Its progress owed much to the pioneering actors Justine Saunders and Brian Syron, playing the suffering Ruby and the drunken Sweet William; and they became major forces in the black theatre movement. Syron had escaped from an abused childhood to New York in the late 1950s, where he became a star pupil at the Stella Adler studio, set for a promising career in Hollywood. But in 1968 he was drawn back to his Australian roots: called home, so he said, by the apparition of a tribal elder. He was the first Aboriginal to have had that kind of extensive theatre training and his school in Sydney became a centre for actors, both black and white, who sought a more daring and indigenous style of expression. He died in 1993, aged only 53.

Meanwhile, in 1979, the nudging of a few consciences over the Western Australian sesquicentenary provided circumstances in which our major black playwright, Jack Davis, could make his mark. Davis found himself writing Kullark, for the theatre-in-education troupe of the National Theatre in Perth. Through a number of metamorphoses a team of actors and dancers emerged in Perth to give a wholly new status to performance by Aboriginal artists. Of national reputation are the actor Ernie Dingo, who made his debut in Kullark, and dancer and writer Richard Walley and Steve 'Baamba' Albert. Others, like Kelton Pell, are beginning to become nationally familiar. But whites have contributed too, notably the director Andrew Ross, in partnership with whom most of Davis' plays have evolved. Ross founded the Black Swan Theatre Company as a multi-ethnic performance group in Perth in 1991 and it now has an affiliated Aboriginal drance training school led by the dancer Michael Leslie. The W.A. Academcy of the Performing Arts also encourages Aboriginal enrolment. Western Australia, isolated from the rest of the country and with one of the harshest histories of race relations, has been a major force in the development of black actors of stature.

In recent times several new writers have emerged from Western Australia, notably Sally Morgan, whose play Sistergirl has had two national tours. Like Davis' The Dreamers, it deals with the dying, who are visited by the spirit of the past: in this case an old black woman sharing an alcoholic's ward with a disreputable Irishwoman. The play has humour and dignity and it is a reflection of the close familial relationship between life and art in the Aboriginal theatre that the death of a cast member during the 1995 revival has resulted in the work being suppressed. Richard Walley's Coordah (1987), which depicts urban Aborigines in conflict with alcohol and the law, has also been widely seen.

Roger Bennett's Funerals and Circuses comes from the Northern Territory but was first performed at the Adelaide Festival in 1992. This is an ambulatory musical play, with songs by Paul Kelly, which deals powerfully with the consequences of a mixed marriage in a country town, mixing violence and comedy, and dealing even-handedly with the uglier side of both black and white characters. His earlier play about his father's life as a boxer, Up the Ladder (1990) has been in the repertoire of the Melbourne Workers' Theatre since 1995. Bennett died in 1997.

The struggle for self-expression has not been easy. Writing itself, Jack Davis has said, is a political act, a splitting of the mind between one's own thought and the demands of black politics. In consequence some of the early plays are didactic, and anxious in their choice of language. They deal again and again with the State Aboriginal Protection Acts of the early part of the century which denied advancement, forced blacks into white-governed rural ghettos and ordered that children be taken away from their parents and taught assimilation. Other common themes are job discrimination, land rights and the high incidence of black deaths in police custody, a phenomenon about which there was an extensive, heated and finally fairly fruitless judicial inquiry. The deaths continue unabated.

Besides the political constraints are those of language and education. Performers generally demonstrate a remarkable natural dramatic sense and confidence; and convey a great sense of liberation; but for many, English is a second language. The language of the theatre is also foreign: its forms, and its definitions and its disciplines. It is a courageous path these artists have chosen to follow. It has required of them great patience in dealing with the stereotypes of some parts of the white-controlled industry and the good intentions of others. The fact that we have world-class young actors today like Bradley Byquar, David Ngoombujarra, Ningali Lawford, Rachel Maza, Deborah Mailman, Lydia Miller and Lafe Charlton; and outstanding dancers and choreogaphers like Kim Walker, Raymond Blanco and Steven Page working with major companies, is an important witness to the rate at which we are putting aside the imitative skills of the past in favour of something more recognisably our own.

But it is also in their innocence of that burden of theatrical tradition that Aboriginal performing artists are finding their strength. They have arrived in the Western theatre at a time when the form is more diverse than at any other period in its history. In aesthetic criticism, absolutes of excellence have given way to issues of relevance and community debate. Writers today are freer to choose their own form than they have ever been: the only restriction lies in the capacity of their peers to understand it.

The form to which Aboriginal theatre has steadily moved is what the novelist Mudrooroo Nyoongar has called 'Aboriginal reality' - the co-existence of a material and a spiritual reality represented symbolically, often by dance, or magic, which is introduced quite unselfconsciously into apparently realist drama. Jack Davis is particularly accomplished at this. In Kullark, his first play, the history of early colonial relations hangs over the life of a modern country-town family. In The Dreamers it is most clear: old Uncle Worru is dying and as the domestic drama is played out around him, the ghosts, the language and the rituals of his past invade his consciousness and interpret his world. In Barungin, Smell the Wind, Davis' indictment of death in police cutody, the double reality is integrated symbolically: the funeral service with which the play opens is carried on the wind across the events which follow and returns again to the graveside as the national roll of the dead is intoned in a liturgical lament.

'Jack Davis' plays are often accepted as merely examples of twentieth century naturalistic European drama', Mudrooroo wrote in his introduction to Barungin, 'but I see this as a white reading in that this way the symbolic aspects are relegated to secondary motifs - attempts to break free of the format - rather than being of primary importance. I do not see them as devices to breakdown the "realist" frame, but as integral parts pointing to the polysemic nature of Aboriginal drama.'

It is fair warning: to directors, dramaturgs and to publishers. My task as an editor is to make a work as accessible and compelling to the reading public as possible and to present the author to greatest advantage. When dealing with unconventional work like this it is tempting to intervene: to regularise presentation, to correct punctuation, to 'improve'. The poet Robert Adamson described an incident in his experience. He had been sitting on a jetty with Kevin Gilbert, each with a copy of their first published books of poetry. Adamson was excited and proud at having his work in print. Gilbert was angry and threw his book into the harbour. The quality of his poems had been destroyed, he said, by the addition of punctuation. The profound feelings they expressed had, in his view, been 'civilised'.

The same warning applies to the advice offered by directors and dramaturgs in the early stages of play development. And I have been guilty myself of giving orthodox presentation to publication. There are black writers who have refused to be performed and published by white institutions for this reason. There are others, and Davis and Mudrooroo are among them, who believe the purpose of their work is reconciliation.

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