On 19 November, 2004, an Indigenous Australian man named Cameron Doomadgee died in police custody. Arrested for allegedly causing a public nuisance, Doomadgee suffered four broken ribs, massive internal bleeding, and a liver cleaved in two. His injuries were akin to those often seen in a head-on road collision or airplane crash.
The release of autopsy results led to riots breaking out in his hometown, Queensland’s Palm Island. Locals burned down the courthouse and police station, attracting the eyes of the world. A small army of armed police from mainland Australia was quickly deployed to the island.
Over a decade later, questions are still being asked. In 2006 Christopher Hurley, the senior sergeant in charge of Doomadgee’s arrest, was found to have caused the injuries, but in the following year was acquitted of manslaughter by an all-white jury. Beautiful One Day addresses how this could have happened.
Devised by three theatre companies, Belvoir, Version 1.0 and Ilbijerri, the production is a musing on both the joys and injustices experienced by the Palm Island community. The piece has no playwright. Instead, the “theatrical documentary” is more a collective rumination, threading together first-hand accounts, court documents and transcripts, autopsy reports, and occasional re-enactments, with interviews of locals played on four large video screens.
It is powerful stuff. While Jane Phegan and Paul Dwyer play figures of white authority, Rachael Maza (whose father, the theatre pioneer Bob Maza, was born on Palm Island) addresses the audience with upfront candour and warmth. There are three Palm Islanders in the production: dignified elder Magdalena Blackley, Harry Reuben, and Kylie Doomadgee, Cameron’s niece, whose impactful performance is in turn ferocious and tender.
Beautiful One Day starts with a potted history of Palm Island, a tropical paradise turned into a veritable penal colony (one of the many crimes that resulted in resettlement was having a “half-caste” child). Meanwhile the Aboriginal Protection Act constricted life on the island to an obscene level, with infringements like “whistling after curfew”.
Life on Palm Island is one injustice after another. Take an incident in 1930, when the superintendent of the time, Robert Curry, had a mental breakdown, killing his own two children and setting fire to large parts of the island. The Indigenous men who, on a white man’s orders, shot Curry dead were subsequently punished with jail time.
But the production is careful to intersperse such dark history with hope and, if not happiness, a sense of pride. The play title is derived from the belief among Palm Islanders that their island will be beautiful, one day.
While the production has already toured London, Sydney and Melbourne, and most recently Palm Island itself, don’t expect anything too polished. The nature of its form leaves it, at times, feeling ramshackle and unfocused, but no doubt this is part of its charm – a rough and ready honesty.
