Kath : A Play for Primary Schools
Millswood
:
Acting Company of South Australia
,
1984
Z845876
1984
single work
drama
children's
'He was a beauty, that ten-foot carpet snake we had as a pet. My father belonged to the Nunukul tribe of Stradbroke Island, and the carpet snake was his totem. This is a tale of a place not far from home that takes audiences to the oldest living culture on earth.
This performance is an adaptation of celebrated poet, author and artist Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal's book, Stradbroke Dreamtime. In this newly created work from QPAC and Queensland Theatre Company, Oodgeroo's stories come to life on stage helping young audiences to share in her tales of growing up on Stradbroke Island.
Join in a dance telling a Dreamtime story and listen to songs that tell of the water, the land and the people of the island.' Source: www.outoftheboxfestival.com.au/ (Sighted 18/05/2012).
Author's note: These stories were written while I was staying at Tambourine Mountain, in Queensland, Australia, with the well-known Australian poet Judith Wright. It is a lovely place, the home of thousands of birds and animals, and Judith Wright helps to guard the mountain and its creatures from greedy speculators who threaten to come there with mechanical shovels to dig it up and destroy it... (pp.9-10)
Kath : A Play for Primary Schools
Millswood
:
Acting Company of South Australia
,
1984
Z845876
1984
single work
drama
children's
This article explores the possibility of intercultural catharsis through literature, metaphorical connections and representations of place in Tony Birch’s Ghost River (2015). Water, rain and essentially the river, symbolise the building of a nation and the repair of Indigenous and non-Indigenous race relations. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is deconstructed and built upon using Indigenous philosophies and intercultural dialogue to explore ideas about relationship building as a spiritual journey connected to the textual directions of the landscape.
When Mary Ann Hughes complained in 1998 that critics were preoccupied with the process of editorial collaboration that shaped Australian Aboriginal texts, she argued that this focus led to the neglect of the literary merit of the work. While the collaboration of mainstream writers with editors primarily went unremarked, “in the case of an Aboriginal writer, the role of the editor in constructing the work is the issue which most readily springs to the fore.” Hughes remarked upon the then decade-long critical determination to materialize the traditionally invisible craft of editing. This critical preoccupation ran parallel with the second wave of Aboriginal life writing (Brewster, 44), which witnessed the transformation of Aboriginal publishing from marginal to mainstream, reaching beyond the local to global audiences (Haag, 12). The exponential increase in the publication of Aboriginal life writing was accompanied by the politicization of publication processes, including coproduction, that have conventionally been kept from public view. (Introduction)
'In Australia, where the oppression of native peoples and cultures was, if anything, even more severe than in North America, it has been harder to create contact zones, and, as discussed in chapter 5, attempts by white writers such as Patricia Wrightson to blend their traditions with those of indigenous Australians have been met with suspicion or hostility. Non-Aboriginal writers from Australia have generated such a collection of ignorant, patronizing, and demeaning texts about Aborigines that some of the latter want to call a halt to any further attempts. As the novelist Melissa Lucashenko says, "Who asked you to write about Aboriginal people? If it wasn't Aboriginal people themselves, I suggest you go away and look at your own lives instead of ours. We are tired of being the freak show of Australian popular culture" (quoted in Heiss 10). Whereas American writers often treated native cultures as noble, if doomed, and Indian characters as heroic adversaries or guides to the white hero (as in James Fenimore Cooper Leatherstocking series), early depictions of Aboriginal people at best treat them as part of the landscape and at worst—and there is a pretty clear worst in Austyn Granville lost-world romance The Fallen Race (1892)—as subhuman.' (Introduction)
