Play shows upsetting reality

Nailed
Written by Caleb Lewis
Directed by David Berthold
Starring Ursula Yovich, Tim Draxl, Wayne Pygram and Annie Byron
Griffin Theatre Company
The Stables Theatre, Kings Cross, Sydney
Until August 14

REVIEW BY PETER BOYLE

Caleb Lewis predicted his play would upset some people. He wasn't joking. This is a very upsetting story of a pregnant 14-year-old Aboriginal woman who thinks she has escaped from a mission with her white 19-year-old boyfriend. But there is no freedom or happiness in store for her. She is doomed to follow the fate of her mother and lose her child to the next stolen generation.

It is a wounding tale and perhaps all the more raw because the tragedy at the heart of Nailed — with variations in detail — has been the lived experience of so many generations of Indigenous Australians. In 1994, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that 10% of Indigenous people over the age of 25 had been forcibly removed from their mothers. The devastating 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report Bringing Them Home considered this an underestimation, and a national survey of Indigenous health in 1989 found that 47% of Aboriginal respondents of all ages had been separated from both parents in childhood.

Nailed is set in 1959. According to Bringing Them Home, during the 1950s and '60s even greater numbers of Indigenous children were removed from their families to advance the cause of "assimilation". The right's dismissal of this issue as a "black armband" view of the past is insulting nonsense. Stories like this are not about the past. Revisionist historians like Keith Windschuttle should be forced to watch Nailed over and over again.

From Green Left Weekly, July 27, 2005.

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From GLW issue 635