BY ANDREW MESSENGER
Black Diggers, by QTC at The Playhouse, QPAC, September 26.
Tim O’Brien, in his epic, crazed Vietnam War prose poem The Things They Carried talks about war stories. He talks about friends sacrificing their lives for their friends – the bread-and-butter subject of combat fables. A grenade flies out, landing in a recce patrol of five. One jumps on it, shielding the rest with his life. It blows up – and kills them all anyway. Courage doesn’t matter, because this grenade doesn’t care about courage. One of them asks his best friend in the world what the fuck he did that for. The sacrificed one says “story of my life man” and tries to smile.
A war story can only be truly about war, he says, if it doesn’t matter whether or not it actually happened.
Black Diggers is full of war stories. In its essence, a lot of the story could be told over a campfire or a case of beer, except there’s no-one to tell it and no-one to listen. So we tell it on stage.
Black Diggers is a bit of an enigma, as a play. This is the sort of play that makes careers (Luke Carroll is the real stand-out. I hope he gets a huge film gig or some such out of it; he deserves it). Diggers has already earned and deserved the sort of critical and pubic acclaim original Australian Theatre has not seen in maybe a generation. Thousands are probably going to buy tickets and they should.
That is because this is not a truly radical work. It is neither The One Day of the Year nor Brecht. It’s not even, really, anti-war – which is refreshing, in a way. Tom Wright and Wesley Enoch don’t challenge the ANZAC myth – they incorporate it, they use it as a tool of historical healing. That is, I think, the true genius of this work. If you put Indigenous Australians in uniform, at the heart of our most emotionally valued myth, white people like me cannot help but recognise their right to sit at the heart of all our Institutions. After all, the land the ANZACS defended was and remains owned by Indigenous peoples.
I should probably tell you a little about the play. It begins in colonial Queensland, in the midst of a massacre by a quartet of Queensland Mounted Police. They argue about whether or not to murder in cold-blood an Indigenous baby. A kindly educated man happens by, berates them and adopts the child as his own. From the start, we have this debate over the value of Indigenous lives. Are they really equal to the white “Australian-Briton”?
The show moves on. There are blokey legitimately funny jokes: two troops enlist as “James Cook” and “Beau Desert”. One character ponders what losing the war would mean – it would be terrible! Maybe the invading Germans might even steal our land!
It’s an all-Indigenous ensemble cast, all male. The play is absolutely frenetic for the first half or so. It’s a series of war anecdotes – the time the blokes beat up that racist because he wouldn’t be a team player. The time Jamaican supply troops insulted us. The time I realised Cap’ kept sending me out on recce patrol because he assumed I was a good tracker: I was born in Newtown. As soon as one anecdote is done, another begins. The same nine people play about a thousand different characters, literally changing hats every few minutes. Then, about the forty minute mark, you get whiplash. Everything suddenly changes speed, mood and direction. I won’t tell you what happens, but I will say it is devastating, it involves a bravura performance by Luke Carroll and it is my favourite part of the show. The pacing of this play is just spot-on, absolutely mood perfect. It’s almost like a tightly edited movie. No bit goes on too long. The pacing is the chief reason Black Diggers works so damn well. That is to say, Wesley Enoch’s direction is the reason Black Diggers works so damn well.
It Will Be Different Afterwards. The phrase haunts the Black Diggers. At the front, colour is erased under the weight of this supreme collective effort. We must get that hill. We must not lose this wood. Race doesn’t matter, only the objective, beating the Hun (a small point: there are some pretty old-fashioned German stereotypes in this show). The men, black and white, become closer than friends, closer than lovers – they become mates. Surely this friendship will endure into civilian life. Surely these public servants, these captains of industry, heads of Returned Service League clubs and mayors of towns will help drive away the race hate that has festered in the heart of Australia since 1788. But, of course, they don’t. More Indigenous land is stolen to make way for Soldier Settlements which Black Diggers are, of course, not eligible for. Others return to their “protector” who steals their wages and treats decorated war heroes like children. Over the horizon, a whole new variety of genocide begins. A generation of Indigenous children is stolen.
But think about the assumption behind this theme for a moment. Respect is something that has to be earned. Just as Australian nationhood was earned through blood and fire, Indigenous equality was earned through the destruction of Indigenous men. These men sign up because they hope they can earn a place in the new Australia – but why should that be earned? The tragedy of this play is supposed to be of a sacrifice wasted. But perhaps the real tragedy is this sense that Indigenous people – or white people, or Asian people, or anyone – feel the need to win their place in society through war in the first place.
So in many ways Black Diggers is a straight re-telling of the same almost religious ANZAC myth, the myth of idealised sacrifice transcending national or racial barriers. It’s the same story of birth within mass murder, of death justifying a nation that Charles Bean sold us a million copies of one hundred years ago. The biggest change: now Bean’s “heroic race from the bush” is multi-coloured.
But true war stories don’t have meaning, transcendent or otherwise, because war doesn’t have meaning. It’s just force. It isn’t wise or vindicating, it doesn’t absolve or exonerate, validate or legitimise. You can be killed because you’re not good enough and you can be the best and blown away. It’s beautiful and ugly, loving and hating. It doesn’t justify or create. It is no one thing or another. Great courage doesn’t always earn you anything, and it often means nothing. You can jump on a grenade and not save your mates and it means nothing because you’re all meat now. Tim O’Brien could have told you that.
Image supplied.
