Australian scenes in black and white find a stage
By Martin Flanagan,The Age, 9 June 1999

NEIL MURRAY insists that his play King For This Place is not autobiographical, but it does follow the trajectory of his life. A farm boy, Murray grew up on a property substantially poisoned by salinity at Lake Bolac in western Victoria. Working on the farm as a youth, he discovered stone tools and learnt from his father that the area had once been populated by another People. He grew up asking himself two questions. Who were these other people? What did they know about land? Attempting to fill the gaps in his knowledge, he journeyed north in 1979, eventually arriving at Papunya in the Northern Territory where he worked for three years, mostly as a teacher. During that period, he also helped to form the Warumpi Band, the first major Aboriginal rock group.

His 1993 novel, Sing For Me, Countryman, is at one level an account of that experience. At another level, one seen by too few critics, it is an extraordinarily candid but respectful account of traditional Aboriginal society by a contemporary white writer. Like Xavier Herbert, a writer he admires, Murray is nothing if not his own man. Angela Chaplin, the artistic director of Fremantle's Deckchair theatre Company, read Sing For Me, Countryman in a German pensione near Bonn in 1995. She finished it in a single sitting. "It was the first time I had read a book that I felt had truly rounded Aboriginal characters." What also impressed her was the author's familiarity "with so many different aspects of indigenous culture".

Two years later when she heard that Murray had ideas of doing a performance piece based on his music and writings, she commissioned him to write a play. Among her hopes was that he would work with indigenous languages. He did. King For This Place, which has just finished a successful season in Fremantle, employs an artful blend of Luritja, Kriol and English so that the dialogue, while being authentically Aboriginal, has enough English for the audience to stay in touch with the characters. It also made the play attractive to Stephen "Baamba" Albert, who lived at Papunya in the '70s and is familiar with Luritja. Albert, whose performance as 'uncle" gave the production its gravity and moral weight, says that Murray's play represented a step forward for him as an Aboriginal actor.

The plot is simple enough. Lenny, a young white played by Phillip Mclnnes (himself a farm boy from Mulunbudin in Western Australia), is driving drunk through the desert when he hits a roo. Three blackfellas find him unconscious by the side of the road and take him with them. Lenny, who's driven up from Victoria, wakes to find himself in another world, half the contents of his wallet gone, his ute who knows where and probably stripped by now. Lenny calls the blackfellas thieves and is struck by one of them, Peter Tjapaltjarri (Kelton Pell), for insulting "uncle".

Pell's performance in the play was extraordinary. His character has a deep, ferocious anger in his soul. He's the drunk you see late at night in country towns. Later when Lenny, whose farm skills earn him a job as an outstation worker, denies Peter Tjapaltjarri use of a government vehicle, he spits out his contempt for the "gumment", saying they have nothing to do with this land.

The play holds nothing back. Pell says if a blackfella had written it, no one would have come to watch. But if it had to be written by a white, it had to be performed by blacks. When a drunken Peter steals the community vehicle and drives off recklessly into the night, endangering the lives of several children, he must face tribal punishment. He begs for mercy from his uncle but is finally commanded to be still and receive his spearing. For that moment, the audience waits with him. This, truly, is theatre that takes people somewhere they are otherwise most unlikely to go. The roles of the two Aboriginal women were played by Melodie Reynolds and Sher Williams-Hood. Both describe Murray's writing as "real".

Trevor Jamieson, another member of the play's Aboriginal cast, is from the desert country west of Kalgoorlie. "You have God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Ghost," he says. "We have the Law, the Living and the Land." Stephen Albert describes the play as "beautifully balanced" - as true about white culture as it is about black. Lenny is wandering across the land's surface, lost for all his assuredness, when the three men find him.

Jamieson says Aboriginal people are always taking in lost people. He has a story about a Japanese man riding a bicycle through the desert who was taken in by his community. As a character, Lenny is limited, but innocent in his limitations. He falls for an Aboriginal girl who is 'promised ' to a man who beats her. Lenny fights him and loses. Realising this is neither his community nor his place, he decides to go home to country Victoria.

But the place to which Lenny returns is not the one he left. He now knows what's missing, what used to he there but is no longer in his sleep, the Spirits of the past call to him. The point of the play, according to its author, is that at the moment Lenny learns to grieve for what has been lost he begins to come home. Or, as Stephen Albert puts it: The more he belongs to the land, the more he belongs to himself."

By and large, Sing For Me, Countryman (which is now out of print) was dismissed by the Australian literati as a social realist novel and therefore part of a tired and discredited literary genre. What was overlooked was that in no area of Australian life is a social realist novel more desperately needed than at the interface of black and white Australia where apparently intractable problems arise daily. As things stand, these are either not talked about, as in polite society, or aired on talk-back radio in ignorant and damaging ways. For those who profess an interest in reconciliation. The frankness of Murray's art is both challenging and encouraging.

The path he traces is difficult but rewarding, and his experience is that white Australians who walk towards Aboriginal culture will be welcomed.

Before opening night, all involved in the play cast, crew and author - participated in a smoking ceremony led by Pell, a Noongar, the production being on Noongar land. King For This Place has now finished in Fremantle and, as yet, there are no plans for it to travel to Sydney or Melbourne. The twist that goes to the heart of Australian culture is that what is seen as art of national significance outside Australia is often seen as slight and provincial within it. When Chaplin read Murray's novel in Germany four years ago, she was traveling with another Deckchair production, Ningali "This is the sort of Australian theatre people overseas want to see," she says. "They're not interested in our interpretation of Strindberg."

Meanwhile, in Perth, the local critic for the West Australian newspaper said he thought King For This Place would work better as a musical. As for Murray, he intends returning to Lake Bolac later this year where he will probably resume work on the sequel to Sing For Me, Countryman. At 42, he says he no longer has the energy for touring with a rock hand, but he does have enough material for another solo album and, later this year, the University of Northern Territory Press will issue a collection of his poems.

Will he write another play? "The idea selects the medium," he says.