1999: What Do They Call Me? by Eva Johnson

What Do They Call Me? by Eva Johnson.  Canice Productions: performed and directed by Marie Andrews. National Multicultural Festival at The Street Theatre Studio 7.30pm March 17-20, 1999..

    It is a great joy and privilege to experience a writer and performer at one with their traditions, their style, their themes and their audience. Make sure you don't miss this short, significant piece of theatre.

    Marie Andrews, a Bardi woman and lawyer from Broome, is surely a Kimberley diamond, reflecting brilliantly the three characters of the mother Connie and her two daughters: Regina, taken by "Welfare" and brought up in a middle-class foster family; and Alison, both proud of her Aboriginality and her self-determined role as a lesbian activist. 

Connie is in jail on trumped up charges of "abusing the language" - "Can't even swear in my own country," she says.  Regina cannot hate her white "mother" who can't accept that her properly married "daughter" finds after 30 years that she must meet and identify with her real mother Connie.  Alison, a sophisticated naif, works her intelligence to maintain her relationship with white feminist Sara, while bravely facing her mother with the truth of her sexual orientation.

Eva Johnson, the Malak Malak woman from Daly Waters whom many of us may remember performing in Women of the Sun, has turned playwright and teaches drama in Adelaide.  What Do They Call Me? is 10 years old, written before the Stolen Generation report.  It is partly autobiographical, and uses the ancient storytelling form with minimal but absolutely effective costume and light changes.  Andrews, who was Company Manager for the tour in 1994 of her cousin Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Day, is entirely at home as director and performer - and as herself in an open forum with the audience to finish the evening.

"I see this as a healing process between indigenous and white people, and hope that we can move forward as a whole people," says Andrews. Canice Cox, whose mother was Aboriginal and father was the white policeman at Fitzroy Crossing, and who married Japanese pearl diver James Ishiguchi, was Andrews' adoptive grandmother. Her name is honoured in Canice Productions.  She believes it's this multicultural Kimberley history which fires creativity not to be missed.

© Frank McKone, Canberra