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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lExploring the pain of the 'Stolen Generations'Juliet Rowan 10 November 2002 - Imagine for a moment the pain of being forcibly taken away from your parents, possibly never to see them again. Such was the fate of as many as 50,000 Aboriginal children in Australia who, as a result of discriminatory government policies, were removed from their families and placed in institutions and foster care or adopted into white families for more than a century up to the early 1970s. Stolen tells the stories of five members of these "Stolen Generations." The work, which is to be performed in Tokyo next month, draws attention to the different forms the removal took and highlights the disastrous emotional impact on indigenous people's lives, particularly in adulthood. The play was commissioned by the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative, based in Melbourne, and written by Jane Harrison, a former advertising copywriter whose maternal grandfather was Aboriginal. Having grown up isolated from the indigenous community, Harrison was attracted to the project out of a desire to explore her own heritage. During the course of writing the play, she read thousands of oral transcripts and spoke with many members of the Stolen Generations. Shocking stories of indigenous people being taken away as children only to have their own children taken away as adults, of suffering physical and verbal abuse and rape, and of forced servitude to white families emerged as commonplace. "It was a very difficult journey in many ways, both in terms of learning the material, because I wasn't really familiar with the idea of a Stolen Generation before that...but also fitting in and feeling like I was the right person to represent these very painful stories," Harrison said during a recent visit to Tokyo. Since it premiered in 1998, Stolen has enjoyed considerable success both at home and abroad, with regional tours of Australia and performances in major cities including Sydney, London and Hong Kong. Now recommended reading for Australian high school seniors, it has been seen by more than 10,000 students this year in Melbourne alone. For many audiences, it is their first encounter with the Stolen Generations. "I think it's been pretty shocking for a lot of people," said Harrison, who has seen rows of schoolchildren reduced to tears. The play, which switches between past and present, has many powerful moments that drive home the emotional devastation wrought on the Stolen Generations. One character, for example, tells how he was taken away from his mother by welfare officials simply because she had a can of expired food in the pantry--proving her unfit, in their eyes, to raise a child--while another shares his fears about meeting his mother for the first time since he was removed from her custody as a child. "What do you do when you meet your mother for the first time in 26 years? Shake her hand? Give her a hug?" he asks. The play also draws attention to the dilemmas faced by indigenous people adopted into white families and the societal pressures they face in dealing with their past. "You black fellas want me to be reunited with my (Aboriginal) family and learn to love them," one character says to the audience. "And you white fellas want my adopted parents to become loving and tolerant of my black family." Of all the heart-wrenching stories in the play, though, perhaps none are more powerful than those of the cast. At the end of each performance, the actors--who all have personal or family connections to the Stolen Generations--introduce themselves and share anecdotes from their lives. The sessions are improvised, with each of the five saying whatever is on their mind that particular day. At one performance, an actress even told of meeting a brother she did know she had while on tour with the play. "It's really then that it hits home to the audience that it's not history...that these people up onstage have to deal with these kinds of issues everyday of their lives," Harrison said. (For the Japan performances, these sessions have been scripted due to the necessity of interpretation.) The play relies on a simple but effective set. Hospital beds, for example, serve both as props in scenes at an institution for Aboriginal kids and, later, are turned on end to form prison cell walls. The entrance to the stage is through a crack in the back wall that extends right across the ceiling, symbolic, Harrison says, "of the deep wrenching apart of people's lives." Undoubtedly, works like Stolen and the film Rabbit-Proof Fence, which tells the true story of two young Aboriginal girls who escaped from a government detention center and walked 2,400 kilometers home to their parents, have created greater awareness of the Stolen Generations among ordinary Australians. In recent months, however, Aboriginal issues have been overshadowed by terrorist threats and the question of how to deal with a large influx of refugees from countries like Afghanistan. "Unfortunately, indigenous issues have had to take a backseat again," Harrison said. "It's a pity because the pain is still there and something needs to be done and people need to have it acknowledged before they can move on." In the meantime, the playwright hopes her work will continue to raise awareness of the Stolen Generations around the world. "No matter what your background, you can gain some understanding of what those people felt, their emotional journey," she said. "I just think it's important that these things are aired, acknowledged and shared." Harrison is also continuing to explore indigenous themes in her work. She has written two additional plays centering on Aboriginal characters, the first about a member of the Stolen Generations and a Jewish Holocaust survivor who meet on a park bench, and the second, a lighthearted work about four generations of Aboriginal women. She has also completed the libretto for an opera based on the 1971 Australian film Walkabout, a story of two white children who meet an Aboriginal boy in the outback. She hopes the opera, which takes the perspective of the indigenous character, will be produced next year. "Stolen" will be performed at Tokyo Geijutsu Gekijo Sho Hall 2 in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, on Dec. 12-13 at 7 p.m., Dec. 14 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Dec. 15 at 2 p.m. (03) 5428-0337 Source: Daily Yomiuri related links:
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