Theatre: Black Diggers (★★★★½)

Queensland Theatre Company
Written by Tom Wright
Directed by Wesley Enoch
Designed by Stephen Curtis
Cast: George Bostock, Luke Carroll, Shaka Cook, Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Guy Simon, Colin Smith, Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 7 March



Late in Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, a returned WWI serviceman begins bleeding under the arm, and a piece of shrapnel, buried in his body for decades – a “bit of left-over war” – comes to the surface.
It’s an apt metaphor for the work done by this magnificent piece of storytelling.
Something like 800 indigenous Australian men sidestepped regulations that barred them – as non-European non-citizens – from enlisting in the 1st AIF. They fought at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front, and gained respect and comradeship in the trenches, where mud and blood covers all colours of skin, and killing and dying come alike to all races.
For many, though, their homecoming was appalling, their service largely ignored by a country unprepared to afford them the dignity and opportunities of being an Australian, let alone one of its returning heroes.
Their stories are told in skilfully interwoven vignettes that take them from reserves, small towns and inner-city suburbs to the battlefields and back. The all-male, all-indigenous ensemble plays characters black and white, Australian, English or German, male and (once) female, with power and commitment.
Around them, Stephen Curtis’s brooding, massive set of charcoal grey-black, like a battlement or a deep fortified bunker, is painted over with the names of our men, and those places that once were open wounds in this country, and haunt us to this day; Messines, Pozieres, Bullecourt, Amiens and that beautiful hell, Passchendaele, where 38,000 Australians were killed, missing or wounded in eight weeks of monstrous carnage.
The great strength of Wright’s text and Wesley Enoch’s direction is how it emphasises how alike we all are. These young Aboriginal blokes in 1914 may have been kept apart from the wide, white community and deprived of its rights and benefits, but they felt the same patriotic fervour, the same yearning for the Big World, as did their young, white countrymen.
There’s great knockabout humour in the early scenes. Enoch and his cast make mischief with everything from misguided evolutionary theories to AIF enlistment bureaucracy.
But, in the deadly court of artillery shells and bayonettes, fear, damage and death batter at it remorselessly.
If these keen, tough, canny lads are represented here better than they were, or do more here than they did in life, that’s no different to how we see all our bright, gone boys.
In the play’s great scene, the ghost of a soldier (Luke Carroll), smeared with funerary paint, tells the story of his last act of desperate, brutal, courage. It’s stunning, spellbinding writing and performance.
Carroll is one of a cast of nine, and each has fine moments. The experience of Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Colin Smith and the marvellous George Bostock anchor the production, Guy Simon does some great character work and the young blokes, Shaka Cook (magnetic here as he was in Jasper Jones last year), Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles really get inside the young men they are playing.
The play does have some trouble finishing, and doesn’t quite maintain a seamless blend of message and dramatic momentum right to the end.
But that’s only as if an old digger wants to tell you one story too many. It’s well worth waiting every last second, and hanging on every last word.            
Late in Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, a returned WWI serviceman begins bleeding under the arm, and a piece of shrapnel, buried in his body for decades – a “bit of left-over war” – comes to the surface.
It’s an apt metaphor for the work done by this magnificent piece of storytelling.
Something like 800 indigenous Australian men sidestepped regulations that barred them – as non-European non-citizens – from enlisting in the 1st AIF. They fought at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front, and gained respect and comradeship in the trenches, where mud and blood covers all colours of skin, and killing and dying come alike to all races.
For many, though, their homecoming was appalling, their service largely ignored by a country unprepared to afford them the dignity and opportunities of being an Australian, let alone one of its returning heroes.
Their stories are told in skilfully interwoven vignettes that take them from reserves, small towns and inner-city suburbs to the battlefields and back. The all-male, all-indigenous ensemble plays characters black and white, Australian, English or German, male and (once) female, with power and commitment.
Around them, Stephen Curtis’s brooding, massive set of charcoal grey-black, like a battlement or a deep fortified bunker, is painted over with the names of our men, and those places that once were open wounds in this country, and haunt us to this day; Messines, Pozieres, Bullecourt, Amiens and that beautiful hell, Passchendaele, where 38,000 Australians were killed, missing or wounded in eight weeks of monstrous carnage.
The great strength of Wright’s text and Wesley Enoch’s direction is how it emphasises how alike we all are. These young Aboriginal blokes in 1914 may have been kept apart from the wide, white community and deprived of its rights and benefits, but they felt the same patriotic fervour, the same yearning for the Big World, as did their young, white countrymen.
There’s great knockabout humour in the early scenes. Enoch and his cast make mischief with everything from misguided evolutionary theories to AIF enlistment bureaucracy.
But, in the deadly court of artillery shells and bayonettes, fear, damage and death batter at it remorselessly.
If these keen, tough, canny lads are represented here better than they were, or do more here than they did in life, that’s no different to how we see all our bright, gone boys.
In the play’s great scene, the ghost of a soldier (Luke Carroll), smeared with funerary paint, tells the story of his last act of desperate, brutal, courage. It’s stunning, spellbinding writing and performance.
Carroll is one of a cast of nine, and each has fine moments. The experience of Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Colin Smith and the marvellous George Bostock anchor the production, Guy Simon does some great character work and the young blokes, Shaka Cook (magnetic here as he was in Jasper Jones last year), Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles really get inside the young men they are playing.
The play does have some trouble finishing, and doesn’t quite maintain a seamless blend of message and dramatic momentum right to the end.
But  if an old digger wants to tell you one story too many, it’s well worth waiting every last second, and hanging on every last word.

This review appeared in The West Australian 5.3.15