ABSTRACT
Hailed as the country’s first Aboriginal musical, Jimmy Chi and Kuckles’ Bran Nue Dae took Australian theatrical circles by storm after its premiere at the Perth Festival in 1990 where it won a Sidney Myer Award for outstanding achievement in the performing arts. Two national tours to major venues followed, as well as a local tour to Broome, the play’s ‘birthplace’, and other Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Bran Nue Dae is widely regarded as a landmark in Aboriginal theatre history, not only because it reached a larger, more differentiated audience than previous work in the field, but also, and more importantly, because its generic innovations and profound rejection of Otherness seemed to open up new possibilities in Aboriginal performing arts. In the 1980s, Aboriginal theatre had largely centred around the monumental achievements of the late Jack Davis, whose primary project had been to dramatise the oppressions of indigenous Australians in the wake of European imperialism. Chi’s play does not disavow this history – in fact the colonial legacies of alcoholism, dispossession, and social breakdown are woven into its very fabric – but the emphasis is on celebration and regeneration. In this respect, as the original programme notes put it, Bran Nue Dae is indeed ‘a play to ease the pain’.
