Kevin
Gilbert (1933-1993), Indigenous activist, writer and artist, wrote the first
play by an Aboriginal person to be publicly performed in Australia. Born in
Condoblin, NSW, of Wiradjuri, English and Irish heritage, he grew up on
reserves and fringe settlements, beginning to work itinerantly at the age of
fourteen. In 1957, when he was 23, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for
the domestic murder of his non-Aboriginal wife. He served more than fourteen
years in prison, maintaining that he acted in self-defence. While incarcerated
in the 1960s he began to make lino-cuts, and he started to pen the play The
Cherry Pickers in 1968. It was smuggled out of gaol on toilet paper. It was
first workshopped and presented in a reading at the small Mews Theatre in Sydney
'in the open air' with Bob Maza and other Aboriginal actors reading the parts.
The play is significant that it was the first play written in English by an
Aboriginal and also the first play to be performed entirely by an Aboriginal
cast.
The
play was performed in its full form by Melbourne's Nindethana Theatre Group in
1971 and in Redfern, Sydney in 1972 but the play was not published until 1988
when, in the wake of protests against the Bicentennial celebrations of European
colonization of Australia, it became a symbol of Aboriginal protest. Gilbert's
play is based on the stories and experiences of itinerant workers and it deals
with, as Gilbert puts it in an introduction to the play written in 1969: ...
spiritual searching and loss, my people pushed into refugee situations, dissocialized
if you like. The play's narrative mixes traditional creation myths, rituals,
political diatribes, clever dialogue and humour. It is through this humour that
Gilbert explores alcoholism, violence and spiritual and cultural issues.
The Cherry Pickers is a play of humanity, of the search for justice, of
a return to spirituality. It is an intimate, albeit dramatized, glimpse of the
family. It is a communication, a gift that, should your heart glimpse the key,
will enable you to understand what is meant when Aboriginals demand integrity
as the only basis upon which Blacks can begin to negotiate justice.
By: Mary Q.
