Behind the white male hero

September 24, 1997
Issue 

Picture

Behind the white male hero

Black Mary
By Julie Janson
Directed by Angela Chaplin
Company B in association with the Olympic Arts Festivals
Wilson Street Carriage Works

229 Wilson Street, Newtown, Sydney
Until October 12

Review by Helen Jarvis

The old Eveleigh carriage works at Redfern provide an unsurpassed venue for this important new play by Julie Janson. The enormous space has been made into a rough mountainside, with a creek across the front of stage separating the action from the audience. The top of the mountain merges with sky and mist to present a vision that is almost filmic in scope.

So too the story has a dimension that goes beyond the specifics of the plot to speak of white Australias black history. The play retells the exploits of bushranger Captain Thunderbolt (Jerome Ehlers) through the eyes of his wife Mary (Margaret Harvey), herself the daughter of an English ticket-of-leave man and an Aboriginal woman.

Mary can read and write, which he can not, but she chooses to turn her back on the white society of Parramatta, in which she might have been able to better her station, in order not only to join her love in acts of daring and outlawry, but also to return to her people and to the land of her ancestors, the Biripi nation, in the high country of northern New South Wales

This dream sustains Mary through the months of hunger and exhaustion as they seek to evade the troopers and police led by Captain King (Lewis Fitz-Gerald), who symbolises white authority and oppression, but who cannot succeed in his efforts without the help of certain Aborigines who turn against their own people — the black tracker (Jimmy Little) and a young woman Louisa (Irma Woods), who plays a number of duplicitous roles.

The spirit of Marys mother (Lillian Crombie) is a powerful presence throughout the play, standing majestically in the shadows, clad in a cape of kangaroo skins, giving her daughter warning and advice.

It is a spectacular performance, with the setting alone making it an absolute must. The music is hauntingly beautiful, and comic relief is provided by Chris Haywoods tragicomic characterisation of Fred Britten and by the boisterous scene in the bar of the Spreadeagle Hotel.

But its reinterpretation of the quintessential Australian tale of a white male hero to reveal the heroism and strength of the black female character is what makes it a play to remember, appropriately coming to the stage in Sydney at the time of the mounting campaign to defend native title.

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