Forgotten Refugees at Home

Saturday, 16 June 2007

Miriam Cosic reviews Ngapartji Ngapartji's World Premiere in Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006. October 19, 2006 Ngapartji Ngapartji Melbourne International Arts Festival Big hART Productions. The Arts Centre, Melbourne, October 15. DESPITE the seemingly unbridgeable cultural gulf that exists between languages, people generally talk about the same things: seduction, aggression, domestic organisation. Even at the level of peoples, the same issues re-emerge: community, war, displacement. Ngapartji Ngapartji, an ambitious work in progress, deals with these ideas in recounting the fate of the Spinifex people after nuclear testing on Pitjantjatjara land in central Australia in the 1950s. Conceived by Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin, the sprawling multi-disciplinary production relates the story of Jamieson's family, deprived of health and homeland by the Maralinga blasts. Resonant stories of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan and the experience of refugees in the early 21st century are tellingly interwoven. A lot of comedy, singing of popular songs in language by the Pitjantjatjara choir and audience-participation language lessons - drawn from the ongoing online tutorial at www. ngapartji.org - helps the medicine go down. Jamieson is a charming and persuasive storyteller. Through gesture as well as words, he is the tour guide on a voyage that veers between laugh-aloud humour and silence-inducing anguish. Though some editing of the script would help, Rankin mostly directs the disparate parts so that they cohere. Among the multinational cast are two women who elegantly tell stories that overlap with the experiences of the Spinifex people. Yumi Uniumare, a trained Butoh peformer, relates the anguish of a woman who loses three generations of her family to the atomic bombs that ended the Pacific War in 1945. Najeeba Azimi, a 15-year-old Year 10 student from Adelaide, gives a poetic rendering in Hazari of her own experience of fleeing Afghanistan with her mother and sister. Jamieson terms the Pitjantjatjara people who fled the Maralinga-induced sicknesses "refugees", and that label, rarely used in this context, is apt when the events are told from their point of view. This an inclusive plea for understanding and justice and a sharp reminder that we can have strong sympathy for the dramatic stories of foreigners while ignoring tragedy at home. It's a open-hearted black-armband view of history and it would be churlish, after seeing it, not to acknowledge that the Spinifex people have good reason to wear it. A mainstage production is scheduled for Sydney next year.