2004: The Great Garden Game. Canberra Youth Theatre

The Great Garden Game.  Canberra Youth Theatre's interpretation of the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia.  Artistic Director, Linda McHugh.  March 3-6 and 12-13, 7.30-8.45pm.

    If we praise Canberra Youth Theatre, then praise must go even more to the National Museum for commissioning The Great Garden Game, to follow CYT's Shake, part of the Tracking Kultja Festival 2001, and Alive! in 2002.  Commissioning original work of this kind is unique among museums worldwide, and places our NMA in the forefront of modern thinking about a museum's role.

    As a museum of Australian national culture, NMA firstly records, secondly reflects upon our cultural heritage, and thirdly creates new culture.  CYT has produced a young person's view of life in Australia, in dramatic form, by exploring the Garden of Australian Dreams, which is itself a symbolic exploration of Australia in the form of landscape architecture. In April 2003 CYT formed a team of "Germinators", older young people including Antonia Aitken, Aj Biega, Maddy Donovan and Tom Woodward, joined in October by Dörte Finke as part of her studies in Cultural Science at the University of Hildesheim in Germany.  Aged between 19 and 27, the Germinators were given the opportunity to learn the ropes of directing a creative development program with younger people, mainly secondary college student members of CYT. 

    Encouraging this process is an important initiative by NMA, and a unique feature of its work.  So what have the young people come up with?  They discovered while talking with Richard Weller of Room 413, the designer of The Garden of Australian Dreams, that the tunnel represented for him the idea that much of Australia's wealth is underground, and in this sense the land itself is where our modern dreaming is located.

    CYT has used the tunnel as the place where each actor presents their personal understanding of what it means to live in Australia.  Amongst critical views of our involvement in war, the main theme that I heard was about their sense of freedom, of speech and action.  As you pass, each actor "switches on" rather like the soundscape in City Walk - an interesting idea, but I found it difficult to pick up more than a few words from each performer as the audience pass through and several actors are speaking at once.

    Contrasting with the freedom theme, I found the two strongest pieces dramatically were being "imprisoned" in the white tower, which might have represented the experiences of asylum seekers in recent years, and the picture of the convict era played out around the huge fallen tree in floodwaters, with the road water depth indicator.  By this time darkness had fallen, moonlight eerily shadowed the space and our authoritarian past seemed to well up with foreboding.  Taken on a tour of this dreamscape, on a warm still night with the sun slowly setting, we had begun with humour (I found myself saying "Of course I do" to a sheep which demanded in baa language "Do you love me?") and gradually slipped into a deeper fantasy, almost a cultural memory.

    I hope this kind of commission by the Museum can be extended in future years to youth theatres from other parts of Australia.  This way young people's cultural understanding can be made available more widely.  Perhaps an annual ritual exploration of the Garden of Australian Dreams could become part of the Museum program.

© Frank McKone, Canberra