Perth Voice Interactive

STORIES from stolen generation survivors are recreated word for word in the one-man performance Hart.

Noongar man Ian Michael is the sole presence on stage, but brings with him verbatim stories of others affected by government policies that saw kids taken from parents through force or trickery, sometimes to never see each other again.

“When I first started writing Hart, I imagined trying to write a story like this, imagining it, and I couldn’t,” he says. “Verbatim theatre hits you at a deeper level because those words really came out of someone’s mouth and those are the feelings they felt.”

The stories came from interviews Michael and co-writer Seanna van Helten from SheSaid Theatre held with Noongars affected by the stolen generation (and as Michael points out, that’s just about every Aboriginal person).

Hart has played at Melbourne Fringe, South Australia and New Zealand, but this’ll be the first time Noongar stories have been told in Noongar country.

Despite the tough topic, those interviewed were pretty forthcoming.

“They want these stories to be told and I’m really lucky that I’m the person who gets to do that,” Michael says. “I didn’t want to open up wounds or trauma for people, but I’m very surprised and lucky that they wanted to tell their stories.

It’s not a story that’s frozen in the past, either: One of the men interviewed, Uncle Sam, tells his story “so younger Aboriginal people can see that this is still happening”.

Michael says many are familiar with films like Rabbit Proof Fence and that’s a good starting point, but that was set back in 1931 and people could think it’s all in the distant past when the effects continue: a generation stricken with trauma doesn’t get over it as soon as the policy officially ends, and Michael argues it continues in a different guise today with efforts like the Northern Territory intervention.

Today, the huge number of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care (at a rate 10 times higher than non-indigenous) is creating what some advocates call a “lost generation” of kids with no connection to their culture, one of the aims of later iterations of the stolen generation policy.

The play has its warm and funny moments, but with such hard subject matter “a lot of people are shocked and saddened and angry” after hearing what happened, Michael says.

Occasionally someone will come up to him trying to downplay the dark history, arguing it was all done with the best intentions or it wasn’t really that bad or people today shouldn’t be affected by it, but largely the shows have generated thoughtful conversations.

“I don’t think our country as a whole has a great understanding of what happened, and the continuation of what’s happened from those events.”

He says by the end of the play “this group of people have listened to me for 60 minutes”.

“That’s the beginning of change for me. Hart is the start of the conversation.”

It’s on at the Blue Room May 24 to June 11, tickets from blueroom.org.au/events/hart

by DAVID BELL