Black Diggers is a Queensland Theatre Company and Sydney Festival production and is considered a ‘significant work of cultural sharing and truth-telling’cxiv. Black Diggers is written by Tom Wright and directed by Queensland Theatre Company Artistic Director, Wesley Enoch. The production toured nationally in 2014 and continues in 2015. It was developed for the Sydney Festival and Brisbane Festival as part of Australia’s 2014 commemoration of the centenary of World War Onecxv.
Black Diggers is based on research into the lives and deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander soldiers who fought for the British Commonwealth in World War Icxvi. The production
draws from in-depth interviews with the families of black diggers, veterans, historians and academicscxvii. There is an all-male Indigenous cast, who tackle multiple roles,
encompassing different ethnicities and genderscxviii. Black Diggers offers an untold
representation of Indigenous experiences and stories from before and after World War I. The play explores the motivations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians to enlist in WWI and tells the stories of soldiers who felt disconnected from their homeland on their return from warcxix.
The Black Diggers production is well received by Australian audiences, attracting ‘a standing ovation on its opening night at the Brisbane Festival’cxx and ‘positive critical reviews’. John McCallum from The Australian states that the subject matter is ‘fascinating and
revelatory’.cxxi The direction from Wesley Enoch is praised by Larissa Behrendt from The Guardian, commenting on his success in ‘connecting the audience with themes, iconography and myths they can all relate to’. She went on to say that Black Diggers is ‘not just one of the highlights of this year’s festival but a new high point in telling a national narrative on the stage.’cxxii
The production is successful in providing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective to the well-known white Australian narrative of World War Icxxiii. Wesley Enoch has expressed his concern with the ‘diversity of voices in Australian theatre’ and hopes that the Black
Diggers production will ‘bring audiences in their droves’ and ‘spark greater interest in
Indigenous stories’cxxiv. Writer Tom Wright comments on the anecdotal feedback he receives,
saying ‘many Indigenous people, particularly those who are ex-service people themselves, loved the show’. He goes on to say ‘people from an older generation of Indigenous people in Queensland and New South Wales are very pleased with the show as it neatly ties in a big Australian national narrative with their Indigenous experience.’
How Black Diggers addresses challenges with authenticity and representation The Black Diggers production addresses the challenge of representation and authenticity within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait arts ecosystem, by acknowledging and presenting multiple perspectives and through the engagement of an all-Indigenous cast who hold multiple roles encompassing different genders and cultural identities. Writer Tom Wright comments on the authenticity of indigeneity in Australia, saying it is a contested site where ‘everything gets mediated through white terminology [where] the aspect of listening to
authentic Aboriginal voices can be placed to one side’. He continued by sharing his views on representation, saying:
109 Representation of Indigenous experience in Australia ranges everything from tokenism all the way through to a deeply problematic and troubling question of what nationalism is and in an anthropological sense what indigeneity is.
Wright takes the view that there is not ‘an objective Indigenous experience and objective truth and objective history’ but more a series of experiences, truths and histories depending on the individual. He therefore discounts that there can be a ‘pure Indigenous voice’ in theatre, particularly due to its collaborative nature.
The biggest challenge about working in Indigenous arts, as Wright sees it is:
…as someone who doesn’t identify as Indigenous, having cultural permission to appropriate Indigenous stories is by far the most challenging aspect of my job as a writer or as a director or anything else, so issues of cultural permission for non-Indigenous artists is the biggest challenge for me.
He continues that the second biggest challenge is ‘not finding yourself recolonised by white expectation.’ By ‘recolonised by white expectation’, Wright means that white audiences treat the play as an ‘experience of cultural tourism’, which is different to Aboriginal community work. He sees it as providing a ‘tension’ particularly when the work has a ‘political slant.’ Wright explains that having an all-Aboriginal cast playing multiple and diverse roles alleviates many challenges around representation and authenticity, stating:
At the simplest level we just didn’t have to [develop strategies to overcome challenges of representation and authenticity] because we had Indigenous actors and the premise of the show, although it was a very complicated show, the premise of the show was quite clear. It’s understood and you could read indigeneity into the faces and bodies and I tried to make it quite clear that I was not taking a position and so the show has moments which are a direct opposition and contradicting moments that have happened five minutes before.
Equally importantly to authenticity and representation, is Wright’s explanation that the show acknowledges multiple voices and a re-imagined experience rather than attempting to recreate a factually correct experience:
Black Diggers doesn’t seek to be a photographically realistic depiction of individual
experiences of Aboriginal people but it was more we’ve taken on board all of the experiences but then fictionalised them. I’ve given soldiers invented names…because I didn’t want to run the risk of misrepresenting the way families, communities or for that matter the Australian War Memorial understands the truth. I wanted it to be emotionally and historically truthful of a range of the black experiences of war but I didn’t want to get caught up in having to be so accurate that the minute I made a mistake the whole thing came crashing down. So it’s an act of fantasy, it’s an act of creation, it’s still an active storytelling and it still comes out of one of the Aboriginal senses of truth which is the emotional and family truth of experience but it’s not designed to be a stage version of the history of the war.