Writing history and telling stories aren’t analogous acts, even if their disciplines overlap and interact. When the world of academia – with its seeming rigour and professionalism, boosted by citations and peer reviews – confronts a culture with thousands of years of oral tradition but no written word, the tension between the two feels dangerously apposite. This could be the stuff of terrific drama, if only playwright and director Andrea James could wrestle her material into something more coherently dramatic.
The conceit of The Black Woman of Gippsland is sturdy and instantly intriguing: Jacinta (Chenoa Deemal) is writing her PhD on the “white woman of Gippsland”, an urban legend about a woman shipwrecked off the coast of Corner Inlet in 1840, who was supposedly taken in by members of the Gunaikurnai mob.
Two expeditions sent from Melbourne to “rescue” her led not to her return (she may never have existed) but to the savage butchering of the Gunaikurnai people. Jacinta’s exploration of this myth and its aftermath – her meticulous picking at the threads of story to uncover a wider truth – ruffles some feathers in her family, notably her Aunty Rochelle (Ursula Yovich) and cousin Kyle (Zach Blampied).
The myth of the lost white person in the wilderness (often a woman or child) is ubiquitous in Australian colonial history, underpinned by an Anglocentric disquiet about the bush and its original inhabitants. Jacinta knows too well the vein of racism running through the apocryphal story of the white woman of Gippsland; it would spoil the plot to say more, but she lives with the consequences of an unjust legal system every day. And while a grappling with methodology – the university’s rejected oral sources key to her theory – hinders her academic ambitions, real damage is happening to her family in the present.
All of which should make The Black Woman of Gippsland a crackling, provocative work of decolonisation and resistance. But while the play feels suitably weighted by its ideas, James never finds a way to make compelling drama out of it. Much of the characterisation is flat and simplistic – the gruff cop and the supercilious PhD supervisor – and the actors are often left with little to do. Black deaths in custody and the tragedy of the stolen generation, while nominally relevant, seem shoehorned into an otherwise thin plot, and the tone is often didactic.
Some good performances anchor the play: Deemal is terrific as the dogged but circumspect Jacinta, determined to uncover truths she already senses in her body. There is a weariness threaded through her tenacity that speaks powerfully of generational trauma and the burden of ambition. Yovich is strong too as Aunty Rochelle, her head often slowly shaking from side to side with grim purpose. She manages to suggest a ring of protection, harbouring her immediate family. And Blampied has a likable, jocular presence, but he’s hampered by an underwritten part.
For a play haunted by generational loss and grief, Romanie Harper’s set remains frustratingly prosaic. Three richly detailed playing spaces sit unmoored in front of a blue curtain, while Rhian Hinkley’s video projections swirl ineffectually above. There is a stunning coup embedded in the design but it emerges far too late; the play needs access to the sacred throughout, to ground and centre the superb ceremonial dances choreographed by Brent Watkins. As it stands, they feel awkwardly superimposed.
At one point in The Black Woman of Gippsland, Jacinta protests, “I’m not a nerd, I’m a blackademic.” It’s a flippant line that nevertheless gives us a glimpse of a whole world – of a wave of new academics keen to dismantle a system that denigrates black oral history, even over blatant white lies. James’s play is ultimately about a massive clash of values, a battle between opposing worldviews. But she doesn’t manage to fold that battle into the drama in a meaningful way; characters have to tell us things that should rightfully emerge from their actions. That gap between languages, that murky, unresolved space we all occupy in a brutally colonised country, refuses to close.
The Black Woman of Gippsland is on at the MTC, Sumner Theatre, until 31 May.
