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| Playscript and Program published by Currency Press |
Milk by Dylan Van Den Berg. The Street Theatre, Canberra, June 9 – 12, 2021.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 9
Director – Ginny Savage
Set and Costume Design – Imogen Keen
Lighting Design – Gerry Corcoran
Sound Design – Peter Bailey
Cultural Consultant – Gaye Doolan
Movement Cultural Consultant – Tammi Gissell
Performed by
Roxanne McDonald – Character A
Katie Beckett – Character B
Dylan Van Den Berg – Character C
Milk
is a new and powerful development in Australian First Peoples’
theatre. It is a highly emotional work in the long-standing tradition
which can be seen in four contrasting examples from among many since The Cake Man by Robert J Merritt (1975) became well-known in its film version in 1978, followed (selected just from my own 20 years’ of reviews) by Conversations with The Dead by Richard Frankland (2003), My Urrwai by Ghenoa Gela (2018), and Black is the New White by Nakkiah Lui (2018).
It
is also a major achievement of the development program under-pinning
The Street Theatre’s work, not only for the scriptwriting and direction,
but for the beautiful set design and lighting, especially for the
lightning on the distant edge of brooding mountains.
To explain
how affected, in fact shaken, I felt as the lights and sound faded on
the history and personal experiences of these three characters – “an
Aboriginal woman from 1840s Tasmania, an Aboriginal woman from 1960s
Tasmania, and a fair-skinned, young Aboriginal man from the 2020s” – I
need to go to my own experience, weirdly enough in a café in a Canberra
suburb, Ainslie, across the city from my usual area.
Dylan Van Den Berg has written “Milk
reflects the complex private struggles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples living out bifurcated identities.” A few days ago, I
found myself at a loose end in Ainslie waiting for a doctor’s
prescription to be filled. A café offered onion soup for lunch, and had
a Covid-spaced table available.
The café is named Breizh, which I
couldn’t pronounce in English. The onion soup was very definitely
French. The people serving were clearly Middle Eastern. The
specialities were Breton. This is multicultural Canberra.
When
I looked up Breizh on my phone while waiting for the soup, I found it
is the Breton language name for Brittany in France – the language
related to Old Cornish in England and Welsh in Wales, where I was born.
Now my mind began to do what Dylan Van Der Berg’s mind was doing in
creating his play. One of my grandmothers was Welsh. My father was one
of her six sons, but my mother’s father was born within the sounds of
Bow Bells in London, with a Cockney accent like I had when my parents
brought me to Australia, aged 14 in 1955. His surname was Solly –
Jewish, perhaps?
But then, because of the French connection in
the café, I remembered going to Normandy to find my Australian wife’s
grandfather’s World War I grave, and then my mind turned to Richard the
Lionheart, the English king buried at Anjou with his heart kept at
Rouen. Then I began thinking, but my background on my father’s father’s
side must be in Ireland, as my clearly Celtic skin's lack of colour and
red beard and face shape show.
I knew I would be seeing Milk,
written by an Aboriginal man with a Dutch name (I assume), so I began
to think how my knowledge of the history of Europe which informs my
background and personal connections, and the whole way I think and
approach life, simply are not in any way part of an Aboriginal person’s
make-up.
Though I now have Australian citizenship, I cannot be
Australian in the same way as a First Australian is. I only have one or
two thousand years to call on; nothing like the tens of thousands
represented, say, in the oldest rock art in the world at Murujuga
(Burrup Peninsula in WA) where I have heard the local elders speak.
After
watching the play, I began to wonder if any of my Irish ancestors who
probably left poverty-stricken Western Ireland for London in the late
18th Century, had been transported to Australia in the days of the
invasion , or perhaps had become whalers and sealers on Bass Strait
islands who had become ‘husbands’ of women such as Character A in Milk.
Other
McKones, I think unrelated to me, arrived here in the early 20th
Century. I can only hope none of them were the drunkard types that
Character B met in pubs in her time. Like Character C, on his European
side, I have had the opportunity for a university education and
recognition; but without the slur he suffered when whiteys thought he
might look a bit Aboriginal. The worst I’ve been called is Ten Pound
Pom.
What hit me hard in seeing Milk – a title
which I guess might refer to skin colour or even to the fact that
Aboriginal people have had difficulty digesting milk which was never in
their evolutionary history – was exactly what Van Den Berg has described
in his program note: Writing Milk has been a
tremendous challenge and an unexpected pleasure. After trawling through
stories of grief and pain, what became apparent to me was the strength
and resolve of our mobs – despite what we have lost (or, rather, what’s
been taken from us) and despite concerted efforts to resign us to
history books and anthropological study, we are still here.
As director Ginny Savage wrote, This
metaphorical, time and space shifting world asks its audience to
consider: what are the truths of the land you’re standing on? Shouldn’t
you know them?
Yes, indeed.
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| L-R: Dylan Van Den Berg, Katie Beckett and Roxanne McDonald as Characters C, B and A in Milk, The Street Theatre, Canberra Photo: Creswick Collective |
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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