AustLit

This play examines life in a small country town during two periods, the 1940s and the 1980s, and focuses on the search for identity in the Aboriginal community of Coordah.

'Richard Walley has woven stories about and by Aboriginal people into a loosely-knitted, episodic play. The contemporary story, about life in the Office of Aboriginal Planning is broken by dance sequences which portray the suffering of Aboriginal people since 1788. Segments of poetry are also used to break the action and the result is a fragmented production.' (Source: AusStage website)

'The friendship between an Aboriginal boy and a white girl raises issues of race in a touching story of two families who seem to have nothing in common, until danger strikes, forcing them to face their prejudices. (Source: Publisher's blurb)

This play is set in a country town, the story centres on the return of an Aboriginal soldier after World War II and the rejection he experiences by the white community.

'With humane irony the Western Australian poet, Jack Davis gives a painful insight into the process of colonisation and the transformation of his people.'

'The Dreamers is the story of a country-town family and old Uncle Worru, who in his dying days, recedes from urban hopelessness to the life and language of the Nyoongah spirit which in him has survived 'civilisation'.' (Currency Press website)

Dallas Winmar's play explores the experiences of two women in depth, one called 'black' the other called 'white'. We follow these women through numerous incarnations, from small children, to close friends, to blue collar workers, to pregnant mothers, and finally to old women.

'Yibiyung was Dallas [Winmar]'s grandmother and this is her growing-up story. She was one of hundreds of girls swept up in the forced removals of the 1920s and trained to become model domestic servants. But it's Yibiyung's break from this regime and her extraordinary flight across Western Australia which gives her story its rolling, expansive rhythm of survival.' Source: Belvoir Street website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/ (Sighted 01/09/2008)

Based on real life events that occurred in 1931, Rabbit-Proof Fence is the story of three mixed-race Aboriginal children who are forcibly abducted from their mothers by the Western Australian government. Molly (aged fourteen), her sister Daisy (aged eight), and their cousin Gracie (aged ten) are taken from their homes at Jigalong, situated in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, at the orders of the Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, and sent to an institution at Moore River to be educated and trained as domestic servants.

In Perth, Western Australia, the Coolbaroo Club operated for 14 years (1946-1960) as a meeting place and a community focus for the local Aboriginal community. The Club was the only Aboriginal-run dance club in a city which practised unofficial apartheid. Continually harrassed by police with enforced fraternisation bans and curfews placed on them, the Indigenous population was also required to carry identity cards and deal with bureaucratic obstruction. During its lifetime, the Club attracted black musicians and celebrities from all over Australia and occasionally from overseas, among them Nat 'King' Cole, Harold Blair, and the Harlem Globetrotters.