Temporal setting: 1930s
Location notes:
The Moore River Native Settlement was located 135 kilometres north of Perth and 11 kilometres west of Mogumber.
Jack Davis spent some of his childhood in the 1920s at the Moore River Native Settlement.
Temporal setting: 1827-32
Location notes:
The Swan River Colony was the first British settlement in Western Australia. Captain Charles Fremantle of the HMS Challenger declared the colony on May 2, 1829. The Swan River has a long history in local Aboriginal Dreaming and history.
Kullark features Charles Fraser, the New South Wales botanist, along with with Captain James Stirling, whose expedition and report in 1827 was instrumental in setting a British colony in the Swan River area.
Quotes
“Charles Fraser, a well dressed botanist carrying a shovel and butterfly net enters through a revolving screen, revealing a watercolour of the Swan River in 1827. This picture cuts the Rainbow Serpent near the tail.
Stirling: Mr Fraser, a British colony would stand a better chance of prospering her on the Swan River than anywhere in the world”
(p. Act One, Sc. 3)
“Alice [reading from her diary]: September the seventeenth, eighteen thirty-two. There has been no rain here for months, and the heat is already so oppressive that I find it quite a labour even to write in my journal.”
(p. Act One, Sc. 7)
Temporal setting: 1979; 1930
Location notes:
The play opens in 1979 at the Yorlah household, identified as being in the south-west of Western Australia. As the play travels back through time, the Yorlah family is shown to be removed from their Northam home in the 1930s and taken to the Moore River Aboriginal Settlement.
