When Australian Salvation Army officers told Monica - an Aboriginal woman from Yorta Yorta - that they'd look after her three-week-old baby while she went to see about a job, she believed them. She came home and found the child gone, given into the care of foster parents, her baby thus becoming another statistic in the infamous "Stolen Children" period of Australia's history when indigenous infants were removed from their families as part of the government's long-term plan to assimilate Aboriginal children into the dominant white population.
Monica's child was taken from her in 1964 and the baby, Deborah Cheetham, is now 36, an opera singer, writer and solo performer of the award-winning White Baptist Abba Fan, one of three Australian plays written and performed by Aborigines showing in London this week.
It wasn't difficult to recognise Cheetham when we met last week in Covent Garden: she has her mother's dark skin and tightly curled black hair, cropped neatly around a watchful face. But when mother and daughter met for the first time after a separation of 21 years, their features were about all they had in common. Deborah had been brought up by a kindly, well-intentioned Baptist couple and to her Aboriginal mother, she was a spoiled, smart-arsed whitefella - and a lesbian to boot. White Baptist Abba Fan charts the journey back to her ancestral home, a journey Cheetham has not yet completed. (The initial meeting with her mother was so unsatisfactory that they didn't meet again for another nine years.) "That first meeting came at a very difficult time for me," she says. "Everything was going wrong. I'd been rejected by the Baptist Church because I was lesbian and I'd stopped singing because of abuse from a teacher."
If there is any humour to be found at all in this sorry tale it surfaces when the horrified Abba fan discovers her long-lost mother favours country and western. A pivotal moment in the performance is when Monica and her sister begin singing country and western together, and Deborah, the opera singer, quietly joins in. In real life, her mother and aunt were a partnership, performing country and western in pubs and clubs. An uncle who enjoyed a heyday in the 1960s, also as a country and western singer, is now making a comeback. Next week, he and Cheetham will be performing in Hannover together. So where does all the music come from?" From my mother's family. It's part of Aboriginal culture."
She has never met her natural father and falters when saying his name: " John . . . Harold Burke. He was a bus driver of Irish descent. His family weren't very keen about my mother." Nevertheless, they married for love but he later walked out, leaving Monica to bring up those children still left to her.
Here, Cheetham's voice hardens. "The Prime Minister, John Howard, says that only 10 per cent of Aboriginal children were stolen. Well, my mother had nine children and three of them were stolen. Maths has never been my forte but that adds up to 30 per cent to me." Of the survivors, one baby died in infancy and two sons later died of heroin abuse.
The fate of "Stolen Children" sent, instead, to institutions, is the focus of Jane Harrison's play, Stolen, in which we hear the stories of five Aboriginal childadults whose days are spent scrubbing, mopping, ironing and shopping and who quickly learn to line up in order of lightness of skin when potential adopters come to view them.
The set of Stolen is skeletal. Each child has a bed covered by an old chenille bedspread, except for Anne's which is colourful and pretty - she was adopted by a white family. The bars on each end of Jimmy's bed turn, at times, into the bars of a prison. There is a drab green filing cabinet - always locked - which holds the secrets of their lives.
ONE BY the one, the child-adults enact their own personal tragedies. A little girl finds a foster home but is raped there. The same happens to Jimmy. Anne's white parents tell her she had an aboriginal mother and then reject her when she asks to see her. Jimmy mourns for his mother whose regular letters are withheld from him." No, she didn't write," he is told. "She's dead." Jane Harrison, the daughter of an Aboriginal mother from the Muruwari tribe and of a Scottish/Jewish father, learned a great deal about her culture while researching Stolen. "I wasn't stolen and nor was my mother but I was brought up distant from Aboriginal culture, so researching this play brought it all home to me. The cast is really very brave because they have to go on every night acting these terrible things, some of which happened to their own families. One actor comes from a family where 10 members of it were stolen.
"The thing is, people think we're talking about history, about something that happened way back in the 1930s, but we're not. None of the actors is older than 40. That's how recent it is, and we're still feeling the repercussions."
Third of these three Australian plays is Box the Pony, featuring Leah Purcell, an Aborigine who grew up on a mission and was sent to work in a slaughterhouse. Coming from a family of boxers, she developed the same skills but was prevented from boxing because she was a girl. Instead, she turned to singing as a means both of escape and of telling her story. Sad, raw but also funny, these three entertaining productions are a reminder that the "Stolen Children" are still owed an apology.
Stolen is at The Tricycle Theatre until July 15th. To book phone: 00-44-20-73281000; White Baptist Abba Fan and Box the Pony are on a double bill at The Barbican Centre until July 8th. To book phone: 00-44-20-76388891
