Fool’s Gold and Louis Nowra’s Golden Age

There is a tall mound of black earth on stage. I like it very much. Naturally, at the Sydney Theatre Company, it looks to be a clean, neat, trim and well-behaved pile of soil, nothing at all like the “colossal cowpat” the Sydney Morning Herald described.

The play is Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age, the director is Kip Williams. The Wharf is a small theatre. Seats look down on the playing area. The lights dim. A broken Greek column leans against the little mountain and the stage has become a Greek theatre, in Hobart. In a sleek long white dress, one shoulder bared, Ursula Yovic stands dramatically atop it and declaims a speech from Iphigenia in Tauris. She is Elizabeth Archer, a doctor’s wife: playing Greek tragedy in her backyard. Greek theatre is her thing, and it raises money for charity.

The time is 1939. For the next two and a half hours the pile of earth, from designer David Fleischer, will become whatever the director wants it to be. Actors come towards us climbing over it, they walk around it, they play beside it. It breaks down, it clings to their feet, arms and clothes. It gets walked around the stage. Things get stuck into it, or are placed on it. In a blackout the cast prod a line of long spears into it and that becomes a tall and menacing wall around the New Norfolk lunatic asylum. There is skilful lighting and clever sound effects as it changes to become a Greek theatre or a place somewhere in the wilds of western Tasmania; it is a tennis court, an elegant dining room, and with the head of a huge broken statue leaning against it, a battleground in Berlin. Like a child playing in the mud it becomes what the director’s imagination wants it to be as he frames Nowra’s play.

In The Golden Age two young men, Peter (Remy Hii), the son of Elizabeth and her doctor husband (Robert Menzies), and his working-class friend Francis (Brandon McClelland), come across a strange group of people in the Tasmanian bush. They are the remnants of a community that has been living in isolation since the 1840s, with obvious signs of inbreeding. Only the matriarch, Ayre (Sarah Peirse) seems capable of speaking their own strange but poetic language, which Nowra has created. Returning to Hobart with their young finders, the group are placed in the New Norfolk asylum. The two young men go to war, and the group are studied and die or suicide until only Betsheb (Rarriwuy Hick) is left. At the end she and Francis return together to her wilderness.

In short scenes the director whisks us through a fast-changing series of places, like flicking through a series of pop-art comic-book images. The Berlin battle scene, strangely played after the fall of Berlin, ends with a murder. The scene, which includes a huge broken head of Frederick the Great, only lacks a stage-filling Lichtenstein speech bubble saying “Bang!” to accompany the firing of the fatal shot and fill the scene’s blackout.

The epic play, with suicide, deaths, murder and self-castration, is firmly and cleverly conducted. Words, actions and images are bonded together to lead us through the strange story. Only some stilted language, which could have used directorial Band-Aids, hampers our progress.

The Golden Age runs for about two and a half hours. At the end of that time the Sydney critics had seen a quite different play from what I had seen. None of the Sydney reviews I have read discussed incest, inbreeding, birth deformities—even though the connection between Tasmania and the hobby is a source for mainland humour. As the play was running the Premier was unhappy because of a statement by Wotif founder Graeme Wood that Tasmanian politics is “inane and stupid and inbred”.

Instead of white retards one critic saw black Aborigines and something nasty in the cultural woodshed:

It’s a post-colonial nightmare, to make you truly ashamed of what was done to Aboriginal Australia in the name of “civilisation”—let alone what was done to the world, during World War II, in the same name.– Time Out

Another kept the colonialism, but warned of the Aboriginal analogy:

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The cowpat writer was more physical: “Liam Nunan makes an eye-catching debut as the crippled Stef.” (Sydney Morning Herald) The comment, coming after the breaking news that “Sydney’s theatres are gripped by a need to talk about still unresolved issues of our history and identity”, possibly refers to the Court of Miracles moment when the actor Liam Nunan, the young, dumb cripple, slides out of his clothes to reveal a slim, Sydney tanned young man’s body which glows under the spotlights as he is erotically washed, while standing, by Betsheb, his sister/cousin/aunt. It is an erotic scene, tastefully staged for the middle-aged female STC subscribers, and SMH reviewers. Replace with unhealthy, pasty, Tasmanian white, crippled flesh on the male side and simian, inbred features on the female and you would transform a sexy advertisement for incest into something real—and rather disturbing. It would certainly cause bobo theatregoers to rethink their own problems with “unresolved issues of our history and identity”.

The play grew from a tale an academic told Nowra of the finding of a “strange group” of people in south-west Tasmania just before the Second World War. They were sent to the asylum at New Norfolk “because they seemed to confirm Nazi theories of genetic and racial degeneration”. And, according to this story, they died there. The original storyteller wasn’t sure if it was true but it inspired the artist. Play publicity now assures theatregoers that it is based on a true story.

Very possibly the basis of the tale Nowra was told concerns Black Bobs. Part of Tasmanian folklore, it is a real place in the centre of the state with genuine backwoods-gothic claims to fame. The region, and a family associated with it, has inspired the most popular stories of miscegenation and incest in Tasmania. Across the years the place has been associated with unusual family relationships, violence, suicides and strange stories. In January 1945 James Pearce, twenty-seven years old, spoke what must be one of the best exit lines in our history. After mid-day “dinner” with his niece, Vera Minnie Pearce, he left the house saying “he might go and kill some snakes”, as one does. He disappeared and was found the next day by his brother, hanging on a rope suspended from a tree, some five metres from the ground. His clothes were on a nearby log.

In the first half of the last century Black Bobs was occasionally in the news with sometimes strange stories picked up by mainland newspapers. In May 1932 the Hobart Mercury had an attention-grabbing headline, “Cripple in Chains, Remarkable Allegation”. The local council in Hamilton, north of Hobart, had received a letter claiming that when the writer, a neighbour, visited a house in Black Bobs he found only a twenty-eight-year-old crippled man in a back shed. The man had been tied to a cart wheel with fencing wire and had a padlocked chain around his neck: “All he had to eat was two or three potatoes which had been boiled with the skins on in an old frying pan.” The cripple received a pension, said the writer, and his six un-working brothers were living off that, “and what they were able to steal from their neighbours”.

The council investigated. They found a man unable to talk and mentally deficient but healthy and well fed even though “those responsible for his care stated they had to chain him up as they were afraid of his wandering into the bush, and getting into one of the creeks”. Though one councillor suggested sending him to the insane asylum, the council only passed the letter to the police. They too found no signs of ill-treatment. His mother denied he was ever chained up, though she did admit that at times “he would fasten wire around his waist and drag small logs of wood from outside to the fire inside”. The police noted that “the lower part of his body was much deformed. When he moved he dragged his legs, or crawled along on his side.”

The description and the Tasmanian landscape suggest a darker variation of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Three more of the children were also deaf and dumb, while the others appeared normal. Queensland academic and critic Cecil Hadgraft visited Tasmania in the 1950s or 1960s and recorded what he called the Tasmanian toast: “To our incestors!”

The casting of The Golden Age is multi-racial and applauded because, for once, someone has looked outside and seen what we look like at the moment. The young players are good-looking choices who make the harsh play soft-centred. Nowra’s later play Così was set in a mental hospital; this earlier play deals with physical and mental deformities.

The lost people could have been played by actors with disabilities. Francis and Betsheb are in love. At the end of the play they return to her world. They are both physically attractive—but how would an audience have responded if the part of Betsheb had been played, as it could have been, by an actress with a disturbing disability? Ayre, played by Sarah Peirse, is a matriarchal, proud, noble figure. A fat slovenly creature from the distant Sydney suburbs would have disturbed the audience far more than these illusions from distant Tasmania. Hard casting would have illuminated the play, though perhaps horrified STC audiences.

With a truthful and confronting cast the audience’s reaction might not be so submissively acquiescent to some of the seemingly boomer generation statements by William Archer, the drunken, suicidal, Hobart psychologist:

their culture is more authentic than ours. We Australians have assumed the garb of a hand-me-down culture, but at our heart is a desert. For their appalling ignorance and pathetic beliefs they at least have a real core, an essence.

A freak-show cast would make an audience think carefully before they accepted such a statement. In his overlooked and brilliant book Down Among the Wild Men (1972), John Greenway recounts a conversation with the anthropologist Norman Tindale. The two men were about to go on a scientific expedition into the outback for which they needed a huge amount of equipment and stores. They compared their preparations with the Aborigine who, says Tindale, could enter the desert naked and immediately make a stone cutting tool to cut his spears and woomera:

“We represent progress?” I [Greenway] asked philosophically.

“Of course,” said Norman, “don’t talk rubbish.”

We listen to the lost language, invented by Nowra, without understanding, though it is interesting and occasional words and meanings are clear. The published edition has a nine-page glossary with invented text and translation. For example:

“He fed on tarse o’dark in the black quim o’a belle.” / “He was fed by a diseased penis while he was in the diseased womb of a young girl.”

“Fer skilly we gobble in awe.” / “For this food we thank you and will eat it with the proper respect.”

The Golden Age is a classic Australian play, they say. That’s not what they told Louis Nowra back in 1985 when it was first performed. He received such a critical kicking that he took a three-year break from playwriting. In one of his autobiographies, which are very good reading, he tells of meeting a student writing a thesis on the play, and its first production: “And you know what, he said enthusiastically, there was not one good review anywhere!”

Now the play is, unfortunately, popular and acclaimed for educational analysis like this:

Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age is the most comprehensively counter imperial text in Australian theatre. The play’s main strategy is to target a central dichotomy in imperialist discourse, between the civilised imperial centre and the barbarous or primitive colonial margins.

It’s enthusiasm-killing commentary. If we stopped funding the big Sydney and Melbourne subsidised theatres and put the money into an Australian National Theatre perhaps we might be able to see clearly for ourselves what is important or interesting theatre.

Louis Nowra has written over thirty plays. He is an author who deserves a major performance retrospective in a National Theatre context. It should be us, the playgoers, who decide what is “classic” theatre, not the people who mistake magic mountains for cowpats.