Captivated by herstory

‘[T]heater isn't a place to go to forget anything, but a place to go to remember.’ —David Mamet (quoted in Sanchez-Escalonilla, 2014).

On 24 July 2019 we attended the opening night of Forgotten at Riverside Theatres, a play about the first riot of the women in the Parramatta Female Factory in 1827 by playwright, Cate Whittaker.

A sizable cast of school students, alumni of the Parramatta diocese Catholic schools’ performing arts program, CAPTIVATE, provided a rabble amply raucous for the small Lennox Theatre stage.

The story focused on a few key women who were sent to third class—where they did hard labour—and the rebellion that broke out after the ongoing theft of the prisoners’ rations.

Women were brought to the colony for the purpose of growing the population in Australia. Marriages were arranged out of Female Factories for freed convicts and were a way out for the women, as was the possibility of being employed as a domestic servant. The Parramatta Female Factory—named thus, and impressed upon as just that, ‘a factory’, by the Matron in the play, because the women were put to productive work—was the first in Australia.

(While I have still not been to visit the Parramatta Female Factory, I was pleased to recall some of these details from visiting the Cascades and Ross Female Factories in Tasmania three years ago.)

My recent reading on institutionalisation in the nineteenth century gave me insight into the Irish experience in both Britain and Australia. Those Irish frequently institutionalised in asylums and hospitals in Australia had often been previously interned in British institutions. As a subjugated population, the Irish were characterised in racialised ways as being physically and mentally weak, diseased and degenerate—characterisations that persist today with clichés of the Irish as drunk and disorderly. Migrating to Australia, it seemed, was a new beginning of ongoing institutionalisation and racialised treatment of the Irish.

This context, for me, made the moment toward the end of the second act with an Aboriginal woman all the more poignant, as she and veteran convict, Annie, commiserated over the loss of their respective lands to the ‘bad white men’: the British.

And if this emotional moment just before the intermission foreshadowed the emotion at the end of the play, that was made more significant for me by the details of the costuming, colour symbolism of cloth and ribbon reminiscent of the plays of the Irish Literary Revival. (Thanks to my recent studies of Irish Literature.)

The focus on herstory, the untold stories of women in history, was given significance by all of the female characters being given first names, and the secondary stories of experiences of diaspora, loss of family and children, and opportunities of marriage and work outside the prison. Each of these stories was given poignancy, from the gift of food from the Aboriginal woman, a solo song to a separated child, the loss of a child, making the audience empathise with the convicts’ campaign against deprivation.

While I would note that the Irish accents employed may be forgiven, the subject of this play should certainly not be forgotten.

Reference

Sanchez-Escalonilla, A. (2013). Verisimilitude and film story: the links between screenwriter, character and spectator. Communication & Society, 26(2), 79-94. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/docview/1468444821?accountid=10382