By Steve Dow
In early August, Elaine Crombie and six fellow Indigenous stage actors took a ship with their director Wesley Enoch to Me-Mel/Goat Island, to imagine life around Sydney Harbour prior to British contact.
They visualised the bark canoes from which Aboriginal women fished with hooks and lines, navigating unspoiled escarpments, small fires flickering on board each vessel.
In Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison’s play The Visitors, about to open in a new production at the Opera House, seven elders from seven Indigenous groups are imagined meeting at Warrane/Sydney Cove in 1788 to decide whether to welcome the “pale aliens” aboard the First Fleet’s 11 ships.
Jane Harrison started writing The Visitors 12 years ago, but struggled to have it produced.Credit: Janie Barrett
Coincidentally, when the curtain falls for the final time on the production on October 14, Australians will have voted on an Indigenous Voice to parliament.
Harrison, who fully supports the proposal, says that if it fails, “it will be devastating for the Aboriginal community. Even though there’s dissent within the community, I think the majority of blackfellas still want the Voice to come up”.
“The referendum seems really simple to me: why would you vote no when it’s really just having a voice? It’s about a conversation, it’s about putting us in the Constitution and recognising us.
“If it doesn’t get up, we’re back to nothing; we haven’t got an avenue for those other things that need to be done: treaty, truth-telling.”
Harrison’s first play, Stolen, premiered a year after the 1997 release of the Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generations. “I have an uncanny knack of taking [several years] to bring projects to fruition, and then it’s the right time,” she says.
Matthew Cooper starring in a production of Stolen at National Theatre of Parramatta.Credit: Amanda James
For her part, Crombie says there is “definitely” a weight of attention on the actors in such roles. “In the spotlight we don’t just represent ourselves – I don’t represent myself,” she says.
“I’m for my people; I’m always for my people.”
In The Visitors, Crombie will portray a Cameragal elder, Jaky, who is a tradie and a joker. The actor is keen to temper the play’s darker subject matter. “Where there’s space for an ad-lib, I’m milking it 100 per cent,” she says with a laugh.
Crombie is still considering whether to paint her nails powder blue to match her “flash” costume of blue suit and suspenders. “Because Jaky was previously named Jacob, I find myself being really butch too. I’m just like that naturally: straight out and not soft,” she says.
In 2020, when Moogahlin Performing Arts premiered The Visitors at Carriageworks during Sydney Festival, all seven elder roles were male, and played by men.
Harrison says the Northern Territory intervention, during which Aboriginal men were “problematised as poor citizens”, was her impetus for writing the script with an all-male cast and roles.
Now, in the revised version of the play co-produced by Sydney Theatre Company and Moogahlin, two elders have been given new gender-neutral names and will be played by women, in recognition of women’s leadership roles in Aboriginal communities.
One character, Wallace (Dalara Williams), a Burramattagal elder and anthropologist and philosopher previously known as Walter, will be also be portrayed as visibly five to six months pregnant.
The elders all perform barefoot but wear business suits, which Harrison says gives them the status that they would have had at the time as the senators of their age. “I was thinking of Paul Keating in his Italian suits,” she says.
Likewise, she says the anachronism of having Western rather than traditional Indigenous names is designed to make them more relatable to an audience.
After writing her first draft in 2011, Harrison admits she struggled for years to get the play produced, given greater women’s representation was being sought in theatre: “I don’t think people were interested in a play with seven men.”
Living and working in Ballarat in regional Victoria, the playwright used the years of delay to also write a novel version of The Visitors, which has just been released, as well as the libretto for a separate Victorian Opera production, which will also feature women elders, and is set to open in Melbourne in October.
Harrison on the set of The Visitors at Carriageworks in 2020.Credit: Renee Nowytarger
Harrison says despite some small changes to the new version of The Visitors play, the tone remains optimistic because she wanted characters to have agency. She is constantly inspired by the “generosity” inherent in modern Indigenous Welcome to Country speeches.
Rehearsals started in early August with the actors’ own Welcome to Country, a smoking ceremony performed by Muruwari elder Uncle Matty Doyle.
Elaine Crombie says she and fellow actor Luke Carroll, who plays Cadigal man Gordon in The Visitors, shed a tear watching the ceremony: “You could hear a pin drop.”
Crombie and Carroll were in the same Sydney Theatre Company rehearsal room together 22 years ago, starring in a revival of Indigenous playwright Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers, also directed by Enoch.
The cast of The Visitors, including Elaine Crombie, check in with each other every morning to make sure they’re OK.Credit: Daniel Boud
There was no smoking ceremony then for the fledgling actors: “We just got in and got on with it.”
Now, the cast check in with each other every morning to make sure they are coping with the weighty subject matter, she says.
Crombie sweeps her hand to point across the harbour to the north shore, from which Cameragal elder Jaky would have emerged: in her mind, Jaky is real.
“I’m representing someone who lived around there,” she says. “They know that I’m talking about them, they know, they will probably come over eventually, you know what I mean?”
She has a sense someone is watching over her in this play?
“Yeah, otherwise we wouldn’t have been allowed to get this far. That’s my own belief. Nothing is by accident.”
The Visitors is at the Opera House Drama Theatre from September 11 to October 14; Riverside Theatres from October 19 to 21; and Illawarra Performing Arts Centre from October 25 to 28.
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