We will show the country

The scene is Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, the time 1881. The community – women and men, young and old – take on the state government of Victoria in a fight for justice, dignity and self-determination.

It is a moment in history which Dr Tony Birch, acclaimed author, University of Melbourne-trained historian and lecturer in creative writing, considers remarkable on many levels.

Coranderrk, one of 13 Victorian stations and reserves established by the Aboriginal Protection Act to advance the separation of families and put a stop to cultural customs, was situated just outside Healesville.

Now, with initial funding from a University of Melbourne Cultural Community grant and supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, this moment has been captured in a series of unique verbatim-theatre performances of a play based on archival texts called Coranderrk: We will show the country.

Verbatim (or documentary) theatre is the term used to describe plays constructed from the actual words spoken by people which have been documented in newspapers, government reports, interviews etc. The genre is experiencing a boom across Australia.

“What’s important about this remarkable production,” says Dr Birch, “is that everything you hear is as it was recorded at the time. This is more than a piece of scripted theatre, it is a record of the theatre of a formal Government Commission of Enquiry, and the theatre capturing a moment of colonisation in 1881. It’s a dramatisation of a remarkable time in Australian history when competing interests collided in obvious conflict.”

As such, the play Coranderrk – the result of a collaboration between the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences Minutes of Evidence project and the Ilbijerri Theatre Company, offers an unprecedented insight into Australia’s colonial past.

The project comprises a range of industry partners including Arts Victoria, the Department of Education, the Koorie Heritage Trust, La Mama, Regional Arts Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, VicHealth and the Victorian Educational Aboriginal Association.

“From the point of view of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, their interest was in closing the reserve down and having it divided up and given to white farmers who coveted what they saw as economically viable land,” says Dr Birch.

“The Board was also very concerned at what it saw as a vibrant, growing Aboriginal community at Coranderrk, one that was not only agitating and protesting for their own rights, but whose struggle was filtering out to other Aboriginal people in reserves and missions across the Commonwealth.

“On behalf of the Aboriginal community, it was something quite different. Coranderrk was a place on which they were forced to live from the early 1860s onwards, a place that we might imagine was one of incarceration or form of prison, but in fact became a place of great cultural sustenance and resistance.”

The protest, waged in response to the threat of being dispossessed of their relatively recently acquired lands, resulted in a campaign which spanned several years and culminated in the station residents appearing at the Victorian Commission of Enquiry appointed to determine their fate and that of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve.

“This important project promotes shared ways of understanding the past,” says Dr Julie Evans, a Senior Lecturer in the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences and one of the chief investigators on the Minutes of Evidence project.

“Apart from the superb theatre productions already staged and planned, including a tour of regional schools, it will lead to the development of curriculum materials for schools, training for Indigenous policymakers, an Indigenous PhD scholarship, school workshops, and public forums.”

Guiding this project is a shared vision that Coranderrk will one day become a familiar name in schools and households across Victoria and beyond.

“Our agreed aim is to keep working together to increase the public’s knowledge of this incredible story through the powerful medium of theatre which honours and involves both the power of the written word and the intimacy of oral testimony,” says Giordano Nanni who conceptualised the production and co-wrote the script with Indigenous dramaturge Andrea James.

“And to ultimately promote a shared historical consciousness between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in Australia.”

Coranderrk: We will show the country will be performed at La Mama Courthouse Theatre from Wednesday 16 November to Sunday 27 November.

www.ssps.unimelb.edu.au/research/criminology/funded
www.lamama.com.au