It has seemed to me for some years that two aspects of the Aboriginal struggle have been under-valued.

Ernie Dingo, who performed in many of Jack Davis’s plays, writes: “We are not/ Strangers/ In our own country/ Just/ Strangers/ To a European society/ And it is hard/ To be one/ When / The law/ Is the other.”

First performed three years before the bicentenary of the white settlement of Australia in 1788, the Jack Davis play No Sugar protests against the control of white government policy in Aboriginal lives

Resistance and Rhetoric in Jack Davis' No Sugar

an essay comparing No Sugar and The Removalists - analyses techniques in australian theatre

First performed three years before the bicentenary of the white settlement of Australia in 1788, the Jack Davis play No Sugar protests against the control of white government policy in Aboriginal lives.

It has seemed to me for some years that two aspects of the Aboriginal struggle have been under-valued. One is their continued will to survive, the other their continued efforts to come to terms with us … There are many, perhaps too many, theories about our troubles with the aborigines. We can spare a moment to consider their theory about their troubles with us. – W.E.H. Stanner, After the Dreaming (1968)

Ernie Dingo, who performed in many of Jack Davis’s plays, writes: “We are not/ Strangers/ In our own country/ Just/ Strangers/ To a European society/ And it is hard/ To be one/ When / The law/ Is the other.”

Last year, Google was congratulated for its ‘google doodle’ published to mark Australia day. The day, January 26th, is often criticised as a celebration of ‘Invasion Day’ and many view it as offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

...it was the case nearly everywhere in the non-European world that the coming of the white man brought forth some sort of resistance...Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance... (Said p.xii 1994)

The story of Australia, as it is constituted in white Australian history and culture, has as two of its powerful underlying themes the achievement of nationhood and the quest for an Australian identity: as Andrew Lattas observes, "[t]he continual questioning of who we really are is the essence of Australian nationalism."(1) Lattas' remark is itself an incident in the Australian story, for though it poses an essential, monocultural "we", it admits that this "we" is constituted through doubt, uncertainty, "questioning". Such instability of identity and authority is the product, not only of a Derridean différence, but also of the doubleness of colonial discourse in Australia.