The Cherry Pickers By Kevin Gilbert

     

KEVIN GILBERT   Was  born in Condoboli, South Wales in 1933, he left school after fifth grade at age fourteen, and worked in itinerant seasonal in 1957 Gilbert was sentenced to life imprisonment after a domestic dispute in which his wife was killed. During the fourteen years that he spent in some of the worst jails in Australia he strove to educate himself, honing his artistic talents to become a prominent poet, playwright, printmaker and photographer. Gilbert wrote the play The Cherry Pickers I 1968 and first exhibited his work in 1970 at  the  Arts Council Gallery , Sydney. He was granted parole in 1971 , his book   Living Black : blacks  talk to Kevin Gilbert (1977) was awarded the National Book Council Book Award in 1978 . Kevin Gilbert died in 1993. The Cherry  Pickers his greatest play one of which places much greater emphasis on the exclusiveness of the black expression of black issues while others have served to unnecessarily expand Gilbert´s material instead of pruning the play and which affects the playwright´s intended communication of black integrity toward a white audience. Gilbert´s play expressing aboriginality within the European structural constraints of publishing. He deals with this contradiction by satirizing the white invasion of Australia and subsequently creating a work which places a dramatic thorn in the consciousness of white Australians in a passionate and vibrant manner which brings the Cherry Pickers beyond a one dimensional method  of confrontation ,showing this confrontation between two social entities that fight  for the supremacy of the power one white and one black.

                                                                                                               by: Juan E,Peraza