White ghosts and unseen Aborigines

Looking off the southern edge
By David Buchanan
Cast: John Moore, Douglas Walker, Wendy Strehlowe
Dance: Anna Mercer and Michael Leslie
Music: Gary Ridge, David Buchanan and Lois Olney
Artrage Theatre Festival, October 3 to 24
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
Preview by Karen Fredericks

Perth playwright David Buchanan's Looking Off the Southern Edge headlines the 1992 Artrage Theatre Festival in Perth in October. The production blends dance, drama and music to produce what Buchanan describes as "... exciting, moving theatre that isn't locked into naturalistic boundaries that say audiences should be passive onlookers to a slice of life".

Inspired by the experiences of some of WA's most notorious criminals, the play centres on Todd Gilmore, a "charismatic killer" of Aboriginal and Irish descent, who is dying in the isolation ward of a government hospital. Gilmore's mind swings between the poetic incarnations of his ancestral "beach people" and his past in prison.

The audience is taken on a journey which goes back to the European arrival on the West Australian coast, when Aborigines thought the newcomers were returning "Djanga" — the spirits of their dead who once lived on the western islands.

Buchanan says he has he has long been interested in the islands off the southern coast of Western Australia and concerned with living "more truly" in the region. "It's only possible to do that by learning more about Aboriginal heritage. Aborigines saw us as white ghosts, and we didn't even see them." By implication, he says, his play is an examination of the way Australia was colonised and how those values are maintained today.

Black Swan Theater Company promises a "story of intrigue, corruption and political manipulation as Gilmore's mind opens a window on the disturbing secrets of our past, secrets which threaten to rock the foundations of the white establishment".

From GLW issue 73