Black Diggers

In the Sydney suburb of Glebe, after World War Two in 1949, a “bloke with a glass of wine” gives a speech he admits he was not expecting to give to a large assembly. He sees “some justice in the world” but also the “weariness” of the young people who “talk about imperialism and foreign wars and about being lied to.” He considers them “ingrates” and wishes he could teach them “what it was like [...] in a living hell” during the war. The man, who is Aboriginal, “thank[s] God for the Army.” He was “just another woebegone failure” when he joined, but the army gave him “dignity,” allowed him to make sense of his past and find a feeling of belonging in and loyalty to Australia. While the war was “the worst thing on earth,” it also “made me, and it made us, for better or worse.” He offers a toast.

Soldiers sing a song about paying to see a “fair tattooed lady.” The song describes her tattoos, which are national symbols of Australia ranging from “the words ‘Great ANZAC corps’” to “an emu and a fucking kangaroo.” The song’s lyrics end with, “but what we liked best was across her chest, my home in Woollomooloo.”

In 1919, getting off their ship back home in Australia, Mick jokes that “they really rolled out the red carpet” but Archie tells him to take it easy. They shake hands and decide to agree “this wasn’t for nothing,” then promise to “make sure things don’t go back to the way they were.”

Laurie leaves camp, having been decommissioned. Laurie’s friend is surprised to see that he is “back from the dead.” As he begins to tell his story, Bertie’s mom rushes into the scene and embraces Bertie, telling him how happy she is to see him and chastising him for falling out of touch. She explains her long journey and the family’s troubles at home—but Bertie says nothing and follows her away “stiffly, almost marching.”

In a pub on Anzac Day in 1932, a pub worker kicks Archie and another digger out, even though they are dressed formally and even wearing their war medals, which the worker thinks might be fake. Archie explains that they want to honor their “mates who didn’t come back” and insists that they fought side by side “blokes like you” in Europe—but the worker, who also fought in the war, says he “never saw any men like you over there.” An RSL secretary tells the worker to let them in, “and anyone else with medals and rosemary,” because “we don’t see the skin, we see the service.” The bar’s manager agrees, and the secretary decides to buy Archie a drink.

At a public meeting in the Western District of Victoria in 1922, a worker from the Soldier Settlement Commission explains to three farmers that the government is appropriating some of their land to give to soldiers. The farmers protest that, beyond being unjust, the land is barely productive. Still, the bureaucrat says that the soldiers will have “new techniques, fertilisers and so on…” The farmers ask if they will get to use “these new techniques,” but the public servant refers them to “a different department.” They have no right to appeal the decision, he explains.

Mick Dempsey asks if he has a right to some of this land, which his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather farmed. The public servant tells him he has to apply for land, and the farmers announce that Mick is “a serious war hero.” Mick asks if other aboriginal servicemen have been awarded land settlements, but the public servant claims it is “not [his] department.” The farmers note that the land being given away is “rocky outcrops” and “swamps,” where nothing can grow.

Mick gives a speech, recalling his four years in the war, watching his friends die, and thinking, “you’re finally fighting to protect what’s yours.” They are in an Indigenous town, one created when whites forced Aboriginal people to migrate. And now that he has returned from the war to his land, the government is taking his land away with “a stroke of the pen.” Whereas for white Australians “the war’s over,” Mick insists, for Indigenous people “it’s never going to end.”

In 1920, at a cattle ranch called Bertha Downs, Archie wears a coat in the rain while the farm overseer takes shelter on the verandah. Archie points out that men who can no longer work there end up homeless, and that the women do not get compensated. The overseer says he does not care about Archie’s time in the war and complains that he has been “the worst kind of black, an uppity one,” since returning home. The manager insists Archie work and shut up, then threatens Archie’s family and blames him for “[getting] me angry.”

After the overseer leaves, Archie complains to his friend, who wants to stay out of the argument and tells Archie he has changed. Another worker, an “old hand,” claims Archie thinks he’s “better than [the rest of] us” and suggests he leave. Archie laments that he “thought things would change after the War,” and the “old hand” says that Archie is “the only thing that’s changed round here.”

In 1939, at the Queensland reservation called Cherbourg where they grew up (back when it was called Barambah), Ern and Norm sit by a fire. Ern complains that his remaining arm has started to shake. Yelling into Norm’s one good ear, he speaks of his nightmares and the way everyday events in Australia remind him of the war, like when watching a raven kill a lamb reminds him of a man named Pat Daffy dying. Ern leaves, and Norm listens to an old hymn about looking to Canaan from the Jordan River, before pontificating about how nobody cared about color in the war, “and when they called me mate they meant it.” When he got back to Australia, he foolishly thought relations between whites and Indigenous people would be better. But “they painted my colour back on the day I got off that boat,” and he no longer understands what he was fighting for—he “won something over there” but “lost it back here.”

Each with a different disability, the cast members sing the hymn Norm was listening to, “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand.” Looking across to Canaan, “where my possessions lie,” they sing, “I am bound for the promised land.”

In 1935, a minister stands before the grave of a pauper, completely alone. He delivers a eulogy to the man, “Tank Stand Tommy,” whose real name nobody knows. People only knew the homeless Tommy for sleeping under his tank, drinking and swearing, smelling horrible and crying loudly in public. People did not know about his war service—after his death, three medals were discovered among his few possessions, and it turned out he spent three days buried alive in Pozieres. “Acquainted with death,” it made sense that he could not “sleep within walls” after returning to Australia. The minister throws dirt on the coffin and leaves.

In the town of Murgon in 1939, Ern walks into a pharmacy and gives the chemist his war medals, because his family is “not interested” and “they’ll only get lost.”

In a new scene, short excerpts from soldiers’ letters fall from the ceiling and the cast reads them. In the first, a soldier thought his service would “make [him] a naturalised British subject and a man with freedom.” Instead, he ended up stuck on a farm settlement “like a dog” in Australia. In the second letter, someone named Higgins laments that his family did not get to claim the same privileges as white Australians, even though five of them served in the war. In the third, a veteran reveals that he has decided to pass as Maori and leave the farm where he has been working, since he is being treated even worse than in the past, as he waits for his back pay. In the fourth, Ernest Hopkins explains that he enlisted under a different name, but does not understand “why I have to prove what my former comrades do not…”

In the fifth letter, a schoolmaster vouches for “Mr. Prudden,” whose shell shock has gone untreated and unacknowledged. The sixth letter concerns “the gross injustice intended to us [Indigenous veterans] by depriving us of our food.” And the seventh implores the RSL to appeal to the State Government and help “grant full citizen privileges to every one of us coloured soldiers,” instead of leaving them “servile to the Aborigines’ Protection Board.”

In the woods near the Murrumbidgee river in 1927, Bertie’s Grandad laments that the formerly beautiful land has grown covered with trenches because of irrigation. Bertie, now 25, simply stares into space and holds the lock of Frank’s hair, as his mum says he is “not coming back from the world of the grown-ups.” Before the land was irrigated, when it used to burn, Grandad remembers, “little green shoots came up everywhere.”

On Castlereagh Street in 1949, Harry is begging for money and Stan, in a suit, passes by, before they recognize one another and try to catch up. Harry admits he cannot find work, and Stan admits he is now working at the Department of Lands. They momentarily recall the war and Stan gives Harry some cash. Harry “shuffles off” and Stan laments, “we that are left, grow old.”

In 1937, Laurie collects congregants’ hymn books at a church in the city of Mount Gambier. Someone stops and asks if he was in the Light Horse, fighting in Palestine. The man recognizes him, since “you’d hardly forget a face like yours,” but Laurie denies this and insists it must be someone else. He claims to be “just an usher on the Sabbath, doing my duty,” but the man insists. Laurie breaks and tells the man, Mr. Burchett, that the war is “of this world. This broken, weak, sad world.” But Laurie prefers to “think of another world.” Mr. Burchett leaves and Laurie turns off the lights before remembering that he “walked in the Holy Land,” which is “enough for [him].”

In Forest Lodge, Sydney, in 1929, Nigel writes a letter condemning the previous year’s Coniston massacre and insisting that Australia’s “brutality and savage butchery” continues. He charges the public with “a strange silence, a lack of curiosity, and a peculiar lack of outrage” about the massacre, which is contrary to the values he fought for in the War. On the other side of the stage, there is a newspaper office, and its workers come over and take Nigel’s letter, which they find difficult to believe could be the work of a “darkie.” An assistant suggests printing a copy of the letter to show Nigel’s “beautiful handwriting” and prove “that aborigines are educated enough to write like this,” and the editors agree to make Nigel’s handwriting the story as they insist that nobody will bother to read the content of his letter or care about the massacre.

On George Street in downtown Sydney, Nigel wears a costume reading “TARZAN THE APE MAN” and hands out flyers for the show. He drinks and says, “Sorry Dad.”

An old soldier, who turns out to be Ern, gives a long monologue in 1956. He remembers entering the war so naïve, too young to understand “the way the world worked.” When he returned to Australia and showed people his scars, “they whistled and said poor bugger you and we all got on with things.” Sometimes he wondered if the war really happened, but for the most part he was happy to have gotten on with his life.

During World War Two, Ern says, one day his scar began “oozing that lovely rich black blood.” He got fixed up, but when he removed the bandages, the smell reminded him of the war, and then he dug his fingers into his wound and pulled a piece of bullet shell casing out. In the following three years, he found seventeen other pieces. This is what happens after war: metal “inches its way up,” a little bit every year. He gave the pieces to his grandchildren, and the next Anzac Day he went into town in the rain, feeling “about as lonely as a black bastard can feel,” and cried on the street before going to the pub, where “our mob” shouted “Coony! Coony! We thought you was dead!” Ern finds this “funny. Because for a long time, I was.”

A recessional hymn uses war metaphors to implore God not to let people forget their pain and celebrate God’s “ancient sacrifice.”

In 1993, the Prime Minister speaks at the opening of Australia’s “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” The Prime Minister explains that everything about “this Australian” is unknown, from his home and rank in the military to his occupation, religion, and family.

At the Callan Park psychiatric hospital in 1951, a nurse wheels a sleeping man past Nigel and asks if he is “enjoying the sun,” but tells him not to “stay out too long.” He claims to be “the British Forces Representative in this camp” and promises to “intervene on your behalf with the Red Cross.” The nurse asks Nigel if he can see people “rowing on Iron Cove,” and he replies that he can see “the big world” beyond. The nurse reminds Nigel to join the following morning’s service (presumably for Anzac Day). Nigel says, “I don’t want to join in. I don’t belong.” The light fades and the play ends.