Father and son are circling one another. “I could put you on your back, smart arse, and I’ve got you covered in the rookery, too,” says Ben Duncan, 60, played by the actor Kelton Pell in a black singlet.
“Is that a challenge, old man?” his son Ritchie (Luke Carroll), 30, fires back. “First one to 15 birds.”
Grandson Clay Duncan (James Slee), 16, wearing a baseball cap turned backwards, is assigned to count each man’s catch of short-tailed shearwaters.
Shearwaters, a type of muttonbird, also called yolla or moonbird, are harvested for food (the meat tastes like mutton), feathers for mattress fill, and the omega-3 rich oil, which is squeezed out of the birds’ guts, for medicinal use. Harvesting is a confronting job to outsiders: chicks are pulled from their burrows and their necks are quickly snapped.
Today, chequered tea towels substitute for the birds. We are in a Melbourne rehearsal room. The play, The Season, first presented as a work-in-progress public reading in Sydney last year at the Yellamundie Indigenous playwriting festival, is edging towards its formal premiere at Sydney festival, at the Sydney Opera House.
The Season was written by the first-time playwright Nathan Maynard as a tribute to Indigenous bird harvesting culture. It’s a tradition being kept alive, Maynard tells Guardian Australia, despite pressure “to assimilate” after authorities “moved our fellas off into mainstream Australia, basically to try and breed the black out of us”. Maynard says he wrote the play because he wanted to “pay respect to them old fellas” for surviving, and keeping the culture thriving.
Indigenous people have been catching muttonbirds for thousands of years. “Millennia,” Maynard emphasises. “It’s just evolved. Our old fellas used to go to the rookeries, and get these birds when they were there because they were a great food source; a seasonal tucker.”
Dog Island, where the muttonbirds are harvested in Maynard’s play, is named for Great Dog or Big Dog Island: a 354-hectare granite isle filled with tussock grassland, off the south coast of Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where commercial birding operations have existed for more than 200 years. Maynard’s father didn’t take him muttonbirding on Big Dog, his family’s “spiritual home”, until he was 15, because birding season, which runs late March through late April, clashed with the school term. Maynard, though, takes his eight-year-old son each year.
Maynard is a Trawlwoolway man and descendant of Mannalargenna, a leader of the north-east Tasmanian Indigenous peoples, who led resistance against British soldiers in the early 19th century.
In 1995 the Tasmanian government handed back several sites, including Great Dog and Babel islands, to Indigenous people in an acknowledgement of Aboriginal dispossession. Maynard carries on the self-determination fight: in 2011 he was arrested during a smoking ceremony protesting against a road going through an important cultural meeting place at Kutalayna, in Tasmania’s lower Jordan valley.
The Season is being presented in a wider Sydney festival program marking the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, which voted to count Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the census and amend two sections of the constitution that discriminated against Indigenous people.
Maynard says he wants a treaty now for Indigenous Australia, and does not support the current constitutional recognition campaign. “What does [recognition] do? It tells us we’re here. We know that we’re here. Why can’t being recognised be part of a treaty?”
His play is delightfully funny and, while culturally specific, the family dynamics it depicts are universal. All seven actors in The Season, as well as the writer and the director, Isaac Drandic, are Indigenous – a rare combination in Australian theatre.
In the rehearsal room corner, crouching shirtless and in shorts, script open on the floor, the bushy-bearded actor Trevor Jamieson is about to spring into action. Jamieson has imbued his character, a rival muttonbirder named Neil Watson, with a slightly hunched posture, comical tiptoeing and a helium-sucking voice, inspired partly by the antics of a Noongar friend in Western Australia who visits kids’ hospitals as a clown doctor.
Behind Jamieson, on the wall as inspiration, are classic black and white images of muttonbirders by the photographer Ricky Maynard – Nathan Maynard’s older cousin – from collections entitled The Moonbird People and Portrait of a Distant Land.
The Season’s characters are north-eastern Indigenous Tasmanian people, so Jamieson – whose father was Pitjantjatjara and mother Noongar – has to adopt what he calls a Tasmanian “southern twang”. There is a sprinkling of local vernacular in the script, such as “coe”, a synonym for “fellas”.
After rolling a smoke during the break, Jamieson explains how he approaches the challenges of dialogue that varies across Indigenous language groups: “Where you live geographically – it’s the way you speak, the way the air blows, and on country, the vibrant energy it all gives you.”
On stage, Jamieson has played the Arrernte painter Albert Namatjira, in an accent influenced by German Lutheran missionaries, as well as the fictional Darug warrior Ngalamalum in Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River for Sydney Theatre Company. In the ABC miniseries version of The Secret River, the character was called Gumang, or Grey Beard.
“You get the fuck off my rookery, Watson,” yells the senior Duncan at Jamieson’s character, resting on his shoulder a wooden spit which slightly resembles a spear but is thicker and carved to a point at both ends, on to which the slaughtered birds are threaded.
In the next scene Jamieson’s character is in strife with his lover, Aunty Marlene, 62, played by Lisa Maza. “Sweet cheeks,” he implores, “sight for sore eyes.”
“I’m not your fuckin’ bird island fling,” she admonishes, then scorns his “freckled dick prick”. Watson slinks off, and Aunty Marlene says in soliloquy: “He had his light on and I flew straight into it.”
There is a Dreamtime story that muttonbirds come from the moon, hence Indigenous birders are sometimes dubbed the moonbird people. Less romantically, the birds, blinded by light, have a habit of flying into the plucking sheds at night.
Muttonbirding became the commercial mainstay of the islands by the mid-19th century after European sealers hunted seal colonies to near-extinction. Tasmania and the surrounding islands attract some 18 million birds every year. The chicks are “taken under strict controls”, says Tasmania’s Department of Primary Industries, Parks Water and Environment, although a poor breeding season a couple of years ago raised concerns about their survival.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s 2014-15 monitoring report indicates that bird occupancy rates at burrows at Big Dog and Babel have improved, although animal rights groups want an end to recreational killing, mostly distinguishing hunting by non-Indigenous people from that by Indigenous people with a cultural connection to the land.
That cultural connection ensures care is taken to maintain the muttonbird population, and the habitat is kept in balance so that the birds come back. “We play a part in making sure everything else around them is sustainable, too,” says Maynard.
Issues such as land rights and cultural maintenance may inform his work, but Maynard knew from the beginning of this play that he had a comedy on his hands.
“This being my first play, I didn’t want to write something sad,” he says. “There was a lot of sad stuff out there. And I wanted something to celebrate. I wanted blackfellas to be able to go to the theatre and go, ‘That was cool.’”
• The Season plays at Sydney festival 10 to 15 January and Hobart’s Theatre Royal 16 to 19 March during the Ten Days on the Island festival
