Foley falls flat

Foley at the Melbourne Festival

I went to see Foley at the Melbourne Festival last week to reacquaint myself with aboriginal history and the sparkling repartee of what I remembered of the 1970’s Gary Foley. So it is Gary Foley playing Foley.

The stage has piles of boxes, some marked ASIO (Aboriginal Secret Intelligence Organisation), a desk with a laptop, and four very big screens facing the audience. “Redemption Song” is playing as the tiered semi circular space fills with about a hundred people. The show starts with some archival footage circa late sixties, of a twenty something bearded hungover Foley in a long dero’s coat, berating a white middle class woman whilst lying on the concrete outside a public building. Toward the end of his tirade he says “I’ve got no time to talk to insignificant little shits like you” and with that the music sounds and Gary Foley, the sixty-one year old, enters to great enthusiasm and applause.

The performance takes the form of a lecture in…