Nuggets of pain
At its heart, Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold is about a family denied the right to grieve.
Ruby Hamad
It would be easy to label actor and debut playwright Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold – now in a new production for Sydney Theatre Company – as a play about racism and police brutality. It certainly covers those issues, but this categorisation also demonstrates part of the problem Wyatt tackles: the inescapability of stereotyping that dehumanises even when packaged as a desire to be “educated” about racism.
Wyatt plays Breythe Black, a young, handsome “Indigenous actor” – his quotation marks – who is on the cusp of significant fame. We meet him, spear in hand, in the middle of shooting a tacky Australia Day lamb commercial that he clearly finds degrading. When he receives word his sick father has died back in Kalgoorlie, he quits and returns to the City of Gold.
Strip it back and this story is about losing a loved one before you could show them what they meant to you – and of being denied the right to grieve.
Prodigal son Breythe is visibly out of place in rural Western Australia, as shown by his obnoxiously spotless white Nike sneakers. They impress his devoted cousin Cliffhanger (Ian Michael) but older brother Mateo (Mathew Cooper) can’t wait to tell Breythe they will soon be covered in the red Kalgoorlie dust that attaches itself to everything.
Even in its grief the family cannot escape the whiteness that dominates the social landscape. There is no respite from the hostility of the white townsfolk or the threat of brutality from local police. This Black family isn’t permitted to grieve a fallen member in peace and dignity; as with every other part of their lives, the rituals of death are scarred by the racial prejudices of non-indigenous Australia.
From the moment Breythe returns home a time bomb is ticking. The only question is, for whom? In the meantime, there are family matters to attend to. With Breythe readjusting after living on the east coast for so long and the moody Mateo consumed by his own repressed resentment, it is left to their sister, the peace-keeping Carina (Simone Detourbet), to take on the practicalities of the funeral arrangements, hold the encroaching whites at bay and prevent the brothers from taking their pain out on each other.
Wyatt has an assured stage presence and confidently leads a small cast, some making their Sydney Theatre Company debut. Designer Tyler Hill’s background in fine art and architecture is apparent in his stark but functional set: the front verandah of a typical outback home is set at a diagonal to allow full view of the rows of corridors that make up the house, a design that is cleverly used by lighting designer Verity Hampson to direct our attention where it needs to be at pivotal moments.
Shari Sebbens, who played Carina in the play’s original run, switches to directing duties for this production and opts for understatement. There are some stumbles here and there – I would have liked, for instance, to learn more about the Black siblings’ mother, who is referenced but absent from the action – but you never know when you’ll next come face-to-face with a priceless nugget. Trevor Ryan as Breythe’s recently deceased father, for example, is granted exponential resonance by the simple costume design – even in the flashback sequences, when he is teaching his young sons and Cliffhanger to hunt kangaroo, he always wears his burial suit. Is this history as it happened or as Breythe remembers it?
Wyatt’s witty script contains some knockout lines and he delivers the second act opening monologue flawlessly. Commanding the stage from the roof of the house, he unfalteringly switches from humour to raw anger to grief to sarcasm and back again. Hurling barbs at performative progressives who “can’t be seen to be racist” but who harbour the same attitudes as the explicit racists he knew growing up, Wyatt has the audience enthralled. His targets include the respectability politics of nice-guy celebrities such as Dwayne Johnson and the infamous Will Smith slapping incident. “Never trade your authenticity for acceptance,” he demands, setting the tone for a stellar second act.
City of Gold premiered at the Griffin Theatre Company in 2019, a time when Wyatt was grieving the father he had lost four years earlier and was deeply dissatisfied with his own acting career. It was the year before the murder of George Floyd reignited the Black Lives Matter protests on a global scale. Wyatt, who is Wongutha-yamatji, was shaken by the killing of a 14-year-old relative in his hometown of Kalgoorlie and then again by the death of Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot by a white police officer. He dedicated the opening night’s performance at Griffin to Walker.
In 2022, the play’s subject matter is only becoming more relevant. Yet even as it hurtles towards its inevitably brutal end, there is space in the play to experience the love of kin and community at the heart of this tale about a family who are never permitted to simply sit with their pain. “I don’t regret not being here when Dad died,” Breythe says. “I regret not treating him better when he was alive.”
These emotions are what the siblings would be processing if it were not for the racism that pursues them into even these most private moments. This is searingly highlighted in an exchange between Breythe and Mateo, the latter serving as a mouthpiece for the respectability politics that Breythe so abhors. Mateo has no patience for the Black Lives Matter protests led by internet activists who, he says, know little of the realities of life in their town, and he provokes his brother by suggesting that the negative image held by white folks is at least partly the result of Black people “acting badly”.
As the loose cannon Mateo, Cooper at times threatens to steal the show. His controlled urgency exhibits flashes of the dignified rage that simmers under Mateo’s aloof exterior and that Mateo tries so valiantly, if misguidedly, to suppress. “Either bury it or live with it,” he scoffs at Breythe. But his own anger and grief can be neither lived with nor buried: it demands to be met head on.
Cooper delivers City of Gold’s most subtly wrenching line. After one of their tense interactions, Breythe – who has been having recurring dreams about his father ever since he arrived home – storms off to bed. “Say hi to Dad for me,” Mateo tells him, but Breythe is already gone. There is so much loss, guilt and longing behind those six words that no response could possibly suffice. And none is given.
City of Gold is playing at the Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney, until June 11.
Tristen Harwood
is a writer, cultural critic and researcher, and a descendant of Numbulwar.
As I walk through the glass doors of Glen Eira City Council Gallery to see Confined 13 – an exhibition of 400 artworks by 350 Indigenous artists who are either currently incarcerated or recently released from prisons in Victoria – I’m uneasy. A man in a black suit with an identifying number pinned to his lapel moves towards me. Is he a gallery assistant there to direct me into the exhibition space, or a security guard about to shoo me away?
Maybe he was both: the line between security guard and gallery assistant isn’t all that clear. He does direct me to the gallery space. But I’m stuck in that uncertain augural moment for a while, and it returns to me now.
Confined 13 is the flagship event of
The Torch, an organisation that works with incarcerated Indigenous artists to facilitate and exhibit art-making, deepening artists’ cultural connections. It brings into relief the carceralism and necropolitics that underpin the Australian nation state, which in part defines itself by dictating who gets to live within its borders and who is left for dead, who gets locked in offshore detention, who gets killed inside its prisons, or in the back of a divvy van or holding cell, or during a police chase, or is shot dead by a cop in their own home.
Last year, one of my six younger brothers went to prison, just as another was getting out. When family members are in prison, the ambient violence of Indigenous deaths in custody seeps in through your pores, inhabits you. The knowledge that every time a news notification appears on my phone announcing another Indigenous death in custody, I could be about to read my brother’s name.
I’m buoyed when I enter the gallery: it’s full of mob and a vast, ecstatic collection of paintings colourfully plastering every wall from floor to ceiling. Walking through Confined 13, my feelings of dread ebb away.
Two paintings paired together address Indigenous deaths in custody directly. Bill Mansfield’s National Shame Job (2021) is a linguistic painting that uses white, red and yellow hand-painted text on a black background to ask “Why are Aboriginals still dying in custody after the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody?” … “This is a National shame job!” It seems to provide commentary for C. Harrison’s Deaths in Custody (2021), which sits alongside it. Harrison’s painting is slightly larger at 59 centimetres x 87 centimetres – the size of the vast majority of paintings in the exhibition, an indication of the limited access to art materials in prisons – and depicts 440 human figures rendered in black that resemble cut-out paper people chains.
The figures are painted on an earthy, nostalgic orange that recalls the colour used in a lot of 1970s Aboriginal kitsch “tourist art” and is decorated with a black-and-white crosshatched pattern reminiscent of Top End Indigenous painting, such as the rarrk used in Arnhem Land barks. The 440 black figures mark the number of deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission at the time it was painted. The number has since reached 500, suggesting the painting knows its own limits and accounts for only a moment in history, rather than the unutterable and ongoing nature of suffering and grief.
Using a similar colour palette to Harrison’s Deaths in Custody is Big Don’s visionary Koorie Old Style Boxing (2021). Instead of making an earthy orange by mixing acrylic paints, as in Harrison’s work, Big Don literally uses the earth – terracotta clay – to sculpt a large vessel that depicts a scene showing Aboriginal tent boxers midfight, mid-punch and post-match, in the circling, storytelling style of a Grecian vase. Much as the pictorial work of Greek vases provides insights into daily, mythological and ceremonial life in antiquity, Big Don’s vase tells of a time around 1910-70 when Aboriginal men used to travel around as troupes of boxers, fighting in circus tents. The sport required willing, fungible bodies that it was socially acceptable to shape and misshape through violence.
The theme of boxing recurs in Longy’s Cultures Together (2021), a mixed media painting in which the artist has depicted the faces of Eddie Koiki Mabo and Lionel Rose on a pair of boxing gloves. While Rose, the first Blackfella to win a world boxing title, has a much more direct relation to the sport, the two men are highly respected and prominent figures whose actions led to changes in how the settler state relates to Indigenous people: Mabo for the historic recognition of land rights and Rose as the first Indigenous person to become Australian of the Year.
Sharing a vitrine with Cultures Together is Leroy Mclaughlin’s Dinner Time (2021). Here, Mclaughlin has painted a dingo onto a small wooden A-frame, which he has turned into a timepiece by pulling apart a household clock and transplanting its hands so they tick in the centre of the painting. The central dingo figure comprises red crosshatching outlined in puffy yellow paint to create shapes that resemble tribal tattoos, and it seems to walk through the painting across the red earth.
Mclaughlin says of his deadly painting, “The dingo is looking for his dinner on Country and now he has had his feed, it’s time for seconds.” In this sense, the dingo simultaneously occupies and unravels the past, present and future. “Time for seconds” satirises linear regulatory time, as the only clock that the dingo follows is his body clock.
There is so much work in Confined 13, a reminder of the number of Blackfellas locked up in Victoria. But the fucked-up carceral state we live in can’t circumscribe the sheer creative energy of the artists. As I perambulate around the gallery, new works reveal themselves with each lap.
Shaggy has painted Deadly Storm (2022) on a pair of Velcro prison-issue sneakers. It pictures a lightning storm with streaks of white lightning that light the night sky into an incandescent blue. Patrick H. has framed up a koala and an echidna using a series of dots as well as crosshatching and figuration in Australian Culture (2021). Busy ant mounds at the bottom of the painting recall Willie Gudabi’s brimming paintings, such as Love Story (1990). In fact, Australian Culture seems to be a serendipitous ode to the radically synchronistic painting of 1990s Ngukurr artists such as Gudabi, Ginger Riley Munduwalawala and Djambu Barra Barra.
Confined 13 is luminary because it can’t be pinned to any single style of Indigenous art-making, whether an aesthetic such as rarrk or a politics such as cultural nationalism – and it’s not trying to. It’s an outlet, as Sean Miller – an artist who was formerly incarcerated and now works with The Torch as an arts officer – said in his speech on the night. Making art takes you out of “the depression of prison”, both in your head and socially, as the work connects with other people’s lives.
The Torch is a flicker – I don’t want to say of hope – but maybe an illumination of beauty of the kind that has always resided in Indigenous acts of resistance: of the refusal to be crushed by the settler state, even in its most oppressive conditions.
Confined 13 is showing at Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne, and online until June 5.