Sydney Theatre Company is the perfect place for a play about Bennelong: a short walk around the harbour from Bennelong Point, where the Wangal leader lived for a time in the 1790s, and next door to the Barangaroo precinct, named for the Cammeraygal leader he married and had a child with.
Jane Harrison is also the natural playwright to interpret his story, as one of our pre-eminent theatrical truth tellers in plays such as Stolen, about the Stolen Generations, and The Visitors, imagining first contact through an Indigenous perspective. With Bennelong she has her work cut out: a complex, contested figure branded by the colonists as an untrustworthy collaborator and a traitor to his people, and now regarded by some First Nations people as a sellout.
