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Drama and the Dreamingframing the play West of West Wirrawong

by Paul Anthony Sherman M.A. B.Ed. Studies, Dip, Journalism (UQ)

submitted in application for the Research Masters Degree

in the Faculty of Creative Industries

Queensland University of Technology

2009

i

Keywords:

Drama, the dreaming, Nietzsche, playwrighting, playwriting, stageplay, creative practice as research

ii

ContentsKeywords: ............................................................................................................................... ii

Statement of Original Authorship .......................................................................................... iv

Dedication .............................................................................................................................. v

West of West Wirrawong ...................................................................................................... 1

Drama and the Dreaming - Exegesis ................................................................................... 103

Bibliography and Published Works Consulted .................................................................... 124

Conferences Attended in 2006 ....................................................................................... 127

Conference Presentation ................................................................................................ 127

Relevant Roles played in stage productions ................................................................... 127

Some Activity Sources of Indigenous Culture ................................................................. 128

Sound Recordings (vinyl) ............................................................................................ 128

Audio Cassettes .......................................................................................................... 128

Sound Recordings (CD) ............................................................................................... 128

Live Performance ........................................................................................................ 128

Appendix A: Relevant Poems ............................................................................................. 129

Somewhere under the Rainbow Serpent ....................................................................... 129

Beerwah-on-Seine .......................................................................................................... 130

Southern Burnett Sentinel .............................................................................................. 132

Amah Rock ..................................................................................................................... 134

Reading the Rocks .......................................................................................................... 135

gifts for gubbas ............................................................................................................... 137

Appendix B: A Chapter Summary, with comments, of The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche ............................................................................................................................ 139

iii

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or

diploma at any other institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis

contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due

reference is made.

Signature _________________________________________________________

Date _____________________________________________________________

iv

Dedication

To the creators of all legends and myths, including Australian Indigenous songmen and

song women

Special thanks for David Unaipon (the man on the Australian $50 note), to Oodgeroo of the

tribe Noonuccal, to Bernard Hickey of Australia’s Maryborough and Italy’s Lecce, to Aldo

Nagagnino, of Presicce, to Maryvonne Nedeljkovic and her students in the University of Le

Havre, to Queensland storyteller and poet Herby Wharton, to Cheryl Buchanan and the

JageraJarjum song and dance Troupe, to Wesley Enoch, Robin Wells, John Dugdalee Jones,

Robert Stuurman, Val Vallis, Judith Wright.

To Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner and his cronies such as Wotan, Erda, Fricka, Freia,

Siegfried, Siegmund, Sieglinde, Brunnhilde,Fasolt, Fafner, Loge, Donner, Mime, Alberich,

the Rhinemaidens, The Norns and the Valkyrie.

To Mother Beerwah, Father Tibrogargan, Son Coonowrin, to Wantima, and in North

Queensland he Spangled Drongo Byjimjillah, to Sunshine Coast’s Coolum, Ninderry,

Maroochy and Mudjimba, to theBlue Mountain’s Three Sisters, to Kangaroo Island’s Two

Sisters.

To Dionysus, Apollo, Zeus, Semele, Niobe, Artemis, Orpheus and Eurydice…

v

Drama and The Dreaming

West of West Wirrawong

A play by Paul Sherman

PO Box 387,

Lutwyche , Q4030.

Characters

Young male actor in Prologue, who plays Stoney in play

Merle town librarian, a poet

Lilypilly town’s oldest resident

Anthony retired school teacher

Billy acting editor of The West

Wirrawong Bugle

1

1


Scene

Suggestion of a public square in the centre of a country town. Upstage right, a series of

rostra, climbable, suggestive of a war memorial.

Downstage left a couple of small bushes.

Here and there, other, movable rostra to suggest benches and an open air picnic table.

Dedication

To the creators of all legends and myths, especially Australian indigenous songmen and

songwomen.

2

2


Prologue

Spoken by young male actor who, as he talks, puts on grey, statue-style military uniform of

World War One.

Gidday, guys. Heard of Henry Reynolds, historian? You musta. Well,

Henry wrote about us Statue Soldiers on war memorials all over the

country. City squares, suburbs, country towns – me and me mates pop

up everywhere. Come Anzac Day, Remembrance Day, we’re the centre

of attention. Rest of year, most of youse don’t notice us much. Well,

Henry Reynolds, he asked why there’s nothing about the Aboriginal

dead on the stones under us. Oh, of course the Aboriginal soldiers who

died in the two World Wars and the other ones, they get their names up

sometimes. But Henry asks where’s the acknowledgement of the fallen

Aboriginal tribesmen who died for their country in the other wars, the

battles fought here, on this soil? Just thought I’d pop Henry’s question

before I turn into stone, so to speak. And blowed if I know the answer.

I’m just gunna be a Gallipoli-and-after guy.

Oh, ‘nother reason why I’m chattin’ to youse now before I go into

character, so to speak, I’m just an ordinary actor. Flesh an’ blood. Can’t

keep statue-still all the time. An’ you won’t be wantin’ to watch me

fidget. So now an’ again I’ll come down orf me perch. An’ if I skedaddle

into the wings for a bit, you’ll let your imaginations fill me in up on me

stone block there, won’t youse? Thanks. Knew yer would.

Checks gear

3

3


Reckon that’s about it. Old Stoney. Young Stoney. Well, as Laurence

Binyon wrote – Binyon, you know him, wrote The Ode – I’m one of that

lot who grow not old. An’ I reckon it’s about time for SLOW FADE ON

WEST WIRRAWONG as I climbs me perch.

4

4


ACT ONE

Slow fade as actor climbs rostrum. Blackout as he freezes, rifle

beside him. Lights up for morning.

Enter Merle, with briefcase whose contents she checks. She

calls to offstage.

Merle Sorry, son, the library’s closed. Hmmm? Don’t worry. We’ve put

it on hold, that local history one your mum wants. What? Ten

o’clock tomorrow. Oh, you’ve got school. Well, after school then.

Bye, Blake.

She waves. Sits down.

Blake’s mum’ll be disappointed. Not much Indigenous stuff in

that. Half a chapter at most .

(Opens briefcase. Takes out notebook and pen.)

(Smiles) The poet’s pen – (writes, pauses) This one’s a toughie.

Not like the pram poem.

Enter Lilypilly, who watches Merle.

5

5


Lily (Laughs) Pram poem. The one you pinched off me.

Merle Well you found the pram, Lilypilly. And you told me the tale. But

the writing’s the hard part.

Lily So you say, Merley-girlie.

Merle Late for you, Lil.

Lily Yeah.

Merle Thought Sunsetholme’s brekky all done by 8.30.

Lily My turn for washin-up. What’s this one about?

(Merle points up to Stoney).

Lily ‘Bout ‘im again? Did ‘im last week, didncha?

Merle First draft. I scrapped it. Too….too heroic.

Lily I liked it.

Merle Too generous, Lily. You like everything I show you. Anyway last

week’s Sonnet to Stoney…too forced.

Lily You and your fourteen liners. Merley’s pearlies, eh?

Merle Well, that one’s in the bin.

Lily Aw, you too fussy. Speakin’of bin, look at that rubbish.

Merle What?

Lily Those kids an’ their empties.

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6


Goes over, picks up rubbish, drops in bin.

Told ‘em once. I told ‘em a thousand times. Seeya, Merlie. (on

way out, turns back) An’ doncha chuck this one out. You bring it

up to Sunsetholme. Read it to me an’ all us oldies.

Goes.

Merle (Reading bits as she writes) “sonorous motor bikes…sober or

staggering…”

Stoney, miming binoculars at eyes. Looks down over her

shoulder.

Stoney Where’d we be without Merle, eh? West Wirrawong’s Poet

Laureate. and she’s stuck with Old Stoney for current subject.

Well, from here it reads better than her first bite at me. That

starchy sonnet. Glad she chucked that one.

Merle moves up to stone under the statue. Touches name on

memorial list.

Merle My grandad. Didn’t come back from the Somme.

7

7


Goes back to where she’s left her writing. Picks it up. Reads.

“He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier

centreing the civic square, taking no sides

as round his perch the traffic flows –

the four-wheel drives, farmers’ utilities,

the beat-up heaps, sonorous motor bikes,

the feet in boots, or rubber thongs, or bare

---this way and that, sober or staggering

on bitumen plain where once the bullocks strained

and, backwards of bullock days. The Dreaming’s dust…”

Stoney “Dreaming’s dust…” Wow!

Merle Hmmm….”Dreaming’s dust”. I’m in your territory once again,

Lilypilly.

Goes.

Stoney Ask Lilypill. Sure, Lilypill knows. But half the time, Lilypilly

won’t say. My Dreaming’s different, you see. Comparatively

recent. Yes, I’m a 1915-eener. You out there. You knows all

that Gallipoli stuff, don’t youse? Yeah, thinks youse do. But I

was there, see. I was there. Isle of Imbros nearby, where that

Pommy General Hamilton had his HQ. He wasn’t in the boats

8

8


come invasion morning. Oops! “Invasion”. “Landing” we had

to call it. Lost lots of brothers on the beach. Then the ridges.

Lone Pine and trenches. Want me ter go on? Don’ like ter say

“no” eh?

Blackout. Lights up on morning. The same but Stoney has

gone. Enter Anthony.

Anthony (Sings) “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua.”

(Grins) “I’ve come to write my memoirs in Wirrawong.” My

fingers itch. I’m keen to type my memoirs in Wirrawong. Yes,

I’m an old fart, as no doubt you can see. Not one of the laptop

brigade. But in New-Millenium Wirrawong not one

typewriter to be had for love or money, it seems. Up and down

Paperbark Street I’ve been since Rafferty’s bus pulled in

yesterday at high noon but not even the Salvos with a

typewriter on sale. But, luck at last comes Anthony’s way.

Who should I run into at the corner of Paperbark and Possum

Streets but my old West Wirrawong High School student,

Merle – Merle who won the Senior English prize in …in 1980

something with her sonnet sequence on … on something. Yes,

9

9


Merle’s promised to give her old English teacher a veteran

Olivetti typewriter they’re throwing out of the West

Wirrawong Town Library.

Enter Lilypilly

Lily Bet she never.

Anthony turns and sees her. They hug.

Anthony Panthony! You back again, eh?

Anthony Every year.

Lily Not last year, yer wasn’t.

Anthony Every other.

Lily Found it yet?

Anthony Found it?

Lily Birth of Blade Mountain

Anthony (Pointing offstage) Up there. Only gotta climb Mount Muller, you

can’t miss big Blade.

Lily Ar, you know what I mean. All that bullshit you been squeezin’

me for years. “Mythological origin of mountain’s name.” As if I

could tell you that.

10

10


Pause. There’s something unspoken between them.

Anthony Seen Merle?

Lily Las’ night I seen her. She was writin’ a poem. What’s that

bullshit about ole typewriter?

Anthony Come again?

Lily Heard you spoutin’ it. Said she was gunna give you chuck-out

typewriter so’s you could do your true confessions. Whatever.

Anthony OK. Confession number one: how Lilypilly saved my life.

Lily (Laughing) Bullshit!

Anthony When I was just a little nipper.

Lily Knee high to a grasshopper.

Anthony Saved my life, you did.

Lily (Laughing) Never.

Anthony Too right you did. You know. That day the floor broke. Floor of

that great big old wooden house used to be round the corner there

down Lehmann Road. Me and my little brother were playing

marbles in the dust under the house. Mum and everyone was up in

the house for the big auction. We could hear people shouting out

bids.

11

11


He starts to act it out – he’s a little boy again, playing marbles

in the dust.

Lily Yes, an’right beside you was all these bubs in their prams, parked

under the house to keep them bubbas outa the sun. All the mums

up in the house watchin’ the men biddin’ like crazy.

Anthony Then you noticed it.

Lily Yeah, then I did. Those lil’ bitsa sawdust droppin’ down through

the cracks in the ole wood floor.

Anthony My little brother looked up and a bit of sawdust got him in the eye.

That’s when you started screaming.

Lily I could see the whole floor startin’ ter buckle an’ bend.

Anthony You yelled to me and my brother to push all the prams out.

Lily Too right I did. Just got ‘em out in time, we did.

Anthony The whole floor came down. Men and women screaming

as down they came.

Lily Bit the dust. The whole bang lot. Just as we got the last pram out.

Anthony Cuts and bruises. Bleeding legs. Round came the ambulance.

Had to stop mum crying. Then it hit them. None of the babies

killed or hurt. Nor us neither. We’d got them all out. Thanks to

you, Lilpill.

12

12


Lily Aw it was nothin’.

Anthony If you hadn’t been there on duty. Nursemaid to rich Mrs Jackson’s

twins. If you hadn’t pushed the panic button, all those babies’d

have been crushed to death, my brother and me too.

Lily Codswallop! You’d have got onto the danger yourselves soon

enough. Once your brother copped that sawdust in’s eye…

Enter Merle.

Merle G’day, Lilypilly. Well, I’ve found it, Anthony. Out the back of

the library under a pile of throw-outs. You can take over that back

room long as you like and mine your ole memory nuggets deep

as you like.

Anthony Back room’s not my scene. Thought you’d be bringing the

typewriter down here.

Merle That dinosaur Olivetti! Weighs a ton.

Anthony Don’t you have a trolley or something?.

Lily Yeah, that ole books trolley I useta shove round the kiddies’ room

in me salad days.

Merle Can’t shove it down the street, Anthony.

Anthony Well I’ll go up and lug it down.

13

13


Merle Can’t come out the library doors without my permission.

Anthony But I want to work away here. On the park bench up there.

Between Old Stoney and the stringybarks.

Lily Ironbarks.

Anthony Well where I can smell the stringybarks down past Peter’s Creek.

Council haven’t ringbarked them yet. I checked them out, out the

bus window as we came in this morning.

(Sings) “I think that I shall never see…”

Merle (Joins him) “A poem lovely as a tree…”

Lilypilly laughs.

Anthony (Leaving) “A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast…

Lily Glad I got him and his brother out from under that house.

Merle What house?

Lily Long story, Merley-contrerlie. Guess you’ll read it in his memoirs.

Merle Anthony’s memoirs! All we got round here’s the West Wirralong

Bugle printery. They won’t even print my poems.

Lily ‘Bout time our bugle editor turned up, eh?

Merle Oh Aub’s always late. Specially for Centenary Committee

14

14


meetings.

Lily Yeah well I’ve got other fish to fry. Just ‘cos Aub’s asked me to

be on the committee so’s I can give – what’s he call it?

Merle “Indigenous input”.

Lily (Laughing) “Indigenous input”. The way he said it! Made it

sound like he wanted me ter pour a bucketta mud inter

Wirrawong’s billabong.

Merle Now, Lily. You know Aub’s always well-intentioned.

Lily ‘Course he’s well intentioned. He’s got well intentions enough to

bust the wall of your dad’s stormwater dam. But we’re gunna need

more than good intentions if we’re not ter see this Centenary thing

turn into a local version of all that Federation bullshit we went

through years ago.

Merle That’s why we want you on the Committee, Lilypilly. To

contribute to the Time Capsule and all.

Lily Contribute to the what?

Merle Time Capsule. It’s something we’ll bury in the ground, containing

samples of every aspect of West Wirrawong life and culture, and

we’ll dig it up in 50 years.

15

15


Lily Will we now?

Merle Metaphorically speaking.

Lily Oh yeah. As they say, “our sons and daughters” will. Well, I’ve

only got Nerrida. Not my daughter. Not really my niece, your

way a’ talkin’. Calls me Aunty, though. You know.

Merle I know. Nerrida’s a darling. Wish I was her Aunty.

Lily So who’s these sons and daughters of ours gunna dig up this Time

Capsule crap come fifty years, eh?

Merle I meant…metaphorically speaking.

Lily Look, Merly mine, just ‘cos you’s a poet doesn’ mean you gotta be

mouthin’ metaphors every second breath.

Merle OK, Lily. You win. Guess I’ll leave it to Aub to outline his ideas

for the contents of the West Wirrawong Centenary Time Capsule.

But I do know he’s sincere when he says he wants you to decide

the indigenous input into the samples of our life and culture which

it will contain.

Lily (Smiling wryly) “Samples of our life and culture”. Hmm.

Remember the mission school we used to have past Peter’s Creek?

Merle Willesey’s Waterhole?

16

16


Lily Near Willesey’s. Pastor and his wife. She was…well, meant well,

I suppose….Useta get us to sing stuff….(Remembering)

“Samples of our life and culture…” (Starts to sing)

“All things bright and beautiful…”

Enter Billy, done up as a caricature of a bush poet, even to

corks hanging from the brim of his overdosed bush brown hat.

He has a bugle at his side. He carries a grotesque time

capsule, resembling a cross between an explosive shell and a

mini space-rocket.

Merle and Lily are stunned. But Lily, after a few seconds’

silence, resumes her song, partly in self-defence. As she

repeats “All things bright and beautiful”, Billy puts the bugle

to his lips and plays the hymn along with her,. As if in support

of Lily, Merle joins in.

Lily, Merle “All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small…”

Billy Oh yes, mon enfants, ye bright and beautiful innocents of

West Wirrawong, oh yea, it is those very bright and beautiful

samples of your simple yet uplifting Austral bush culture that

we wish to include in this….(Lifting the Capsule)….. in this

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17


impregnable, modest yet commodious and inclusive

encapsulation…your….your very own…(Blows his bugle in

fanfare….Time Capsule!

As Merle and Lily gape at Billy and the Capsule, Stoney, drawn

by the bugle blast, rushes in unnoticed by the others, and

climbs his rostrum, taking up his military pose, but gaping

down at Billy.

Billy Well, now I’ve shown you this magnificent encapsulation,

allow me to introduce myself. Billy the Boy, newly appointed

editor of your esteemed local newspaper.

Merle Where’s Aub?

Lily Yeah. Where’s our Aub? He’s the editor of The Bugle.

Billy Grieve ye not. Your esteemed Aub’s in good hands.

Lily (Alarmed) He’s…he’s not…

Billy No, no, no, good woman…….

Lily Don’t you “good woman” me, condescending shit!

Billy Forgive a stranger his formal tone. I assure you your Aub was

driven to the city last night by the new proprietor of the West

Wirrawong Bugle, Fred Brannigan, my father, who has

18

18


appointed me acting editor until your…your, it would seem,

well-loved Aub is deemed fit to return to newspaper journalism.

Stoney (Loud shout) Bloody hell!

Billy looks up alarmed. Merle and Lily look up at Stoney, then

confidentially at one another.

Lily Crows pretty vocal this time o’year.

Billy Daddy told me to be ready for anything.

Lily Just as well.

Merle Now look here, Mr Billy…

Billy Billy Brannigan.

Merle Billy Brannigan. Now, we all knew The Bugle, founded (may

I say) 62 years ago..

Billy I know.

Merle 62 years ago by Aub’s grandfather with money from the

sale of part of his pastoral run…

Billy I know. His grandfather’s pastoral run called Osterley after

where his ancestors worked on an estate in England

Lily Shit!

Billy Daddy is always thorough in his research.

19

19


Merle Into people whose property he purchases.

Billy You don’t have to get nasty.

Merle Look, lad. We all knew The Bugle was losing money and we

were very relieved when Aub told us your father had bought it

and paid the debts. But Aub is an outstanding editor, and…

Billy Aub may well be outstanding. But to put it bluntly, he’s old-

World. Outmoded. Sales of The Bugle have been dropping

alarmingly. It needs new-generation journalists, forward-

thinking innovative journalists like me to regenerate our rural

weeklies…

Merle The Bugle’s a bi-weekly, you idiot!!

Lily Sock it to ‘im, Merley-whirlie! Sock it to ‘im!

Billy I know it’s a bi-weekly. But I think that’s the core, the very

heart and core, of the problem we’re facing. Now, Dad and I,

we want to re-market Wirrawong’s beloved Bugle as a big,

bright, bionic WEEKLY.

Lily Youse just gotta be jokin’.

Billy No, we’ve done our market research. After all, it’s ridiculous

to compete with the metropolitan dailies. People don’t go to

their locals to read about the war in Iraq –

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20


Merle Maybe not, but local coverage of national cultural issues is

essential –

Billy (Stumped) What?

Merle I thought I was being crystal clear. We want our locals to provide

a forum for nation-wide issues of cultural significance.

Anthony, pushing a trolley with a typewriter on it, enters.

Anthony I agree.

Billy Maybe, but Dad and I maintain that daily news is not the core

concern of a rural journal.

The others ignore him, giving Anthony their attention.

Merle However’d you manage it, Anthony?

Anthony (Playing cool) Manage what, now?

Lily Getting’ that dinosaur out the library door?

Anthony No big deal, just slammed it aboard and shoved it out.

Merle Dot Crichton’s on the door today. She’s a stickler for

regulations. How’d you talk her round?

Anthony Oh, the old school charm, you know. She was one of my past

students.

Lily (Looking at typewriter) Does it still work? Me ole aunty had

21

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one like that. Give it away to the Salvos centuries back.

Anthony Ah, does it work? Good question, Lilypilly. Let’s see now. You

there – (Glances at Billy, who is fuming at being side-lined by

Anthony’s entrance) – got any spare paper in that little

monstrosity of yours?

(Seeing some paper protruding from inside the capsule, he

snatches a page, to Billy’s fury, then sets typewriter on a rostrum,

twists sheet of paper in and types noisily)….Hmmm…First line of

Anthony’s memoirs, commenced this day of days in the epicenter

of West Wirrawong ”THE…QUICK…BROWN…FOX…JUMPED…

OVER…THE…LAZY…DOG…” Done it!

Merle “Lazy dog”! Lazy log.

Anthony Just testing.

Lily Aunty Jilly always typed “lazy dog.”

Anthony You sure, Lilly?

Lily Sure I’m sure. Always dog. Always.

Billy (Fuming at the lack of attention he’s getting) Look, when you lot

have finished clowning around over logs and foxes or whatever

you’re feeding that outdated dinosaur with, perhaps we could

get into our Centenary Committee meeting.

22

22


Anthony Centenary Committee? Without our Aub? Without our

chairman?

Billy Not the chairman now. Aub’s not. I am.

Anthony You? Will someone fill me in?

Billy The chairman is …ex officio. Whoever’s boss of The Bugle. As

from today, that’s me.

Merle (Awkward cough) Aub’s gone.

Anthony (Alarmed) Gone?

Merle Aub’s been…been deposed. Meet Billy the Boy…

Billy Billy Brannigan.

Merle Billy’s The Bugle’s new editor.

Billy Acting editor. Aub’s been taken by Daddy to Brizzie for re-

training.

Anthony Daddy?

Lily Billy’s dad has bought The Bugle.

Anthony Come again?

Merle It’s a long story.

Anthony I can wait.

Merle (Looking at audience) Yes, but can they?

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Anthony But Aub phoned me only last week. Asked me to come up

and judge the one-act play competition. For the centenary.

Merle Did he now? I thought that was to be my job.

Anthony Aub told me he thought an outsider would be better for judge.

Lily You’re no outsider, Anthony.

Anthony Am now. Don’t live here anymore. Aub reckoned I’d be impartial.

Merle (Half-annoyed, half-amused) That bugger, Aub. Can’t beat him.

Giving me the chop for outsider Anthony.

Lily (Strongly) Anthony’s no outsider.

Billy Anyway, no problem. I’m the new chairman and I’ll back Aub on

that.

Merle (Teasing) Will you now, Billy Boy?

Billy Best to have an outsider to judge local comps.

Lily (Louder still) Anthony’s no outsider.

Billy Look…look, Jilly….

Lily Lily!

Merle Lilypilly’s our oldest resident.

Billy Well, Lilypilly, you’ve made your point. But Aub wanted

Anthony for judge and I, as new chair of the centenary

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24


committee, endorse that. Anyway, Anthony, there stacks of

centenary stuff in Aub’s old office. And there’s a pile of plays

a mile high waiting for judgey-wudgey to just get stuck into.

Lily (Laughing) “Judgey-wudgey”.

Merle He’s learning our lingo, eh Lilypilly?

Lily Sure is, Merley-whirlie.

Billy (Smugly) Dad did tell me to listen to local idiom.

Anthony Oh, bless you, Big Daddy!

Merle and Lily are close to hysterics. Billy looks puzzledly

pleased.

I’ll do my best to be a judge, and a good judge too. But first, may

I be so bold as to enquire as to the origins of that space rocket

there?

Billy (Patting his baby) It’s my Time Capsule.

Anthony Yes, I can read, Billy. But may I ask where on earth you picked up

that particular example of the species?

Billy Dad designed it. I made it.

Anthony In your very own backyard shed in Brizzie?

Billy Yes.

25

25


Merle (Half-hiding her laugh) We believe you.

Lily explodes with laughter.

Billy (Unconscious of Merle’s sarcasm) You see, once Dad told me

we’d taken over The Bugle, I started reading all the back numbers.

Got onto the Time Capsule proposals and couldn’t resist getting to

work on a prototype at once. Checked out all the different

designs I could find from here and there - - school centenaries,

town centenaries –

Lily Bushfire centenaries –

Billy You sending me up?

Lily (Masking up) No way, Billy boy.

Billy Anyway, all the centenary time capsules I could check out,

Internet and all –

Merle You surfed them, eh?

Lily Great balls o’fire!

Anthony The capsule to cap all capsules.

Billy Solid, yet symmetrical. Capacious, yet capable of being interred

in –

Lily In what?

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26


Billy Well, in the ground.

Anthony Where?

Merle What ground?

Lily Whose ground?

Billy West Wirrawong’s ground.

Lily Got permission?

Billy From whom?

Lily Original owners.

Billy Do we have to get Council permission to dig a capsule into the

ground?

Lily Not talkin’ ‘bout Council. Talkin’ ‘bout original owners.

Billy Oh, you mean the local tribe?

Lily Not just one tribe round ‘ere. Come from lotsa places. My people

weren’t original tribe. I could put you onto right people, though.

Billy Look, all I want to do – all we want to do –

Merle We?

Billy Well, this whole Time Capsule idea…I’ve read the letters to the

editor after Aub first brought it up in The Bugle. I thought the

whole Centenary Committee was behind it.

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27


Merle Behind the idea, yes. But the details….yet to be decided. Like…

Like where we want to put it.

Billy How’s about over there…in the town centre…just dig into the

bush plot under the Statue Soldier.

Stoney (Startled) Hang on a jiff!

All look up. Stoney freezes. Merle and Lily exchange a wink.

Lily Carn the crows!

Anthony Not sure that’d be the right spot. Lots of people round here

feel that’s sacred ground.

Lily All sacred ground.

Anthony Yes…but, Lily, I mean that’s the war memorial.

Lily War sacred, eh?

Anthony Not war sacred. But…the sacrifice…the lads who never came back.

All on the ground freeze.

Stoney intones.

Stoney They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

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We will remember them…

The others unfreeze.

Anthony Funny. I was remembering when I first came back to West

Wirrawong to teach here. Must have been…it was, thirteen

years after I left here as a boy. First year teaching here I had

a room in the Royal… just across the road there. Came Anzac

morning and I was woken by the sound of a bugle. Last Post

it was. Stumbled out onto the verandah, tucking my sleeping

singlet into my undies, and there I looked down on the people

standing silent under the statue. Then the bugle changed to

Reveille…

Billy tries to blow a reveille.

…stop it. That’s awful.

Lily He tried.

Anthony Then some old ex-digger started to say the Ode. Got the words

a bit wrong, of course. “Condemn” for “contemn”. “Not grow

old” for “grow not old”..

Merle They all do that.

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Lily Bugger it up, eh?

Merle Never mind what poor old Laurence Binyon really wrote.

Billy Poor old who?

Anthony You can’t be serious.

Merle Editors! The Ode’s author was Laurence Binyon, Billy Boy.

Anthony When does this One Act Play competition have to be judged?

Merle Next Monday.

Anthony You’ve got to be joking.

Merle The West Wirrawong Bacchantes are champing at the bit to

start rehearsals.

Billy West Wirrawong Bacchantes?

Anthony Used to be West Wirrawong Amateur Dramatic Society – the

WADS - in my day.

Billy WADS? What?

Anthony West Wirrawong Amateur Dramatic Society. Get it?

Billy (Sheepish grin) Sorta.

Merle Anthony, you weren’t back last year when we had this way out

drama teacher up the High School. Talked the local Thespies into

doing that weird one by Euripedes.

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Anthony Not Medea!

Merle No. The Bacchantes. You know, where the chorus women go

crazy and rip up all the animals. Said it’d relate to what goes on

down our meatworks. Anyway, good for publicity. The Bugle

gave it the colour centrefold. Even got a few paragraphs and a

piccy in The Courier Mail.

Billy Courier Mail!

Lily Shit, eh!

Merle Anyway, the local lads and lassies are just itching to start

rehearsing whatever wins the one-act centenary comp.

Anthony And the result’s to be in by next Monday. Bloody Aub never told

me that.

Billy Don’t wish to be critical. But Aub was starting to get a bit lax on

details. Better get stuck into that pile of plays up The Bugle office.

Sooner the better.

Anthony (Going) Only way I can do it by Monday. You’ll have to be my

co-judge, Merle.

Merle On one condition.

Lily Onya, Merley-girlie.

Merle We’ll get this trolley up The Bugle office. Put the plays in this.

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Get them all up to the library.

Billy You’ll need ten trolley trips I reckon.

Merle Whatever. But we’ll do the judging up in the Library. Down the

Bugle office, we’d be stifled by the absence of Aub.

Billy You mean by the presence of me.

Merle No need to take it close and personal, Billy. Now Lily. How about

you join us for the judging?

Anthony Great idea. Come on, Lil.

Lily No way. Have to get back up to Sunsetholme. Three batches of

scones to make for mornin’ tea for all us oldies up there.

Anthony Well, save a few for the oldies down here.

Lily No way. All I can do to save the crumbs for the cats.

Lily, Anthony, Merle and Billy leave.

Stoney How’ll we manage, eh? Have to wait till Monday for the

winner of the West Wirrawong Centenary One-Act Play

Comp. Ten trolleyloads of entries pouring in from all over the

nation – and perchance from across the Great Waters – and there

can be only one winner to rouse the Bacchantes. Hmmm…how’s

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your Geography, folks? The Bacchantes. Methinks the

Bacchantes came from near where I’ve been … Turkey. The

Bacchantes are… well, Grecian from the mountains of

Thebes…mountain women. Oh so lovely when they’re in their

peaceful mode. But oh so savage when they get stirred up and

striking the ground with their THYRSUSES. You know… the

thyrsus? It’s …sorta…

(lifts rifle and stabs it down)….sorta like this. A thrysus ain’t a

rifle but it’s a bit like a rifle ‘cos it can scare the living daylights

outa people. Those Bacchantes, they’d strike the ground with

thyrsus sticks with vine leaves round ‘em and sometimes wine

would spout outa the earth. And sometimes they’d drink the

wine and start singin’ and dancin’ like ..

Waves an arm and a leg.

and they’d start to rave and get savage and tear poor little lambs

and moo cows to bits. Fair dinkum. But what about me? When

they first gave me this …

Shakes rifle.

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33


on the boat to Egypt back in 1914. First World War. Only we

never knew there’d be a Second, did we, eh? When they first give

me this before we caught the troopship to Egypt, they said, “This is

your rifle, soldier. The rifle is the soldier’s best friend.” Then when

we got to Egypt we had to do bayonet drill.

Fixes bayonet on rifle.

and had to run down these trenches dug in the sand and rip the

guts outa bags of straw hangin’ from ropes at the end of the trench.

Starts to demonstrate.

Can’t do it up here. Have to come down.

Climbs down.

You won’t tell on me, will youse? There we were in Egypt, never

knowing nothing about what was to happen the year after 1914.

There we were, doing these runs down the trenches with bayonets

at the ends of our rifles. An’ we had to yell like banshees. The Sar-

Majors forced us to.

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34


Does a run, yelling loudly, stabs over rostrum and knocks type-

writer off.

Oh shit, got Anthony’s old Olivetti right in the guts.

Drops rifle. Picks up typewriter.

Looks like I’ve made a real good job of it, too. Poor ole Anthony.

Where’ll you type your memoirs now, eh?

Pushes some typewriter keys.

Now Murdoch. You had a typewriter like this, didn’t you Keith?

On that Isle of Imbros, off Gallipoli, 1915. Keith Murdoch. Thank

God you got that Gallipoli letter to the British Prime Minister

exposing the hopelessness of it all. The senseless slaughter.

Otherwise…God knows how long it might have gone on. But,

thanks to you Murdoch, there was a withdrawal ordered…..

Finds the Time Capsule.

And this old buddy, eh. You take me back too. Those shells

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exploding at night… over the beach, over the cliffs, over the sea.

Shrapnel falling down. Into the trenches, into the moonlit surf,

onto the decks of the hospital ships. Shrapnel falling, steel

striking steel, horrible hail…

Clutches his forehead.

“Lest we forget, lest we…”

Blackout.

Lights Up. Stoney has gone.

Enter Merle and Anthony.

Anthony Do you think there’s any hope, Merle?

Merle By Monday? Frankly, no.

Anthony The Bacchantes will have to be patient.

Merle You don’t know the Bacchantes, Anthony. They’ll tear us limb

from limb.

Anthony Well, let’s go for the Under Milk Wood.

Merle Pardon?

Anthony The Under Milk Wood lookalike – soundalike.

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Merle Beg yours?

Anthony Wasn’t it in your short list?

Merle Dylan Thomas isn’t eligible for Wirrawong’s One Act comp.

Anthony More’s the pity. You know, I distinctly remember passing you

under our ghost Gums or whatever she called it.

Merle She?

Anthony Emily Austen was the nom-de-plume, I seem to recall.

Merle Nom-de-plumes are notorious for cross-dressing. I once helped

judge the state-wide regional library poetry comp. The winner,

posing as Sylvia Plathway, turned out to be Theodore Hughes.

Anthony Well, even if our Emily Austen turns out to be Branwell Bronte, I

still reckon Under Our Ghost Gums is our best bet.

Merle Oh, that one! I think it was Blue Gums.

Improvising from memory of the Script and also sending it up.

Night-time in Blue Gum Town. Once again

blackout comes, deeper than billabong.

Careful-stored candles plucked out of cupboards

flicker from window-panes, betraying each occupant.

Old Major Marmalade, retired from military

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dreams of the comrades now Middle East sand-duned.

“I hope you remembered to pass on those messages,

letter and love-tokens, for Susy McLean.”

Percy the Postman, passing each letter-box,

regretting he failed to steam open the secrets,

imagines what meanings the hand-writing hides…

Anthony Come on, it wasn’t as bad as that.

Merle Well, given that a condition for the competition was, that

each play had to have a focus on an aspect of small-town life in

Australia, I suppose Dylan Thomas’s poetic perve on a Welsh

sea-side village is a relevant model. But is there one original

character?

Anthony I think that young paramedic breaks new ground. That scene

where she resuscitates the old dairy farmer who’s been struck by

lightning.

Merle Too melodramatic for me.

Anthony Dairy farmers have been known to be struck by lightning. My

first year teaching up here I got asked out to a dairy farm some

weekends. First time I ever milked a cow, the boys (one of them

was in my Grade Nine class) played a joke on me by putting a

bull into the bails –

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Merle I’m waiting.

Anthony What for?

Merle The farmer struck by lightning.

Anthony Oh, that?

Merle You’re losing it a bit, Anthony.

Anthony Wait till you’re seventy plus. No. I mean the boys on that farm

told me about the farmer struck by lightning on another farm –

Merle And did the lady paramedic save him?

Anthony West Wirrawong didn’t have a paramedic, male or female,

back then.

Merle You really think that resuscitation scene could be staged

credibly?

Anthony Hmm…It’d be a challenge. I suppose.

Merle Anyway, it needs updating.

Anthony What?

Merle The CPR Resus! It’s two initial quick breaths now. Not five.

Anthony Nitpicker.

Merle And…look. I’ll show you. I’ve had to update my Resus.

Starts doing resuscitation on Anthony.

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Enter Billy.

Billy Ullo…ullo…ullo. What’s –

Anthony Nothing’s going on here.

Merle I’m just resuscitating this old fella, according to new CPR and

EAR.

Billy Got a winner yet?

Anthony What?

Billy The One Act play comp?

Merle We’re attempting to shorten the short list.

Air Raid cum Fire Brigade siren sounds.

Billy What the heck’s that?

Anthony City slicker. Cut your ear-teeth on West Wirrawong’s Fire

Brigade, laddy.

Billy (Looking round) Where’s the fire?

Merle Don’t you know?

Billy What?

Merle Thought you told us you’d read The Bugle’s back numbers. It was

in last week’s.

Billy What was?

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40


Merle About the Fire Brigade’s siren practice due this very day to the

minute.

Anthony Takes me back.

Merle Back to what?

Anthony Air raid siren.

Billy Air raid!

Anthony Stand by for history lesson, Mr Acting Editor. West Wirrawong’s

Fire Brigade siren is a bit of well-preserved ancient history. In

World War Two, when I was –

Enter Lily.

Lily Knee-high to a grasshopper –

Anthony Yes. Way back in 1942, this very melody now enchanting your

ears – well it was our air raid siren.

Billy Air raids? Out here?

Merle Teach him some history, Teach. Like you taught us.

Anthony You see, Acting Editor. That siren takes me back. Reminds me

why I came here as a nipper. Me Mum and Dad thought Brizzy

was gunna be bombed by the Japs. So did most of Queensland’s

coastal population think their cities and towns was gunna be.

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Well, Mum, me, and me young brother Mick hopped on the

Westlander –

Lily Train wasn’t called Westlander then, Teach.

Anthony Thanks, Teacher Aide. Well, with a whole mob of scaredy cats,

we got on this train heading west and went choof-choofing up

the Great Dividing Range and nor-west to here. Thought we’d

be safe from those big bad bombs. But one day, in the convent

school where me and Mick were scratching away on our slates,

this shit-scary great siren went off and kept going and going. And

Sister Benignus, this nun who’d just handed out all the slate

pencils, said –

Lily “Out yers all go and into the slit trenches the men dug last

weekend.”

Anthony More or less.

Lily Sister Benignus never said “yers”, of course. That’s my

contribution.

Anthony Well, you were there helping her, weren’t you?

Lily Yeah. With the pegs.

Anthony Pegs for our toothy-pegs.

Lily I was helpin’ out the nuns as a domestic round the convent,

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two days a week it was. And Sister Benignus, this real good gun

nun, she said, “Grab all the pegs, please, Lilypilly, and help me

dole them out.” “Course they was wooden pegs. No plastic back

them days. An’ when all you little cheekie-weekies was deep

down those slit trenches out the convent backyard –

Anthony hops between two rostra, acting out the trench

business.

Anthony Mucky-yucky they were, too, down the bottom, those slit

trenches. There was lots of mud left still greasy from the summer

rain a fortnight back. And all our feet were stuck in the mud.

Lily (Laughing) Yeah, and there was me helping Sister Benignus to

hand out a peg to each of youse.

Anthony (Laughing) Yes. And we said, “What’s the pegs for, Sister?”

Lily Yes. An’ she said, “Shove ‘em between your teeth, children.” And

youse all said –

Anthony “What for, Sister?” And Sister said –

Lily “So’s your teeth won’t chomp together and break to bits from the

bombs’ vibrations when they rain down on West Wirrawong.

That’s why, children.” And youse all laughed. And Sister

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Benignus said –

Anthony “It’s not funny. You’ll laugh the other side of your face when those

Zero dive-bombers come.”

Lily Yes, that’s what Sister said. But – gun-nun an’ all, she got it wrong

about those Zeros. Zeros was fighter-planes, not bomb-

droppers.

Anthony Anyway, Zeros or not, they never flew over West Wirrawong. We

looked up and all we saw was clouds and crows.

Lily An’ an eagle goin’ roun’ and roun”, high over Mount Muller.

Anthony But I did see a couple of hawks diving down on Blade Mountain.

Then the “All Clear” siren came. Trench drill all over for the day.

Lily An’ youse all climbed outa the trenches. An’ I helped Sister

Benignus hose the mud off your feet before you went back up the

the steps into class.

Anthony Sister Benignus…remember when she got us all praying after the

Centaur was torpedoed?

Lily Hospital ship Centaur… Went down off Moreton Bay and we was

all crying when Sister Benignus told us ‘bout Sister Savage.

Anthony “Sister Savage, the sole nurse saved.” And I remember thinking,

“Sister Savage. Funny name for a nurse.”

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Lily Lost her rosary beads. Slipped out of her fingers on the raft where

she was praying with the survivors for those gone down.

Anthony And Archbishop Duhig, so the Catholic Leader said, gave her

his own rosary beads.

Lily Made of mother of pearl.

Billy (During most of this, he’s been tinkering with the Capsule).

Any chance this history lesson grinding to a halt?

Merle There’s acting editors for you! No respect for a nation’s heritage.

Billy Well, about time we decide what’s to go inside this Capsule. Plus,

who’s going to bury it?

Merle My vote goes to our Lilypilly.

Lily Me? You just gotta be jokin’.

Merle You’re our oldest resident.

Lily “Spose I am. But that’s why I reckon you should get one of the

kiddies to do it. One of them should still be around whenever it

gets dug up.

Anthony When will it get dug up?

Billy I think the plaque will say, “To be brought to the surface in 50

years”.

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Lily Crikey!

Anthony Two thousand and fifty-six.

Merle Teach can add up.

Billy Now, about time we finalised the contents. Aub’s left a list

in the office. It’s quite satisfactory, on the whole…

Merle (Sarcastic cough) Fancy!

Billy Representative samples of local cultural and sporting bodies,

agricultural statistics, names of current councillors…

Lily yawns.

Merle (Hopefully) Local literature?

Billy Funny you should ask that. Now, don’t want to be pushy, but I

thought you all just might like a preview of a poem I completed

last night, while you were busy judging those one-act plays.

Anthony Billy the Boy…you, a poet?

Lily Crikey-wikie!

Billy Oh it’s just a little thing. But I hope it reflects the ethos of a place

I’m just getting to know. (Takes out seet) Care to hear it?

Merle Be our guest.

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(Billy hands her the sheet).

You want me to read it?

Billy Frankly, no.

(Merle gives show of mock despair)

Well, it’s mine, you see. And I stayed up half the night learning it.

I’d be grateful if you’d be so good as to prompt me, Merle.

(Strikes a pose. Ready to recite).

Merle What’s the title?

Billy Title? Oh, forgot to give it one.

Lily Gotta have a title.

Anthony Every good deed has a name, Billy.

Billy Well… how about … how about …”Our Town”.

Merle Afraid Thornton Wilder pipped you at the post.

Billy Thornton…?

Anthony Wilder. Playwright. Americano. Wrote “Our Town”.

Billy How…how about… I call mine: “Bugle Billy’s Ballad..”

Merle applauds.

Thanks Merle. But… poem first, you know.

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He declaims, needing a few prompts. Improvise these.

Now there’s movement round West Wirrawong for the

time is drawing near

When we’ll celebrate our town’s centenary

And we’ll do it with the best of them, of that you needn’t fear

And the banners will be out for all to see.

When Bill Berthelsen and his brothers took up their cattle run

And pitched their tents beside old Peter’s Creek

The going wasn’t easy, it wasn’t just fun in the sun

But they battled through the bright times and the bleak.

And many others followed from those pioneers’ first ploughs

They planted fields of corn that towered tall.

They raised the big beef cattle and the herds of jersey cows

They battled on, they triumphed over all.

From the heights of our Mount Muller to the lucerne on the flats

The land is yielding sorghum and sweet corn

And we get along just famous except for friendly spats

And the pioneers who’ve passed we sadly mourn.

All applaud. Billy bows.

Merle Yes. I think we must make room for that.

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She puts it in the Capsule.

Billy Of course, it’s just my first draft.

Lily (Mock innocence) Really?

Billy And it’s only in the Bush Poetry category.

Merle No time to get bogged down with genres. But, Billy, you know

there’s other local poets busting to get into the capsule. There’s

our pumpkin-sconner Glenda Farrington, you know. She’s

been runner-up twice running in the Countrywomen’s poetry

comp.

Billy Glenda?

Merle Farringdon. Not quite in your league but I think we should

squeeze her in. She’s great on goannas.

Billy By all means.

Merle And there’s someone else, too, who has written a poem, though

it’s not quite finished yet. About our town icon.

Billy Town icon?

Merle Old Stoney. We call him old but that’s just ‘cos he’s been round

for ages. You see, he grows not old.

They freeze.

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Enter Stoney, mounts his perch, freezes.

They unfreeze.

He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier

centreing the civic square, taking no sides

as round his perch the traffic flows –

the four-wheel drives, farmers’ utilities,

the beat-up heaps, the sonorous motor bikes,

the feet in boots, or rubber thongs, or bare

this way and that, sober or staggering

on bitumen plain where once the bullocks strained

and, backwards of bullock days, the Dreaming’s dust.

All applaud.

Lily The Dreamin’, eh?

Billy (Guardedly) Hmmm… Yes I think we should find a spot in the

Time Capsule for that one. Who wrote it?

Merle I think it’s one of Ann’s.

Billy Anne. Anne who?

Merle I think she’s Anne-Onymous.

All freeze.

Stoney steps down, kisses Merle and leaves.

All unfreeze.

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Billy Well, when you’re next in touch with this poetess –

Merle (Firmly) Poet!

Billy - this Anne-Onymous, you might ask her to post a copy of her

poem down to my Bugle office.

Goes to Capsule.

Merle I don’t think the poem’s finished yet.

Lily Neither’s The Dreaming.

Billy goes, taking Capsule.

Merle Bloody idiot!

Lily You tell him, Annie-Onommie.

Anthony (Sarcastically) Means well.

Merle Wirrawong Bugle Boy! Not sure if I want my poem in with his

jingle.

Anthony Heard worse.

Merle Yes, but I mean! Been here a couple of days, soaks up a summary of

local history, churns out his clichés of “pioneers’ first ploughs” and

books it prime space in our Centenary Time Capsule.

Anthony It’s the nature of the beast. Every editor thinks he’s a poet

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misplaced.

Lily Yer know, I bin thinkin’.

Anthony Haven’t we all, Lily?

Lily No. I bin thinkin’ all this Centenary stuff’s just a –

Anthony Load of shit?

Lily No.

Anthony No?

Lily No. It’s a cartload of ole crap.

Merle (Pretending shock horror) Pioneers, plug your ears!

Anthony I’m with you in a way, Lilypilly. In fact, this whole anniversary

thing – wedding anniversaries, silver anniversaries, golden and

diamond anniversaries, centenaries, bi-centenaries..

Lily One day, tri-centenaries…

Anthony It’s all so … well, frankly, Euro-centric, Anglo-centric…

Merle Anglo-Saxon-centric..

Anthony In a nutshell, this whole centenary thing’s cutting things a bit

short.

Lily Too right it is. Adds up to an insult…

Anthony To the original people here. Yes, it does. We’re so linear with our

history. So trim with our time zones, so definitive with our

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dates. On this day to the dot, blah-blah- blah bloody years ago,

Captain Rear Vice Admiral Arthur-Charles-Georgie-Porgie-Phillip

raised the BRITISH flag above the sandy-wandy shell-scattered

seaweedy waters of Port Jackson, Botany Bay… God save mad

King George the Turd…rah, rah, rah.

Merle I think you’ve made your point.

Anthony Come again?

Merle I think I get you.

Anthony You should, Annie Onymous, with that poem of yours,

restrospecting to the Dreaming and so on.

Merle The Dreaming’s not just the past, is it Lilypill?

Lillypilly shakes her head.

Anthony No. Yet the way we go on as if our past here started when brave

Bill Berthelsen and his three brothers, settled…

…settled, as we say, as if they were butterflies that suddenly

alighted on Terra Firma. Or we say they took up…took up land

along what we call Peter’s Creek because Bill Berthelsen’s wife’s

sister’s firstborn happened to be christened Peter…

Merle All very well, teach. But…

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Lily Was waitin’ for the but, Merlie…

Merle Well, here it comes. Sorry if it hurts…

Lily I can take it. Had plenty of practice, you know…

Merle To be fair…

Lily I know the next bit.

Merle Please, Lilypilly. To be fair, we’re only saying we’re about to

celebrate the centenary of the town. We’re not claiming for a

moment that it’s the centenary of all human life in this part of

the world. Our pioneers built this town, that’s for sure.

Lily Built it on what?

Anthony Built it out of what?

Lily Built it with what? What stones? What trees? Look, Merlie,

hope this doesn’t hurt…but…look around, girlie. Look, we never

had no fences…when I say we, well, wasn’ really my people here

first, my gran’ was forcibly moved here, shoved in the Community

the Gov’ment set up down Willesey’s.

Merle Willesey’s.

Lily Willesey’s Waterhole. You know. Peter’s Creek. The other side.

Merle I know.

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Lily Bet you don’ know ‘bout them stones. Marked the tribal

boundaries, they did. No need fer fences. Then the white

fellers moved ‘em. Split ‘em up fer buildin’ blocks. Oh yeah,

“only stones” you say, “only stones…”

Merle moves to hug her. After token resistance, Lilypilly

accepts.

Enter Billy.

Brushes his hands.

Billy Safely stowed.

Anthony What?

Billy Safely stowed. The Capspule. Back of The Bugle front room.

Ready for next month.

Anthony (Pointing to the women) Shut up about capsule. Shut up about whole

bloody centenary, you take my advice.

Lily (Moving away from Merle) I can take it. Bin West Wirrawong

bloody time longer any youse. Lily can bleat like Centenary

sheep.

Billy I’d like to make it clear that The Bugle will be happy to publicise

any indigenous attitudes to the Centenary, including those that

may be critical of the concept.

Lily (Laughing) “Critical of the concept!” Gift of the gab, eh Merle?

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Billy Now, there’s not only the Time Capsule to be thought of. There’s

the whole order of the procession to be worked out.

Lily Procession? Shit, thought we’d worked that out long ago.

Merle Aub showed us the plan for the procession last week.

Billy The plan…ah yes. But…best laid plans…

Lily …”Mice an’ men”, we know.

Billy It’s alright about the first float. Indigenous artefacts.

Lily (Mock tears) Pity we gave Captain Cook the kybosh for prime

spot.

Anthony Captain Cook! Did he make the short list? Jimmy Cook never

came within cooee of West Wirrawong. All he ever did was mis-

name the Glasshouse Mountains. Thought they looked like

bleedin’ glass furnaces back where he was born in bleedin’

Yorkshire.

Lily Pity never landed near ‘em. Might have cottoned onto those beaut

Gubbi Gubbi names. Beerwah –

Merle - - - Tibrogargan –

Billy (Crooking his neck) -- and coward son, “Crookneck” Coonowrin.

Lily (Laughing) Even Billy Boy knows Crookneck.

Billy Read it on the postcard, mate. Bought one in Landsborough.

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Anthony Bully for you then.

Lily Read it on the postcard, you say. So, you can read the rocks, then?

Billy Come again. Read the rocks?

Lily Musta been past Beerwah-Tibrogargan-Coonowrin lots times

drivin’ Brizzie-Sunshine coast, eh? I went by train. You an’ big

Daddy drove, I bet.

Billy (Guardedly) Yes.

Lily So, you know which mountain’s which, eh?

Billy Well, know Coonowrin. Got the …

(Apes it)… crook neck from his dad’s nullah-nullah.

Lily Why?

Billy Er – not sure. Wasn’t it something tribal?

Lily Something tribal! I give up.

Anthony Said you read the postcard. Remember how his father got angry

because the son wouldn’t save the mother from the flood?

Billy Oh yeah. That’s it. Father got angry…because…

Merle …the son…

Lily …wouldn’ save …

Anthony …the mother…

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Billy From the flood. I know.

Lily Musta read that postcard real good, eh anthropologist!

Billy You don’t have to rub it in.

Lily Which mountain’s the mum?

Billy Oh, that’s the big one, Tibrogargan. The one closest to the

highway.

Lily Nup. Tibrogargan’s the dad. Beerwah’s the mumma. Surely you

saw her pregnant bulge?

Billy (Kidding) Yeah. Sure.

Lily So. Reckon you can read the mountains, eh?

Billy (Smirking) With a bit of help.

Anthony What about West Wirrawong’s mountains? How’s about you

help me, Lilypil, eh” Help me read the rocks, read the mountains

round this neck of the woods.

Lily You got good eyes. Do your own readin’

Anthony Bit on the fade now, these eye lamps of mine.

Lily Better than mine.

Anthony Mind if I chuck you a question or two?

Lily Depends.

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Anthony Hmmm… What do I see from here when I look…when I look up

there along Brown’s Road?

Lily Royal Hotel, Merlie’s ole library, West Wirrawong council

offices, then High School.

Anthony And, after the High School, when Brown’s Road becomes a

winding track and climbs higher?

Lily You know. Mount Muller.

Anthony Oh. And why’s it called Mount Muller?

Lily “Cos that’s where Rolf Muller and his family planted corn after

they came out from Bavaria in 1911, or 12, or whenever it was.

Anthony True. But what did the original inhabitants call it? Your people?

Lily Thought I made it clear. Original people weren’t my people. My

gran…

Anthony Forced to come here. I know.

Lily Then why you keep asking questions? Sound like Centrelink.

Anthony (Pretending Casual) Oh, I just thought you might have heard..

stories, you know.

Lily So I have. But not my stories. Not for me to pass ‘em on.

Anthony Not even to me? Not even to Anthony?

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Lily Not even to Anthony.

Anthony There must have been an old story about what’s marked down as

Mount Muller on our map.

Merle Like there was about what we call the Glasshouses.

Billy Like…(Does his neck jerk)… Coonowrin.

Lily Yes.

Anthony (Eagerly) Yes?

Lily Yes. There was. They told it to me. But not for me to tell it to you.

(Looks at Billy) Not for postcard either. You not the person.

Now not the time.

Billy But Lily…

Lily Lilypilly to you, Billy.

Billy What better time than now. Centenary time.

Lily Centenary time shit time. “Centenary”…”Centenary”…

hundred years (Flicks fingers)…nothing. Plenty more time.

Plenty lotta water…time’s deep creek.

Merle But, Lily love. When will we find out? There’s practically

nothing up the library…local legends, I mean. Shouldn’t

somebody be writing down these stories? Writing down the

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original myths? Be giving us the authentic names?

Lily More than stories. More than names.

Anthony (Daringly) You mean Biami business, eh?

Lily What you mean?

Anthony Biami.

Lily Hey, look out!

Merle Rainbow Serpent.

Billy That stuff, eh?

Lily (Despairingly) What’s the use? Sometimes I think…think you

can’t even begin to understand.

Anthony We’re trying, though.

Lily Some of youse are.

Billy Look, Lilypilly, I’ll promise you this. I’ll start an Indigenous

Column in The Bugle, as soon as I can get a guarantee of a

regular contributor.

Lily Will you now, Billy?

Billy How about that?

Merle Sounds like a step in the right direction.

Lily Might be. Depends how it’s done. Who does it.

Billy How about you, for starters?

Lily Me? I’m too busy. Cookin’ an all that up Sunsetholme.

Anthony I could help you. You talk. I pound away on my old Olivetti.

Hey, where’s my old typewriter dinosaurus? (Goes to it)

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It’s a mess. Looks like someone shoved a bayonet up its guts.

Billy Sure does.

Merle We’ve got great Microsoft on the PC’s up the Library.

Lily Stuff your Microsofties!

Anthony There’s my Lilypil! How’s about you tell me about Blade

Mountain and I’ll make you immortal on me ole Olivetti if it’s

still working.

Lily (Alarmed) Blade Mountain? Thought you wanted Mount

Muller.

Anthony You pulled out on that, remember? Anyway, it’s brother Blade

nearby turns me on.

Lily “Brother Blade?” Who told you “Brother”?

Anthony Figure of speech.

Lily I gotta go. (Leaves)

Merle Leave her alone. Stick to your own memories, you take my advice.

Leave this place to do its own dreaming.

Anthony Trouble is…(Touches chest) something tells me it’s my place too.

My dreaming too.

Billy Boy, you got it bad. See you down The Bugle. (Goes.)

Anthony Well, Anne-Onymous. When you going to finish your poem?

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Merle I’ll ask her. She only comes out at night.

Anthony Given it a title yet?

Merle I believe she wants to call it, “Turning to stone”.

Anthony “Turning to stone”. Hey, that’s good. That’s good. You might call

it mystic.

Merle Remember when you taught us Coleridge? You said, “That’s why

I like him. He dared to be mystic.”

Anthony Did I say that?

Merle Sure did.

Anthony I said lots of things. Mostly rubbish.

Merle (Smiling) Mostly. Not entirely.

Anthony I’d like a copy of “Turning to stone”. Persuade Annie to part with

one.

Merle It’s not finished yet.

Anthony How do you know?

Merle Annie tells me everything.

Anthony Good girl…Annie must be.

Merle (Hand in pocket) Fancy that. I’ve a copy here after all. And that

strange new verse Annie told me she’s having trouble writing.

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Anthony Why?

Merle Well it’s about guilt, you see. Inherited guilt.

Anthony Deep.

Merle Has to be. Remember what Lily was saying about our people

smashing the trees and the stones?

Anthony Lily says lots of things.

Merle Yes. (Hands paper to Anthony. Turns to leave.) Perhaps we can

persuade her to say more. (Goes)

Anthony puts Merle’s poem in pocket. Anthony goes to

typewriter. Gets it working. Pounds away noisily. Stoney

comes in, looks over Anthony’s shoulder, then climbs up on

perch and freezes. Anthony takes paper out of typewriter,

silently reads it, then tears it up in disgust.

He takes Merle’s poem from his pocket, stands up to read it

and sees old Stoney.

Anthony (Reading, with looks up)

“He stands on guard, the Statue Soldier

centreing the the civic square, taking no sides

as round his perch the traffic flows…”

Good on you, Merlie-girlie. Yes, you get the traffic and the night

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time roughies to a tee…ah, here we are

“—bitumen plain, where once the bullocks crawled

and backwards of bullock drays, the Dreaming’s dust…”

Aha… and now this new verse. Well, start of it…

“At night the bush creeps closer, iron roofs soften.”

“Ironbark eyes”… never got that from my poetry lessons,

Merlie, nor from Coleridge neither…

“ under the lace of stars

those silver leaves crossing the chasm of time,

ironbark eyes, burn into mine, accusing…”

(He looks up offstage towards Blade Mountain. So does Stoney)

Ironbark eyes … ironbark eyes … accusing. ACCUSING!

Blackout.

Lights up on Anthony typing memoirs a day later. Stops. Takes

out paper. Silently reads.

Anthony Self-indulgent crap!

Tears up paper. Types another burst. Silently reads.

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Hmm… Not so bad. How I got to sing with the Australian Opera

Chorus in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Wasn’t paid to sing. Just supposed

to be a prison guard but had to join in the Prisoners’ Chorus.

German stuff and all.

(Sings) “O welche lust

in freier Luft

den Athem einzuheben…”

Anthony What’s it all mean. Oh, sorta…

“O welcome joy

this friendly air

I’m freely breathing.”

Well, when I saw this ad in the Courier Mail a while later –

“Basses needed for chorus of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the

Queensland Con, and told the bloke I’d sung with the Australia

Opera Chorus, didn’t even have to audition. So there I was,

singing in Don Giovanni, dancing the minuet and all in the big

party scene.

Does some minuet steps. Stoney mockingly applauds.

Anthony looks round, puzzled.

Oh but my favourite bit in The Don! When the Statue comes to

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life. The Statue of the man Don Giovanni’s killed. Don

Giovanni mockingly invites the Statue to supper.

Gestures casually at Stoney.

And the Statue accepts.

(Sings) “Don Giovanni, I come

in response to your call.

And the Statue shakes Don Giovanni’s hand and the Don

nearly freezes to death. (Laughs) (Resumes Typing)

Stoney (Singing) Don Giovanni, I come

in response to your call.

Anthony looks round, alarmed, as Stoney strides down from

his perch and extends his hand.

Anthony I was only in the chorus.

Stoney I was only in the trenches. What’s Italian for “Anthony”?

Anthony Errr…”Antonio.”

Stoney (Sings) Don Antonio, I come in response to your call.

Extends hand. Anthony shakes it. Freeze.

Blackout.

End Act One.

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ACT TWO

Stoney and Anthony holding handshake.

Anthony Is this some hoax?

Stoney Not that I know of, Anthony.

Anthony You know my name.

Stoney I have ears. You’ve been blabbering on for days. Reckon I know

right inside you by now. God, those memoirs of yours. And now,

this stuff about the Stone Statue coming to life. I couldn’t resist

that.

Anthony That’s in an opera. Stuff happens in operas. This is real life.

Stoney Oh yeah.

Anthony Don Giovanni jokes with a statue, invites it to supper…

Stoney It? Him, surely.

Anthony And the statue comes to supper. Actually, it’s Don Giovanni’s

LAST supper. ‘cos when he shakes the Statue’s hand, he turns

cold as stone.

Stoney And…do you?

Anthony No…I don’t.

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Stoney So maybe we’re birds of a feather.

Anthony Can’t you do any better than that?

Stoney Cast in the same mould?

Anthony Ah, now you’re talking. (Stoney breaks handshake).

Stoney Remember?

Anthony Remember what?

Stoney That dawn service. Forty-eight years ago. When you came back

to West Wirrawong to be a teacher.

Anthony The Last Post bugle woke me, and I looked down from the

Royal’s verandah and saw you.

Stoney You’d seen me before. You were here that year you lived here as

a boy.

Anthony Never noticed you then. I was just a kid.

Stoney But there was a war on. World War Two, for God’s sake.

Anthony Never noticed you. Different when I got older. Starts to sink in.

War and peace. Not much peace.

Stoney So, you’ve become a philosopher?

Anthony Sorta.

Stoney Have to be a philosopher to write your memoirs. “Life and loves

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of Anthony Teacherman, Anthony Panthony, would-be opera

singer, seeker for meaning in mountains and myths…”

Anthony What was that first bit? About my memoirs.

Stoney “Life and loves of…”

Anthony “Loves of…” You shouldn’t have.

Stoney Shouldn’t have what?

Anthony Reminded me.

Stoney Reminded? You mean you’d forgotten her?

Anthony Oh, you must have a heart of stone.

Stoney What? For reminding you that you have?

Anthony Stop it! (Starts to search among torn-up papers)

Stoney Mate, what exactly are you looking for?

Anthony Mind your own bloody business.

Stoney (Picking up papers) Mate, I could help you. Is it this one?

(Looks at paper) About how you nearly drowned when

Peter’s Creek flooded but you hooked your foot in a half-

submerged tree. (Reads) “My youthful obsession. Must

cross every creek. My old-age obsession: must cross cultural

creeks.” Shit mate, that’s philosophical.

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Anthony No. Not that one. The one about her.

Stoney Her?

Anthony Trish.

Stoney You never read that one out loud.

Anthony It’s private.

Stoney Private? In memoirs you plan to publish?

Anthony Who’d publish this stuff?

Stoney Ever heard of self-publish?

Anthony Ah, here it is. “There was this dirt road through a corn field.

Heading down to Peter’s Creek.” Sorry Stoney, you hold the

fort, eh mate?

Stoney Do as a rule.

Anthony Gotta walk that road again. (Goes)

Stoney Strike me pink. Sometimes I’m glad I grow not old. (Climbs

rostrum. Freeze.)

Enter Merle.

Merle What’s all this mess?

She picks up and reads some pages.

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Memoirs. Harder to market. Harder than poems.

(Remembering) ..”The editor thanks you for your contribution

but regrets that he is unable at the present time to accept it for

publication…” Bloody editors!

Enter Billy.

Speak of the devil!

Billy (Waving a sheet) What am I gunna do?

Merle Publish and be damned.

Billy Damned if I do. Damned if I don’t.

Merle You serious?

Billy Read this (Shoves sheet at her) Came in on the texto this

morning. Media release from the Federal Minister for Indig –

Merle Mal Whatsis? Minister for Indigenous Affairs?

Billy Oh, whatever it’s called. Hot stuff, eh?

Merle Give me a minute to read it, eh…oh, this was all on the TV last

night. Didn’t you see it?

Billy Well, tell the truth, I was brushing up my Wirrawong ballad.

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Adding a few stanzas.

Merle Mustn’t cram the capsule, Banjo.

Billy Just another twenty lines or so.

Merle Why you showing me this stuff?

Billy Well, it’s a bulletin to the Media. For general release. What

should I do?

Merle Do?

Billy Should I run it in The Bugle?

Merle Why not?

Billy Why not? Aboriginal men raping children, beating women

near Alice Springs.

Merle Not near Alice Springs. A remote community way north of Alice

Springs.

Billy Wherever. This article gives the impression Aboriginal culture is

to blame for these outrages. Running this could be hell to pay,

now I’m committed to the indigenous culture column. I’ll look a

right proper ass.

Merle loudly brays.

Billy Are you listening to me?

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Merle I’m trying to read what you gave me. There’s some positives here,

you know.

Billy Positives? Are you crazy? It says this monster drowned a little girl

he was raping.

Merle Yes, and they said Jack the Ripper was Queen Victoria’s son.

Billy Are you trying to tell me this didn’t happen?

Merle No I’m not. But everyone who will read this will know you can’t

blame a whole society’s culture because a few members of it

behave like monsters. There’s positive stuff here.

Billy What you mean that “Send in the army” rubbish someone offers

as a solution?

Merle No, I mean about support for this women’s self-protection

group. They’re after Federal funding for more children’s

services. (Hands the sheet to him)

Billy (Reading it) Hmmm…good can come out of evil, you mean?

Merle That poor little mite. Life snuffed out. But now she’s found a

loud voice, you see. No, Jack the Ripper was never Queen

Victoria’s son, or whatever. But what about all those abandoned

children in England’s Nineteenth Century slums? Child

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prostitution? Battered women? And the upper classes turning a

blind eye. A blind eye for many of them because they were blind.

They didn’t know. Because the media mostly didn’t tell them. It

took a Charles Dickens to tell them, didn’t it, eh?

Billy I suppose so. I’m just a humble local regional news editor.

Merle Billy, there’s not a humble bone in your big toe. So you’re

scared to print this, eh?

Billy Well…a bit.

Merle You’re like Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister.

Billy Flattery will get you everywhere with me.

Merle No flattery intended. The creature tried to dissuade people from

reading Oliver Twist.

Billy So your advice is that I publish?

Merle It is. These items are horrific and maybe they misplace the blame,

but publishing them could be a step towards getting something

done.

Billy What will Lilypilly think? She’ll be deeply hurt.

Merle She’s tougher than you think.

Billy How will she feel when she reads it?

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Merle Ask her. After you’ve run it.

Blackout.

Enter Anthony reading The Bugle.

Anthony Hmmm… from the Magistrate in Alice Springs. Well, I suppose

she knows what she’s talking about. How did I put it in my

memoirs? “More creeks to be crossed…”

Enter Lilypilly, unsteadily.

Anthony helps her to sit down on rostrum, moving the

newspaper which he has put down.

How are we battling, Lilypill?

Lily Seen better days, Anthony.

He picks up paper.

Anthony This?

Lily Oh, I’ve read that.

Anthony Must have hurt.

Lily Lilypill’s bin hurt before, long time, many time.

Anthony You? Something like this? When you were a girl?

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Lily No. Not me. Nothing like that. But somethin’ bad about

little baby. Something could have happened. (Hits her heart)

Got me here. Remember that time…that time with the pram?

Anthony Under the house that time? When we got the prams out before

the roof caved in?

Lily No, not that time. I mean time with jus’ one pram.

Anthony One pram.

Lily Maybe I never told you.

Anthony Not much you never told me, Lil, back when I was a nipper.

Enter Merle.

Lily This wasn’ when you was a nipper. No, it was years after you left

with your Mum and brother. I told Merle about it, though.

Merle Told me what, Lily?

Lily ‘bout that pram left on the riverbank. Empty pram where the

bank runs steep. You wrote poem about it, didn’t you?

Merle (Remembering) “Empty pram where the bank runs steep

Empty pram where the creek runs deep…”

Lily Changed me into you, didn’t you, Merlie?

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Merle Oh, us poets do that all the time. Curse us, curse us.

Anthony If you insist.

Merle Pinched your persona, I did, Lily.

Lily Ouch!

Merle “Walking river bank I froze.

Feet froze up. I saw this pram,

empty pram on steep-slope bank…”

Lily Brings it back. Found this little crumpled-up blanket. Ole

brown teddy bear dangling its paw from the shade-cover.

Me pretty active then. Just outa me teens. Then and there,

dived right in. Swam up and down, swam round the bend.

Dived down real deep, checked out the bottom, mud and all.

Found nothin’ there. Nothin’ at all.

Anthony Great, Lilypill. I can just see you doing that. But what’s all that

got to do with (Showing newspaper) this?

Lily Can’t you see? You dumb or somethin’? (Grabs paper) This stuff

says Northern Territory tribal mothers not tell cops ‘bout men

abusin’ kids. You believe that?

Anthony Don’t know what to believe.

Lily Believe me. Swam round and round that creek, dived down to

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bottom, over an’ over, lookin’ for that baby missin’ from pram.

An my ole man – long gone ‘e is – if he’d been with me that day,

which he wasn’t, ‘cos that was before we’d even met, if he’d

been with me, he’d have done the same thing. Anyway, when I

couldn’t swim no more, an’ me arms felt like dead tree roots, I

went straight into town to the cop-shop, made them ring up, root

around. But … no baby missing, they said. Maybe some idiots –

whitefellas, blackfellas, I don’t know – just dumped old pram

beside the river, like they couldn’t be bothered pushing it the

three miles out to the dump. Never entered their stupid heads

someone like me’d break my heart over it. Remember, Merlie?

Broke down, didn’t I, that day I told you all about it.?

Merle Remember? Oh, yes. Your breaking down made me write the

poem.

Lily Never wrote nothing, though, about me swimmin’ round hours,

searching and searching.

Merle Sorry. Somehow I just couldn’t work that into the poem’s

persona.

Lily “Poem’s persona”. Gee, youse writers talk bullshit sometimes.

Merle Oh, we do. We do. But maybe sometimes we touch a nerve.

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“My feet freeze up. How can I pass..”

Went something like that, I think…No

Yes had it before…

“Walking river bank I froze.

Feet froze up. I saw this pram,

empty pram on steep-slope bank.

The teddy hangs, no tiny fingers

tickle the teddy’s tousled hair,

no baby rumples the folded blanket.

This way, that, I turn and stare.

No parents claim the childless pram.

I dredge with downward eyes the slope

that slips into the silent river.

Dead leaves drip from low-slung branch,

cold leaves cut the river’s skin…”

Enter Billy.

Billy What’s going on? Poetry recital?

Merle You might say that.

Billy Sorry to disturb.

Merle That’s alright.

Uneasy silence.

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Anthony Cat got your tongue, Billy?

Billy Well, frankly, I was wondering how you felt, Lilypilly.

Lily ‘bout what?

Billy That article about…about the Northern Territory troubles.

Lily You the editor. Bugle your bloody paper.

Billy How you feeling?

Lily Have known better days.

Billy I’m still hoping you’ll write that indigenous cultural column

for The Bugle.

Lily Thanks a lot. Keep on hoping, then. (Hugs Merle) Love your

poem, Merlie-girlie.

Merle Thanks.

Lily Just love it. (Smiles) Persona and all. ‘Bye, Anthony. Come up

Sunsetholme for a cuppa with the oldies, eh?

Anthony hugs her.

Oh, an’ bye-bye, acting editor.

Billy So you’ll drop your column in soon, eh?

Lily Wait and see. (Exits)

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Billy Where’s that niece of hers?

Anthony What niece?

Merle Nerrida.

Billy Yes, that’s the name.

Merle What do you mean?

Billy Seen her round?

Merle Not for ages. Oh, she popped in at Sunsetholme last year

for Lilypilly’s birthday. She lives over South Wirrawong,

I think.

Billy Well, she rang The Bugle this morning. Thought I was Aub

at first. Asked if I’d seen her Aunty. Said Sunsetholme had

rung her to say they were a bit worried about Lilypilly lately.

Hasn’t been a hundred percent.

Merle Look, I think I’ll just head up the hill after her.

Anthony Good idea.

Merle Just to be on the safe side. (Goes)

Billy What was all that poetry about when I came in?

Anthony A pram.

Billy Poetry about a pram?

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Anthony Yes.

Billy You having me on?

Anthony No.

Billy The Bacchantes have been on my back again.

Anthony I’d be happy to give them “Under Milk Wood Meets West

Wirrawong” but…

Billy Funny. I read through the list of titles. There’s none called

that.

Anthony No. There’s none called that.

Billy Then how come…

Anthony Theatre’s not quite your scene, is it, Billy?

Billy No.

Anthony What is?

Billy Can’t you guess?

Anthony I’d rather you tell me.

Billy I’d hoped you’d all gathered that I have…well, I have… a passionate

belief in the revival, through New Age journalism, of Australia’s

rural reality, of our nation’s internal intensity, of our too-long-

concealed cultural core…

Anthony Is there any truth in the rumour currently sweeping The Bugle

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office that you have replaced Editor Aub’s framed photo with

your own degree?

Billy What degree?

Anthony Oh. They say…they say you have a Toogoolawah TAFE degree in

Accumulated Cliché.

Billy You know…before I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance

I heard of your reputation for dry wit.

Anthony I believe you. Still, poles apart as we are…

Billy (Grinning) Surely not!

Anthony …poles apart as we are, we do have one thing in common.

Billy Only one?

Anthony That I know of. And that is an incurable affection for this funny

little outpost. I revisit nearly every year. You’ve just arrived. But

I sense you’re not keen to leave.

Billy Not till I’ve rebuilt The Bugle and put this town on the map.

Now.. (Moving confidentially towards Anthony) Ever heard of

negative gearing, Anthony?

Anthony Yes, actually.

Billy Well, negative gearing’s what I see as the solution to West

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Wirrawong’s problem.

Anthony What problem?

Billy The problem of our lack of … our lack of established identity.

Let’s face it, nobody knows us.

Anthony We do. You do. Aub – I speak it respectfully in his absence –

loves us. Merle loves us. Lily loves us. The Bacchantes love us.

Billy But… but the nation as a whole… the nation knows us not.

Anthony And could I ask you to reveal me your little secret.

Billy What little secret?

Anthony Your secret as to the manner in which what you call Negative

Gearing will make us known.

Billy Look at it this way. We’re like a novelist who’s never won the

Booker Prize, never been short-listed for the Booker, never been

long-listed for the Booker. So what can he or she (or she or he)

claim? “I’ve been unlisted for the Booker, not once, but three,

four or more times.” Get it?

Anthony I’m beginning to…

Billy Never be fearing of negative gearing.

Anthony I like it.

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Billy A bush poem with no rhymes…Let’s get with the times.

Anthony I’m not so sure that I…

Billy Well, my Capsule contribution has rhymes, so maybe I’m eroding

my own case. But if the exception proves the rule…you with me?

Anthony Not entirely.

Billy Here’s another aspect. West Wirrawong has no Big Mac’s,

so you have to go to South Wirrawong for Big Mac’s. West

Wirrawong has no Kentucky Fry so you have to go to North

Wirrawong for Kentucky Fry. West Wirrawong has no Sizzlers

so you have to go to East Wirrawong for…but there isn’t any

East Wirrawong…see the picture?

Anthony Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Billy Can you name me one fact, figure or feature for which West

Wirrawong is famous?

Anthony Not on the spur of the moment.

Billy Hey, maybe that’s it.

Anthony That’s what?

Billy Our slogan. “Come ye, come ye, come ye. Celebrate the Centenary

of West Wirrawong, the town that’s not on the spur of the

moment.”

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Anthony You know, Billy. I really think you should have a talk to your Dad.

Billy Dad’s sent me here while he’s re-educating Aub in Brizzie.

Anthony Does your Dad share your enthusiasm for Negative Gearing?

Billy Negative.

Anthony Are you being deliberately ambiguous?

Billy I hope so.

Anthony What would you feel if I proposed introducing you to a stone

statue?

Billy Apprehensive.

Anthony Would you care to shake hands with our only identifiable icon?

Billy That would depend.

Anthony On what?

Billy On whether the icon wished to shake hands with me.

Anthony Oh, he’s very understanding. He’s seen and heard a lot since

…since… Hey, Billy, your Dad. Did he…was he ever a soldier?

Billy No. But his father was a prisoner of war in Changi…Singapore.

Anthony I know where Changi is, Billy.

Billy And great-grandad lost a leg in a trench over Anzac Cove.

Anthony Gallipoli?

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Billy Great-grandad was there. That’s why…

Anthony That’s why you try to… that’s why you like to play the Last Post?

Billy How’dya guess?

Anthony Where’s your bugle now?

Billy Down The Bugle office.

Anthony Now Billy…please. Do me a favour. Do yourself a favour. Do

somebody else a favour. Scoot off now and grab that little

bugle of yours and beat it back here. Go on!

Billy goes.

Anthony Negative gearing. Well, as Wittgenstein never said, “Takes all

types.”

Stoney You should know.

Anthony Know what?

Stoney Takes all types.

Anthony You should know.

Stoney Know what?

Anthony Well you’re a type, aren’t you?

Stoney Come again?

Anthony In a way. Prototype,…sort of ….sort of, may I say, Platonic

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form? Perfect form?

Stoney You crazy, man?

Anthony I wonder if Plato would agree with Wittgenstein.

Stoney You off your rocker? (Coming down)

Anthony You off your perch. (Points up)

Stoney Look, Anthony. There’s a limit.

Anthony So Wittgenstein was wrong about you, eh?

Stoney Wittgen…?

Anthony …stein. Austrian philosopher. Peaked in England. Uni of

Cambridge and all.

Stoney What’s this Wittgenstein been saying about me?

Anthony Pity you never met him. I think you’d have proved him wrong.

Stoney What?

Anthony Wittgenstein said that when a body turns to stone it can’t feel

pain. Of course he was philosophically speculating…

Stoney The bloody idiot!

Anthony Anyway, you’re not a body that’s turned to stone. You were never

a body in the first place. You’re a man-made myth, a stone symbol

of…of…

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Stoney (Shoving him) Feel that?

Anthony (Shoves him back) Watch it, full-back.

Stoney Feel it, full-forward.

They jostle, Aussie Rules style.

Anthony Not bad for a myth. Must have had a good stone-mason.

Stoney Not bad for a teach. Guess you played Aussie Rules.

Anthony Fifty years back I was in Qld Uni Aussie Rules first team.

Stoney Ninety-one years back I was in Anzac’s first boatload.

Anthony No you weren’t.

Stoney Metaphorically speaking. Metaphors matter.

Anthony Where’d you pick that up?

Stoney It’s in your memoirs. Been reading your stuff.

Anthony Perving over my shoulder, eh? (Shoves him playfully)

Stoney (Shouldering him, Aussie Rules style. Going for mark) This

mark’s mine, dickhead!

Anthony reels. Falls over. Grabs foot in pain.

Can’t take it, eh?

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Anthony pulls shoe and sock off. His foot is bleeding.

What the heck..?

Anthony I’ve broke me big toe.

Stoney What? From my little shoulder shove?

Anthony Not you, you idiot. Down the creek.

Stoney Down the creek?

Anthony You know. I told you. I was after her.

Stoney Her?

Anthony Her? TRISH! I told you. That one I was keen on. All that time

ago. She wore a jumper in winter. Brown and gold stripes. Like

the corn by the road down to the creek.

Stoney Memories don’t break big toes, mate.

Anthony Look. I was walking the old dirt road. Took me shoes off like I

used to do when I was young. Then, across the road to the creek,

found this fence with a gate. Sign on the gate: “Road closed”.

So I kicked it.

Stoney Bloody idiot.

Anthony OK. But I lost it. Bloody fence blocking road to the creek.

Blocking up memories.

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Stoney (Sympathetically) Memory lane!

Anthony Don’t you send me up, Stoney!

Stoney Wasn’t.

Anthony So I started kicking the bloody gate. Just about broke me big toe.

Stoney Don’t blame me.

Anthony You shoved me.

Stoney Didn’t break your toe. Just a shove.

Anthony Shoved me over. Why?

Stoney (Hands up to grab imaginary ball) Going for a mark. Bloody

stupid question.

Anthony Fucking stupid answer. (Grabs toe) Ow!

Stoney Put a sock on it. Here, let me.

Stoney sits on ground beside Anthony. Tries to fix his

sock round his toe. Last Post heard off stage.

Anthony Shit, it’s that idiot of an editor.

Stoney Not Billy the Boy?

Anthony Billy the Boy in person. And he’s blowing his bugle.

Stoney He’s playing my tune.

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Anthony Quick! Up to attention! No…up on your perch. Come on,

Stoney. This is serious, mate. I want the full monty

Stoney, puzzled, climbs his perch, grabs his rifle, freezes.

Enter Billy, blowing the Last Post.

Anthony stands to attention. When Billy finishes,

Anthony applauds.

Billy You’re not supposed to applaud the Last Post. It’s to introduce

the Minute’s Silence.

Anthony I know.

Stoney (Booming) I know.

Billy looks up, alarmed.

Billy Who was that?

Anthony It’s the echo.

Billy OK. Where is he?

Anthony Who?

Billy The ikon, of course. You said you’d get me to shake hands with

our only identifiable ikon.

Anthony You’ll be a great editor, Billy. You’ve sure got one hell of an

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imagination.

Billy (Smiling) Aw, shucks.

Anthony But you have. Like that Time Capsule you’ve made. And the poem

you’ve written. And that bugle you blow so beautifully.

Billy You’re just saying that.

Anthony Tell you what.

Billy What?

Anthony You promise to go back to your office, do some careful proof

reading, polish the Time Capsule, and I’ll get Merle to arrange for

you to be the bugler next Anzac Day…no, sooner than that, next

Remembrance Day in West Wirrawong.

Billy Aw shucks! (Goes).

Stoney He for real?

Anthony Surreal. Billy the Boy’s the bright hope of new age Aussie

regional journalism.

Stoney (Getting down) Now, about this Wittgensetin bloke. Said stone

don’t feel pain. (Waves bayonet)

Anthony Steadeee…

Stoney Feel my blade, eh! Well…(Taps breast) Metaphorically speaking.

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In here…I’ve felt blade.

Anthony Blade! Blade! (Taps head) You’ve got me, Stoney. Got me going.

(Grabs notebook and pen, sits down, starts writing)

Stoney (Looking over Anthony’s shoulder) What’s this? “Birth of

Blade Mountain.”

Anthony Yes. Bless you, Lilypilly.

Stoney What Lilypilly got to do with bayonet?

Anthony Shush…(Scribbles) Not bayonet. Blade! You see?

Stoney I see this. Egypt, 1914. Year before Gallipoli. Bayonet practice in

sand trenches. Ripping guts out of straw dummies.

Bayonet drill.

Rips me still.

Anthony Jigging rhymes. Worse than Billy’s ballads.

Stoney (Hits stomach) Got me here! Gets me here! (Mimes Bayonet

charge. Anthony watches, runs to him).

Anthony (Grabbing rifle) Me too. Nasho days. National Service. Wacol.

Thought they’d send us to Korea. Had this old red-faced,

beer-gutted Warrant Officer with a bayonet charge obsession.

Reckoned he’d done the real thing. Lots. Went on like he had

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a divine mission to turn all us Wacol Nashos into demons with the

blade. We had to run along this trench with stuffed straw

dummies –

Stoney Had them in Egypt –

Anthony Shuddup! –stuffed straw dummies hanging from ropes down the

far end. Had to yell and scream and banshee like crazy as we ran.

Like this…”YAAH……EEE”, thrusting the bayonet in and turning

the blade like a bloody corkscrew. Ah…

Sags down, near tears.

Stoney comes and pats him on shoulder.

Stoney Me too.

Anthony (Looks into him) Pain in the stone.

Stoney You know…at Gallipoli. Among all the bodies they found..they

found…I found….I still find. There were these two. One in Aussie

uniform. One Turk. They had bayoneted each other. “According

to orders.” But they died embracing.

Anthony You sure?

Stoney I was there.

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Anthony Metaphorically speaking.

Stoney Metaphors matter.

Stoney resumes his freeze on perch.

Anthony (Reading as he writes)

The birth of Blade Mountain

I’m bursting to know.

Was it named for a memory

of long-buried woe?

It’s blade like a bayonet

lances the sky.

It’s name cuts the question

but what’s the reply?

Oh, rock-edge that rises

shape sharp as a spear

name like a razor

formed out of a fear.

While Anthony is busy writing, Merle and Billy enter.

Merle has two sheets of paper.

Billy touches Anthony on shoulder.

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Anthony Please, Billy. Must finish this poem.

Billy For the capsule?

Anthony No! Not for the capsule. It’s for me.

Merle So’s this. (Gives paper)

Anthony Lilypilly. Funny, never read her hand-writing before. It’s a bit like

mum’s was. (Reads) Oh, I see.

Merle Didn’t they ring you at the pub?

Anthony Who?

Merle Sunsetholme. They said they’d ring you.

Anthony I’ve been out. Down the creek. (Anthony reads) Was it quick?

Merle A stroke. Just after she finished these notes.

Billy One to me too. For The bugle.

Merle I was with her. Nerrida too.

Anthony That niece of hers.

Merle Nerrida more than a niece. Had a bit of an inkling, she did.

Billy The one that rang me at The Bugle. Thought I was Aub.

Anthony We’d better ring Aub. Had a soft spot for Lil.

Merle Who didn’t?

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Billy We’ll run it in The Bugle. Just as she wrote it. Then we’ll put that

issue at the top of the stuff in the Time Capsule. Have to find

someone else to inter it.

Anthony Lily wouldn’t have done it anyway. Remember, “Get one of the

kids,” she said.

Merle I’ll get onto Ted, the Principal. They all loved her up the school

Come on, Billy. I’ll introduce you.

Billy and Merle leave.

Anthony (Reading Lilypilly’s letter) True to your word, old Lily. Saved my

life but can’t tell me secrets…

(Reads on. Smiles) “Read the rock, read it for yourself…stone tells

own story…”

Looks up at Stoney, who remains frozen.

Anthony (Looking off towards mountain. Writing, struggling with words.

Sometimes he gropes for them. Sometimes they come in a rush)

The birth of Blade Mountain’s

a mystery still

though it’s four decades down

since I first climbed the hill.

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A rookie school teacher

by timetables bound

but weekends were free

to grapple the ground.

Your birth, your beginning

I sought for the source

of your surge to the surface

with some deep legend’s force.

Geology’s guidelkines

failed my heart’s test.

Their formalised phrases

lacked all interest.

All that starch about “strata”,

text-terms set in ice,

for my heart’s heavy hunger

just couldn’t suffice.

Goes to scrunch paper and put it in bin.

Stoney (Loud) No! You finish it.

Anthony writes on.

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No, I reached for the rainbow

Spirit-Serpent once spun

when in old Alcheringa

all forms first begun.

Leaves preached sweet sermons

on many a walk

when I listened to language

no grammar book taught.

Now I’m weathered and wiser

got the itch for old song

like Maroochy’s lamenting

Where Mount Coolum “bilong”.

But you, old Blade Mountain,

you spear my soul’s sky,

cut open my cloudscape

and I’m wondering why.

Anthony walks off towards mountain. Lights fade except

for focus on Stoney, who looks out to audience.

Stoney (Smiles) Spose you could call me a sort of Time Capsule. Well,

you put a lot of your stuff into me, don’t you? Every Anzac,

every Remembrance Day. “I shall grow not old as…” you know.

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Think you know. I’m this uneasy ikon, aren’t I? Disturbing yet

reassuring. War memorial for generations that weep over wreaths

yet endorse the invasions that seed the inevitable wreaths. Ah,

shut up, Old Stoney, Young Stoney. What would you know?

Stoneys don’t feel painsies, eh?

(Looks off) Next week they’ll be cramming their stuff into the

West Wirrawong Centenary Time Capsule. Big deal, eh? Not too

many of that lot will be round to dig it up. Not too many of them.

But sure as stone-eggs, I will. Eh?

End.

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Drama and the Dreaming - Exegesis

Shape making perilous way from shapelessness1.

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow 2

One day, as she searched, the woman came upon the ashes of a fire her own

tribe had kindled long ago… And as she looked at the ashes, she called to

Biami the Good Spirit to help her find her tribe3.

This essay is prefaced by thoughts of three poets (one of them also a noted

dramatist) who indicate that their creativity involves personal explorations of

shadowy uncertainties as in uneasy smoulderings, stirrings of ashes. So has it been

with me. All my life I have been slow finding my feet. Now in old age, I stumble

much as I did when I was young. I grope within and without.

I have been an actor since Kindergarten when, in 1938, I gave a spontaneous one-

man-show to my companions based on my images of the Disney film Snow White

and the Seven Dwarfs which I had seen a few days before. I have been writing

poems since high school in the 1950s and plays since university in the same decade.

The content of my play, West of West Wirrawong, is an imaginative response to my

own life. Its technique is a result of my experience in the theatre as actor and

director, both amateur and professional. In researching, both for the play and this

essay, I have been helped by reading (mostly of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

from the Spirit of Music) by my personal association with such writers as Judith

1 Wright, Judith. from “The Morning of the Dead”. 1994. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 209.2 Elliot, T.S. from “The Hollow Men”. 1954. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, p80.3 Noonuccal, Oodgeroo. Then Walker, Kath. 1972. Stradbroke Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p100.

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Wright and Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, and by playwrights such as David

Brown and the members of my QUT Cohort (chaired by Errol Bray) during 2006. I

have also been influenced by the work and comments of actors who have read and

performed my various drafts, and by audiences who have seen these performances.

Two comments which I treasure are: “Nothing much happens in this play” and “you

should turn it into a one-man show and perform it yourself”. That which follows is

a response to these comments, an interrogation of my creative response to the

readings, and a personal reflection on my experiential and creative process.

When I embarked on the process of this Creative Writing Masters degree I was

advised that I should define my Research Methodology and indicate whether it was

inductive or deductive. I have found this to be challenging, as I have never been

comfortable with notions of formal logic. In exploring my influences and sources of

inspiration it seems to me that a chance comment by a two-year-old child may

influence me as much as a pronouncement by a sage in a lecture hall. If I am on my

way to a school to act Macbeth (being a retired teacher, now a volunteer guest), the

sight of a dead yellow leaf on the pavement may inspire me more than my

recollection of what Granville Barker said in one of his Prefaces to Shakespeare. In

other words, my methodology is that of a magpie. I was delighted when, at a QUT

seminar on Critical Realism, the guru of that theory, Roy Bhaskar, spoke of “magpie

methodology 4.

In those early days of this research project, in an attempt to encourage me to develop

analytical tools, I was given six questions to answer. Now, in my introduction, I

will give brief answers to these questions.

What am I researching? Why?

- this is my response to personal mystery, including Indigenous myth; because

a spirit in me says I must.

Who am I as a researcher?

- an old fart whose feet have taken him from the foot of Mount Tibrogargan to

the slopes of Etna, whose voice has taken him from performing in the chorus of Don

4 Bhaskar, Roy. Comment made in Seminar on Critical Realism, sponsored by the Institute for Indigenous Leadership in Education and by the Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, April, 2006.

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Giovanni to performing the work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (sometimes with the

author present); in other words, someone with a rich experiential background in the

effects of myth across a range of cultures.

How will I design my research?

- my design has taken the form of a meandering, rather than a

longitudinal/latitudinal map. I have imaginatively climbed every myth mountain I

could, from the Gubbi Gubbis’ Beerwah to the Jirrbals’ Byjinjillah (“Split Rock” in

North Queensland, south of Tully)5.

How will I conduct my research?

- by continuing to perform in as many plays as I can (since March 2006, I have

acted in ten plays, from those by local writers to Shakespeare and Euripides); by

reading and re-reading Nietzsche, reading Indigenous myths and legends, watching

the Indigenous song-dance troupe Jagera Jarjum; attending the plays of Kooemba

Jdarra…; and of course by continuous reflection on the plays I have written and on

those in which I am currently acting or which I am rehearsing.

How will my research contribute to knowledge?

- it will contribute to the writing of my play, which may or may not be

performed; as for contribution to knowledge, my aim for the play is to provide new

audiences, particularly in regional Australia, with a different perspective on the

relationships human beings have with each other’s mythology.

How will I communicate my contribution to knowledge?

- the main way, obviously, in which a playwright can communicate, is through

the performance of his, or her play, which may confirm or challenge the audience’s

perceptions. Or, if reviewed, it may provoke discussion among those who read the

review, whether or not those readers have seen the performance. If the play is

published, or even if it receives publicity, it may influence the reading public. Even

this essay may be read and thus achieve communication to some other

playwright/student.

5 “Fire from Walgooey the Taipan”, the Legend of Byinjillah. Collected by Gladys Henry. In Giroo Gurrll. 1967. Brisbane: Fortitude Press, p4-5.

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So – that concludes my introduction. I trust the reader will read on at her or his

peril.

Now… where does that “peril” come from? Well, as it happens, I am, as I write

this, trying also to remember my lines as the cynical ape-man Apemantus

(Diogenes-based) in Shakespeare’s rarely acted Timon of Athens, in which I say to

Timon (who, in his populist phase, has invited me and trendy Athenians to his feast):

“Let me stay at thine apperil, Timon: I come to observe…” 6. Apemantus is a highly

critical, yea verbally abusive observer. As I prepare to play this role, I am looking

(being a Stanislavsky-tuned actor) to those aspects of myself that I can use. In my

life I (I hope) have mostly been an encourager but I often find myself critical of

those who (as Timon) fail to see through false praise, who fail to see the falsity of

so-called civilization. In my immediate situation I am confronted with what I see as

the pretentious emptiness of life when it plays the role of promoter of creativity.

I have sat in on (and sometimes contributed to) group seminars. Where these have

followed play readings, I have found them very helpful. Where the focus has been

on abstract concepts, not illustrated by the reading or performance of dramatic,

poetic or prose works, I have sensed that others have seemed stirred and even

stimulated; however, I have frequently found myself at a loss to connect the concept

with the concrete experience. Some layers of academic thought and language seem

constipated by obsessions with concepts. This must have been so in the nineteenth

century at the University of Basle where Nietzsche, though professor of classical

philology, had artistic yearnings:

A particularly modern weakness inclines us to see the primal aesthetic

phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a way. For the true poet the

metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really

hovers before him in place of a concept 7.

The closest I have come to the concept-arousal is by personal recollection (during

my long struggles to write this essay) of what might be called a concept but which I

6 Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Act One Scene Two, 33-34. p 22 in Arden Shakespeare, Oliver, H.J. (ed). 1959. London: Methuen.7 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Tanner, Michael (ed). Whiteside, Shaun (tr). 1993. London: Penguin, p 42.

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would prefer to call a poetic image, one which chimed with my own in-life arousal,

the image of an insect passing through the chrysalis phase.

The image comes from a poem I first read fifty-one years ago, the same year in

which I met (and, as a young poet was encouraged by) Judith Wright, the editor of

the Oxford Book of Australian Verse, in which she included a poem by Furnley

Maurice, the pen name of Frank Wilmot. Part of this poem incised itself in me:

There breaks upon my sight

A low magnificent light

Green as the core that in a green fire burns…

There is a spirit bound

Within this holy round;

A chrysalis cares not what freedom brings,

But, without love or sight,

Breaks its way into light

Not knowing it will some day move with wings8.

I gradually came to realize that, as I persisted with my play, this image of the

chrysalis was strengthening me, and that the fabric of the chrysalis was related to my

practice-based research, involving personal reflection as well as literary study. In

terms of linear time (later in this essay I shall look at Indigenous perspectives on

cyclical time), the need for the chrysalis-cocoon is brief, as the pupa matures from

lava to moth; but my personal chrysalis need was over years, indeed decades, as I

came to reflect on why my Western-educated certainties were assailed by inner

doubts and fears which came to be desires; why my Eurocentric artistic urges (first

night in London in 1969 I was in Covent Garden desperate to hear Beethoven’s

Fidelio) were both challenged and complemented by disturbingly delicious myth-

music calling me back to Australia.

But now, there is that Hamlet of Denmark (whom I first played in a heavily-cut

version at the age of fifteen) pinching my ear, though the words are those of his

8 Maurice, Furnley (Wilmot, Frank). from “The Gully”. A Book of Australian Verse. Wright, Judith (ed). 1956. London: Oxford University Press, pp 46-47.

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father: “But, soft! Methinks I scent the morning’s air; / Brief let me be” 9.

I shan’t be very brief but I am conscious that this essay should not exceed ten

thousand words and I know I must take my reader back to the (comparative)

“morning’s air” of my life, if I am to fully frame this play’s pupa-larva stage.

In 1958, after four years as a cadet reporter on The Courier Mail and two years

studying for teaching in both the University of Queensland and the then Kelvin

Grove Teachers’ College, I was posted as a first year teacher to the Murgon Rural

School (which a year later became the Murgon State High School). My mother

brought to my attention something I had never known – that at the age of six months

she had brought me as a baby to Murgon to visit my aunt and uncle who were

working in the Bank of New South Wales.

As soon as I received my letter of appointment, I looked up Murgon in the Guide to

Queensland and discovered it was the centre of a dairying and corn-growing area,

that it was near Barambah Creek and that nearby was a mountain called Boat

Mountain. I immediately felt the urge to discover why the mountain was so-called.

The locals’ comment, that it resembled in shape a boat turned upside-down, never

satisfied me. I persuaded myself that the name must be related to an Indigenous

myth. The pursuit of such a myth became an obsession with me. My pursuit in this

specific instance has failed, but it has led to related awarenesses.

At Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College and at the University of Queensland in 1956 and

1957 I received no instruction in Australian Indigenous culture. However, through

my contact with Judith Wright and through such of her poems as “Bora Ring”, my

curiosity grew.

In 1958 in Murgon I had Aboriginal students (from nearby Cherbourg) in my

classes. On day, calling the class roll, I found that a student called Henry was

absent. When I asked his mates where he was, one answered, “Henry, he go

walkabout, sir.” I wondered if his walkabout included the slopes of Boat Mountain.

The relevance of this incident will become clear in due course.

I spent four years teaching in Murgon. My subjects included geography, which then

9 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act One Scene Five, 58-59. Oxford Shakespeare, Hibbard, G.R. (ed). 1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p 188.

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had a strong geological content. I taught, from the textbook, geological data about

the volcanic origins of mountains. This data never satisfied me, and I was found

myself recalling a childhood memory. In 1943 an American war correspondent and

artist, posted to Brisbane, had painted for my father a vivid image of what we then

called The Glasshouse Mountains. This was the name given by Captain Cook as he

observed them from his telescope far at sea, when he was reminded of glass-making

furnaces in his native Yorkshire. Later I learned the names Tibrogargan, Beerwah

and Coonowrin given to these mountains by the local Gubbi Gubbi people. I also

was told an outline of the legend.

Now, in 1958 in Murgon, I looked on the dark, rumpled slopes of Boat Mountain

and came to believe this mountain also had a mythic origin. Teaching (as part of my

English classes) Judith Wright’s poem “South My Days”, I came across: “...high,

delicate outline / of bony slopes, wincing under the winter…” 10. Judith Wright,

returning to the countryside of her birth after tertiary education at the University of

Sydney and after months in Europe, found the New England tableland to be “full of

old stories that still go walking in my sleep” 11. These were not Indigenous stories.

It was not till years later that she became friendly with Oodgeroo Noonuccal (then

Kath Walker) and came to feel an affinity with Indigenous culture. But even in

1959 in Murgon I was starting to make links between mountain and myth, though I

had no understanding of concept-based approaches. At this time, my response was

all a result of intuitive experience.

Indeed, even what is the book-core of my Literature Review, namely Friedrich

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, came to me initially as

the result of a life experience. I never knew I had a need for Nietzsche when in

1986 I arrived in Venice to take up a six-week occupancy of the Australian Writers’

Studio there (the Australian Writers’ Studio in Italy has since been moved to Rome).

My brief in Venice was to research for, and to begin writing a play about Richard

Wagner in Venice writing part of his music drama (he loathed the word ‘opera’)

Tristan und Isolde. His text (he shunned the word ‘libretto’) was drawn from Celtic

myth, a divergence from the Nordic myths which inspired many of his music

dramas.

10 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 20.11 Ibid. p 21.

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There I was in the city of falling angels (some stone carvings had dropped down

from the church of Santa Maria dell’ Salute) where the Maryborough-born Bernard

Hickey, who was lecturing at the Ca Foscari University in Venice at the time, was

my mentor and guide. He was later to be Professor of English in the University of

Lecce in southern Italy. I had just completed my MA on Xavier Herbert at the

University of Queensland, my thesis there having incorporated the non-Indigenous

Herbert’s exposition of Indigenous myth. Myth was far from my mind as I walked

the canals where Wagner had walked, and listened to a brilliant pianist playing the

Liszt transcription of Wagner’s Tristan score. I found a large biography of Wagner,

translated from the German into Italian but my Italian was halting. In this volume

was a reference to a one-time Wagner acolyte called Friedrich Nietzsche.

Since I was myself a Wagner acolyte, I tried to find out more about Nietzsche. At

last, in the English section of a second-hand bookshop near the Grand Canal, I found

a paperback on philosophers which had a chapter on him. I am afraid I cannot recall

who edited the book, or who published it or even what was its exact title; but,

reading it that night in a room overlooking a back canal, I came for the first time in

my life upon the notion of those differing yet creatively-unifying drives, the

Dionysian and the Apollonian. At the time it mattered not at all that the presentation

of those two forces was an over-simplification of Nietzsche’s presentation The Birth

of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, which I was not to read in full until nearly two

decades later. Nietzsche evades precise definitions of his terms but the editor of the

book I read in Venice provided crystal-clear definitions: the Dionysian was the

dangerous vertical, rising from the depths of ecstatic experience; the Apollonian was

the safely-ordering horizontal, bringing harmony and a measure of clarity to the

Dionysian bubbling from below.

Since then, the vertical-horizontal intersection, the creative wrestling of the intuitive

with the disciplined, has always worked for me as a way of comprehending my own

internal wrestling of the sense-image with the linguistic, of the mythic mystery with

the patterned music. I have now read The Birth of Tragedy twice and find myself

responding to Nietzsche’s non-defining association of the Dionysian with a sort of

Bacchic intoxication (I say “a sort of” because Nietzsche’s language is elusive) and

of Apollonian with an illumined dream that relates to (but is not entirely bound to)

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clarity and harmony12.

Though my favourite poet Judith Wright was not a Nietzsche fan, I feel she was on

his wave length at times: for example “Darkness where I find my sight…”13. This

image recurs in the last poem of her last collection: “Perhaps the dark itself is the

source of meaning…” and the Dionysian-Apollonian interplay is, I suggest, implied

in other lines from that same poem, “Patterns”: “The play of opposites, their

interpenetration - / there’s the reality, the fission and the fusion…”14

I believe it is an awareness of the dramatic and poetic tension achieved by the

opposing of like characters with unlike that led to the positioning in my play of the

acting editor Billy Brannigan in relation to the characters who are at home in West

Wirrawong. Likewise within the ex-teacher Anthony there is the ongoing wrestling

between the allegedly factual content of the geography-geology syllabus which he

has been required to teach, and his personal, inner, imaginative response to the

mountain which rises over the town. (Boat Mountain in Murgon becomes Blade

Mountain in West Wirrawong.) Here too, Nietzsche, on my second reading of The

Birth of Tragedy, endorsed my characterization of Anthony: “Now the Olympian

magic-mountain opens up before us, revealing all its roots”15.

Anthony imaginatively glimpses those roots and wants to trace them to their mythic

sources. My play is essentially about his failure to do this. He is getting ahead of

himself. He wants to write his own poetry in response to the landscape. That is

valid; but he wants to feel with non-Indigenous fingers the pulse of the Alcheringa,

the Dreaming, of the original inhabitants. This he cannot do. He tries to attain his

goal by questioning Lilypilly. Lilypilly is closer to Alcheringa than Anthony can

ever be, but even Lilypilly cannot provide him with what he needs, whether she

wished to or not, and she loves him well enough to know his limitations. Lilypilly

has not come from the original people of this locality.

This is where Nietzsche’s and Judith Wright’s pointing to the creativity of the dark,

the unknowing, the irrational has supported me in the writing of my play and of this

essay. As Nietzsche put it (and when he speaks of “modern” he means the 1870s),

12 Ibid.13 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 59.14 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 426.15 Nietzsche, Op. Cit., p 22.

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creativity is not aroused by rational or conceptual certainty:

A particularly modern weakness inclines us to see the primal aesthetic

phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a way. For the true poet the

metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a representative image that really

hovers before him on place of a concept 16.

So I show Anthony in pursuit of the roots of his mythic mountain, a pursuit that is

never rewarded by fully grasping the image that hovers before him. However,

Anthony is not the only poet in the play; there is also Merle, the town’s librarian,

Anthony’s former student. Merle, like Anthony, is aroused by myth; but Merle,

though she is bonded in friendship with the Indigenous Lilypilly, is roused, not by

Indigenous myth but by the myth symbolized by the Statue Soldier. Within the

frame of my play, Merle comes closer to poetic success than Anthony does. Her

response to Lilypilly’s story of finding the empty pram is to assume a poetic

persona. But her response to Old Stoney is complex: though she writes her poem in

the third person, she is projecting herself in the persona of Stoney, using his

Apollonian dream-clarity to intersect with her own Dionysian uneasiness about West

Wirrawong’s present and past, that past incorporating a fibre of guilt which also

nudges Anthony as he reads her line: “ironbark eyes burn into mine, accusing” 17.

The creation of Old Stoney as a character in the play is the most risky of my

dramatic devices. Were it not that I had sung in the chorus of Mozart’s Don

Giovanni, in which the murdered Commendatore’s statue comes to life (as in the

related Don Juan play of Moliere), I would not have dared to draft him in my

Dramatis Personae. However, once I had placed him there, he became a spokesman

for issues which I felt I could not otherwise have projected. War’s horrific

negativities demand a Dionysian release in celebrations of valorous sacrifice. These

celebrations, recurring annually in the Anzac rituals, can only be reconciled with the

concept of civilization if imaged through Apollonian grace as in the statue of the

young soldier, the concrete or marble columns solemnly engraved with names, the

use of aphorisms such as “Lest we forget” and of artistic embellishments such as the

bugle’s Last Post and the recitation of the Binyon “Ode”.

16 Ibid, p 42.17 from the play West of Wirrawong, by Paul Sherman, MS, p 48.

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I have tried in my play to use the suggestive possibilities of silence. Lilypilly has

plenty to say but she is not eager, or able to give the information Anthony seeks.

Merle intuits that present dwellers in West Wirrawong have some guilt about those

they have supplanted; but she images only “ironbark eyes… accusing”. This derives

from a personal uneasiness I have felt when walking through Sawpit Gully, near

Murgon. But I had no factual information about any massacre. Stoney, the statue

soldier has by virtue of his non-naturalistic image, both the freedom to comment and

the aura of tacit restraint. Hence (I hope) those times when he does comment (as,

for example, upon the ritualizing that idealizes uneasiness about war) will have a

special potency. In an early draft I had the long-standing editor of The Bugle

present as an informed commentator on most issues. However, I came to feel that

his editorializing was non-dramatic. I replaced him with the young, verbose, acting-

editor Billy who is ever ready to pronounce on almost all issues. I hoped that his

(mostly) superficial verbosity would enhance the restraint of the others and also give

counter-posing resonance to the silences.

So I trust the pupa of my play has emerged from the cocoon-chrysalis state as a

moving moth. I say “moth” rather than “butterfly”, for I am aware that this play

moves roughly and clumsily, with little smoothness or grace. That is how it must

be. It is not a play for sophisticated, or cosmopolitan tastes. Perhaps I can persuade

an Arts Council to tour it through country towns, for I know it is true to them.

Indeed, with a resurgence of awareness of the identity of country towns – now in

Queensland highly resentful of attempts to make them merge with one another - it

may have some appeal. I have toured country towns for the Arts Councils of

Queensland, Victoria and the Northern Territory so I think I know my market.

Country towns can surprise one. For example I’ll never forget how croak-croakily

alive The Frogs of Aristophanes was when I saw it performed by the local theatre in

Mt Isa. Perhaps my play stands a chance of arousing (or resonating with) rural self-

awareness, of smiting city smugness that culture’s chief abode is in the subsidized

Cultural Centres of capital cities.

I hope someone in some audiences will see through my Billy the Boy Brannigan’s

obsession with rationally-definable (“enlightened”) goals. Conversely, I hope some

audience members will be consoled by an awareness that they share, or may grow to

share, the gentle branch-bearing of the non-assertive (except in crucial moments)

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Lilypilly. I also hope I may help some people to look at our Statue Soldiers at some

other times than Anzac and Remembrance Day, and that I may help challenge the

current politicizing of sacrifice and the current pollution of human tragedy in the

service of a nationalistic false-Crusade. As a writer of poetry, I hope that the efforts

of Merle and Anthony to write poems are not wasted efforts – and here I recall the

comment of a co-Cohort member that “nothing much happens in this play”.

Because I know what the writing of a poem means to the writer (and may mean to

the reader), I cannot conceive of such as being “nothing much”.

A clue to my central concern (central problem perhaps, but I use problem in its sense

of ‘issue’ rather than of ‘obstacle’) is the distinction between the sophisticated linear

sense of time and the primitive (not in any inferior sense) cyclical sense of time.

It was the Noongar (from West Australia) artist Robert Stuurman, at the Indigenous

Knowledge conference, organized by QUT’s Oodgeroo Unit in 2006, who

verbalized for me my awareness of cyclical time:

When time is cyclical it tends to stand still and a sense of eternity pervades

the ever present now18.

Commenting on Jack Davis’ play The Dreamers, Joanne Tompkins has pointed out:

While European written language and history operate in a linear chronology,

the aboriginal understanding of the past is less fixed19.

I have recently found myself reacting critically to Governmental concerns that

history in schools be constituted formally as “linear”, history which, whatever its

appearance as factual history, might easily be aligned with Rudge’s notion of history

in Alan Bennett’s play (and film) The History Boys as “just one fucking thing after

another”20. Of course there is a place for linear history but I believe that Lilypilly,

Anthony, Merle and Old Stoney in my play are moved by images of time as

recurring, overlapping – cyclical.

The urge to escape from the confines of linear chronology has been expressed

18 Stuurman, Robert. Paper presented in Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies. June 2006. Papers published by Oodgeroo Unit, QUT, Brisbane, p 7419 Tompkins, Joanne. 1994. “Jack Davis’s Plays”. Jack Davis, the maker of history, Turcotte, Gerry (ed). Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 5520 Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. 2004. London: Faber and Faber, p 85.

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strongly in non-Indigenous culture. In my youth I found it a challenge to wrestle

with T.S. Eliot’s opening of his Four Quartets:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past. . .21

But then Judith Wright, in her The Moving Image, came to my rescue with her

imaging of the keys to unlock linear time’s tentacles:

We are caught in the endless circle of time and star

that never chime with the blood; we weary, we grow lame,

stumbling after their incessant pace

that slackens for us only when we are

caught deep in sleep, or music, or a lover’s face… 22

Judith clinches the issue in her quotation from Plato which opens her first volume:

Time is a moving image of eternity23.

The Anthony of my play is old, yet he encapsulates the Wordsworthian wonderment

that is associated with childhood. That is also a mark of Indigenous Australian

awareness of the continuity of Creation. As Wordsworth puts it: “Heaven lies about

us in our infancy”. Later he refers to the persistence of the “vision splendid” through

young age until “[a]t length the Man perceives it die away.” Near the end of the

Ode he states that, at certain times even in mature age there are moments when

gleams of what has been return to us. He concludes by pointing to moments of

apotheosis, such as when nature’s beauty is revealed to us through a flower 24. In

writing my play and this essay I have found it essential to seek and to grasp such

revelations in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing. I am fully aware that

such people as Anthony, the scholarly teacher in life-long pursuit of non-scholastic

21 Eliot, T.S. 1944. Four Quartets. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, p 3 22 Wright, Judith. Op. cit., p 3.23 Ibid, p2.24 Wordsworth, William. from “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood”. In The Penguin Book of English Verse. Hayward, John (ed). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp 264-65.

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wisdom, can be the subject of incredulity and ridicule. Often I notice, as I pass by

train my (I dare to call them ‘my’, though it was the Gubbi Gubbi people who first

embraced them) beloved Tibrogargan-Beerwah-Coonowrin Mountains, that my

unending wonder at their form, texture and colour is not shared by most other

passengers. Indeed, most do not look up from their newspapers, magazines or

novels; or even turn their eyes out of the glaze responding to their plugged-in iPods

or CDs. This concern is the core of my poem “Somewhere under the Rainbow

Serpent”25.

My quest for legends in this land has been a long one. It is nearly a decade since,

returning from Hong Kong where I had seen and pondered the Amah Rock, source

of a local legend, I came across a group of rocks on Horseshoe Bay, Bowen. In

Hong Kong, at the Yuen Long Merchants’ School, I had worked on a poem

(subsequently published there) based on the legend of a girl with her baby waiting in

vain for her husband to return from the sea. I was glad that the students knew the

legend, one of them helping me with his drawing. A few days later I was in Bowen,

doing outdoor drama at the bay with local students but none of them had heard of

any legend concerning the origin of these rocks. As a result, I wrote the poem,

“Amah Rock”26.

In the decade of my birth, a highly significant collection of Australian Indigenous

mythology was published. This was Myths and Legends of the Australian

Aboriginals, published in 1930 by George G. Harrap. The book was published

under the name of William Ramsay Smith, who was Chief Medical Officer of South

Australia. David Unaipon, the Indigenous author, had done all the work of

collecting and writing two drafts under the sponsorship of Angus and Robertson,

until they assigned the David Unaipon copyright to Ramsay Smith in 1927. Ramsay

Smith then edited the work, re-writing parts of it, and it was published with no

mention of David Unaipon’s part in it. This publishing scandal has at last been

partly sanitized with the publication (in 2001, by the Miegunyah Press of the

University of Melbourne) of the legends as David Unaipon wrote them, edited with

a preface by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker27.

25 See Appendix A. 26 Appendix A. p28.27 Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Muecke, Stephen and Shoemaker, Adam (eds). 2001. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press.

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I did not read either the Ramsay Smith version or the David Unaipon original until I

was well into the final drafts of my play. Apart from my early acquaintance with the

Tibrogargan-Beerwah-Coonowrin legend28, my knowledge of Indigenous lore was

perfunctory until I met Kath Walker (late Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal) after

performing one of her poems in her presence on Minbjerribay (Stradbroke Island) in

the 1980s. In the period 1958-61, when I was teaching in Murgon, the ‘set books’

for the subject English included only one story based on Indigenous lore – this was

“Nintaka the Lizard” published in Essays and Adventures by Jacaranda Press, edited

by two of my lecturers at the University of Queensland in 1956, A.K. Thomson and

C.H. Hadcraft. Of the twenty-eight essays and stories, half were by English writers.

None of the Australian writers was Indigenous. C.P. Mountford’s was the only one

drawn from Indigenous legend. His piece was based on the human origin of a group

of rocks in Central Australia, and it came to be seminal for me in my creative

development. However, I quote from the editors’ note: “Legends of the Australian

aborigines are fairly numerous… But they are not at all well known, and very little

use has been made of them in Australian literature”29. That latter comment impelled

me to make use of such legends myself, when I could find them, and to make use of

what other Australian writers had made of them. In my University student days I had

merely skimmed through the Jindyworobaks such as Ian Mudie and Rex Ingamells30.

I found their use of Indigenous words and attitudes somewhat forced and artificial,

though I felt they were making a healthy onslaught on the obsessively Eurocentric

poems of the Vision school of the Twenties, led by the Lindsays. I then had no idea

that the Vision poets had seized on Nietzche as their philosophic torchbearer. Later,

when I came to know this and also to know Nietzsche’s views on the creative

possibilities of myth, especially as expressed in Chapter 23 of The Birth of Tragedy,

I came to an understanding of their ‘visionary’ dilemma. Nietzsche did not mince

words: “Without myth all culture loses its healthy and natural creative power; only a

28 Authentic version in Wells, Robin. In te Tracks of a Rainbow. 2003. 18 Nebula Street, Sunshine Beath, Queensland: Gullirae Books. pp 81-83.29 Thomson, A.K. and Hadgraft, C.H. (eds). Essays and Adventures. 1956. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, p 181.

30 The Jindyworobaks were a group of white Australian poets, including Rex Ingamells, Nancy

Cato, Ian Mudie and Les Murray who “sought to promote indigenous Australian ideas and customs, particularly in poetry... active from the 1930s to around the 1950s...intended to combat the influx of "alien" culture, which was threatening local art” (Wikipaedia, 2007). “Jindyworobak Movement”. Sept 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jindyworobak_Movement.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930s


horizon surrounded by myths can unify an entire cultural movement…”31.

Australia’s visionaries of the 1920s took this to heart. But, not knowing Indigenous

myths (few by then had been recounted or published) they turned to the gods and

goddesses, the sacred mountains, the spirits and sprites, the Pan-prancers of Greece

and Rome. A poem included in the 1923 Vision anthology is this one by Pamela

Travers. She called it “Ecce Homo” and, lest anyone miss the genuflection to

Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, she wrote below her poem’s title, “God is dead.” Her poem

is more than fifty lines long. I do not think it is meant to be satirical or a self-

parody, but this is how it ends:

God is dead, then who’s afraid

To steal the lips of a prancing maid?

Come, old Pan, for the time is mellow.

Plums of love are ripely yellow;

The little apples of love are red,

Pluck them, pluck them, for God is dead32.

I see this as an artificial poem; but even such genuine poets as Hugh McCrae fell

into the trap of the transplanting mythic obsession of the visionaries.

Judith Wright felt that the visionaries’ cup was essentially empty. She agreed with

R.D. Fitzgerald that “centaurs” in a Hugh McRae poem was artificial but she blamed

the Vision creed as a whole, rather than McCrae in particular:

But I think it is permissible to believe that Fitzgerald had made an attributive

error. It was not McCrae’s centaurs that were rocking-horses; it was the

theories that Vision based on McCrae’s practice… McCrae had already

drained from the Greek imagery all that for him was drinkable; Vision

insisted on re-offering him the empty cup33.

I appreciate that the aims of both Jindyworabaks and the Vision poets were derived

31 Nietzsche, Op.cit., p 109.

32 Travers, Pamela. Poetry in Australia. 1923. Sydney: Vision Press, p 115.33 Wright, Judith. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, 1965. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, p 133.

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from the culture and state of knowledge of their period, however in writing my play

I am trying to show that Australian landscape is not an empty cup, not merely a

picturesque background or a commercial stage for Eco-Tourism, but an imaginative

stimulus for primary creativity.

For me, 1957 was a creative turning-point. It was the first time I had a poem

published with payment. This was when Douglas Stewart, then literary editor of The

Bulletin, posted me a cheque for a guinea and published my poem, “Old Brisbane

Quarry”. He had rejected earlier poems of mine which had flowed more from

theories than from experiences. But “Old Brisbane Quarry” was a poem I did not

plan to write. I wrote it from my feet up, so to speak, unconscious of form or

process. I was on my way through the old bush track down through the steep path

an old quarry at Albion. On my back was a pack of my football gear, as I headed to

catch a bus to the University of Queensland for Aussie Rules training, Suddenly, a

bulldozer stopped me in my tracks. The threatened demolition (for smart new

housing developments) of my Brizzy bush boyhood playground had begun. Angrily

and sadly, I forgot about footy training and headed back for home. I started

pounding at my typewriter, and by midnight I had the first draft of a poem which

ended:

Here there is silence for the seed to push

Its permanent impress of primal love

That sets the soft palm feathering on the stone

That sets the sweet grass springing in the stream.

Quietly the recent river’s undertone

Crystals the stirring of a blurring dream34.

A year later I was teaching in Murgon (a local Indigenous word, so they say, for

Lilypond – the inspiration for the name of the character Lilypilly) with Indigenous

students from Cherbourg in my classes. I came to know some of them, and to listen

to them. But I did not visit Cherbourg. To do so, I would have needed (in

accordance with the ‘protection’ laws of those days) to seek written permission, just

as the Indigenous people there had then to obtain official permission to visit

34 Sherman, Paul. ”Old Brisbane Quarry”. August, 1957. The Bulletin. Stewart, Douglas (ed).

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Murgon. I refused to submit to what I regarded as un-Australian.

It was not until the mid 1990s that I actually visited Cherbourg. By then, all barriers

to entering or leaving were down. I was there to teach drama in the brand new

theatre-in-the-round, built as part of the Narrunderi TAFE in Cherbourg. Most of

my teaching colleagues were Indigenous and so were all my drama students. I was

able to sit in on sessions about Indigenous culture, of which by then I had acquired

some limited knowledge. However, it was a chance meeting that provided yet

another piece in the puzzle of my creative journey.

As I have indicated, I learn best from the feet up, not from the brain down. During

my teaching sojourn (not long) in Cherbourg I was staying at night with an old

friend in Murgon. I had no car. One afternoon I was walking the miles from

Cherbourg back to Murgon. I had crossed the creek, once a formal barrier not

passable without official permission. I was listening to the wind through the gum

tree branches when a car suddenly stopped. A friendly, late middle-aged face of

someone I had not seen for decades smiled at me, offering me a lift. Yes, it was that

very Henry who in 1958 had ‘gone walkabout’ from my class when I was calling the

roll. By the 1990s I at least knew what ‘walkabout’ was.

In 1999 I had a unique opportunity to work creatively with Indigenous people. I

played Gonzalo in the Queensland Theatre Company production of The Tempest,

directed by Simon Phillips, who was also director of the Melbourne Theatre

Company. I began rehearsal on the same day as did the members of the Jagera

Jarjum troupe, an Indigenous song-dance company from west of Brisbane. Simon

had assigned Caliban to an Aboriginal actor from west of Melbourne and Ariel was

a Torres Strait Islander girl. The Jagera Jarjums were The Tempest’s islanders, with

whom Gonzalo has some significant interactions and about whom he makes some

(partly appreciative, partly condescending) comments. We had great discussions,

helped by the Indigenous Associate Director, Wesley Enoch, who is now directing

for Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre.

My experiences such as the TAFE drama tutoring in Cherbourg (which led to the re-

meeting with my former aboriginal student) and the association with an Indigenous

song-dance troupe in Shakespeare’s The Tempest were but two instances of cultural

convergence in me. And I think it is obvious that movements towards cultural

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convergence are central to my play, West of West Wirrawong. For the term

‘convergence’ I am indebted to our major poet, Les Murray. As he writes in his

essay, “The Human-Hair Thread”:

It is to the credit of the Jindyworobak poets that they were the first white

artists to try to make assimilation a two-way street. Convergence is a better

word here, though; assimilation carries too deep a stain of conquest, of

expecting Aborigines to make all the accommodations while white people

make none35.

Having had, as a non-Indigenous person, great opportunities to interface with

Indigenous culture, I must state that I appreciate Indigenous suspicion of those who

try to commit what I call Cultural Invasion. Nowhere has this suspicion, nay,

resentment, been better expressed than in a poem in last year’s Blak Times edition

of Meanjin. As Anita Heiss wrote:

I do not want to hear

about your spiritual experiences

at Uluru… 36

However, myth, though locally created, has a way of finding universal resonance.

As David Unaipon wrote in the beginning of his seminal collection: “Perhaps some

day Australian writers will use Aboriginal myths and weave literature from them,

the same as other writers have done with the Roman, Greek, Norse, and Arthurian

legends…”37

And internationalization of Indigenous art has already begun. On visits to Italy and

France I have found great interest in Australian Indigenous narrative and poetry.

Aldo Magagnino, a school teacher colleague in southern Italy has now published his

Italian translation of Indigenous legends. He first heard these from Australian

archeologists active near the school where he taught – in the Italian city of Gallipoli

35 Murray, Les. “The Human Hair-Thread”. 1984. Persistence in Folly. London: Sirius Books, p 29.36 Heiss, Anita. “Apologies”.2006. BlakTimes, Meanjin. Minter, Peter (guest ed). Vol 65, Issue 1. p 176.37 Unaipon, David. Op. cit. “Introduction:, p xliii.

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(not to be confused with the Anzac locale in Turkey)38. In 2006, in company with a

Queensland Indigenous poet, novelist and story-teller Herb Wharton, I took part in

an international conference in the University of Le Havre, France. My main

contribution was presenting the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal. At the time of that

conference my play was taking its final shape. Crossing the English Channel (La

Manche to the French) I had a dream experience in which I confronted both the

turbulence and the tranquility of what Les Murray calls Convergence39. Later, I

wrote a poem about my internal wrestling of the Dionysian and the Apollonian,

about the restlessness before the reconciling of remoteness and closeness. Since, as

I believe I have demonstrated, such tensions are projected within the characters of

my play, I now close my essay by presenting my poem as the Exegesis’s Epilogue:

It is December, 2006. I am crossing the English Chanel from Portsmouth to

Le Havre to present the poetry of Oodgeroo Noonuccal in conference in the

Université du Havre. I am tired, for the ship has sailed five hours late, at 3.30

am. Cross-cultural currents are interlocking with the rough Channel

currents. I am aware that the French won’t hear of it being called the

“English Channel”, it must be “La Manche”. But there are deeper counter-

currents within me. Hence this poem.

Moreton Bay meets La Manche

My Francais phrase-book’s not beside my pillow.

To tell the truth, my pillow’s missed the boat

though boat’s sailed five hours late. Tomorrow’s port

I’m programmed down for poems; main one’s

by Oodgeroo, touching her father’s totem:

Noonuccal-nurtured, old mate Carpet Snake.

But, rolling with the roughly-wooded deck

(Atlantic’s elbow jabs me in the ribs)

I’m pining for a far Pacific bay,

for Straddy’s sandbanks where Minjerribah38 Buri, Maria Roaria and Magagnino, Aldo. Racconti del tempo del sogno. (Selezione e traduzione, raccolti da A.W. Reed). c2000. Nardo (Lecce): BESA Editrice, via Duca degli Abruzzi, 13/15.39 Murray, Les. Op.cit., p29.

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croons harmony with Quandamooka’s choir.

But Neptune’s trident zaps my comfort zone.

Now, midnight-muffled, Portsmouth sunk astern

and Isle of Wight’s last blinkers lidded down,

we’re wrapped in Courbet’s canvas-cleaving Wave,

its gallery-grace alarmingly alive.

Poseidon’s sea-horses aren’t my mounts –

I’ve lost my pathway to tomorrow’s poems.

Two decade drowned since I crossed Quandamooka

(map-marked as Moreton Bay) to meet you, Kath

before, re-christening as Oodgeroo

you nursed your name in Paperbark’s soft folds.

You gave me charter to perform your tale

- your father’s totem mate, Old Carpie snake.

Now Quandamooka’s far. But murderous Manche

suddenly smiles, seeding her serpent sea

with reptile ripples, eggs of eastern dawn

and soon a coastline sprouts its stony tower.

Sliding the stone-stubbed shore of Normandy

the surf uncoils. I glimpse Old Carpie’s scales.

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Bibliography and Published Works Consulted

Bennett, Alan. 2004. The History Boys. London: Faber and Faber

Bhaskar, Roy. 2002. From Science to Emancipation, Alination and the Actuality of

Enlightenment. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Biggs, Fred. “Mapooram”. as narrated to Roland Robinson, in Koch, C.J. 1987.

Crossing the Gap, A Novelist’s Essays. London: Hogarth Pres.

von Brandenstein, C.G. 1974. Taruru. Adelaide : Rigby.

Brennan, Christopher. 1956. “What do I Know?”. Wright, Judith (ed). A Book of

Australian Verse. London: Oxford University Press.

Buri, Maria Rosaria and Magagnino, Aldo. c2000. Racconti del temp del sogno.

(Selezione e traduzione, raccolti da A.W. Reed). Nardo (Lecce): BESA

Editrice, via Duca degli Abruzzi, 13/15.

Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. Language and Myth. Langer, Suzanne (tr). New York: Harper

and Brothers.

Eliot, T.S. 1944. Four Quartets. Sydney: Angus and Robertson

Eliot, T.S. 1954. “The Hollow Men”. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber

Euripides. 1963. Medea. Vallacott, Philip (tr). Harmondsworth : Penguin Books.

- 1959. Euripides V (Electra, The P{hoenician Women, The Bacchae).

Arrowsmith, William (tr). New York: University of Chicago Press.

Greer, Germaine. 2004. Whitefella Jump Up. London: Profile Books.

- “Whitefella Jump Up : The Shortest Way to Nationhood” Quarterly Essay.

2003. Issue 12. Melbourne: Black Inc.

Hamilton, Edith. 1940. Mythology. New York: NAL Penguin.

Henry, Gladys, (collector). 1967. “Fire from Walgoey the Taipan: the Legend of

Byjinjillah”. Giroo Gurrll. Brisbane: Fortitude Press.

Herbert, Xavier. 1938. Capricornia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.

Herbert, Xavier. 1975. Poor Fellow My Country. Sydney: Collins.

Holt, Lilian. 2004. Correspondence on Whitefella Jump Up. London: Profile Books.

Hope, A.D. 1973. Selected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.

Jaffa, Herbert C. 1979. Modern Australian Poetry : 1920-1970 . Detroit : Gale

Research Company.

Koch, C.J. 1987. Crossing the Gap. A Novelist’s Essays. London: Hogarth Press.

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Lindsay, Norman (ed). 1923. Poetry in Australia. Sydney: The Vision Press.

Meanjin. 2006 Vol 65 Issue No 1. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Mudie, Ian. “Underground”. A Book of Australian Verse. Wright, Judith (ed).

London: Oxford University Press.

Murray, Les.1984. “The Human Hair-Thread”. Persistence in Folly. Sydney: Sirius

Books.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.

Whiteside, Shaun (tr), Tanner, Michael (ed). London: Penguin Books.

- 1961. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Hollingdale R.J. (ed). London: Penguin.

Oodgeroo, of the tribe Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker). 1964. “Cookalingee”,

and “Stone Age”. We Are Going. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press.

- 1972. “Carpet Snake”. Stradbroke Dreaming. Sydney: Angus and Robertson

- 1998. “Ballad of the Totems”. 50 Years of Queensland Poetry.

Rockhampton: Central Qld University Press.

Reynolds, Henry. 2006. The Other Side of the Frontier. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Shakespeare, William. 1973. Hamlet. Nigel, Alexander (ed). London: Macmillan

Education.

- 1959. Timon of Athens. Arden Shakespeare. Oliver, H.J. (ed). London:

Methuen.

Slessor, Kenneth. 1923. “Pan at Lane Cove”. Poetry in Australia Lyndsay, Norman,

McCrae, Hugh and Slessor, Kenneth (eds). Sydney: The Vision Press.

Sophocles. 1947. The Theban Plays. Watling E.F. (tr). Harmondsworth: Penguin

Classics.

Tompkins, Joanne. 1994. “Jack Davis’s Plays”. Jack Davis, the maker of history,

Turcotte, Gerry (ed). Sydney: Angus and Robertson.

Thomson, A.K. and Hadgraft, C.H. (eds).1956. Essays and Adventures. Brisbane:

Jacaranda Press.

Unaipon, David. 2001. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Carlton,

Victoria: Miegunah Press.

Wagner, Richard. Music Dramas. Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde,

Ring of the Nibelungen.

Wells, Robin. 2003. In the Tracks of a Rainbow: Indigenous culture and legends of

the sunshine coast. Sunshine Beach (18 Nebula Street): Gullirae Books.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1997. Wittgenstein on Human Nature. Hacker, P.M.S. (tr).

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London: Phoenix.

Wordsworth, William. 1956. “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from

Recollections of Early Childhood”. The Penguin Book of English Verse.

Hayward, John (ed). Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Wright, Judith. 1956. A Book of Australian Verse. London: Oxford University

Press.

- 1965. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford University

Press.

- 1994. “Patterns”. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.

- 1994. “The Morning Dead”. Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus and

Robertson.

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Conferences Attended in 2006

Master Classes with Roy Bhaskar. Spo9nsored by the Institute for Indigenous

Leadership in Education and the Creative Industries Faculty, QUT. Creative

Realism in Context. April 20- 21, 2006. QUT.

Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies Conference. Organised

by Oodgeroo Unit, QUT. Surfers Paradise, June 28 – 30, 2006.

Conference Presentation

“Poetry of Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccal”. Reconciliation Conférence,

Université du Havre, France. Faculté des Affaires International. December

7 – 8, 2006.

Relevant Roles played in stage productions

Aeschylus. Orestes in The Eumenedes (adapted as The Flies by Jean Paul Sartre)

Sophocles. Tiresias and member of Chorus in Oedipus Rex, translated by W.B.

Yeats.

Anouilh, Jean. Creon in Antigone.

Euripedes. Title role and Nurse in extracts from Robinson Jeffers adaptation of

Madea.

Shakespeare, William. (I list only the roles I have played where cultural differences

are core themes) Title role and Edgar in separate productions of King Lear;

Gonzalo in The Tempest; Adam in As You Like It.

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Some Activity Sources of Indigenous Culture

Sound Recordings (vinyl)

Elkin, .P. 1953. Tribal Music of Australia. New York: Folkways Records.

Laade, Wolfgang. 1975. The Bora of the Pascoe River. New York: Folkways

Records.

Holmes, Sandra LeBrun. nd. Land of the Morning Star. Sydney: HMV.

Kansky, G. nd. Mornington Island Corroboree Songs. Australia: W & G Records.

Audio Cassettes

Corbett, B. & Summers, M. (Narrators), Knox, R. & Atkins, M. (singers). nd.

Dreamtime Legends of the Australian Aboriginies. Tamworth: ENREC

Studios.

Tjapukai Dance Troupe. nd. Proud to be Aborigine. Larrikin Records: Paddington,

Sydney.

McRae, Murdo. 1997. Aboriginal Earth Chants. Aboriginal Artists Agency (no place

listed). Australian Broadcasting Commission, Aboriginal Arts Board and

Music Board of the Australia Council acknowledge for help.

Sound Recordings (CD)

Barambah, Maroochy. 1995. Mongungi. Daki Budtcha Records: New York.

Burragubba, Adrian. 2005. The Didj in us. Produced by the artist, and sold while

performing in the Queen Street Mall, Brisbane.

Live Performance

Jagera Jarjum Song & Dance Troupe of South East Queensland. I performed with

them in Shakespeare’s The Tempest for QTC in 1999 and have regularly

attended their Indigenous performances ever since.

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Appendix A: Relevant Poems

Somewhere under the Rainbow Serpent

(dedicated to Aldo Magagnino, of the Salento, and to the Indigenous creators of the Dreaming

legends included in In the Tracks of a Rainbow, by Robin Wells, Gullirae Books, 18 Nebula St,

Sunshine Beach, Qld, 4567).

Salento, southern Italy. Not quite

dear Dorothea’s “sunburnt country” but

Salento-sojourning, I find Aldo,

a teacher etching emus, kangaroos

in Dreaming songlines, librettoed in Italian.

fair gobsmacks me, does Aldo. Once, nearby

he’d palled with Aussie archaeologists

swinging their picks abroad. He’d drunk their yarns

tall-timber stories spinning soul from stone.

He’d waltzed their swag of legends, rainbow-rich

dredging many a Dream-deep billabong

rippled with bunyip breath for one and all.

Now, treading a legend’s track near Noosa Head

I trip on a tourist, Christmassing in Queensland,

who might as well have stayed in Toorak Road,

scorning the sand, she scans her Weekend Age,

impervious to wild Wantima’s pain

in nearby headland profiled, sandstone face

that rebel boy’s memorial. Wilful one,

his father’s warning scorned, sea-monster’s meal

spat out as stone. Wantima outstars time...

but Madame Melbourne’s not to mysteries.

Now near Caboolture (Carpet Snake enscrolled)

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melting our tilt-train’s windows, tragic tears

from father Tibrogargan’s face intrude

but make no impact on a youth iPodded

flexing to CD’s pre-planned pulse. Maybe

he’ll scrawl on “Glasshouse Mountains” postcards

(Cook’s label, hooked on Yorkshire furnace towers)

but as for the woes the Gubbi-Gubbis wove

round “Crookneck” curse of cowardly Coonowrin

afraid to rescue floodswept Mother Beerwah,

hence Tibrogargan launched his Lear-like rage,

he’ll never know. iPod’s his only icon.

But Aldo’s far-flung coals enkindle mine,

bridging the jetlag gaps of miles and minds.

A Dreaming depth ignites dead definitions,

lithe muscles coil, defying Logic’s language

that classifies, that clots and calcifies.

Old heartspun mountains melting masks of stone.

Paul Sherman 2007.

Beerwah-on-Seine

African girl, student in Le Havre’s Uni,

she mimes the pregnant womb of Mother Beerwah

while I, the ageing Aussie visitor,

guide two French students keen on improvising

the tragic Tibroggan’s Lear-like rage

against his coward son, crook-necked Coonowrin.

We’re half a world away from Glasshouse Mountains,

Cooks’s bizarre banding of the humps he saw

from far off shore, recalling boyhood’s towers

where Yorkshire yeasted glass in furnace flame

but Kabi Kabi legends laced in me

when Bribie boyhood’s blood first brothed, salted

in Sunshine Coast’s tide tub, rekindle now

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as Pumicestone Passage froths my mindscape

merging with River Seine’s dark estuary.

A legend’s life eclipses ours, makes mock

of cancelled calendars, of scheduled space.

So here in Europe’s sculptured academe

the ancient Austral rocks’ lost lava life

bubbles and breathes again in mythic mime.

No need of language as the youthful trio

blend belly shape, freeze-frame in craggy frown,

sculpt statues of themselves, retell the tale

older than Oedipus, forever fresh.

Paul Sherman 2007.

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Southern Burnett Sentinel

He spins me back, the Murgon statue soldier,

his youth’s exuberance snuffed out in stone,

guarding the names of lads who gave their all.

Last drive from Brisbane, passing Wacol station,

I time-warped back through half a century

when my turn might have come, Korea calling.

My birthday broached the fated call-up dates

so Wacol opened wide its khaki wings

to claim me and m mates for “three months basic”.

We conscripts buckled up in a battle dress,

we route-marched, drilled, chucked dummies first

then graduated into live grenades.

with Banshee wails we made our bayonet runs

ripping the guts from swinging sawdust bags,

my conscience pangs scraped by sergeant’s scorn,

his “Soldiers’ Chorus” certainties

that Bren gun, bullet blast and bayonet blade

were freedom’s angels in the “goody” fight.

What did I know? What know I now? Below

this statue soldier’s stillborn youth, wearing

my Old Fart’s Nasho medal’s bronze, I wince

from Wacol’s legacy of bayonet blades.

Korea calmed, I fired no shot in anger,

was salted for a sea I never swam.

On Anzac Day I watched the true-blue rankers

whose bayonets struck through sadder stuff than straw.

I see some stand with shrapnel in their souls,

watching the labeled wreaths, the flickering frame.

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My old man’s stored-up tears, for too long locked

in Logic’s reservoir, are seeping now.

Paul Sherman 2007.

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Amah Rock

She’s waited long, a symbol grown,

the flesh, the blood, the aching bone

have hardened into statue stone.

Her tears are rainclouds closing down

upon the sprouting tower town

which turns its back upon her pain

and rides the rattling Kowloon train.

But 30 years ago I saw

before the high-rise fenced the shore

the eyes that burned into the bay

for husband journeyed far away,

the baby bound upon her back

she’d carried up the mountain track,

the baby now stone cold as she –

a symbol fixed eternally.

Paul Sherman March 1, 2000.

(written for Yuen Long Merchants Association Secondary School, Hong Kong).

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Reading the Rocks

(at Horseshoe Bay, on returning from Hong Kong)

From Nathan Road, goodbye Kowloon

neon calligraphy slicing the skies

borne by a Jumbo QNTAS balloon

to Cairns’s Coral Sea sunrise

Mogodon-mindless, grabbed by Greyhound

bussed to Bowen, sunset burning

coral-crunching Horseshoe-Bay-sound

coconut sweetness of returning

Older scrolls I must unravel

Confucius in Capricorn, rocky reading –

my currency changed from foreign travel

my rock-salt gardens need re-seeding.

Five rocks, furrowed, sea-slug-snowed

wrestling time’s stiff stranglehold

pockmarked in a cancelled code

cold-faced nuggets nursing gold.

I’m Kowloon-dazzled, Bowen blind.

The dragons dance, the bronze gong gleams

but I must anchor my whirlpool mind.

Now I must fathom my own land’s dreams.

Five rocks chomping a choppy tide –

one slit and scarred, one bony, tough

one ready the rising wave to ride

one butting the water, playing it rough.

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One just a baby, last in line

scared of the salt that stings his feet

pigmy bristles pimpling his spine

nosing the foam for scraps to eat.

The rocks I glad-wrap in my brain

toe-trace the stories in the sand

my mad calligraphy, anchor-chain

re-berthing me in my own land.

Paul Sherman 2007.

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gifts for gubbas

You joked about the nickname nailed onus

the dour non-tribe, our top-hat talk

jangling with jargon... Gubbas, gubbas

you dubbed us, nuggety knockdown lump of a name

carved from Colonial “Gov’nors” know-all ones.

Once, brushing a wattle tree out Murgon way

I flinched from the flex of a carpet snake

whose rainbow scales, sliding the bronze blossoms

touched icebergs in me... Later I read your lines

and learned to look through neo-Nunukul eyes.

Kath, before you rechristened to Oodgeroo

I danced to that ballad you spun for the snake

your father’s totem mate. You painted him too

in ochre prose, beckoning old Biami

the overseer who smiled from rainbow skies.

Your island tales dropped anchors deep in us

brought down to earth our double walled defences,

white-anting all our screened hygienic houses.

You made us feel for feather, fur and scale,

the land’s vast legacy we’d tunnel-visioned.

Your cherished Carpie, chasing your mother’s chooks,

crossing the earthen floor you wordspun for us,

slithered inside our padlocked padded hearts

devouring all our sterile stalactites.

Your tale untied us, loosed our stapled tongues.

Dredging the salted channels of your Dreaming

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you carried the catch to us on raft of words

across wide Quandamooka. Biami’s bounty

gave hungry gubbas the saving grace to graze

on fields no tractor ploughed, no “duster” sprayed.

(Note: this poem recalls Oodgeroo’s “Ballad of the Totems” and “Carpet Snake” story

though its text is independent of theirs. She was given to use both the “Nunukul” and

“Noonuccal” spellings of her tribal name. “Quandamooka” is said to be the original name

for Moreton Bay.)

Paul Sherman. 2000. Moongalba – Poems in Honour of Oodgero, Zonta Club, Brisbane.

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Appendix B: A Chapter Summary, with comments, of The Birth

of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

THE RE-BIRTH (THANKS TO RICHARD WAGNER) OF THE GREEK TRAGEDY CREATED BY

AESCHYULUS AND SOPHOCLES BUT DESTROYED BY EURIPEDES AND SOCRATES, OUT OF THE SPIRIT

OF DIONYSAIE CHORAL MUSIC AS RE-CREATED IN ITS EROTIC, MYTHICAL POWER BY WAGNER:

The Birth of Tragedy is the early work of a University of Basle classical philologist,

aged twenty-eight, in love with early Greek tragedy, who had aspirations as a poet

and musical composer. He was at that time a Wagner-worshipper, having personally

played the piano transcriptions of The Valkyrie. Friedrich Nietzsche’s full title for

his 1872 work was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, which I shall

hereafter abbreviate to BT. I suggest that my above Chapter Title might give some

indication of the contents of this bewildering, yet fascinating work.

The main impact of the book is its enthusiastic, insistent, but by no means clear or

consistent, promotion of the artistic importance of the creative tension between

impulses Nietzsche calls Apollonian and Dionysian. When I first read BT I

immediately fastened on Dionysian as being the dangerous, irrational vertical

impulse and Apollonian as the calm, ordered, controlling impulse, where technique

produced moderation.. These interpretations were some help to me in my own

acting and writing, but I now realize, on re-reading BT, that my early responses

were too simplistic.

In the first chapter of BT, Apollonias is associated with dream, and Dionysiac with

intoxication. Wagner-lover Nietzsche immediately links Apollonian with the

dream-poet promotion of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger. He then moves on to his

early mentor, Schopenhauer, who influenced Wagner too. Nietzsche quotes from

The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer’s simile of the calm boatman

in the midst of the sea-storm. But he immediately associates himself with

Schopenhauer’s imaging of dread, and then indicates how a sense of lost way can be

handled by the “narcotic potion” of Dionysiac urges, wherein “subjectivity becomes

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a complete forgetting of the self”. Nietzsche’s association of Beethoven’s Hymn to

Joy with the Dionysiac at first seems shocking to one who is accustomed to the idea

of Ninth Symphony setting of the Schiller “An die Freude” as being associated with

church music. Now, however, tempted by Nietzsche’s reference, it is possible to

hear the frenzies of deep diving in the work.

In Chapter Two of the BT, we are pointed to the Greeks in a series of mysterious

(maybe deliberately mystifying) references to the seductive power of the Dionysiac

dithyramb. We must take this (if we will) at face value for neither Nietzsche’s age

nor ours could have physically heard a Dionysiac chorus. (“Dithyramb” refers to no

musical technicality; it is simply a reference to the complex double-birthing of

Dionysus, who was sheltered in the thigh of his father Zeus after being taken from

the womb of his lightning-struck mother Semele).

Chapter Three makes a healthily pungent criticism of Greek culture, exposing the

façade of godliness. It is almost like the author’s Hellenic prefiguring of his later

Anti-Christ phase. Chapter Four continues this criticism of the hypocrisy in Grecian

society and god-status. The chapter culminates in a startling image of the product of

the marriage of the two impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian: “...whose

mysterious marriage, after a long period of early strife, was finally blessed with such

a child, at once Antigone and Cassandra.

Chapter Five opens with raising our hopes that we are near to understanding of the

Dionysiac-Apolline union. However, what we get is a complex look at the lyric poet

Archilochus and the mystery of artistic creation. Chapter Six is more fulfilling

because (again starting with Archilochus) it establishes a link between the folk song

and what Nietzsche calls “Dionysiac currents”. He outlines the importance of music

in the Dionysiac.

Chapter Seven sees the introduction of the chorus as “the crucial step towards the

open and honest declaration of war on all naturalism in art”. Nietzsche calls on

Wagner’s assertion that civilization “is annulled by music as lamplight is annulled

by the light of day” (though he quotes no source in Wagner for this). Nietzsche

declares: “the Greek man of culture felt himself annulled in the face of the satyr

chorus, and the immediate effect of Dionysiac tragedy is that state and society, the

gulfs separating man from man, make way for an overwhelming sense of unity that

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goes back to the very heart of nature”. He postulates a link (many, myself included,

are happy to debate) between Dionysiac-induced will-denial and Prince Hamlet’s

inaction.

In Chapter Eight Nietzsche explores his perceptions of poetry. He develops his

argument against the view that sees metaphor as a rhetorical figure, and calls for the

promotion of the “image” rather than “concept”. Returning to his main theme he

again notes the transforming power of the dithyrambic chorus. In Chapter Nine he

points to the co-existing of “light-image” and “abyss” (echoing Apollonian and

Dionysiac) in the Sophocles treatment of the Oedipus myth.

Chapter Ten opens staking a claim (and endowing his claim with the Nietzschean

olive-wreath of “certainty”) that “until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the

tragic hero” and that (until Euripides) “all the celebrated characters of the Greek

stage – Prometheus, Oedipus and so on – are merely masks of that original hero,

Dionysus”. This elaborate support of “certainty” appears to me to be unhelpful in

the creative process, whereas, from my perspective, it is easier to relate to his

criticism of the way in which religion, with “the stern and intelligent eyes of an

orthodox dogmatism” systemises its “mythic premises” and moulds myth into

history.

Chapter Eleven opens with the powerful claim that Greek tragedy met its death by

suicide. He blames Euripides for this, alleging that, through Euripides, “everyday

man pushed his way through the auditorium onto the stage”. Chapter Twelve soon

moves into an unequivocal charge of artistic murder: “the excision of the primitive

and the powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy, and the rebuilding of tragedy on

non-Dionysiac art, morality and philosophy – that is the intention of Euripides, now

revealed to us as clear as day”. This is followed by an examination of Euripides’

late work (posthumously performed), The Bacchae. Unlike Nietzsche, I read this

play as a hallmark of Greek tragedy, with powerful resonances for me in the

characters of the two old – Tiresias and Cadmus. To my ear the choruses throb with

poetic Dionysian ecstasy, sometimes calmly informative, sometimes consumingly

violent. The complex attraction-repulsion bond between the two main protagonists,

the disguised god Dionysus and the petulantly over-confident young authoritarian

Pentheus, seems to me to offer full possibilities of artistic engagement to the actors,

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a necessary ingredient for the enthralment of an audience.

Chapters Thirteen to Fifteen are primarily concerned with Nietzsche’s view of the

destructive effect of Socratic logic upon art, empowered by the image, at the end of

Chapter Thirteen, of “how logic twists around itself and finally bites itself in the

tail.” Chapter Sixteen includes a lengthy Schopenhauerian extract endorsing, in

music creation, the subordination of reason. From this, Nietzsche draws support for

his linking of mythology with Dionysian wisdom. Chapter Seventeen looks densely

at drama, relegating the words in both myth-moulded drama and in Shakespeare’s

Hamlet to a secondary role in relation to “the structure of the scenes and the visible

images”. However, it is possible to argue that Hamlet is also myth-based, since

Shakespeare’s allegedly historical sources, such as Saxo Grammaticus, have been

wildly re-woven by the Bard. As well as this, it seems churlish on the part of

Nietzsche to undervalue the role of words in poetic drama to this extent.

Chapter Eighteen is significant in that it celebrates Kant and Schopenhauer as

achieving “victory over the optimism that lurked within the essence of logic”.

Though Kant’s sense of the “Copernican Revolution” is not specifically named, it

could be argued that this is implicit in Nietzsche’s reference to the transformation of

“mere phenomena”. There are, however, no footnotes in BT.

Chapter Nineteen at first seems to be anti-Wagner, opening as it does: “[w]e cannot

describe the innermost content of this Socratic culture more accurately than by

calling it the culture of opera”. However, Nietzsche immediately makes it clear that

by opera he is thinking of floridly superficial vainglorious vocal gymnastics,

appealing to “Florentine circles”. Wagner, of course, would never permit his works

to be described as operas. They were music dramas; and his words were never

libretti, they were poems, not written by librettists but by the composer himself

(though he was not above adapting them from Nordic or Celtic origins). In the mid-

nineteenth century Nietzsche regales us with an hilarious lampooning of

conventional opera, leading to the assertion that “opera is the expression of

amateurism in art”. However, towards the end of this chapter, he sings the praises of

German music “pre-eminently in its mighty sun-cycle from Bach to Beethoven,

from Beethoven to Wagner”.

Chapter Twenty, much shorter than its predecessor, ends with what looks, to a

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twenty-first century reader, like Nietzsche’s attempt to outdo the comic satirical

choruses of The Frogs of Aristophanes. However, it is more than likely that

Nietzsche wishes to be taken seriously. After all, it is the “rebirth of tragedy” that

his whole book is focused upon. His youthful passion is revealed in phrases such as

“grasp the thyrsus and do not be amazed if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at

your feet”40.

Chapter Twenty-one continues in rhapsodically evocative mode, describing the love-

death (Liebestod), the sensation one may experience during performances of Tristan

und Isolde, culminating in the third act. Nietzsche succeeds in confidently yoking

the Apollonian dream-light and Dionysian undercurrents of Greek tragedy with the

towards-Isolde sea-gazing of the mortally wounded Tristan. I am grateful to

Nietzsche for reviving in me my response in the theatre to hearing the “jubilation of

the horn” that “pierced our hearts”. That unification of opposites in jubilation and

piercing is the essence of the creative union of Apollonian and Dionysian.

Chapter Twenty-two continues this exploration of music drama’s capacity to realise

the symbolic power of myth. In this chapter the text of Isolde’s Liebestod is quoted;

Nietzsche’s own text that succeeds it seems to pulse with the music that Wagner

created in this climax of the work. Towards the end of this section Nietzsche

switches from sublimity to a savage swipe at contemporary criticism and journalism,

then he finishes in nobler mode by showing how even a “critical barbarian” might be

redeemed by a successful performance of Lohengrin 41 .

Chapter Twenty-three is essentially an appeal for a lost civilization to save itself by

re-discovering the power of myth. “Myth alone rescues all the powers of

imagination and the Apolline dream from their aimless wanderings”. Astonishingly,

for one who rejected formal religion, Nietzsche in this chapter recognizes society’s

foundational “connection with religion and its growth out of mythical

representations”. The author waxes lyrical (no potentially parodistic excess now) in

40 Thyrsus is “a staff or spear tipped with an ornament like a pine-cone, and sometimes wreather with ivy or vine branches; borne by Dionysus (Bacchus) and his votaries” OED Online.41 As I read this final paragraph to the Chapter, I was swept back to 1958 or 1959 when I attended, with my mother in Brisbane, a fine performance of Lohengrin, the first Wagner I experienced in the theatre. To quote Nietzsche’s last sentence, I then “had an inkling of what it means to be an aesthetic listener”.

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calling on the old Greeks to be the guides, urging his fellow Germans to listen to

“the blissfully enticing call of the Dionysiac bird that hovers above him and wants to

show him the way”.

By the end of Chapter Twenty-three so much has been said. This reader, at least,

was feeling fearful that the final chapters would be anti-climactic. Indeed, the

opening paragraphs of this section seemed disappointingly repetitive. Then, the

opening of the third paragraph plucked a chord: “No one who has experienced the

need to look at the same time as the longing to go beyond mere looking...” I

recognised myself in these words, as one always compelled to look at the immediate

prospect at the same time as speculating about the far field beyond the barrier ridge.

Nietzsche’s next points however seemed to exclude me, claiming that it was difficult

for such a person to imagine how clearly the immediate need and the distant longing

“coexist in the contemplation of the tragic myth”. I found myself challenged, and I

like being challenged. It is preferable to being soothingly stroked.

In this penultimate Chapter, Nietzsche blends ugliness and wisdom in the

appearance and the inner personality of Dionysus’s associate, old Silenus. This

leads Nietzsche to consider discordance and dissonance. The final Chapter,

although repetitive of material which has gone before, concludes with Nietzsche’s

awareness of the world-wound in tragedy, making him call upon the page the aged

Athenian Aeschylus, who reminds us how beauty is built out of bleeding.

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