Writing history and telling stories aren’t analogous acts, even if their disciplines overlap and interact. When the world of academia – with its seeming rigour and professionalism, boosted by citations and peer reviews – confronts a culture with thousands of years of oral tradition but no written word, the tension between the two feels dangerously apposite. This could be the stuff of terrific drama, if only playwright and director Andrea James could wrestle her material into something more coherently dramatic.
The conceit of The Black Woman of Gippsland is sturdy and instantly intriguing: Jacinta (Chenoa Deemal) is writing her PhD on the “white woman of Gippsland”, an urban legend about a woman shipwrecked off the coast of Corner Inlet in 1840, who was supposedly taken in by members of the Gunaikurnai mob.
