31 Aborigine Australian Play: Kevin Gilbert – The Cherry Pickers (1968)

Dr. Pinky Isha

Content 

• Background to Aboriginal Australian Drama

• Introduction to Kevin Gilbert

• The Cherry Pickers

• The Concept of the Aborigine

• Conclusion

• References

Background to Aboriginal Australian Drama:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Drama holds an important place in Australian Literature; these texts are unique documents in so far as their cultural and social legacy is concerned. Hundreds of productions over the last five decades have created a voluminous area of creative and literary works that have never belied the original Australian sensibility, tracing it to its very roots. Many writers have toured Australia extensively while also going global; writers like Jane Harrison in Stolen (1997); Andrea James in Yaanagai! Yanagai! (2003) and Tammy Anderson in I Don’t Want To Play House (2000) have been in continuous production for about a decade. Contemporary Australian theatre today is both for indigenous audiences as well as for mainstream foreign clientele who could be non-indigenous or indigenous. At the leading edge of contemporary performing Art scenario, Australian theatre is dominated by Arts, music and stories, dances and traditional songs, and plays by its leading voices. The first plays by indigenous Australian playwrights to be commercially viable were those concerned with issues of survival. Merritt and Bostock presented a range of context and problems confronting indigenous Australians, and Gilbert’s play The Cherry Pickers (1968) was the first indigenous play to have mainstream audiences. The text presented non- indigenous Australians speaking the first examples of Aboriginal English, as the standard language which was rather unconventional at that time. Merritt’s The Cake Man was the next play to create a flutter on stage during its first performance in 1975. Gilbert and Merritt belonged to the Wiradjuri tribe and Bostock (his play Here Comes the Nigger, 1976) from among the Bundjalung tribe, all reflect the reality and humanity of modern Aboriginal life. Writings of these ground breaking dramatists were followed by a range of plays focussing on perceptibly every aspect of indigenous life and history. In the 1980s Bob Maza from Murray Island in the Torres Strait, first playfully brought to light the excruciating struggle of the people in order to retain their land; this is done in an unassuming manner through a performance text Mereki (1986). His next play The Keepers (1988) fuses a mix of naturalism and non-naturalism to foreshadow the destruction of Boandik people in South Australia.

In Western Australia, Noongar writers such as Jack Davis wrote about aboriginal life and history mingling the physical and visual traditional practices of the people; past is often represented as a dancer, who metaphorically and literally links the past with the now and the here. Visual practices among the Aborigines which had started to dwindle out with modern technology and civilization can therefore be recreated with establishing a link with the past; as in the play The Dreamers (1982) which tells the tale of the Wallitch family in which a didjerridu dancer moving to the sound of music, links the past with the present. In Kullark (1979) behind the chronicling of history is the giant visual image of the Giant (Waargul) Rainbow Serpent, that is believed to be the deity and creator spirit of the people of Western Australia. This visual image is therefore a potent aboriginal marker and a great reminder that the past cannot be ousted by the present, no matter what. In Jimmy Chi’s Bran NueDae (1990) the story is of a young aboriginal man’s journey across Western Australia which becomes a quest for identity and security. Indigenous women writers have also demonstrated a breath of different approaches in their work; names to reckon with are Eva Johnson, a member of the MulakMulak people who in plays such as Tjindarella, Murras, Mimini’s Voices and What Do They Call Me writes about the indigenous subjects discrimination at the hand of colonial masters; she wrote plays throughout the 1980s and 90s.A recurring theme in most of her works is also the impact of governmental policies on women and children. Another indigenous writer from the Muruwari people; Jane Harrison, draws upon the past and present and the gradual transformation of indigenous people down the ages; Rainbow’s End and Stolen were inspired by various facets of aboriginal life, like the establishment of the Roombalara; the Aboriginal Housing Estate at Mooroopna. Cathy Craigie’s Murri Love focuses on the joys and tensions of friendships and relationships. One of the most powerful and abiding voices to have emerged from the last decade is that of Dallas Winmar from Western Australia who in works like Aliwa and Yibiyung expresses the struggles of aboriginal people labelled as half castes. Yibiyung is based upon her grandfather’s life under the Protection Acts. In recent years the frames of referencing in Aboriginal writing has extended leaps and bounds and proliferated in different directions.

The quest for an authentic Australian cultural identity found its penchant in the country’s demand for literary movements like the Jindyworoback movement, founded by Rex Ingamells in 1937-1938; in order to express a distinctive Australian quality in literature and to release Australian Art and literature from the influx of British and other European influences that have so long restricted its true blossoming. A feature of this movement was to turn away from extraneous features and derive inspiration and aesthetic fervour from the casket of Aboriginal legends and language, and most importantly from the landscape itself. Many writers of the period turned to aboriginal legends and tried to connect contemporary culture with it as the only way to validate their own roots and existence. The work of Mary Durack, while labelled paternalistic; hints at this essential legitimising of Aboriginal culture while pointing out its distinctive features. Prichards’s controversial novel Coonardoo (1929) sometimes dismissed by critics as reductive and essentialist in its portrait of the Aboriginal female protagonist, is a shameful critique of the White European’s idea of the native Aboriginal community and explores the divide between the literary self-representation of Australia and the social and cultural dimensions of this great continent, if it is to be attested by the whites only.

Introduction to Kevin Gilbert:

Born in Condoblin in NSW to an Irish father and part Aboriginal mother who died when he was just seven; Kevin Gilbert was brought up in a welfare home at the initial phase of his life and later on by relatives. After a limited education, he worked through his teens as a labourer, married early, had two sons, but suffered a blotch in his career when found guilty of murdering his wife after a domestic argument and was subject to life imprisonment. It was in the prison that he first cultivated a talent for art and literature and developed a love for lino- cuts and painting. His works from the prison was exhibited in 1970 by the Australian Council for the Arts. In 1971 after 14 years in prison, Gilbert’s play The Cherry Pickers dealing with the story of Aboriginal seasonal workers, was staged in Sydney, while he was still in prison. This event in 1971 earned Gilbert the reputation of being the first Aboriginal playwright to have a play performed in Australia. In 1972, he became associated with the Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve near Taree, NSW, where he initiated community aid projects and worked as a community developer. He also established the KalariAboriginal Art Gallery, a milestone in the training of young Aboriginal artists. It did not take long for Gilbert to be associated in the wider cause for the rights of Aboriginals. He started editing periodicals such as Alchuringa and Black Australian News. Gilbert also brought the Australian government to task and demanded for a national enquiry into Aboriginal education and began working wholeheartedly for the functioning and implementation of a Centre for Continuing Research into Aboriginal Affairs at Monash University, Melbourne. In addition to The Cherry Pickers , Gilbert also published two volumes of poetry; End of Dreamtime (1971) and People Are Legends (1978). Gilbert’s poetry rages in protest against society when they look down upon the native Blacks, in poems such as ‘People Are Legends’ and ‘Cock Robin’; the indifferent treatment of the Blacks is mirrored in poems such as ‘Trying to Save Joan Ella’, and in ‘Goomee Jack’ his own degradation and hopelessness as a member of the Aboriginal kind. Gilbert also vehemently protested against the seizure of property of the natives and voices this with great conviction in ‘Land Claims’ and the tragedy of being born as the Aboriginal in ‘Inhabitants of the Third World’. His contentious poem ‘To My Cousin, EvonneCawley’, in the Bulletin (30th Sep, 1980) attacks what he sees as her lack of involvement in Aboriginal problems. One of Gilbert’s noteworthy political tracts on land rights is the famous ‘Because  a White Man ‘ll Never Do It (1973); which argues in favour of restoring not only the land to the evicted natives but also their dignity and self-esteem which had been brutally and painfully robbed from them. In ‘Living Black’, Gilbert attempts to give a first-hand record of what it means to be an Aboriginal; this he skilfully does through interview dialogues with all kinds of Aborigines; urban, reserve, tribal and fringe dwellers. He proposes a program of physical and cultural compensation for centuries of sabotage and mayhem, almost 200 years that have been enormously successful in wiping out the consciousness of this very ancient and meaningful race and their legacy.

The Cherry Pickers:

The history of aboriginal playwriting receives the first major kind of a compendious boost with Gilbert’s historic chronicling of Australia’s indigenous legacy, the theft of the country and its subsequent effects on the minds of those who resist it with stoic calm and a resilience of spirit that is unthinkably heroic. Written in 1968, when Gilbert was serving a fourteen year prison sentence, the text is not at all cynical or acerbic as one might conjecture; but has the familiar rather sympathetic tone of a sensitive bystander. Gilbert by nature believed in the positive influences of reconstruction and never had a reprimanding tone in this work; this drama is a deeply philosophical piece which attempts to build bridges between the native tradition and the contemporaneity of modern life. In the worst of situations, man has to keep his calm and Gilbert often prophetically professed: ‘You sharpen your axe on the hardest stone’. This play in specific has little adherence to logic in the sense that the play is a collage of creation myths, raw limericks, tribal rituals intermixed with political oratory and a rich lore of tribal songs. The spirit of the play seems to be a kind of hanging on that is indeed one of its special features. The play revolves around a group of indigenous Australians who like nomads are forced to roam the margins of their own continent in search of whatever work they can find. They eventually wait in ardent anticipation for the cherry picking season to arrive; cherry picking being a work that fetches good money with the promise of arrival of Johnollo, a talismanic supra-mundane figure who might bring a change of fortune. In the meantime while they await such bliss, they while away the time with singing songs and telling stories. The play also offers a sadly resilient picture of the aborigine, for whom hardships is a way of life; when the cold August with its cruel cold winds give way to the blissful certainty of the sun in Spring, people emerge from their ram shackled, leaky shanties; some from old discarded cars, or dark crevices of the landscape to gather a few of their dirty soiled bundles and get them together for travelling to the promised land of cherry picking. Hundreds and hundreds of them would stagger up to go, some in their bicycles half disbalanced with crazy bundles that would risk falling over; some would catch hold of old tattered caravans drawn by horses and a third category who could ill afford even a bicycle or a caravan would plod along laboriously beside those caravans, moving slowly up steep and sometimes even sand hills of the mallee country; some the more daring of the lot would ‘jump the rattler’; the slow steam train the trailed with an even motion across the continent.

The essence of the Cherry Picking season was not only a momentary release from starvation to livelihood, it was a sense of renewal of lives, of the idea of being reborn every year for that season; a new kind of christening in relationships, among friends, among lovers, and once again nursing the propensity to live and to love. Starving children who had never known the bounties of play and games would now have recourse to toys and dolls for Christmas. The season metaphorically and literally also meant a temporary respite from the ‘local police’ and ‘White Station Managers’ who meted out worse treatment to these poor Australians from the ‘Aboriginal Reserves’. Gilbert portrays this all through a story that is mostly conversation between people and reveal snippets of life rather than a complete story line. There is a wonderful sense of humour, often callow humour in a few places but mostly it rejoices and burgeons with the hope of a new life. In many other works like ‘Me and Mary kangaroo’, childhood of the Aboriginal native in a pristine landscape is depicted; and in ‘Living Black’, Gilbert documents how Australia underwent a rape of the soul, of the mind and the body, in ways so deeply devastating and on such an unprecedented scale that the memory of the hurt becomes a part of its identity; or legacy itself. The diversities of the Bush life along with the joys and sorrows of its attendant circumstances finds stunning expression in Gilbert’s poetry collection ‘Child’s Dreaming’ and ‘Me and Mary Kangaroo’. In other poetry collections like ‘The Blackside: People Are Legends and Other Poems’ and ‘Black From The Edge’ and in writings like ‘Because A White Man’LL Never Do It’; the Aboriginal and White struggle of hate and destruction comes out albeit in a serious vein. Here in The Cherry Pickers life seems to be asking for its rewards even if it is albeit temporary; and this infuses the text with its essential flavour. There is in The Cherry Pickers a conscious idea of sovereignty, of wanting to break free from the colonial yoke. This is a beautifully crafted play in which dialogue attains a rich mix of realism and the metaphysical. The characters are engaging and their dramatic conflicts gripping. Gilbert was the first man in Australia who vied for having the play performed by an all Australian aboriginal cast, where voices spoke not extraneously but from their own depths. It was also a play that saw among its audiences not only Black Australians but also the White colonial masters, so it spoke to mainstream audiences and elicited a miraculous response.

The Concept of the Aborigine:

One major aspect of Australian Aborigine culture is indulging in a lot of practices and ceremonies that have as their forte the reverence for the land and an abiding concern with oral traditions. Language groupings in tribal areas exhibit a range of individual cultures and Australian Aboriginal art has existed for thousands of years and ranges from ancient rock art to modern-day watercolor landscapes. Among a few initiation rituals of the Australian aborigine may be mentioned the ‘Bora’ in which young boys become men; a ‘Corroboree’ which means a ceremonial meet of Aboriginal people; a ‘smoking ceremony’ is likewise a cleansing ritual performed on special occasions and a Tjurunga or churinga on the other hand are objects of religious significance by Central Australian Aboriginal Arrernte (Aranda, Arundta) groups. Another very important ceremony of the Australian Aborigine is a ‘Walkabout’ which refers to a commonly held belief that Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey or rite of passage during adolescence by living away from their family or group, or by moving away from their area. A corollary to this concept is the idea of death which is viewed as a transition to another life altogether, this is not completely different from the one they have left when they died. In death, a part of the person may move to the Land of the Dead, or return to the site where spirit children await rebirth, or merge with the great ancestral and creative beings, while another part of him or her may play the role of a spirit trickster. Not only ceremonies but also creator beings have dominated not only indigenous but contemporary Australian scenario to a great extent; the Rainbow Serpent is a major ancestral being for many Aboriginal people across Australia. Baiame or Bunjil are regarded as the primary creator-spirits in South-East Australia and Dingo Dreaming is a significant ancestor in the interior regions of Bandiyan, as Dingo formed the songlines that cross the continent from north to south and east to west, linking up the continent in the fullest sense of the term. The Yowie and Bunyip are some important ancestral beings, besides several others. These cultural markers often overlapped and evolved over time. Along with the concept of ‘Dreamtime’ memories, traditional healers (known as Ngangkari in the Western desert areas of Central Australia) which included both men and women were highly respected and regarded as custodians of important dreamtime stories. Reflections, symbols and motifs or perspectives, most of which figure predominantly in the sensibility of even modern day Aborigine writers whether they are writing poems, novels or dramas, link up this continuation and perpetuation of ideas and concepts down the generations. Given the new technologies that run amok in today’s globalized world; writing which is no isolated phenomena helps us to pinpoint these culture traits and belief systems of the Aborigine way of life in a much more conclusive and convincing manner.

Conclusion:

Being a seminal play in Australia’s theatre history in 1968, Gilbert’s reputation for the stage was established and profoundly praised apart from being an outstanding poet, artist and philosopher. Because Gilbert refused to license the piece for production until it could be performed by an all aboriginal troupe, which did not occur until after his death in 1993, it was actually a big success when it was performed in Sydney Theatre Company, one of the world’s great ensembles, where the Aboriginal cast that he actually devised move quite effortlessly between serious rhetoric and scabrous humour in an instance. The play gives the feel of recreating life around a campfire even when one is consciously aware of being in a theatre and that is one of the quintessential aspects of the play and it continues to be the abiding feature of the play even to this day.

References:

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• Carroll, D. 1995. Australian Contemporary Drama. Currency Press. Surrey Hills, Sydney.
• Ed. Casey Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1990. Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2004.
• Drama Australia. 2007. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Guidlines for Drama/Theatre Education. Drama Australia.
• Enoch, W. 2005. The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table (play). Currency Press. Strawberry Hills, Sydney.
• Ed. Goetzfridt Nicholas J. Indigenous Literature of Oceania: A Survey of Criticism and Interpretation. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995.
• Harris, S. 1980. Culture and Learning: Tradition and Education in Northeast Arnhem Land. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
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• Ed. Maufort Marc & Franca Bellarsi. Siting theOther: revisions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama. Dramaturgies Series. Volume 1. P.Lang, 2001.
• O’Toole, J. 1992. The Process of Drama. Routledge. London.
• Ed. Randall Gregory C. The Cherry Pickers. California: Winsdor Hill Publishing, 2017.