Hair-Thread”. 1984. Persistence in Folly. London: Sirius Books, p 29. 36 Heiss, Anita. “Apologies”.2006. BlakTimes, Meanjin. Minter, Peter (guest ed). Vol 65, Issue 1. p 176. 37 Unaipon, David. Op. cit. “Introduction:, p xliii.
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(not to be confused with the Anzac locale in Turkey)38. In 2006, in company with a Queensland Indigenous poet, novelist and story-teller Herb Wharton, I took part in an international conference in the University of Le Havre, France. My main contribution was presenting the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal. At the time of that conference my play was taking its final shape. Crossing the English Channel (La Manche to the French) I had a dream experience in which I confronted both the turbulence and the tranquility of what Les Murray calls Convergence39. Later, I wrote a poem about my internal wrestling of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, about the restlessness before the reconciling of remoteness and closeness. Since, as I believe I have demonstrated, such tensions are projected within the characters of my play, I now close my essay by presenting my poem as the Exegesis’s Epilogue:
It is December, 2006. I am crossing the English Chanel from Portsmouth to Le Havre to present the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in conference in the Université du Havre. I am tired, for the ship has sailed five hours late, at 3.30 am. Cross-cultural currents are interlocking with the rough Channel currents. I am aware that the French won’t hear of it being called the “English Channel”, it must be “La Manche”. But there are deeper counter- currents within me. Hence this poem.
Moreton Bay meets La Manche My Francais phrase-book’s not beside my pillow. To tell the truth, my pillow’s missed the boat though boat’s sailed five hours late. Tomorrow’s port I’m programmed down for poems; main one’s by Oodgeroo, touching her father’s totem: Noonuccal-nurtured, old mate Carpet Snake.
But, rolling with the roughly-wooded deck (Atlantic’s elbow jabs me in the ribs) I’m pining for a far Pacific bay, for Straddy’s sandbanks where Minjerribah 38 Buri, Maria Roaria and Magagnino, Aldo. Racconti del tempo del sogno. (Selezione e traduzione, raccolti da A.W. Reed). c2000. Nardo (Lecce): BESA Editrice, via Duca degli Abruzzi, 13/15. 39 Murray, Les. Op.cit., p29.
122 Drama and The Dreaming 123 croons harmony with Quandamooka’s choir. But Neptune’s trident zaps my comfort zone.
Now, midnight-muffled, Portsmouth sunk astern and Isle of Wight’s last blinkers lidded down, we’re wrapped in Courbet’s canvas-cleaving Wave, its gallery-grace alarmingly alive. Poseidon’s sea-horses aren’t my mounts – I’ve lost my pathway to tomorrow’s poems.
Two decade drowned since I crossed Quandamooka (map-marked as Moreton Bay) to meet you, Kath before, re-christening as Oodgeroo you nursed your name in Paperbark’s soft folds. You gave me charter to perform your tale - your father’s totem mate, Old Carpie snake.
Now Quandamooka’s far. But murderous Manche suddenly smiles, seeding her serpent sea with reptile ripples, eggs of eastern dawn and soon a coastline sprouts its stony tower. Sliding the stone-stubbed shore of Normandy the surf uncoils. I glimpse Old Carpie’s scales.
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Hamilton, Edith. 1940. Mythology. New York: NAL Penguin. Henry, Gladys, (collector). 1967. “Fire from Walgoey the Taipan: the Legend of Byjinjillah”. Giroo Gurrll. Brisbane: Fortitude Press. Herbert, Xavier. 1938. Capricornia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Herbert, Xavier. 1975. Poor Fellow My Country. Sydney: Collins. Holt, Lilian. 2004. Correspondence on Whitefella Jump Up. London: Profile Books. Hope, A.D. 1973. Selected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Jaffa, Herbert C. 1979. Modern Australian Poetry : 1920-1970 . Detroit : Gale Research Company. Koch, C.J. 1987. Crossing the Gap. A Novelist’s Essays. London: Hogarth Press.
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Lindsay, Norman (ed). 1923. Poetry in Australia. Sydney: The Vision Press. Meanjin. 2006 Vol 65 Issue No 1. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Mudie, Ian. “Underground”. A Book of Australian Verse. Wright, Judith (ed). London: Oxford University Press. Murray, Les.1984. “The Human Hair-Thread”. Persistence in Folly. Sydney: Sirius Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Whiteside, Shaun (tr), Tanner, Michael (ed). London: Penguin Books. - 1961. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Hollingdale R.J. (ed). London: Penguin. Oodgeroo, of the tribe Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker). 1964. “Cookalingee”, and “Stone Age”. We Are Going. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. - 1972. “Carpet Snake”. Stradbroke Dreaming. Sydney: Angus and Robertson - 1998. “Ballad of the Totems”. 50 Years of Queensland Poetry. Rockhampton: Central Qld University Press. Reynolds, Henry. 2006. The Other Side of the Frontier. Sydney: UNSW Press. Shakespeare, William. 1973. Hamlet. Nigel, Alexander (ed). London: Macmillan Education. - 1959. Timon of Athens. Arden Shakespeare. Oliver, H.J. (ed). London: Methuen. Slessor, Kenneth. 1923. “Pan at Lane Cove”. Poetry in Australia Lyndsay, Norman, McCrae, Hugh and Slessor, Kenneth (eds). Sydney: The Vision Press. Sophocles. 1947. The Theban Plays. Watling E.F. (tr). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Tompkins, Joanne. 1994. “Jack Davis’s Plays”. Jack Davis, the maker of history, Turcotte, Gerry (ed). Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Thomson, A.K. and Hadgraft, C.H. (eds).1956. Essays and Adventures. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. Unaipon, David. 2001. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Carlton, Victoria: Miegunah Press. Wagner, Richard. Music Dramas. Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, Ring of the Nibelungen. Wells, Robin. 2003. In the Tracks of a Rainbow: Indigenous culture and legends of the sunshine coast. Sunshine Beach (18 Nebula Street): Gullirae Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1997. Wittgenstein on Human Nature. Hacker, P.M.S. (tr).
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London: Phoenix. Wordsworth, William. 1956. “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. The Penguin Book of English Verse. Hayward, John (ed). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Wright, Judith. 1956. A Book of Australian Verse. London: Oxford University Press. - 1965. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. - 1994. “Patterns”. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. - 1994. “The Morning Dead”. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
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Conferences Attended in 2006 Master Classes with Roy Bhaskar. Spo9nsored by the Institute for Indigenous Leadership in Education and the Creative Industries Faculty, QUT. Creative Realism in Context. April 20- 21, 2006. QUT. Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies Conference. Organised by Oodgeroo Unit, QUT. Surfers Paradise, June 28 – 30, 2006.
Conference Presentation “Poetry of Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccal”. Reconciliation Conférence, Université du Havre, France. Faculté des Affaires International. December 7 – 8, 2006.
Relevant Roles played in stage productions Aeschylus. Orestes in The Eumenedes (adapted as The Flies by Jean Paul Sartre) Sophocles. Tiresias and member of Chorus in Oedipus Rex, translated by W.B. Yeats. Anouilh, Jean. Creon in Antigone. Euripedes. Title role and Nurse in extracts from Robinson Jeffers adaptation of Madea. Shakespeare, William. (I list only the roles I have played where cultural differences are core themes) Title role and Edgar in separate productions of King Lear; Gonzalo in The Tempest; Adam in As You Like It.
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Some Activity Sources of Indigenous Culture
Sound Recordings (vinyl) Elkin, .P. 1953. Tribal Music of Australia. New York: Folkways Records. Laade, Wolfgang. 1975. The Bora of the Pascoe River. New York: Folkways Records. Holmes, Sandra LeBrun. nd. Land of the Morning Star. Sydney: HMV. Kansky, G. nd. Mornington Island Corroboree Songs. Australia: W & G Records.
Audio Cassettes Corbett, B. & Summers, M. (Narrators), Knox, R. & Atkins, M. (singers). nd. Dreamtime Legends of the Australian Aboriginies. Tamworth: ENREC Studios. Tjapukai Dance Troupe. nd. Proud to be Aborigine. Larrikin Records: Paddington, Sydney. McRae, Murdo. 1997. Aboriginal Earth Chants. Aboriginal Artists Agency (no place listed). Australian Broadcasting Commission, Aboriginal Arts Board and Music Board of the Australia Council acknowledge for help.
Sound Recordings (CD) Barambah, Maroochy. 1995. Mongungi. Daki Budtcha Records: New York. Burragubba, Adrian. 2005. The Didj in us. Produced by the artist, and sold while performing in the Queen Street Mall, Brisbane.
Live Performance Jagera Jarjum Song & Dance Troupe of South East Queensland. I performed with them in Shakespeare’s The Tempest for QTC in 1999 and have regularly attended their Indigenous performances ever since.
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Appendix A: Relevant Poems
Somewhere under the Rainbow Serpent (dedicated to Aldo Magagnino, of the Salento, and to the Indigenous creators of the Dreaming legends included in In the Tracks of a Rainbow, by Robin Wells, Gullirae Books, 18 Nebula St, Sunshine Beach, Qld, 4567).
Salento, southern Italy. Not quite dear Dorothea’s “sunburnt country” but Salento-sojourning, I find Aldo, a teacher etching emus, kangaroos in Dreaming songlines, librettoed in Italian. fair gobsmacks me, does Aldo. Once, nearby he’d palled with Aussie archaeologists swinging their picks abroad. He’d drunk their yarns tall-timber stories spinning soul from stone. He’d waltzed their swag of legends, rainbow-rich dredging many a Dream-deep billabong rippled with bunyip breath for one and all.
Now, treading a legend’s track near Noosa Head I trip on a tourist, Christmassing in Queensland, who might as well have stayed in Toorak Road, scorning the sand, she scans her Weekend Age, impervious to wild Wantima’s pain in nearby headland profiled, sandstone face that rebel boy’s memorial. Wilful one, his father’s warning scorned, sea-monster’s meal spat out as stone. Wantima outstars time... but Madame Melbourne’s not to mysteries.
Now near Caboolture (Carpet Snake enscrolled)
129 Drama and The Dreaming 130 melting our tilt-train’s windows, tragic tears from father Tibrogargan’s face intrude but make no impact on a youth iPodded flexing to CD’s pre-planned pulse. Maybe he’ll scrawl on “Glasshouse Mountains” postcards (Cook’s label, hooked on Yorkshire furnace towers) but as for the woes the Gubbi-Gubbis wove round “Crookneck” curse of cowardly Coonowrin afraid to rescue floodswept Mother Beerwah, hence Tibrogargan launched his Lear-like rage, he’ll never know. iPod’s his only icon.
But Aldo’s far-flung coals enkindle mine, bridging the jetlag gaps of miles and minds. A Dreaming depth ignites dead definitions, lithe muscles coil, defying Logic’s language that classifies, that clots and calcifies. Old heartspun mountains melting masks of stone.
Paul Sherman 2007.
Beerwah-on-Seine African girl, student in Le Havre’s Uni, she mimes the pregnant womb of Mother Beerwah while I, the ageing Aussie visitor, guide two French students keen on improvising the tragic Tibroggan’s Lear-like rage against his coward son, crook-necked Coonowrin. We’re half a world away from Glasshouse Mountains, Cooks’s bizarre banding of the humps he saw from far off shore, recalling boyhood’s towers where Yorkshire yeasted glass in furnace flame but Kabi Kabi legends laced in me when Bribie boyhood’s blood first brothed, salted in Sunshine Coast’s tide tub, rekindle now
130 Drama and The Dreaming 131 as Pumicestone Passage froths my mindscape merging with River Seine’s dark estuary.
A legend’s life eclipses ours, makes mock of cancelled calendars, of scheduled space. So here in Europe’s sculptured academe the ancient Austral rocks’ lost lava life bubbles and breathes again in mythic mime. No need of language as the youthful trio blend belly shape, freeze-frame in craggy frown, sculpt statues of themselves, retell the tale older than Oedipus, forever fresh.
Paul Sherman 2007.
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Southern Burnett Sentinel He spins me back, the Murgon statue soldier, his youth’s exuberance snuffed out in stone, guarding the names of lads who gave their all. Last drive from Brisbane, passing Wacol station, I time-warped back through half a century when my turn might have come, Korea calling.
My birthday broached the fated call-up dates so Wacol opened wide its khaki wings to claim me and m mates for “three months basic”. We conscripts buckled up in a battle dress, we route-marched, drilled, chucked dummies first then graduated into live grenades. with Banshee wails we made our bayonet runs ripping the guts from swinging sawdust bags, my conscience pangs scraped by sergeant’s scorn, his “Soldiers’ Chorus” certainties that Bren gun, bullet blast and bayonet blade were freedom’s angels in the “goody” fight.
What did I know? What know I now? Below this statue soldier’s stillborn youth, wearing my Old Fart’s Nasho medal’s bronze, I wince from Wacol’s legacy of bayonet blades. Korea calmed, I fired no shot in anger, was salted for a sea I never swam.
On Anzac Day I watched the true-blue rankers whose bayonets struck through sadder stuff than straw. I see some stand with shrapnel in their souls, watching the labeled wreaths, the flickering frame.
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My old man’s stored-up tears, for too long locked in Logic’s reservoir, are seeping now.
Paul Sherman 2007.
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Amah Rock
She’s waited long, a symbol grown, the flesh, the blood, the aching bone have hardened into statue stone. Her tears are rainclouds closing down upon the sprouting tower town which turns its back upon her pain and rides the rattling Kowloon train.
But 30 years ago I saw before the high-rise fenced the shore the eyes that burned into the bay for husband journeyed far away, the baby bound upon her back she’d carried up the mountain track, the baby now stone cold as she – a symbol fixed eternally.
Paul Sherman March 1, 2000.
(written for Yuen Long Merchants Association Secondary School, Hong Kong).
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Reading the Rocks (at Horseshoe Bay, on returning from Hong Kong)
From Nathan Road, goodbye Kowloon neon calligraphy slicing the skies borne by a Jumbo QNTAS balloon to Cairns’s Coral Sea sunrise
Mogodon-mindless, grabbed by Greyhound bussed to Bowen, sunset burning coral-crunching Horseshoe-Bay-sound coconut sweetness of returning
Older scrolls I must unravel Confucius in Capricorn, rocky reading – my currency changed from foreign travel my rock-salt gardens need re-seeding.
Five rocks, furrowed, sea-slug-snowed wrestling time’s stiff stranglehold pockmarked in a cancelled code cold-faced nuggets nursing gold.
I’m Kowloon-dazzled, Bowen blind. The dragons dance, the bronze gong gleams but I must anchor my whirlpool mind. Now I must fathom my own land’s dreams.
Five rocks chomping a choppy tide – one slit and scarred, one bony, tough one ready the rising wave to ride one butting the water, playing it rough.
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One just a baby, last in line scared of the salt that stings his feet pigmy bristles pimpling his spine nosing the foam for scraps to eat.
The rocks I glad-wrap in my brain toe-trace the stories in the sand my mad calligraphy, anchor-chain re-berthing me in my own land.
Paul Sherman 2007.
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gifts for gubbas
You joked about the nickname nailed onus the dour non-tribe, our top-hat talk jangling with jargon... Gubbas, gubbas you dubbed us, nuggety knockdown lump of a name carved from Colonial “Gov’nors” know-all ones.
Once, brushing a wattle tree out Murgon way I flinched from the flex of a carpet snake whose rainbow scales, sliding the bronze blossoms touched icebergs in me... Later I read your lines and learned to look through neo-Nunukul eyes.
Kath, before you rechristened to Oodgeroo I danced to that ballad you spun for the snake your father’s totem mate. You painted him too in ochre prose, beckoning old Biami the overseer who smiled from rainbow skies.
Your island tales dropped anchors deep in us brought down to earth our double walled defences, white-anting all our screened hygienic houses. You made us feel for feather, fur and scale, the land’s vast legacy we’d tunnel-visioned.
Your cherished Carpie, chasing your mother’s chooks, crossing the earthen floor you wordspun for us, slithered inside our padlocked padded hearts devouring all our sterile stalactites. Your tale untied us, loosed our stapled tongues.
Dredging the salted channels of your Dreaming
137 Drama and The Dreaming 138 you carried the catch to us on raft of words across wide Quandamooka. Biami’s bounty gave hungry gubbas the saving grace to graze on fields no tractor ploughed, no “duster” sprayed.
(Note: this poem recalls Oodgeroo’s “Ballad of the Totems” and “Carpet Snake” story though its text is independent of theirs. She was given to use both the “Nunukul” and “Noonuccal” spellings of her tribal name. “Quandamooka” is said to be the original name for Moreton Bay.)
Paul Sherman. 2000. Moongalba – Poems in Honour of Oodgero, Zonta Club, Brisbane.
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Appendix B: A Chapter Summary, with comments, of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
THE RE-BIRTH (THANKS TO RICHARD WAGNER) OF THE GREEK TRAGEDY CREATED BY
AESCHYULUS AND SOPHOCLES BUT DESTROYED BY EURIPEDES AND SOCRATES, OUT OF THE SPIRIT
OF DIONYSAIE CHORAL MUSIC AS RE-CREATED IN ITS EROTIC, MYTHICAL POWER BY WAGNER:
The Birth of Tragedy is the early work of a University of Basle classical philologist, aged twenty-eight, in love with early Greek tragedy, who had aspirations as a poet and musical composer. He was at that time a Wagner-worshipper, having personally played the piano transcriptions of The Valkyrie. Friedrich Nietzsche’s full title for his 1872 work was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, which I shall hereafter abbreviate to BT. I suggest that my above Chapter Title might give some indication of the contents of this bewildering, yet fascinating work.
The main impact of the book is its enthusiastic, insistent, but by no means clear or consistent, promotion of the artistic importance of the creative tension between impulses Nietzsche calls Apollonian and Dionysian. When I first read BT I immediately fastened on Dionysian as being the dangerous, irrational vertical impulse and Apollonian as the calm, ordered, controlling impulse, where technique produced moderation.. These interpretations were some help to me in my own acting and writing, but I now realize, on re-reading BT, that my early responses were too simplistic.
In the first chapter of BT, Apollonias is associated with dream, and Dionysiac with intoxication. Wagner-lover Nietzsche immediately links Apollonian with the dream-poet promotion of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger. He then moves on to his early mentor, Schopenhauer, who influenced Wagner too. Nietzsche quotes from The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer’s simile of the calm boatman in the midst of the sea-storm. But he immediately associates himself with Schopenhauer’s imaging of dread, and then indicates how a sense of lost way can be handled by the “narcotic potion” of Dionysiac urges, wherein “subjectivity becomes
139 Drama and The Dreaming 140 a complete forgetting of the self”. Nietzsche’s association of Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy with the Dionysiac at first seems shocking to one who is accustomed to the idea of Ninth Symphony setting of the Schiller “An die Freude” as being associated with church music. Now, however, tempted by Nietzsche’s reference, it is possible to hear the frenzies of deep diving in the work.
In Chapter Two of the BT, we are pointed to the Greeks in a series of mysterious (maybe deliberately mystifying) references to the seductive power of the Dionysiac dithyramb. We must take this (if we will) at face value for neither Nietzsche’s age nor ours could have physically heard a Dionysiac chorus. (“Dithyramb” refers to no musical technicality; it is simply a reference to the complex double-birthing of Dionysus, who was sheltered in the thigh of his father Zeus after being taken from the womb of his lightning-struck mother Semele).
Chapter Three makes a healthily pungent criticism of Greek culture, exposing the façade of godliness. It is almost like the author’s Hellenic prefiguring of his later Anti-Christ phase. Chapter Four continues this criticism of the hypocrisy in Grecian society and god-status. The chapter culminates in a startling image of the product of the marriage of the two impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian: “...whose mysterious marriage, after a long period of early strife, was finally blessed with such a child, at once Antigone and Cassandra.
Chapter Five opens with raising our hopes that we are near to understanding of the Dionysiac-Apolline union. However, what we get is a complex look at the lyric poet Archilochus and the mystery of artistic creation. Chapter Six is more fulfilling because (again starting with Archilochus) it establishes a link between the folk song and what Nietzsche calls “Dionysiac currents”. He outlines the importance of music in the Dionysiac.
Chapter Seven sees the introduction of the chorus as “the crucial step towards the open and honest declaration of war on all naturalism in art”. Nietzsche calls on Wagner’s assertion that civilization “is annulled by music as lamplight is annulled by the light of day” (though he quotes no source in Wagner for this). Nietzsche declares: “the Greek man of culture felt himself annulled in the face of the satyr chorus, and the immediate effect of Dionysiac tragedy is that state and society, the gulfs separating man from man, make way for an overwhelming sense of unity that
140 Drama and The Dreaming 141 goes back to the very heart of nature”. He postulates a link (many, myself included, are happy to debate) between Dionysiac-induced will-denial and Prince Hamlet’s inaction.
In Chapter Eight Nietzsche explores his perceptions of poetry. He develops his argument against the view that sees metaphor as a rhetorical figure, and calls for the promotion of the “image” rather than “concept”. Returning to his main theme he again notes the transforming power of the dithyrambic chorus. In Chapter Nine he points to the co-existing of “light-image” and “abyss” (echoing Apollonian and Dionysiac) in the Sophocles treatment of the Oedipus myth.
Chapter Ten opens staking a claim (and endowing his claim with the Nietzschean olive-wreath of “certainty”) that “until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero” and that (until Euripides) “all the celebrated characters of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus and so on – are merely masks of that original hero, Dionysus”. This elaborate support of “certainty” appears to me to be unhelpful in the creative process, whereas, from my perspective, it is easier to relate to his criticism of the way in which religion, with “the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism” systemises its “mythic premises” and moulds myth into history.
Chapter Eleven opens with the powerful claim that Greek tragedy met its death by suicide. He blames Euripides for this, alleging that, through Euripides, “everyday man pushed his way through the auditorium onto the stage”. Chapter Twelve soon moves into an unequivocal charge of artistic murder: “the excision of the primitive and the powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy, and the rebuilding of tragedy on non-Dionysiac art, morality and philosophy – that is the intention of Euripides, now revealed to us as clear as day”. This is followed by an examination of Euripides’ late work (posthumously performed), The Bacchae. Unlike Nietzsche, I read this play as a hallmark of Greek tragedy, with powerful resonances for me in the characters of the two old – Tiresias and Cadmus. To my ear the choruses throb with poetic Dionysian ecstasy, sometimes calmly informative, sometimes consumingly violent. The complex attraction-repulsion bond between the two main protagonists, the disguised god Dionysus and the petulantly over-confident young authoritarian Pentheus, seems to me to offer full possibilities of artistic engagement to the actors,
141 Drama and The Dreaming 142 a necessary ingredient for the enthralment of an audience.
Chapters Thirteen to Fifteen are primarily concerned with Nietzsche’s view of the destructive effect of Socratic logic upon art, empowered by the image, at the end of Chapter Thirteen, of “how logic twists around itself and finally bites itself in the tail.” Chapter Sixteen includes a lengthy Schopenhauerian extract endorsing, in music creation, the subordination of reason. From this, Nietzsche draws support for his linking of mythology with Dionysian wisdom. Chapter Seventeen looks densely at drama, relegating the words in both myth-moulded drama and in Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a secondary role in relation to “the structure of the scenes and the visible images”. However, it is possible to argue that Hamlet is also myth-based, since Shakespeare’s allegedly historical sources, such as Saxo Grammaticus, have been wildly re-woven by the Bard. As well as this, it seems churlish on the part of Nietzsche to undervalue the role of words in poetic drama to this extent.
Chapter Eighteen is significant in that it celebrates Kant and Schopenhauer as achieving “victory over the optimism that lurked within the essence of logic”. Though Kant’s sense of the “Copernican Revolution” is not specifically named, it could be argued that this is implicit in Nietzsche’s reference to the transformation of “mere phenomena”. There are, however, no footnotes in BT.
Chapter Nineteen at first seems to be anti-Wagner, opening as it does: “[w]e cannot describe the innermost content of this Socratic culture more accurately than by calling it the culture of opera”. However, Nietzsche immediately makes it clear that by opera he is thinking of floridly superficial vainglorious vocal gymnastics, appealing to “Florentine circles”. Wagner, of course, would never permit his works to be described as operas. They were music dramas; and his words were never libretti, they were poems, not written by librettists but by the composer himself (though he was not above adapting them from Nordic or Celtic origins). In the mid- nineteenth century Nietzsche regales us with an hilarious lampooning of conventional opera, leading to the assertion that “opera is the expression of amateurism in art”. However, towards the end of this chapter, he sings the praises of German music “pre-eminently in its mighty sun-cycle from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner”.
Chapter Twenty, much shorter than its predecessor, ends with what looks, to a
142 Drama and The Dreaming 143 twenty-first century reader, like Nietzsche’s attempt to outdo the comic satirical choruses of The Frogs of Aristophanes. However, it is more than likely that Nietzsche wishes to be taken seriously. After all, it is the “rebirth of tragedy” that his whole book is focused upon. His youthful passion is revealed in phrases such as “grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet”40.
Chapter Twenty-one continues in rhapsodically evocative mode, describing the love- death (Liebestod), the sensation one may experience during performances of Tristan und Isolde, culminating in the third act. Nietzsche succeeds in confidently yoking the Apollonian dream-light and Dionysian undercurrents of Greek tragedy with the towards-Isolde sea-gazing of the mortally wounded Tristan. I am grateful to Nietzsche for reviving in me my response in the theatre to hearing the “jubilation of the horn” that “pierced our hearts”. That unification of opposites in jubilation and piercing is the essence of the creative union of Apollonian and Dionysian.
Chapter Twenty-two continues this exploration of music drama’s capacity to realise the symbolic power of myth. In this chapter the text of Isolde’s Liebestod is quoted; Nietzsche’s own text that succeeds it seems to pulse with the music that Wagner created in this climax of the work. Towards the end of this section Nietzsche switches from sublimity to a savage swipe at contemporary criticism and journalism, then he finishes in nobler mode by showing how even a “critical barbarian” might be redeemed by a successful performance of Lohengrin 41 .
Chapter Twenty-three is essentially an appeal for a lost civilization to save itself by re-discovering the power of myth. “Myth alone rescues all the powers of imagination and the Apolline dream from their aimless wanderings”. Astonishingly, for one who rejected formal religion, Nietzsche in this chapter recognizes society’s foundational “connection with religion and its growth out of mythical representations”. The author waxes lyrical (no potentially parodistic excess now) in
40 Thyrsus is “a staff or spear tipped with an ornament like a pine-cone, and sometimes wreather with ivy or vine branches; borne by Dionysus (Bacchus) and his votaries” OED Online. 41 As I read this final paragraph to the Chapter, I was swept back to 1958 or 1959 when I attended, with my mother in Brisbane, a fine performance of Lohengrin, the first Wagner I experienced in the theatre. To quote Nietzsche’s last sentence, I then “had an inkling of what it means to be an aesthetic listener”.
143 Drama and The Dreaming 144 calling on the old Greeks to be the guides, urging his fellow Germans to listen to “the blissfully enticing call of the Dionysiac bird that hovers above him and wants to show him the way”.
By the end of Chapter Twenty-three so much has been said. This reader, at least, was feeling fearful that the final chapters would be anti-climactic. Indeed, the opening paragraphs of this section seemed disappointingly repetitive. Then, the opening of the third paragraph plucked a chord: “No one who has experienced the need to look at the same time as the longing to go beyond mere looking...” I recognised myself in these words, as one always compelled to look at the immediate prospect at the same time as speculating about the far field beyond the barrier ridge. Nietzsche’s next points however seemed to exclude me, claiming that it was difficult for such a person to imagine how clearly the immediate need and the distant longing “coexist in the contemplation of the tragic myth”. I found myself challenged, and I like being challenged. It is preferable to being soothingly stroked.
In this penultimate Chapter, Nietzsche blends ugliness and wisdom in the appearance and the inner personality of Dionysus’s associate, old Silenus. This leads Nietzsche to consider discordance and dissonance. The final Chapter, although repetitive of material which has gone before, concludes with Nietzsche’s awareness of the world-wound in tragedy, making him call upon the page the aged Athenian Aeschylus, who reminds us how beauty is built out of bleeding.
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