Alongside Rob Hudson in the front row of this group are writer and director Andrea James, actor Chenoa Deemal and dancer andchoreographer Brent Watkins, along with some of the other cast and crew of Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of The Black Woman of Gippsland.
Aboriginal people are warned that this post includes reference to traumatic events from the past, and to Aboriginal people that have passed.
If you need some support or just feel like you want to yarn with someone, here’s some support numbers for mob.
For many Aboriginal families in this area, the “White Woman of Gippsland” is a story that has been passed on in the oral tradition through the generations, in yarns and storytelling, pieces of myth and history, sometimes different depending on who is doing the telling, and who is doing the listening.
The way some written histories tell it, in the 1840s a rumour began spreading through white settler communities about the existence of a white woman that was being held against her will by a group of Aboriginal people at Port Albert.
It was Angus McMillan, a Scottish pastoralist and perpetrator of several massacres of GunaiKurnai people, who first claimed he had seen a white woman at an Aboriginal camp near Port Albert.
The actual existence of that white woman was never verified, but the rumour that a European woman was “a captive of these ruthless savages” became the justification for the continued harassment and killings of Aboriginal people in Gippsland.
It also led to the imprisonment and death in custody of GunaiKurnai warrior Bungelene and his family.
Those deaths are thought to be one of the first instances of Aboriginal people dying while in police custody.
Almost 180 years later, the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) is revisiting the story of the White Woman of Gippsland in a play written by Andrea James, a Yorta Yorta/GunaiKurnai woman and a descendant of Thorpe and Pepper clans.
The play is called The Black Woman of Gippsland.
Last week Andrea returned to GunaiKurnai country, along with GunaiKurnai, Noongar and Yamatji dancer/choreographer Brent Watkins and other MTC cast and crew to yarn with Elders and community members about the play, and to continue their education and understanding of the White Woman story and the oral traditions of local Aboriginal history.
As part of that learning process they visited the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place to yarn with GEGAC’s Keeping Place Coordinator Rob Hudson.
Andrea said she has spent four or five years researching and writing the play, during which time she focused on learning as much as she could about the unwritten record – the oral histories of Aboriginal people that often get left out of the official record, which was typically written and reproduced by the colonisers.
“Because it was usually the white man that was writing down his version of the story, that’s the version of the story that gets accepted as history,” Rob said.
“But blackfellas had a different way of telling what happened. That was through storytelling, oral history, because that’s how Aboriginal people communicated what they knew and what was important to them. Unfortunately, that part of history often gets lost because it isn’t written down.”
Andrea said she felt a great responsibility to listen intently and learn everything she could about the white woman story as understood by the Aboriginal people of this country, and to highlight the fact that the terrible things that happened back then are not forgotten relics of the past.
“We’ve got to get it right,” she says. “This is important. Not just because it is history, but because these things are still happening. Deaths in custody are still happening.”
Andrea’s play is not a historical retelling of the events back in the 1840s, but a story set in the present day in which those events of the past reemerge.
“…amongst the books, something doesn’t feel right about the story history tells. The myths and half-truths that surround the figure of a ‘white woman’ said to have lived among the GunaiKurnai people of Gippsland in the 1840s are so abundant it seems the reality is out of reach. But Jacinta is determined to unearth the truth for herself and her Gunaikurnai family no matter the twists and turns the journey might take her on…”
Here’s more information about the play at the Melbourne Theatre Company website.
First Nations community are invited to purchase $5 tickets to the Community Night on Wednesday, 7 May. More info about that at the link above!