Mob has a meeting place at Melbourne Fringe’s Blak Lodge

If you’re looking for a port in the storm of the last few weeks (or 230+ years), there is a safe space for First Nations peoples and their allies at the Blak Lodge this Melbourne Fringe. Erected on the cobblestones of North Melbourne’s Meat Market, it is a multidisciplinary hub and a dedicated space for Mob and those who want to listen to them.

Amelia Jean O’Leary performs Staunch ASF in Melbourne Fringe’s Blak Lodge.Credit: Justin McManus

Ballardong Noongar woman Erica McCalman, Fringe’s special-projects producer responsible for coordinating the creation of the Blak Lodge, has almost two decades of festival experience. “So I guess I’ve always been really, really fond of festivals, they’re my favourite F word,“ she says when we spoke last Friday. “Their potency is always about creating alternate realities, or poking a little hole in the space-time continuum just to see how things could be different.”

McCalman believes the key to any great festival is its hubs. Biripi-Dunghutti woman and artist with a disability, Renay Barker-Mulholland, makes a powerful “fast fashion” statement with Burranba-y, an exhibition reclaiming what is often seen as waste, takes up one side of the Blak Lodge and features a sign underlining that sovereignty was never ceded. Barker-Mulholland has also created a chill-out nook. “Renay was really passionate about making sure there was a space for the neurodiverse community within Blak Lodge,” McCalman says.

Inclusion is vital. “We’ve got a completely First Nations team of front-of-house posts here for Blak Lodge, and this is the first time they’ve been involved in a venue like this, allowing the opportunity to develop their careers and skills. We also have our Deadly Fringe coordinator, Peta Duncan, who has an exhibition [What I Know, How I See] over at the Trades Hall hub.”

The Blak Lodge also features a tea station with a neon campfire where you can help yourself to a hot drink and biscuits for free. “You can have a yarn, where you get like minds coming together and swapping stories and gossip,” McCalman says. “The business in the foyer or out the back in those third spaces is almost as important as the shows.”

Those shows include an encore of Na Djinang Circus’ Deadly Fringe commission Of the Land On Which We Meet, the burlesque beauty of Deadly Sinners, in which a First Nations troupe inhabit the seven deadly sins, and Gamilaroi Yinarr dancer Amelia Jean O’Leary’s new work Staunch ASF. All three shows play out behind a voluminous Blak curtain lit with a neon pink Wominjeka “welcome” sign. “It’s super contemporary, a bit cheeky and fun,” McCalman says. “Deadly Fringe has always had an electric colour scheme and I wanted to lean into that.”

Amelia Jean O’Leary in Staunch ASF: guided by the ancestors.Credit: Justin McManus

O’Leary feels held by this supportive space. “It feels so important to be a part of this programme with such amazing works before and after me. All the works are so different, and that’s what’s so important about the Blak Lodge, showing the diversity of First Nations arts and Culture. It makes me really proud.”

Staunch ASF is a contemporary dance work about O’Leary’s experience of growing up Blak in the western suburbs of Melbourne and continually having to reclaim her identity. “From there, it’s been a continual reclaiming of so many things that should have always been mine, my voice, my energy, my space, my time,” she says. “Set in multiple timeframes, from cultural Dreaming times to modern politics, it’s been guided by the ancestors.”

It’s helped her re-centre after a return to her Country. “The transition, coming back to Melbourne, really impacted my health, and then I was in a studio and had to make something organic and truthful to this time,” she says. “I had to share stories that were quite vulnerable. It’s very expressive movement, vocabulary and storytelling because that is what this work is. It’s my life. And that is now.”

The support of Deadly Fringe and the Blak Lodge makes a difference in trying times, including the funds for O’Leary to hire lighting designer Giovanna Yate Gonzalez, set designer Savanna Wegmen and stage manager Georgie Bryant. “It’s incredible to have this team and to also be in a space that is so supportive. It makes my heart feel like it’s valuable and that something good is coming for the future. If this is happening now, two years later, it’s probably going to be amazing.”

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