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Kullark

Playwright: Davis, Jack
Year: 1979
Type: Play
Edition: National Theatre Inc., 1979

Currency Press, 1982

Synopsis

Kullark has been described as a 'documentary on the history of Aboriginals in WA.' The action begins with a version of the first contact between Europeans and the Noongar peoples, culminating in the death of Yagan in 1833, and covers the forcible separation of families and communities, and removal to reserves, and the ongoing discrimination against Indigenous people...

— Casey, Maryrose. Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967-1997, p.135.

Narrative Locations

Moore River Native Settlement, Wheatbelt, Western Australia  

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. 


Swan River, Perth region, Western Australia  

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)



Yorlah Household, Perth region, Western Australia  

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.




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