'You've got one hand that's gushing blood and in the other hand you're holding the knife. You actually are the full story. Both sides.'
A great-great grandmother sold as a 'wife' to a white sealer. Her granddaughter, who buried her identity to survive the settler-colony. A young fair-skinned Palawa man, their descendant, seeking truths about their shared past. Bound by blood and borne by the winds of the Bass Strait Islands, they meet at the Island of the Dead. White history has swallowed their stories but they're here to wrest them back.
How do you reconcile your identity when your ancestors' blood is muddied with the blood of their oppressors? Can you still hear their songs when the blare of violence has been so unforgivingly loud? Can you dance it all back?
Winner of the 2021 Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, the 2022 Kate Challis RAKA Award and the 2022 Victorian Premier's Literary Award
'Such emotive force, such haunting resonance and such visceral identification. A song of hope…' —Peter Wilkins, The Canberra Times
DYLAN VAN DEN BERG is a Palawa writer and dramaturg, with family connections to the northeast of Tasmania and the Bass Strait Islands. He has held residencies at Sydney Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre Company, and was a participant in ILBIJERRI’s BlackWrights program for First Nations dramaturgs. His play Whitefella Yella Tree premiered at Griffin Theatre Company to much acclaim, receiving an Australian Writer’s Guild Award for Best Original Play and the David Williamson Prize for Australian Writing. Other plays include Way Back When (The Old Fitz), Milk (The Street Theatre), Ngadjung (Belco Arts, Canberra), The Camel (Motley Bauhaus), The Chosen Vessel (The Street Theatre), All that Glitters is Not Mould (NIDA), and The Flood (National Theatre of Parramatta). He is a two-time recipient of the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, one time winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama, and was shortlisted for the UK’s Bruntwood International Award for Playwriting. He studied theatre at the ANU and the State University of New York, and completed a PhD in Aboriginal Gothic theatre at the University of Canberra.
| Cast Info | 2F, 1M |
| Genres | Drama |
| Themes | First Nations |
| Audiences | Adult |
| Extent | 62 |
| Edition | Standard |
| Size | 137 x 210 mm |