But the real strength behind the work of our Aboriginal theatre artists—a strength entirely their own which owes nothing to training or education—is not the politics, nor the scars of history; it is the life-force: the irrepressible humour, the capacity to survive. We saw it in the disreputable Uncle Tadpole in Bran Nue Dae seducing his audience with 'Is You Ma Baby?'. In the invincible Millimurra family in Jack Davis' No Sugar, forced from their home by a greedy politician and into a reservation where the children are separated. We see it in the dying alcoholic and her feckless family in Sally Morgan's Sistergirl; and the old woman with the tub in The Cherry Pickers. More than anything it is this larrikin quality, eternally triumphing over circumstance, that will lead the way to a reconciliation between the races. For if there is a perspective which distinguishes the work of our black writers it is that of reconciliation. There is violence in some of the plays, and anger, and despair; but the drive is to re-enact the past in order to come to terms with it. Which makes it a political act but also an artistic one.

The progress of Aboriginal writing for the theatre has in the 1990s discarded polemic for a deeper psychology. The plays have become more concerned with the emotional and spiritual life of the characters; more confidently experimental in their structure; and more inclined to include the white man and woman in their view of world. Eva Johnson's play Murras (1988) is a highly politicised work which spells out the significance of the Aboriginal homeland and the pleasure and pride invested in traditional skills. Following the 1967 referendum new housing began to be provided to assimilate the black population. A generation on from the families in The Cake Man and No Sugar, in Murras the deprivation is not material; its focus is upon loss of a well-recognised identity and connections with the dreaming. The play shows the forced removal of a family from the country to the town, the powerlessness imposed by the new community and the growing movement of protest which the young son joins.

Eva Johnson's powerful solo performance What Do They Call Me? (1990) moves further in this direction. It is a three-part monologue by Connie Brumbie, thrown into gaol for drunkenness, mourning the children who were taken from her in the 1950s under the Aboriginal protection legislation; her daughters Regina, now a middle-class married woman brought up unaware of her Aboriginality; and Alison, now a social worker, activist and lesbian, who seeks to reconcile the family to each other and their past.

In similar vein is Ningali Lawford's solo show Ningali, which she has performed all over the world in the 1990s, developing it as she went. In it she tells the story of her untroubled childhood in the Kimberleys, the loneliness of a city boarding school, an extraordinary six months as an exchange student in Alaska, the rebellion and trauma of adolescence and racist encounters, and the rediscovery of herself through dance and the emergence of a strong maturity. More than the men these women have used performance to focus upon the healing process; they have given their audiences lasting images of power and grace.

Another such performer is Deborah Mailman, whose work The Seven Stages of Grieving, created with Wesley Enoch, director of the Koemba Jarra theatre company in Brisbane, has also been around the world. This is the most innovative in structure of all the works so far created. It is written in 18 scenes, in a free-verse form incorporating enactments and film images, a variety of storytelling forms and symbolism. The text brings to life a multiplicity of small and large events and responses to them, and ends, movingly, with the poem 'Plea':

You know there has always been this grieving,
Grieving for our Land, our families.
Our cultures that have been denied us.
But we have been taught to cry quietly
Where only our eyes betray us with tears.
But now, we can no longer wait,
I am scared my heart is hardening.
I fear I can no longer grieve
I am so full and know my capacity for grief.
What can I do but...perform.
These are my stories.
These are my people's stories.
They need to be told.

The most recent black playwright to come to national attention is John Harding, whose play Up the Road was first presented by the Ilbigerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative in Melbourne in 1991. It was further developed by the director Neil Armfield in 1997 for seasons at Melbourne's Playbox Theatre and Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. Harding's protagonist is, for the first time, a middle-class Aboriginal, Ian Sampson, a Canberra bureaucrat who returns to his hometown after a decade for a family funeral. There he faces not only punishment by the woman and now-dead brother he deserted, but finds himself the centre of conflict over government policy and local affairs. It is basically a realist play about domestic issues but it carries Aboriginal drama a further step towards autonomy by creating a cast of characters no longer objectified by protest against or reconciliation with the white race, but well-realised individuals working their way through the conflicts of their own community wrought by the rapid pace of change.

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