POSTS IN THE PADDOCK
Every family has its skeletons: the stories that don’t get told, the ones that all the children end up knowing anyway.
Posts in the Paddock is a meeting of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists whose families’ untold stories all revolve around one skeleton – that of Jimmy Governor, the Aboriginal bushranger, husband, and murderer – and a decision to make those stories heard.
Creator Clare Britton, of performance troupe My Darling Patricia, was a child when she first heard the names of the people Governor killed – her great-great-relatives – but the story never tripped off family members’ tongues.
“There’s a generation of people in my family who didn’t talk about it at all,” she remembers.
In Leroy Parsons’ family, the story simply wasn’t told. For him, the Governor connection only emerged after he began working on Posts in the Paddock three years ago.
“It was just a coincidence: we were looking for an actor to work with us on this story,” Britton said.
“Towards the end of the development he told us, ‘I think I have a connection to Ethel Page’ – Jimmy’s wife. And as we looked into it, we realised he was Jimmy’s great-great-grandson; that Ethel was pregnant when Jimmy was hanged for the murders.”
Through theatre, oral histories, sculpture, animation and puppetry, this collaboration between My Darling Patricia and the Moogahlin Performing Arts group grapples with the legend of Jimmy Governor: the people he hurt, the people who hurt him, their children, and their children’s children.
It promises a reconciliation of sorts, though as Britton explains, the idea was never to try to set the record straight.
“The amount of time that has passed, in a way, means that is impossible. We only have limited information,” she said.
“But our intention is definitely to tell a story that lets contradictory truths exist side by side, that allows for that sort of complexity.”
Nov 9-19, Performance Space, CarriageWorks, 245 Wilson St, Eveleigh, $15-30, 1300 723 038, performancespace.com.au
