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‘Addressing a Great Silence’: Black Diggers and the

Aboriginal Experience of War

Liza-Mare Syron

New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 31 / Issue 03 / August 2015, pp 223 - 231

DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X15000457, Published online: 09 July 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X15000457

How to cite this article:

Liza-Mare Syron (2015). ‘Addressing a Great Silence’: Black Diggers and the Aboriginal
Experience of War. New Theatre Quarterly, 31, pp 223-231 doi:10.1017/S0266464X15000457

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Liza-Mare Syron

‘Addressing a Great Silence’:

Black Diggers and the Aboriginal
Experience of War
In 2014 Indigenous theatre director Wesley Enoch announced in an interview that ‘the
aim of Indigenous theatre is to write into the public record neglected or forgotten stories’.
He also spoke about the aims of a new Australian play, Black Diggers, as ‘honouring and
preserving’ these stories. For Enoch, Black Diggers (re)addresses a great silence in
Australia’s history, that of the Aboriginal experience of war. Also in 2014, the memorial
sculpture Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let Fall, commissioned by the City of Sydney Council,
aimed to place in memoriam the story of forgotten Aboriginal soldiers who served during
international conflicts, notably the two world wars. Both Black Diggers and the Yininmadyemi
memorial sculpture are counter-hegemonic artefacts and a powerful commentary of a time
of pseudo-nationalist memorialization. Both challenge the validity of many of Australia’s
socio-political and historical accounts of war, including the frontier wars that took place
between Aboriginal people and European settlers. Both unsettle Australia’s fascination
with a memorialized past constructed from a culture of silence and forgetfulness. Liza-
Mare Syron is a descendant of the Birripi people of the mid-north coast of New South
Wales in Australia. An actor, director, dramaturg, and founding member of Moogahlin
Performing Arts, a Sydney-based Aboriginal company, she is currently the Indigenous
Research Fellow at the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies
at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has published widely on actor training, indigenous
theatre practice, inter-cultural performance, and theatre and community development.
Key terms: Indigenous theatre, Aboriginal theatre, theatre and war, counter-memorial,
Aboriginal visual art.

AUGUST 2014 marked the centenary of the
outbreak of the First World War. The next
four years will commemorate this and the
Second World War with numerous cere-
monies and ongoing events across a number
of countries including France, Belgium, and
the United Kingdom. In Australia these
celebrations will centre on the Australian
and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), a
coalition of nations that contributed to the
war effort in Europe.1 A largely hegemonic
tale that defines Australia’s ideas about its
national identity, the ANZAC legend is one
that excludes other more subjugated voices
such as those of the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples and their experiences
of war.2 Recently, however, these forgotten
accounts are being (re)told and (re)inscribed
back into the national consciousness through
a range of contemporary creative projects.
The first is a public memorial artwork com-
missioned by the City of Sydney Council and
created by Aboriginal visual artist Tony
Alberts named Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let
Fall. The second project is a new Indigenous
play, Black Diggers, produced by the Sydney
Festival and directed by Aboriginal theatre
maker Wesley Enoch. Both works are counter-
hegemonic and counter-memorial. They aim
to unsettle and challenge Australia’s fascin-
ation with a memorialized past, as well as a
history of institutional silence and a nation’s
social amnesia.
The history of conflict with foreign armed
forces in Australia must begin for many with
colonization. The tensions between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal Australians during the
early years of European settlement, invasion,
and colonization is one aspect of Australia’s
history that had largely faded from public

ntq 31:3 (august 2015) © cambridge university press doi:10.1017/S0266464X15000457 223

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discourse over much of the twentieth cen-
tury.3 Among the voices in this void, the
anthropologist W. E. H Stanner wrote and
spoke extensively about Aboriginal resist-
ance as part of his 1968 Boyd lecture series
and in his later published collection White
Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973.4 In
2010, historian Robert Manne republished
most of Stanner’s collection in The Dreaming
and Other Essays.5
Voices in the Silence
In these works Stanner wrote about the per-
sonal, social, economic, and cultural loss
brought about by colonization and modern-
ity in many remote Aboriginal communities
across Australia. His ethnographic account
of one warrior’s attempt to hold back
cultural change in the Daly River area of
Australia’s Northern Territory is outlined in
the 1959 essay ‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’.6
He also gave a series of public lectures titled
‘The Great Australian Silence’, in which he
argued that there existed a ‘cult of forget-
fulness’ practised on a national scale regard-
ing Aboriginal history, society, politics, and
culture in Australia.7
More recently the historian Keith Wind-
schuttle has stirred up public debate about the
colonial experience, suggesting that colon-
ization (in Tasmania) was largely a peaceful
process.8 As the author and historian Henry
Reynolds points out, however, any position a
reader may take on these matters will be one
largely informed and defined by historical
records written by white settlers, anthro-
pologists, or historians.9 Notably absent from
these writings is the Indigenous voice.
Most narratives that circulate today about
Indigenous participation in conflict begin
with the first half of the twentieth century
and primarily focus on the two world wars.
Much of this writing, as in the work of Noah
Riseman, try to (re)address the absence of
Aboriginal involvement from official war
stories.10 However, the true numbers of
Indigenous personnel who served during
both wars, according to Riseman, may never
be known, primarily due to the Australian
Defence Act of 1909. This act exempted from
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compulsory service or military training per-
sons ‘not substantially of European origin
or descent’, effectively barring Indigenous
enlistment.11 The 1909 Act also applied
during the first half of the Second World War.
It was not until recently that the Australian
Defense Force (ADF) recorded the race of
those enlisted.
However, many young Aboriginal men
did enlist during the First and Second World
Wars through regular recruiting stations by
passing themselves off as dark Irish or
southern Europeans. Towards the end of the
Second War some restrictions were lifted due
to the subsequent entry of Japan into the war.
Many Aboriginal people officially enlisted as
land army personnel sent to protect the
Northern Australian Peninsular, and were
later deployed to international war zones
such as Belgium, Afghanistan, and Italy.
According to the Australian Army website, it
is estimated that over 3,000 Aboriginal and
850 Torres Strait Islander men and women
served during the Second World War.12
For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander people who served in the world wars,
the experience, although unprecedented, pro-
vided the opportunity to experience equality
for the first time in a century of occupation.
They stood side by side with other Austra-
lians and other nationalities against a com-
mon foe. However, for many, the realities of
Australia’s social, cultural, and political race
relations of the day hit hard on their return.
Indigenous returned soldiers were not
welcomed at their local Returned Service
League (RSL) events, and not encouraged to
march in uniform on ANZAC commemor-
ation day, which effectively relegated Abori-
ginal war service to a mute historical event.13
The Coloured Diggers Project
In 1999, a group of Indigenous ex-service-
men formed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Veterans and Services Association
(ATSIVSA), dedicated to ensuring that Indig-
enous veterans received their entitlements as
a consequence of their service. The work of
ATSIVSA involved advocacy for Indigenous
veterans and service personnel to govern-
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The sculpture Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let Fall, unveiled in Hyde Park South, Sydney, on 31 March 2015. Photo
by permission of City of Sydney Council.
ment agencies, but it also mounted a yearly
service dedicated to the memory of all
Indigenous servicemen and women. This
event takes place at a site just outside
Canberra and coincides with the Australian
ANZAC commemoration day.
In conjunction with the Babana Aborig-
inal Men’s Group, ATSIVSA was also instru-
mental in establishing in 2006 the ‘Coloured
Diggers Project’, to organize annual ANZAC
day events, including marches that take
place throughout the Sydney metropolitan
area.14
Another aim of this project was to
establish a permanent sculpture on a prom-
inent site in Sydney that would recognize the
service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander soldiers during various conflicts. In
June 2012, the idea was endorsed by the City
of Sydney Council as part of a public recog-
nition project and the monument was com-
missioned in 2014 to be erected in Hyde Park
South in Sydney on Council land, with con-
struction completed in 2015.
Aboriginal artist Tony Albert, who won the
City of Sydney tender, created a ‘sculpture’
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inspired by his grandfather, Eddie Albert,
who escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in
Germany during the Second World War.
Eddie’s story is one of bravery and survival.
He escaped detention along with six other
soldiers who were all captured by Italian
soldiers near Biella in Italy. Three of the
seven escapees were shot when the Italians
realized the prisoners should be returned to
the Germans. Eddie was one of the soldiers
who survived.
Drawing on his grandfather’s story,
Albert’s memorial sculpture, Yininmadyemi
Thou Didst Let Fall, consists of seven metre-
tall bullet-like structures made from black
marble and steel. Each bullet represents one
soldier in this story. Three shells lie on the
ground to represent the lost lives. Albert
envisages the structure as ‘a special and
powerful place for contemplation and
remembrance; a space for all our stories to be
heard and recognized’.15 The site for the
memorial in Hyde Park was chosen not only
for its proximity to the official State War
Memorial, but also because the location was
historically a significant Aboriginal site of
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dispute. As City of Sydney Council’s Barani
Barrabugu (Yesterday Tomorrow) website
explains:
Until the mid-1820s, Aboriginal people travelled
from all over Sydney and as far away as the
Hunter and the Illawarra to gather at a ceremonial
contest ground to the south of the city. The exact
location of this site of ritualized conflict settle-
ment and resistance is unclear. Described as lying
between the road to Botany Bay and the Brick-
fields, it was probably near Hyde Park South. In
bloody fistfights involving up to one hundred
people, spearing and beatings were used to
resolve conflicts at the Brickfields contest ground.
These were observed and recorded by visiting
Russian sailors in 1814, and again ten years later
by the French explorers Dumont d’Urville and
Rene Lesson.16
The Yininmadyemi monument that stands on
this site serves not only as a memorial for
Aboriginal soldiers who served in the armed
forces, but also for all Aboriginal warriors.
Yininmadyemi is a monument that aims to
disorientate visitors temporarily, challenging
not only the social, cultural, and political
narratives of Australians at war but also
those that surround pre-colonial history and
the memory of Aboriginal existence. Yinin-
madyemi is anti-memorial: it unsettles.
Monuments and the Act of Remembering
James E. Young describes the ‘anti-monu-
ment’ in his article ‘The Counter-Monument:
Memory against Itself in Germany Today’:
We live under the illusion that our memorial
edifices will always be there to remind us, we take
leave of them and return only at our convenience,
to the extent that we encourage monuments to do
our memory work for us, we become that much
more forgetful.17
For Young, monuments that act as memor-
ials achieve the opposite of what they gener-
ally intend. Monuments or ‘sculptures’ like
Yininmadyemi are, for the most part, concret-
ized repositories for memory, self-contained
and detached from the everyday. They are
places that allow communities of people to
‘fix’ their memories upon them. When
reflecting on Germany’s obsession with
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monuments after the Second World War, and
the preoccupation with memorializing the
Holocaust, Young suggests that ‘the possi-
bility that the memory of events so grave
could be reduced to exhibitions in public
spaces is intolerable’. He continues:
Rather than embodying memory, the monument
displaces it altogether supplanting a community’s
memory work with its own material form.18
Influenced by the writings of American
academic Lewis Mumford in The Culture of
Cities, German counter-monument artists
such as Horst Hoheisel, Jochen Gerz, and
Esther Shalev-Gerz aimed to (re)instate the
social and cultural memory of people by
taking away the power and fascination of
monuments.19 They did this by allowing
them to crumble, thus promoting disinteg-
ration as absence from public sites. Such
counter-monuments unsettled a public’s pre-
occupation with permanence, and encour-
aged opportunities for open dialogue through
provocation. Importantly, this refusal for the
‘burden of memory’ to be inscribed in arte-
facts throws the responsibility of memory
back on people. For Young, Libeskind’s
Jewish Museum in Berlin, although not
disintegrating or impermanent, is one such
building that achieves this aim. 20
Architect Daniel Libeskind’s plans for a
Jewish memorial building were inspired by
the ideas examined in Anthony Vidler’s The
Architectural Uncanny,21 where Vidler draws
on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’
as an experience of what has been alienated
or repressed through an encounter with the
familiar.22 A sense of the ‘uncanny’ in the
Libeskind Jewish Museum is invoked by an
invitation into familiar spaces and environ-
ments only to be estranged upon entering
them. As Young explains, this experience is
achieved through the creation of architec-
tural voids or places that seem to have no
place or function.23 For Libeskind, these
voids represent the hidden and concealed
memories of Jewish culture, history, and
people from the German landscape. Simil-
arly, Yininmadyemi evokes the absence of the
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experi-
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Lester Bostock with the 2014 cast of Black Diggers. Photo: Branco Gaica, with permission of Queensland Theatre
Company.
ence of conflict in Australia, and provokes
multiple sites of concealed memory and/or
estrangement by its proximity to the state-
sanctioned memorial site.
Also drawing on Freud’s concept of the
‘uncanny’, the Australian scholar Joanne
Tompkins argues that the term ‘counter-
monument’ can be a useful analogy for
theatre, particularly for those plays that
interrogate history and the commemorative
marking of place and space.24 For Tompkins,
to ‘unsettle’ in Australia is to challenge
Australia’s fragile representations of nation-
hood and identity.25 The new Aboriginal
play Black Diggers directed by Wesley Enoch
engages with several of these notions.
The Interwoven Stories of Black Diggers
Black Diggers was commissioned by newly
appointed Sydney Festival Director Lieven
Bertels in 2012. Bertels’s home town is the
site of one of the most important battles of
the Second World War, which took place at
Flanders Field in Ypres, Belgium. A young
Aboriginal soldier, Private Rufus Rigney,
from South Australia is buried in the Ypres
memorial cemetery. The story of Rigney, a
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young Aboriginal man with no rights in his
own country who came to be fighting for the
rights of others in a foreign country, was a
captivating one for Bertels. It is also a story
that crossed two countries from opposite
ends of the world.
Black Diggers is thus based on the excep-
tional stories of the lives and deaths of
thousands of Aboriginal Diggers in the First
World War. These were collected over a two-
year research and development period from
in-depth interviews with the families and
descendants of Aboriginal soldiers from all
over Australia. Research also involved
conversations with veterans, historians, and
academics. Sydney Festival presented this
work of significance, scope, and monumental
ambition in a world premiere event at
Sydney Opera House on 18 January 2014.
Written by playwright Tom Wright and
performed by an all-male, all-Indigenous
cast, Black Diggers presents nine different yet
interwoven stories of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people who served in various
campaigns. At the heart of the play are
accounts of enlistment and training, as well
as stories from the front that are presented
through a brisk, all-singing, and sometimes
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Image of Luke Carroll from the programme of the 2014
Sydney Festival production.
dancing style; the stories journey towards
the inevitable realities of conflict. Although
Black Diggers presents generally familiar
tales of war, it is a story that is told through
the eyes of Aboriginal people.
The play opens with a short passage
depicting colonial conflict, represented by an
Aboriginal warrior with a spear set against
an armed English soldier. From this starting
point, the play jumps to the twentieth cen-
tury, where a group of young Aboriginal men
are eager to leave their small town some-
where in Australia. They urge each other on
to enlist at a local recruitment office. After
failing on the grounds of race, the group
travels to another town and to yet another
recruiting office only to be rejected again and
again. Finally, after being identified as of
nondescript heritage, they join the war as
volunteers and begin their service in the
land-army ranks. It is through the eyes of
these young men that the stories of war
unfold.
Through the careful crafting of the fami-
liar, director Enoch lulls the audience into a
sense of security. Then, through the use of
the mimetic actions, he unsettles many long-
held cultural, social, and historical percep-
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tions of Australia at war.26 In one scene, two
soldiers are stationed at the front. We do not
see their faces, which are shrouded by lack of
light. One takes out a cigarette. He asks the
other soldier for a light. From the obscurity
of darkness, the hidden face of war is illum-
inated.
It is that of an Aboriginal soldier exposed
by the glow of a flame. It is the black soldier
who looks back at him. It is a black man who
is not subjugated, but equal in presence with
the other. Dressed in the same uniform, he is
identical in appearance, and he meets the
other at eye level. It is a sight that catches the
‘digger’ by surprise, the image of an em-
powered black man. His way of seeing the
world is at that moment fundamentally
altered. According to black feminist Bell
Hooks, ‘black looks are meant to challenge
and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert’.27 They
are also meant to transform the spectator.
Another example of mimesis can be seen
on the cover of the production programme.
Actor Luke Carroll is dressed in full military
attire identical to that portrayed and worn by
Australian soldiers during the First and
Second World Wars. He wears a slouch hat,
a bandolier, and an Australian Common-
wealth Service Badge. He stands with head
lowered, mirroring many iconic figures of
war such as those that stand at the ANZAC
Bridge in Sydney’s Inner West suburb. On
each side of the bridge stand two lone
soldiers holding a rifle in the ‘rest on arms
reverse’ drill position in remembrance. But
on the cover of the Black Diggers programme
it is the black actor like the monument, who
stands, alone.28
The icon is subverted and momentarily
replaced by what it makes absent. What mir-
rors the ‘Unknown Soldier’ is the forgotten
soldier. The black actor stands not only in
place of the black soldier, he also stands in
place of all soldiers.29
In much the same way, at the end of the
play a lone bugler stands at the edge of the
stage performing the Last Post.30 Sounded at
military funerals and at commemorative
services such as ANZAC and Remembrance
Day, the Last Post is a symbol of the final
farewell. It announces that the duties of the
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The setting for Black Diggers. Photo: Branco Gaica, with permission of Queensland Theatre Company.
dead are over, and that they can now rest in
peace. It signals the laying down of the
burdens of the past. This is the sound that
marks the end of commemoration and
remembrance. In Black Diggers this call is for
the Aboriginal soldiers whose lives and
stories were not known to all. These stories
can now be laid to rest. They, too, disappear
at the end, along with the performance. As
Joseph Roach reminds us, it is
the very uncanniness of the process of surrog-
ation, which tends to disturb the complacency of
all thoughtful incumbents, and may provoke
unbidden emotions ranging from mildly inconti-
nent sentimentalism to raging paranoia. 31
Through the device of surrogation and sub-
stitution in Black Diggers, Enoch unsettles
many of the dominant and entrenched ideo-
logies about our past that have been historic-
ally and predominantly represented by
Western and white iconic images of war.
Uses of Verbatim Theatre
Black Diggers is a work of ‘fiction(al) non-
fiction’, and Enoch also plays with notions of
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real-ness and a sense of the real. Based on
archival material such as photographs, letters,
and official war documents, and constructed
from research, advice, accounts, and inter-
views, the play demonstrates many features
of verbatim theatre. Verbatim is an approach
that employs largely or exclusively recorded
material from real-life characters and events
to which it gives dramatic shape. According
to Derek Paget, this type of theatre is ‘parti-
cularly well suited to the demystification of
history’.32 A considerable amount of authen-
ticity or sense of the real is attributed to the
stories of Black Diggers by employing this
method.
One claim to the real-ness of the stories
portrayed in Black Diggers is an actual
returned Indigenous soldier who is present
on stage, performing alongside actors. In the
programme George Bostock is credited with
being a ‘cultural consultant’ on the project.
A veteran of the wars in Borneo (1963–66)
and Vietnam (1962–72), Bostock has ten
medals for active and long service in the
armed forces, medals that he wears in the
final sequences of the performance to refer-
ence the annual marching tradition.
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 But Bostock is much more than a pres-
ence. Each night he also appears in various
scenes playing various characters, thus
offering gravitas to the story. Through his
presence and performance, Bostock brings to
the production an authority that gives
legitimacy to the accounts portrayed.
For Peggy Phelan, performance implicates
the real through the presence of living
bodies.33 In the case of Black Diggers, as with
many other plays concerned with Indigenous
issues, it is the presence of the Aboriginal
body that implies the real or the authentic
Aboriginal story. But, the ‘marked’ black
body implies much more than the real. This
body is metonymic, or stands for something
else. Barbara Bolt suggests that bodies are
not neutral; they are inscribed by multiple
traces of experiences of which the actor, or
the character, may remind the audiences.34
In Black Diggers the black actors’ bodies
signify on many levels. They stand as instru-
ments for enacting cultural identity with their
own unique historical connections and cul-
tural deposits. The Aboriginal actors enable
the possibility of a (re)invention of that
identity by (re)placing it within multiple
layers of cultural meaning and memory.
Towards the end of the production, the
actors write in large chalked letters the
names of their relatives who served in war.
Here cultural memory is enacted. Through
performance the names of forgotten black
soldiers are made present and (re)inscribed
on the stage each night.
Conclusion
Wesley Enoch declared in an interview in
2014 ‘that the aim of Indigenous theatre is to
write on the public record neglected or
forgotten stories’. He also spoke about the
aims of Black Diggers as ‘honouring and
preserving’ these stories.35 In achieving this
aim Enoch spent two years together with
researcher and dramaturg David Williams
uncovering and collecting various accounts
of the hidden Indigenous experiences of war.
With playwright Tom Wright, Enoch created
a performance that, for him, (re)addresses
the great silence in Australia’s history of this
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experience. Similarly, through his memorial
sculpture Yininmadyemi the visual artist Tony
Alberts aspires to (re)place these memories
by locating the sculpture in opposition to the
institutionally sanctioned war memorial in
Sydney’s Hyde Park.
Black Diggers and Yininmadyemi are
counter-hegemonic and counter-memorial.
Both unsettle the status quo. All who en-
counter the Yininmadyemi site or experience a
performance of Black Diggers – audiences,
visitors, theatre makers, artists, and writers –
are in some way required to sanctify or
acknowledge what was forgotten or mis-
placed from Australia’s official history. To
unsettle and to be unsettled can be a liber-
ating experience. But let us not forget the
spirits of those whose stories are invoked.
They, too, can now be released from the
shadows and silence of Australia’s past.
Notes and References
1. The history of ANZAC can be traced to an
Australian and New Zealand allied expedition to the
Gallipoli peninsula near Constantinople (now Istanbul).
The Australian and New Zealand forces landed on the
peninsula on 25 April 1915, and met fierce resistance
from the Turks. The campaign lasted eight months with
over 8,000 Australian soldiers killed in action. News of
the landing on Gallipoli had made such a profound
impact on Australians that 25 April soon became the day
on which Australians remembered the sacrifice of all
Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had died in
the war. It was officially named Anzac Day in 1916, and
was marked by a wide range of ceremonies and services
across Australia, the United Kingdom, and in Egypt. In
London, over 2,000 Australian and New Zealand troops
marched through the streets. During the 1920s, Anzac
Day became established as a national day of commem-
oration for the 60,000 Australians who had died during
the First World War. In 1927, every state observed some
form of public holiday on Anzac Day and by the mid-
1930s all the commemorative rituals associated with the
day such as dawn vigils, marches, memorial services,
reunions, and two-up games were firmly established as
part of Anzac Day culture. In subsequent years, the
meaning of the day has been further extended to include
Australians killed in all the military operations in which
the country has been involved.
2. In this article the term ‘Indigenous’ is used to
denote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of
Australia considered as a whole, when no specific
details of cultural or geographical location are singled
out for discussion. The term Aboriginal and/or Torres
Strait Islander is sometimes used to denote specificity of
geography, heritage, culture, and identity.
3. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
believe that their land was never conceded to settlers,
nor was there any formal treaty entered into, and so
regard the colonization of Australia as an invasion.
IP address: 137.111.13.234
 4. William Edward Hanley Stanner, White Man Got
No Dreaming (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 1979).
5. William Edward Hanley Stanner, The Dreaming
and Other Essays (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2010).
6. Stanner, ‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’, in The
Dreaming and Other Essays, p. 19–56.
7. Ibid., p. 189.
8. Keith Windschuttle, ‘Fabrication of Aboriginal
History’, Sydney Papers, XV, No 1 (Summer 2003), p. 20–9.
9. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier:
Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia
(Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), p. 8.
10. Noah Riseman, ‘Serving Their Country: a Short
History of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Service
in the Australian Army’, Australian Army Journal, Cul-
tural Edition, X, No 3 (2013), p. 11–21.
11. Ibid., p.13
12. Ibid. <www.army.gov.au/~/media/Files/Our
%20future/LWSC%20Publications/AAJ/2013Winter/
AustralianArmyJournal_V10N3Winter_History-Serv
ingTheirCountry.pdf>.
13. The RSL was founded in 1916 and supports serv-
ing and ex-service Defence Force members and their
families. Today the League owns many clubs where
members meet and socialize.
14. The term ‘babana’ means ‘brother’ in the Dharuk
language (the Aboriginal language group of the Greater
Sydney area). Founded in Redfern in October 2006,
Babana brings together men from all walks of life who are
committed to supporting and empowering each other,
their families, and their communities. Babana holds
monthly meetings and regular events in community.
15. Tony Albert, cited in <www.cityofsydney.nsw.
gov.au/vision/towards-2030/communities-and-
culture/eora-journey/yininmadyemi>.
16. <www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/hyde-park-
south/>.
17. Young, James. E., ‘The Counter-Monument:
Memory Against Itself in Germany today’, Critical
Inquiry, XVIII, No. 2 (Winter 1992), p. 267–96.
18. Ibid., p 273.
19. Mumford, Lewis, The Culture of Cities (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1938).
20. Young, James. E., ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum in Berlin: the Uncanny Arts of Memorial
Architecture’, Jewish Social Studies, VI, No. 2 (Winter
2000), p. 123.
21. Vidler, Anthony, The Architecturally Uncanny:
Essays in the Modern Unhomely (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
22. Sigmund Freud, in Strachey, James, ed., The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 225.
23. Young, ‘Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum’, p. 11.
24. Tompkins, Joanne, Unsettling Space: Contestations
in Contemporary Australian Theatre (London; New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 49.
http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 22 Nov 2015
25. Ibid, p.6.
26. The mimetic is derived from the Greek word
‘mimesis’ which means to copy, imitate, or adapt.
27. Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
(Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 7.
28. According to Chapter 21 of the Australian
Government Veterans Affairs Ceremonial Manual,
which details the rules, conventions, and guidelines
for Anzac Day and Anzac Day related ceremonial
activities, ‘the origin of the tradition of resting on
reversed arms is lost in time; however, it was used by a
Commonwealth soldier at the execution of Charles I in
1649 (the soldier was, however, duly punished for his
symbolic gesture towards the King’s death) and it is
recorded that at the funeral for Marlborough,
in 1722, the troops carried out a formal reverse arms
drill, which was especially invented for the service, as a
unique sign of respect to the great soldier’ <www.
dva.gov.au/commems_oawg/commemorations/
commemorative_events/organise_events/Documents/
21.pdf>, p. 5.
29. The body of an unknown soldier was entombed
in Westminster Abbey in London on 11 November 1920.
The body was among four brought from France, each
draped in the Union Jack. They had been recovered from
the British battlefields of the Somme, Aisne, Arras, and
Ypres. The soldier was assumed to be British (although
he could have been Canadian, a New Zealander, or an
Australian), but he was intended to represent all the
young men of the British Empire killed during the
‘Great War’.
30. The Australian Government Department of
Defence website states: ‘The Last Post is the trumpet or
bugle call sounded in barracks and other military
installations at 2200 hours to mark the end of the day’s
activities. It is also sounded at military funerals and
commemorative services to indicate that the soldier’s
day has drawn to a final close. During the sounding of
The Last Post, all members wearing military uniform
and headdress are to stand at the attention position and
salute. Armed parties are to be given the order “present
arms” and the commander of the party is to hand salute,
if that person is not carrying a weapon’ <www.defence.
gov.au/ceremonial/ANZACDayHandyHints.asp#Last
post>.
31. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2.
32. Derek Paget, ‘Verbatim Theatre: Oral History
and Documentary Techniques’, New Theatre Quarterly,
III, No. 12 (November 1987), p. 326.
33. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Perform-
ance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 148.
34. Barbara Bolt, ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’,
Hypatia, XV, No. 2: ‘Going Australian: Reconfiguring
Feminism and Philosophy’ Special Issue, May 2000, p.
202–16.
35. Festival Thinking at <www.sydneyfestival.org.
au/2014/Theatre-and-Dance/Black-Diggers>.
231
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