Past Imperfect

“There is no doubt that the mainstream arts sector in Australia has been woefully neglectful of the real scope of experience in our country,” says Eamon Flack, associate director – new projects at Belvoir. “It's been far too white.”

Flack is co-devisor of new production Beautiful One Day – inspired by the 'accidental' death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island – and when he makes the above statement, he doesn't do so lightly. In fact, he's astutely aware of the risks Belvoir's taken in order to try and counter that trend, and the help they needed.

“If you want to address that question you've got to be really smart about it, because it's so easy to blunder in, and it's so easy for a white theatre company, which we basically are, for a privileged, well…,” he stops himself short, “Well, we're not well-funded, no one's well-funded – but for a privileged main stage theatre company to wade into the question of diversity, it can be really self-serving, it can be arrogant, it can go really wrong really easily. We needed help and we needed to learn.”

For a few years now the team at Belvoir have been interested in creating a show about Palm Island. The question was how to do so while being mindful of the potential pitfalls Flack mentions above, and the answer came to them through collaboration.

“Eventually, we decided to bring together several companies,” Flack explains, “A blackfella theatre company, a whitefella theatre company who deal a lot with white power, and ourselves – so Ilbijerri, Version 1.0 and ourselves came together and we just started by talking among each other about each others' work and about the events of 2004 on Palm, with Mulrunji Doomadgee's death in custody and the community response and the police crackdown, and we've basically from that moment making up what that process should be as we've gone along – there was no blueprint for how to make a show like this, so we've had to invent it,” Flack pauses here and laughs with a hint of disbelief, “at every step of the way, which has been quite extraordinary in many ways because there is such a variety of theatrical experience and theatrical language among all the people working together; but also, there's such a variety of life experience.”

Bringing together such a diverse team led first and foremost to discussion, says Flack, about theatre, their practice, Palm Island, and everything else in between. And from conversation came the blueprint they were looking for, from conversation their show emerged.

“It's become about what it really takes, and I mean really takes, for an indigenous community to not give up, because quite frankly, what so many of them have been put through time and again, basically through white governmental mishandling – revolting mishandling – it's pretty horrific. And what it really takes for those communities to keep going – which has nothing to do with white policy a lot of the time, and has everything to do with this thing that we talk about called black resilience, indigenous resilience. What that really means, I think, is what's at the heart of the show.

“How do you really deal with that pain and grief? How do you really build and maintain those quiet, civic, interpersonal social institutions that are really what keeps society bubbling? Fuck government. Fuck policy for a moment. What's really going on underneath that? And that's an interesting question, and it's great for theatre because it's a human question.”

WHAT: Beautiful One Day

WHERE & WHEN: Saturday 17 November to Sunday 23 December, Belvoir Upstairs Theatre