I Am Eora

Wesley Enoch is a busy chap.  Taking the time to chat from Sydney Airport before heading back home to Brisbane, the first Indigenous Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company has spent his morning in meetings, finalising the creative details of I Am Eora, the musical show that has bubbled away at the back of his mind for the last four years, set to premiere at the upcoming Sydney Festival.

I Am Eora seems set to extend what is seen to be possible in Indigenous theatre, incorporating music (including that of desert balladeer Frank Yamma, jazz singer Wilma Reading and hip-hop poet Radical Son), performance and large-scale projections to suggest a story without relying too much on overt narrative.  Enoch, who contributed to the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, describes it as being “like an opening ceremony to a big athletics event”, which although celebratory looks “at the underbelly of things, trying to tell another kind of story, not just the obvious stuff.”

Taking as its point of departure the biographies of three historical figures, Barangaroo, Pemulwuy and Bennelong, the show promises to use their stories to explore the predominant responses of Indigenous people to contact with Australia's colonizers: hostile resistance, a quiet refusal to conform as well as active assistance.  “The dominant narrative is that Aboriginal people just rolled over and let it happen,” says Enoch, “but Pemulwuy resisted and there's been a huge resistance in this country since the very beginning...  What the[se] figures represent is still manifesting today, the warrior, the nurturer and the interpreter.  Many Indigenous Australians experience those three spirits, those archetypes, really in who we are in this country today.”

Although speaking passionately of the ongoing continuities with the deep historical past, Enoch is quick to argue that Indigenous culture is not static but is dynamic and constantly evolving.  “The people who have a vested interest in creating an image of Aboriginal culture as static or authentic thing from hundreds of years ago are people who cannot deal with the fluidity of even the Multicultural Australia... in a pluralist society like Australia, we deserve and should have a pluralist perspective on what Aboriginality is.”

With the show's title, Enoch, who confesses to having a 'tortured relationship' with Sydney, has sought to excavate the meaning of the name traditionally given to the peoples around Sydney Harbour ('Eora' translates as 'people of this place') has traditionally referred to the Indigenous peoples of Sydney Harbour, interrogating what it may mean to say 'I Am Eora' in 2011.

“I think it's actually the people who live in Sydney who are the Eora,” says Enoch.  “That's contentious ... The proposition I'm trying to put forward is that this country can only go forward when we can all say, I am a person of this place, I belong here ... I'll get some flack for it, but I love the idea of art being a little bit contentious … There are lots of different ways of being here and ultimately to be true to an Aboriginal spirit of being of a place, people must feel ownership for a place, care for it, feel responsibility for it as well.”


First published in The Brag