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Aboriginal sin of Australia exposed

By Bridget Galton

STOLEN
The Tricycle, Kilburn

3 May 2001 - The scandal of thousands of Aborigine children forcibly snatched from their “unfit” parents by the Australian Government and placed into homes in the ’50s and ’60s is vividly realised in this moving drama.

Director Wesley Enoch and his versatile cast use inventive expressionistic techniques rather than conventional narratives to focus on a select few heartbreaking stories.

The repeated image of desperate, hopeful letters from a mother to her son, slammed into an institutional filing cabinet never to be read, brings home the children’s terrible loss. Or a child’s hand-clapping game, used to question a youngster returning from a weekend outing with an abusive couple, hauntingly reveals her shame and misery.

The repetition and truncated jump-cut scenes – as furniture in an institutional children’s dormitory is spun around to change the set – at first jars and confines the production’s ability to open out the story from a few, stark impressions. But this improvisational feel improves later when the performers are allowed to breathe and, through brief, intense monologues, recount the tales of a mother, daughter or son robbed of their families.

Stolen particularly excels when exploring the mental illness, inability to settle down and suicide that result from their upbringing. By the end, you are left with a few eloquent images – snapshots of bewilderment, leave-taking, home-coming and searching: the children, shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun, suitcase in hand, waiting; the mother who has not seen her children for 25 years, counting out each Christmas present she never gave them; the tin of out-of-date peas that gave social workers the excuse to remove a child from his mother.

Underpinning their stories is the continuum of racism and colonisation of the Aborigine people by the whites. It is as if the children’s bewildered identities are the desired outcome for a society that wants to rub out their people’s existence.
Food for thought indeed.

Until December 1.

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