A new theatre project will give voice to generations of Victorian First Nations matriarchs who fought state agencies with the pen

Louisa was a young girl when she was abducted by sealers from a beach near the heads of Port Phillip Bay and carried off to a distant, windswept island in the Bass Strait.

Her mother, grandmother and aunt are also said to have been taken that day. The life that lay in store for them included decades of bonded labour as seal hunters, private domestics and oftentimes sex slaves to their captors, who were known to have each held up to seven native wives at a time while ensconced among the remote islands located off the north-eastern horn of Van Diemen’s Land.

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Louisa survived the ordeal of her early life with the sealers and left the Furneaux Islands in 1858 to return to her traditional Kulin nation on the mainland with her husband, John Briggs – also a survivor of the first stolen generations of the new southern colonies.

According to colonial archives, the pair eked out an existence providing casual labour in the districts of modern-day Beaufort in Victoria’s central highland goldfields and around Violet Town, a coach stopover 180km north-east of Melbourne. Documents from the time describe the couple and their 10 children as living in hardship until, in 1871, destitution led the family to settle at the Coranderrk Aboriginal station, near Healesville on the northern outskirts of Melbourne.

Over the next 15 years, Louisa Briggs was expelled from Coranderrk several times, mostly because of her criticism of the station’s administration. As a salaried dormitory matron and nurse, Louisa petitioned for an inquiry into conditions at Coranderrk through a series of letters to colony officials.

Louisa Briggs with her family at Coranderrk Aboriginal station, circa 1874. Photograph: Fred Kruger/Museum Victoria

After the death of her husband in 1878, the Briggs family was moved to the Ebenezer mission station on the banks of the Wimmera River in the Mallee country of Victoria’s west. It wasn’t long before Louisa was holding the administration of Ebenezer to account as well.

Louisa’s letters, and her evidence to a 1876 government inquiry into the possibility of selling Coranderrk and forcibly relocating its residents, have provided the entry point for a new artistic project that has been granted $931,450 by Victoria’s creative state commissions program – the state government’s largest grant for a single creative project.

Titled Bagurrk – the Boonwurrung word for woman – the project was conceptualised by Louisa’s great-great-granddaughter Caroline Martin in partnership with the Ilbijerri Theatre Company. Martin says Louisa was strong-minded and hardworking, and also a vocal activist who was described as “a most resolute lady” in an 1872 edition of Melbourne’s Argus newspaper. Martin credits her mother, the Boonwurrung elder Arweet Carolyn Briggs – also closely involved in the conceptualisation of the project – with uncovering the obscured history of Louisa Briggs. She says she now has a “genetic responsibility” to share Louisa’s legacy.

There’s no such thing as post-colonisation. There is no post. We are still being colonised Rachael Maza, Ilbijerri Theatre Company

Martin says the breadth of the project extends to celebrate “the resilience, strength and sophistication” of First Nations matriarchal heritage right across the state of Victoria, through hundreds of letters from the mid-1800s to the present day that are similar in nature to Louisa’s advocacy for black political mobilisation.

“Through their hundreds of letters of protest for their families and country we can clearly see that our ancestors never ceded their sovereignty,” Martin says. “The many descendants of these women are still writing letters with the same intent. This too will be part of the story.”

Martin and the Ilbijerri team stress that Bagurrk is much more than a historical piece. The theatre company’s artistic director, Rachael Maza, says the letters provide a starting point for exploring the legacy of First Nations women’s resistance. “If we get this right we will see how the rebellion of those inspirational women continues through their descendants today,” she says.

“I’m really keen on smashing this notion that it all happened back then and that there was a day when we got passed it. There’s no such thing as post-colonisation. There is no post. We are still being colonised. It is ongoing.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ilbijerri Theatre Company’s executive producer Lydia Fairhall, artistic director Rachael Maza, Louisa Briggs’s great-great-granddaughter Caroline Martin, and creative director Kamarra Bell-Wykes. Photograph: Jody Haines

That initial concept for the project will now be carried into the community to develop the work over the next two years. The process will involve a program of yarning circles with First Nations communities around the state to hear from the families of strong women who composed the letters to the state agencies. The producers will also identify storytellers who might be closely involved in a theatrical production in 2021. Workshops will be held with the aim of fostering future First Nations performing artists, production designers and producers.

“In terms of the way that we’re making the work, it starts with that community collaborative process,” says Ilbijerri’s executive producer, Lydia Fairhall. “That means people whose story it is get to determine what the story will be.

“We’re moving away from the text-based approach where the theatre professionals are the authority and there are designated hierarchal roles. Everybody that engages in the yarning circles will be a collaborator and devisor.”

Through this process, she says, the final cast of Bagurrk will comprise a mix of professional actors and community members as well as a newly launched youth ensemble.

This embedded approach is becoming increasingly common for research and storytelling focused on First Nations peoples. Earlier this year, Naina Sen’s documentary The Song Keepers provided audiences with an example of how this type of practice ultimately achieves a more rewarding outcome. Fairhall says this way of doing things also situates cultural authority as a driving force behind the work.

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In addition to her custodianship of Louisa’s story, Fairhall says, Carolyn Briggs has been instrumental in the project’s observation of appropriate cultural protocols. The theatre company established an elders-in-residence advisory board comprising Briggs and the Taungurung man Larry Walsh for precisely that purpose. .

Maza says she’s excited by the prospect of the final work being informed along the way. “Normally [with a theatre production] you have to have it all worked out as you’re applying for the money, but we’ve been given this extraordinary opportunity to be able to let the process unfold …

“Money buys time, and that’s where you are going to get the magic. That’s where you are going to get the good stories and the real stories. The stories that matter.”