{"id":12,"date":"2026-02-11T15:52:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T13:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.wrkshp.fi\/carpa9\/?p=12"},"modified":"2026-04-08T17:16:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T14:16:34","slug":"listen-here-country-as-character-and-ecological-whispers-in-first-nations-playwriting-and-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nivel.teak.fi\/carpa9\/listen-here-country-as-character-and-ecological-whispers-in-first-nations-playwriting-and-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen here: Country as character and ecological whispers in First Nations playwriting and performance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction: Listening to country<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n

My daughter has a habit of playing in the dirt. She builds stories from what\u2019s around her \u2013 a gum nut stands in for a wombat, a crinkled leaf for a sail, a gnarled stick for a man who must make his way across the yard. She narrates as she goes, guiding him through the terrain, until the world interrupts. A gust of wind knocks him down or ants swarm or a tree root \u2013 thick and obnoxious \u2013 blocks his path. She folds the obstacles into the tale: the wind might be an omen, the ants overbearing visitors demanding tea and attention. When a bird calls from the tree above, my daughter decides this is part of the story, too: the garbled warning that saves the stick-man from certain peril. Watching on, I see how her play follows the dramaturgy of nature. Each disruption becomes a turning point, a storying process that follows the logic of Country, where every sound or natural element can participate in the telling. My daughter is innately writing with Country, collaborating with what is already there.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, listening to Country is not metaphorical but ontological. Country is not an inert backdrop, nor a \u201clandscape\u201d against which stories unfold; it is a living system of relationships that bind land, water, sky, ancestors\/spirits, humans, and the more-than-human world. As Kombumerri and Wakka Wakka philosopher Mary Graham writes, \u201cLand is the Law\u2026 [it is the] basis for all meaning,\u201d articulating Country as a sentient system that governs responsibility and behaviour (Graham 2008, 191). Goenpul woman Aileen Moreton-Robinson similarly describes Country as an ontological relationship grounded in custodianship rather than possession (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 12\u201314). Knowledge, in this framework, is not abstracted from place but produced through a meaningful relationship with it. For a First Nations playwright, listening to Country means engaging in a form of dramaturgy that recognises agency beyond the human \u2013 that acknowledges life<\/em> in other places \u2013 where the land, water, and skies themselves have the potential to shape dramatic action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This relational understanding is echoed by the Bawaka Collective, who describe Country not as an object of study but as an active participant in knowledge-making. They emphasise practices of \u201cco-becoming,\u201d in which humans, ancestors, and place merge together through a reciprocal relationship (Bawaka Country et al. 2018, 22). Listening, then, is not a passive act but a form of attentiveness that allows Country to guide action, contribute to storytelling \u2013 and importantly \u2013 exist within creative works as an active interlocuter. Even when Country does not appear to act for or against the characters on stage, it remains present and explicable. Deborah Bird Rose, writing for non-Indigenous audiences, gestures toward this worldview when she describes Country as \u201ca nourishing terrain\u2026 a place that gives and receives life\u201d (Rose 1996, 7). While Rose\u2019s work functions as translation rather than authority, it underscores the central idea that Country is animate and responsive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This paper proposes that in First Nations playwriting and performance, Country functions as both character and dramaturgical collaborator. Drawing on my own live performance works \u2013 Ngadjung<\/em> (Belco Arts, 2022), Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em> (Sydney Theatre Company, 2025), and The Chosen Vessel<\/em> (The Street Theatre, 2025) \u2013 I explore how First Nations dramaturgies offer an alternative model of eco-theatrical practice. These works are not \u201cabout\u201d the environment in a Western sense; rather, they respond to Country as a living co-author. I argue that Blak playwriting embodies an ecological dramaturgy grounded in relational and custodial ethics. This approach emerges from my research into Blak Gothic theatre, a mode that reimagines the temporal and affective sensibilities of European and Australian Gothic traditions through First Nations cosmologies and Ways of Knowing. In the Blak Gothic, Country does not simply house ghosts or hauntings; it becomes the holder of memory and the site through which past, present, and future coexist. Listening, in this context, is constitutive rather than descriptive. It demands reciprocity and sustained attention to the temporal folds where colonial histories and ecological realities remain entangled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Country and the limits of \u201clandscape\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To understand Country as character in First Nations performance, it is necessary to acknowledge how radically First Nations concepts of Country diverge from Western ideas of \u201clandscape.\u201d In settler imaginaries, the land is something to be surveyed, measured, and ultimately owned. For First Nations peoples, however, Country is not an object of possession but a living network of relationships encompassing land, water, sky, stories, and kin (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 15\u201318). Country is sentient and sovereign and, in my view, the first dramaturg. W.E.H. Stanner attempted to capture this difference in his oft-referenced description of Dreaming as an \u201ceverywhen\u201d \u2013 a temporal field in which past, present, and future coinhabit (1979). Stanner\u2019s formulation, while necessarily limited by its settler-anthropological frame, nonetheless gestures toward a non-linear temporality grounded in relational continuity: Country is simultaneously a site and a time. To write with Country, therefore, is to engage a temporality that resists linearity as understood by the west. To understand this, we must recognise what Moreton-Robinson calls the \u201contological relationship\u201d between First Nations peoples and land \u2013 a relationship grounded in custodianship rather than possession (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 16). Within contemporary theatre, these distinctions carry significant implications because Eurocentric dramaturgies often treat place as container \u2013 something scenic or purely symbolic. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performance, by contrast, enacts place as agent: Country shapes the emotional and spiritual logic of performance. When playwrights like Wesley Enoch (in Black Medea<\/em>), Leah Purcell (in The Drover\u2019s Wife<\/em>), and Andrea James (in Dogged<\/em> and Yanagai Yanagai<\/em>) stage Country, they do not simply depict terrain but activate presence \u2013 a dramaturgy of relation rather than representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent scholarship in ecological performance has begun to recognise the potential of this approach. The rise of eco-dramaturgy (May 2007; Bottoms & Goulish 2022) signals a turn in theatre-making that foregrounds the more-than-human world. These frameworks, while valuable, often remain grounded in Euro-American environmental thought. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship, Lauren Tynan cautions that ecological frameworks which do not centre First Nations sovereignty and knowledge risk reinscribing the very forms of human exceptionalism they seek to challenge (Tynan 2021). First Nations dramaturgy offers not merely a subcategory of eco-theatre but a radical alternative: a dramaturgy that begins with relation to the world around us rather than mere representation. To speak of Country as character is to unsettle the anthropocentrism of western dramaturgy, where human conflict (generally) defines dramatic action[1]<\/a>. In Blak storytelling, action is often distributed across humans and non-humans: the wind carries messages (as in my daughter\u2019s stick-man story); the river remembers violence; a tree twists and turns, communicating with the humans on stage. Katrin Althans argues in her study of the Aboriginal Gothic that these presences destabilise colonial hierarchies, reminding audiences that the land has always been here, has always watched and listened (Althans 2010).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blak gothic genre elements as ecological force<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Building on this understanding of Country as a relational presence, the Blak or Aboriginal Gothic [2]<\/a> offers a framework through which ecological agency can be staged and experienced rather than merely represented. Its ecological dimensions emerge most clearly through a treatment of place that exceeds the limits of what is typically described as \u201clandscape.\u201d In contrast to settler Gothic traditions, where land is rendered as hostile, empty, or alien, Blak Gothic texts position Country as a living presence shaped by colonial violence and sustained through ongoing relationships of care. In my own theatrical practice, this distinction is foundational: Country does not function as scenic backdrop but as a dramaturgical force that shapes action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholarship on the Aboriginal\/Blak Gothic consistently identifies place as a site of unease rather than estrangement. Bartha argues that nature in Aboriginal Gothic texts is depicted as \u201chaunted by colonisation,\u201d producing a sense of discomfort that arises from a disrupted relationship rather than unfamiliarity (Bartha 2016, 190). This unease is more ecological than psychological, emerging because the land has been irrevocably altered by invasion and is therefore experienced as wounded by First Nations peoples and communities (Bartha 2016, 194). As Bartha further suggests, \u201cuncanny nature is able to empower the dispossessed via its role as witness,\u201d supporting the \u201creanimation of colonial trauma\u201d distinctive to Blak Gothic works (Bartha 2016, 194). This understanding aligns the Blak Gothic closely with ecotheatrical concerns, particularly those that resist representational models in which the environment functions as passive setting. Ecotheatre scholarship has increasingly foregrounded more-than-human agency and ecological relationality, yet the Blak Gothic extends these concerns by embedding them within First Nations ontologies of time and place. Haunting in this context is not an anachronistic intrusion of the past into the present, but a condition of continuity. Country remembers, and that memory exerts pressure on the present. Ecological disturbance is therefore inseparable from non-linear temporality: the past is not recovered or symbolised, but remains active. Linda Hassall\u2019s analysis of Australian Gothic drama is useful here. She identifies an \u201cinvestigation of place\u201d as central to Gothic theatre in Australia, particularly where such investigations uncover the impact of land on \u201cthe hearts and minds of those who inhabit it\u201d (Hassall 2014, 26). Gothic drama, she argues, is characterised by an \u201cuncovering [of] muted histories,\u201d referring to colonial violence that continues to shape contemporary experience (Hassall 2014, 26). Blak Gothic plays extend this logic by refusing resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These ideas underpin my engagement with the Blak Gothic in Ngadjung<\/em>, Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em>, and The Chosen Vessel<\/em>. In each play, Country operates as a structuring or driving force rather than merely a thematic concern. Country exerts pressure on characters, interrupts linear progression, and redistributes dramatic action across human and more-than-human agents. Haunting of Country by colonial forces is not resolved through exorcism or restoration: the disturbance becomes a dramaturgical turning point through which story adapts to Country rather than overriding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ngadjung<\/em> (2022)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ngadjung<\/em> (BelcoArts, 2022), co-created with the Ngunnawal community of Canberra, is a climate-fiction drama that exemplifies how First Nations playwriting engages Country not simply as backdrop, but as character and agent. Set in a dry riverbed in a near-future shaped by climate collapse, the play stages the ecological devastation wrought by colonial capitalism while insisting on the persistence of ecological memory. At its centre are two Aboriginal women from different generations: Flick, who remembers when rain still fell and rivers still ran, and Cass, who has grown up in a world where water is bottled, branded, and sold by corporations. Their encounter \u2013 mediated by the dry riverbed, the moon, and the memory of water \u2013 becomes a dramaturgical exploration of how Country refuses muting, even under conditions of extreme capitalist extraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opening stage directions of Ngadjung<\/em> establish the riverbed as more than scenery: \u201cA dry riverbed. The sun beats down.There are channels in the dirt where the water used to flow.\u201d (Van Den Berg 2022, 2) From the outset, the environment is described as animate and communicative, with trees that \u201clook like skeletons,\u201d earth that \u201cglows red,\u201d and river channels functioning as scars that recall absence. Even before a word is spoken, the audience is invited to read the landscape as alive and expressive. This is what Country as character entails: the land speaks before the human characters do, offering clues or warnings or advice (when and if it chooses to do so). These are the signals First Nations playwrights may leave not only for audiences, but for their creative collaborators. The riverbed is not only setting but serves as a dramatic engine, dictating action and rhythm. Flick digs with and against the earth; Cass collapses from inhaling dust; storms threaten without ever delivering rain. The landscape generates conflict and depicts scarcity, but it also offers strategies for survival. There is shelter beneath trees, knowledge embedded in soil, and memory carried in the snaking shape of the riverbed. Country resists, but it also reaches out and offers choices to the characters who inhabit these places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title Ngadjung<\/em> \u2013 meaning \u201cwater\u201d in Ngunnawal language \u2013 foregrounds weather as the play\u2019s central presence. Rain never physically falls on stage, yet its absence shapes every exchange. Water is the silent third character in the relationship between Flick and Cass, structuring their dialogue, their disagreement, and their longing for a return to the way things were. The only water that appears on stage is not real. Cass arrives carrying bottled synthetic water branded by an international corporation, WETco \u2013 a grotesque emblem of ecological commodification. For Flick, this water is poison, a parody of the \u201creal stuff.\u201d The clash between real water and fake water dramatizes the violence of colonial capitalism: water stolen from Country, processed, and sold back to those it once sustained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the ecological argument of the play extends beyond capitalist critique. Cass also carries a fragment of possum-skin cloak inherited from her grandmother. Scarred by fire, it functions as talisman and counterweight to WETco\u2019s poison. Where the bottled water represents extraction without relation, the cloak embodies Country-as-culture: knowledge made wearable and alive. Objects in Ngadjung<\/em> are never inert props. They are carriers of ecological and cultural memory. The hard drive Cass carries \u2013 filled with stolen data and code \u2013 stands in stark contrast to the possum skin. Both are technologies of a kind, but only one is embedded in Country, the other accelerating its erasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The act of digging recurs throughout the play and becomes its central eco-dramaturgical gesture. Flick digs holes not simply as a survival tactic but as a form of relation \u2013 \u201can arm-wrestle with the earth.\u201d (Van Den Berg 2022, 26) Digging uncovers not water, but stories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

CASS:<\/strong> And you\u2026 know the bits that went first. That got drank up by the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLICK:<\/strong> And you know that the birds flew around and around \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CASS:<\/strong> Looking for a drink \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLICK:<\/strong> Looking for a drink \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CASS:<\/strong> And they circled until their wings couldn\u2019t flap anymore. They crumpled to the earth, feathers dried out like bits of paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FLICK:<\/strong> And the trees gave up and their leaves curled in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CASS:<\/strong> And people huddled under the shade of a thick branch, chasing the shadow around and around the tree while the sun was chasing them.<\/p>\n(Van Den Berg 2022, 42.)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here, Flick and Cass co-perform Country\u2019s memory. Humans, animals, weather, and the land are woven into a shared ecological narrative. The more-than-human is not backgrounded but entangled. This is Country speaking through human bodies, a collective remembering that refuses linear time or singular authorship. Flick\u2019s eventual death at the hands of WETco agents does not mark defeat. Instead, it culminates in transformation as Flick becomes the river. This moment fuses eco-dramaturgy with the Aboriginal Gothic. Flick\u2019s transformation is not metaphorical but ontological, asserting that Country is kin and that death is not erasure but circulation. The play insists that ecological collapse cannot be separated from colonial violence \u2013 and that survival, when it comes, is collective and ongoing rather than restorative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em> (2025)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em> tells the story of two Aboriginal boys, Neddy and Ty, in the early years of colonisation. Sent by their respective mobs to gather intelligence about the white invaders, they meet beneath a lemon tree growing on contested land. What begins as surveillance becomes something else: a series of secret encounters that slowly bloom into intimacy. Beneath the tree they joke, wrestle, tell stories, and fall in love, even as the pressures of invasion \u2013 ecological, social, moral \u2013 begin to encroach. The tree is an introduced species, a colonial graft onto Country, its roots displacing native grasses, its fruit foreign, its blossoms at once alluring and unsettling. In this sense, the lemon tree materialises what Ken Gelder describes as the \u201ccolonial uncanny\u201d: the unsettling presence of the foreign embedded within the Australian landscape (Gelder 2012). Country is not simply altered by invasion here but is made a stranger of sorts to itself. By the end of the play, the lemon tree stands as both archive and monster, holding memory of the boy\u2019s tender relationship while bearing the weight of \u2013 an representing \u2013 colonial violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Neddy and Ty, the ecological consequences of colonisation are not abstract. They speak of sheep chewing grass down to dust, of waterholes fouled, of mobs going hungry, of raids that fracture and scatter families far from sacred places. These moments register the slow violence of invasion at ground level, where environmental damage and social rupture are inseparable. As Deborah Bird Rose reminds us, ecological degradation is never only about nature: it is always also about the breaking of cultural, spiritual, and relational systems (Rose 1996). In Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em>, those breaks are felt in the soil beneath the boys\u2019 feet and in the fragility of the space they carve out together under the tree, where this double violence is experienced and understood. The Yella Tree thrives while native trees wither and it grows larger as the Country around it is stripped and exhausted. It shelters love even as it embodies invasion. The tree is therefore neither innocent nor purely antagonistic, forcing the boys into an ongoing negotiation with Country that cannot be resolved with any certainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crucially, the tree is not mute but functions as an interlocutor \u2013 a third presence in Neddy and Ty\u2019s relationship. They invent stories about its origins, and use it as the stage for their games and intimate moments. Their myth-making is not ornamental but is a way of thinking with<\/em> Country, of testing possible meanings for the tree\u2019s presence and, by extension, for their own place beneath it. Country, in this play, demands interpretation. This becomes most explicit in the play\u2019s final scene, when the boys co-author a story about a spirit who guards a river crossing. The lemon tree\u2019s final form stages more of the ecological uncanny: a condition in which belonging and dislocation coexist, and where care and harm are entangled. The final moment of the play exemplifies this paradox:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

NEDDY:<\/strong> There was a spirit who lived by the river \u2013 right at the crossing where you could leap from rock to rock and get across safely. She was beautiful. And the men who came across her fainted at the sight of her slender arms and her breasts. And she\u2019d\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TY:<\/strong> Drag them \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEDDY:<\/strong> Drag them into the river and leave them to rest for ever and ever, catching glimpses of her figure as she stretched out on the river bank. One day a beautiful young man came along, hoping to cross. And he looked her in the eye. And he asked for safe passage. He didn\u2019t faint at the sight of her. The spirit was angry.
\u201cMy beauty brings men to their knees!\u201d
The man replied \u2013
\u201cYour beauty is undeniable, but \u2013 my heart sings for someone else.\u201d
He points across the river to another young man, waiting patiently. In a rage, the spirit soaked the dirt around the river, and mud pooled at their feet. They can stare? At each other. Until\u2026 Forever. And they did. They never felt warm breath on their cheek. They wasted away, their ankles locked in the filth. They became\u2026 Stone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TY:<\/strong> No. They stretched out their arms. And they became trees \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEDDY:<\/strong> Growing growing growing across the river \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TY:<\/strong> Waiting until they could finally \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEDDY:<\/strong> Finally<\/em> \u2013<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TY:<\/strong> Touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEDDY<\/strong> pulls an axe from his bag. He starts hacking at the tree. The tree becomes more and more unstable. It falls. TY<\/strong> and NEDDY<\/strong> reach for each other. The sun is rising.<\/em><\/p>\n(Van Den Berg 2023, 68\u201370)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The transformation from stone to tree insists on continuance rather than punishment. The lovers do not escape Country; they become part of it, stretching across the river in an act of longing that is also endurance. But the play refuses to let this moment settle into reassurance, as Neddy pulls an axe from his bag and begins hacking at the lemon tree. It grows unstable and falls as the boys reach for each other across the wreckage. The final image does not resolve the tension it has created: Country listens and intervenes but does not reconcile. In Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em>, the land remains an active, unsettled interlocutor \u2013 one that holds intimacy and violence in the same breath, and insists that Blak survival unfolds within, not beyond, that contradiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Chosen Vessel<\/em> (2025)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Barbara Baynton\u2019s 1896 short story The Chosen Vessel<\/em> is a classic of the colonial Australian Gothic. It centres on a settler woman left alone with her baby while her husband is away. Isolated in the bush, she is pursued by a swagman. She flees with her child, only to be murdered near a riverbank. Her body is later discovered by a passing horseman, who mistakes the sight of mother and child for a vision of the Virgin Mary. A priest, hearing this account, reframes her death as divine allegory rather than atrocity, refusing to acknowledge the reality of gendered violence in the colony. While the story stages settler women\u2019s vulnerability, it entirely omits First Nations presence, presenting the bush as hostile and morally opaque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My adaptation of The Chosen Vessel<\/em> reimagines Baynton\u2019s tale through an Aboriginal Gothic lens. Here, the central Woman is Aboriginal, doubled as a Ghost, and the land is never silent \u2013 particularly the river, which becomes a character in its own right. All male characters (Swagman, Husband, Priest, Travellers) are played by a single white actor, intensifying the sense of an oppressive and recurring colonial gaze. At the centre of the drama is the Aboriginal woman and her child, navigating the intersecting violences of patriarchy and colonisation. In this reworking, the Gothic no longer obscures colonial violence; it exposes it, situating Country as an active presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The play opens with Ghost speaking directly to the audience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cWe had mountains that hummed with life.
Down near the sea, you could taste the salt in the air.
Flowers, pretty as anything you\u2019ve ever seen.
No fences or roads or towers or order \u2013
except for what Country laid out for us.
\u2026 Same land you\u2019re sittin\u2019 on now \u2013
Stolen land. Easy to forget, eh?\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n(Van Den Berg 2025, 1)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

From the outset, Country is positioned as sovereign and the holder of memory. This address does not function as exposition alone; it establishes an ecological and ethical framework in which land, memory, and story are inseparable. Ghost does not haunt Country \u2013 she speaks with<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the play\u2019s Gothic atmosphere emerges through its ecological soundscape. Sticks snap underfoot, a calf cries, wind roars across the stage. These sounds are not ambient decoration but dramaturgical agents, escalating tension and propelling action. The calf\u2019s braying warns the Woman of the Swagman\u2019s approach; the sounds of his movement through scrub and water betray his position as she navigates the riverbank. Ecological systems here are not symbolic but participate directly in the unfolding drama. Unlike European Gothic traditions, where nature is terrifying in its strangeness, this Aboriginal Gothic insists that Country is kin. The fear in The Chosen Vessel<\/em> does not emanate from the bush itself, but from the colonial violence enacted within it. This is particularly evident in the river, which functions simultaneously witness and repository of memory. The river carries longing for home, offers momentary guidance, and ultimately holds the Woman\u2019s death without transforming it into spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Towards the end of the play, a Horseman describes discovering the Woman\u2019s body by the river, her child still suckling from her breast. He interprets the scene as a vision of the Virgin Mary. But the Ghost interrupts this mythologisation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cShe\u2019s no virgin \u2013
no divine wisdom written across her face \u2013
no trip to heaven ahead of her.
She\u2019s a woman far from home, layin\u2019 still in the dirt \u2013
Dirt that will take her back.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n(Van Den Berg 2025, 42)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here, the riverbank refuses erasure. The soil does not sanctify the Woman, nor does it render her anonymous. It takes her back, absorbing her specificity, her history, and her relationship to place. In contrast, the Swagman \u2013 figured as a colonial monster \u2013 embodies violence against both body and land. His pursuit of the Woman mirrors the extractive and possessive logics imposed upon Country itself. The Priest\u2019s intervention in the final scene compounds this violence. By recoding the Woman\u2019s death as allegory, he strips it of specificity and transforms it into colonial myth. This gesture echoes what Rose identifies as a persistent colonial impulse: the silencing of First Nations life and knowledge through abstraction and moral displacement (Rose 1996). Against this, The Chosen Vessel<\/em> insists on Country as witness, the land remembering what human institutions attempt to overwrite. The Gothic, in this context, becomes not a mode of terror but a mechanism of truthtelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Taken together, these works articulate a Blak eco-dramaturgy in which Country assumes distinct but related forms of agency. In Ngadjung<\/em>, Country functions as ecological memory, holding knowledge that resists extraction and erasure. In Whitefella Yella Tree<\/em>, it operates as interlocutor, mediating intimacy and invasion through a tree that listens and responds. In The Chosen Vessel<\/em>, Country bears witness, holding violence within a longer continuum of relation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To think dramaturgically of Country as character is therefore not an abstraction. As Rose reminds us, \u201cCountry is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life\u201d (Rose 1996, 7). A First Nations dramaturgy in this space stages entanglement: between human and more-than-human, past and present, care and harm. To acknowledge Country as character is not to anthropomorphise the land, but to recognise agency where western dramaturgy has long denied it: to treat it as scenery alone is to participate \u2013 however unintentionally \u2013 in the colonial logic that insisted our lands were inert and conquerable. In an era of ecological collapse and ongoing colonial violence, Country reminds us that relation itself remains theatre\u2019s most urgent work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1<\/a> Of course, there are examples in absurdist theatre which relocate the source of drama elsewhere, but I argue that the existential questions\/drivers at the heart of such works are inherently human concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2<\/a> Blak Gothic and Aboriginal Gothic will be used interchangeably throughout this paper, acknowledging the body of Aboriginal Gothic critical literature but also the limits of the term \u201cAboriginal\u201d in reference to the genre: Torres Strait Islander folks also participate in making works within this framework. Due to this, I prefer the term \u201cBlak Gothic\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Althans, Katrin. 2010. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film<\/em>. Rochester, NY: Camden House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bartha, Kathrin. 2016. \u201cGothic Landscapes and Aboriginal Belonging in Alexis Wright\u2019s Plains of Promise<\/em>.\u201d Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature<\/em> 16(2): 188\u2013199.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bawaka Country, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru,S. Suchet-Pearson, S.L. Wright, K. Lloyd, M. Tofa, L. Daley. 2018.\u202fIntercultural Communication Handbook<\/em>. bawakacollective.com\/handbook<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bawaka Country, Sarah Wright, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Banbapuy Ganambarr, and Djawundil Maymuru. 2015. \u201cWorking with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Author-Ity.\u201d Cultural Geographies<\/em> 22<\/em>(2): 269\u2013283. doi.org\/10.1177\/1474474014539248<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baynton, Barbara. 1896. \u201cThe Chosen Vessel.\u201d In Bush Studies<\/em>, 1\u201317. London: Duckworth, 1902. Originally published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bottoms, Stephen J., and Matthew Goulish. 2022. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and the Return to Relation<\/em>. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enoch, Wesley. 2007. Black Medea<\/em>. In Contemporary Indigenous Plays<\/em>. Sydney: Currency Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gelder, Ken. 2012. \u201cThe Colonial Uncanny.\u201d In The Gothic World<\/em>, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 463\u2013472. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Van Den Berg, Dylan. 2025. The Chosen Vessel<\/em>. Sydney: Currency Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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