Australian theatre history is rife with misconceptions and myths. We have not taken our theatre seriously enough to record it accurately and because with some notable exceptions few of our critics of the ‘60s and ‘70s were visionary in their assessment of new Australian work.
Maryrose Casey is both a highly qualified theatre historian and an experienced theatre practitioner which makes her uniquely qualified to delve into Australian theatre history and to draw conclusions which challenge the current status quo. In Creating frames Casey has set out to record and honour the substantial and significant body of work that Indigenous theatre practitioners have contributed to the contemporary Australian repertoire and to illuminate the social, political and financial climate in which the work was created.
Casey’s book is visionary in its analysis of the inadequate critical contextualisation of Indigenous work and practical in its articulation of the difficulties of creating theatre in an environment that is often unsympathetic and sometimes downright hostile. Casey’s comprehensive book involves interviews with an exciting and wide-ranging collection of Indigenous artists including Wesley Enoch, Bob Maza, Justine Saunders and Ningali. It provides a desperately needed historical recording of the development of Indigenous theatre in the last 30 years and an insightful analysis of the reception of that work by Australian critics, mainstream Australian audiences, festival audiences and critics around the world.
Casey traces how the development of writers like Robert Merritt, Kevin Gilbert, Gerry Bostock and Jack Davis has had significant cultural impact by redefining how Indigenous Australians are represented on stage. In her insightful introduction, Casey reveals that ‘the book is a result of curiosity’. When she discovered that she could not find satisfactory historical recordings of Indigenous theatre work from the ‘60s through to the ‘90s, Casey set out to excavate and record historical events with clarity and objectivity, and to articulate the contexts within which those events were judged. As a consequence of her research, Casey was able to separate facts from perceptions and reveal certain historical ‘truths’ to be myths propagated by inaccurate judgments drawn from the perspective of the dominant culture.
It becomes disturbingly clear in the course of the book that the mainstream press in Australia, either because of cultural ignorance or prejudice, failed to recognise and record some of the most important developments in contemporary Australian theatre because they were initiated by Indigenous practitioners. As a result, many of the Indigenous