Australian Nationhood and Indigenous Dispossession Theme Analysis

Black Diggers tells the tale of a decision at once contradictory and extraordinary: that of thousands of Indigenous Australians to fight in World War I for the same white settler colonial government that massacred them and stole their lands. While the play draws clear parallels between colonialism and the war, it also shows how Indigenous people saw the war as an opportunity to overcome the wounds of colonialism—to join the Australian nation rather than staying irreconcilably “other” to it. In its dozens of vignettes and handful of interwoven plot lines, the play shows how this sacrifice was both utterly rational and deeply ironic, repaid in some limited ways during the war but completely forgotten after the Allies’ victory.

The play’s Indigenous characters recognize, some openly and some implicitly, that the Australian nation is founded on the theft and plunder of their lands and culture. It is no accident that the first scene depicts a group of white settlers massacring Aboriginal people in Bellender Ker, Queensland in order to take their land. This scene positions the white settlers’ genocide of Aboriginal peoples as not only the foundational injustice that sets up Indigenous people’s subsequent struggles, but also as the critical moment in the foundation of the Australian nation. In other words, it is impossible to separate Australian national identity from the genocide of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Some of the play’s characters recognize this: when the young soldier Bertie returns after the war, his grandad reminisces endlessly about how his land used to be before Europeans took it. In fact, his traumatic fixation on his land clearly parallels the veteran diggers’ fixation on the war, and Bertie’s grandfather promises Bertie that he will never truly find acceptance in Australia—although he also jokes that he does not even know what “Australia” means. At his first battle at the Dardanelles, Laurie sees the irony in “arriving in boats uninvited on someone’s beach after his ancestors were decimated by white settlers’ analogous violation of Indigenous Australians’ sovereignty and humanity. The patriotic songs that punctuate the play, like “Sons of the Southern Cross” and “Tattooed Lady,” show how Australian white settlers justify taking land and massacring its inhabitants precisely by constructing a national identity around natural features of the land they expropriated.

Facing exclusion from a nation built without their consent on their land, the Aboriginal Australians in this play see the military as a means to integrate into the nation and an opportunity to shed their “otherness.” To an extent, they fulfill this dream during the war. Immediately after the initial scene of plunder set in 1884, the play shows a Retired Schoolmaster telling Indigenous characters Harry, Norm, Bob, and Ern about their “duty” to fight in the war and to prevent “Turks” and “Huns” from taking over Europe. While he suggests that they do have a role in defending “their” country (even though the country is built on the theft of their lands), he also imagines the war as a struggle for white racial purity (even though the diggers ultimately end up fighting white Germans). In a scene shortly thereafter, Ern makes the promise of integration through military service (nearly) explicit. He says, “if you can fire a gun and stand in a sun, they might pretend to forget you’re…” (he clearly means “forget you’re Aboriginal”). In some limited ways, these promises are fulfilled—the diggers are allowed to feel part of the Australian nation for the first time by joining the military, and they are acknowledged as such by their fellow soldiers. A number of white soldiers come to Harry’s defense when a white Private starts berating him, for instance, and Ern and Harry both form friendships with white soldiers who promise to treat them as equals after the war.

But, when they return to Australia after the war, the black diggers never win the acceptance they were promised: in fact, they are forced to confront the continuity between the forces they are fighting against and the settler militia forces that stole Australia from them in the first place—and whom they are now fighting for. At first, the diggers are technically disqualified from serving in the military because only “Substantially European” people can serve (even though the Recruiting Sergeant easily lets them lie their way past this requirement). Just thereafter, a newscasting voice praises Australian fighters as demonstrating “the greatness of the White Man,” ironically valorizing Australia through praise for those who colonized the land, while erasing the people who are actually from Australia. And when he is captured as a Prisoner of War at Zössen, Nigel listens to a German guard lecture about the evils of British colonialism and discusses with three Indian soldiers their need to wage a war against their colonizers. After they sustain injuries, Norm, Bob, and Ern sit in the hospital disillusioned, wondering which “Australia” they were fighting for: their land, or the government that is occupying it. Most starkly, when they return to Australia, the Indigenous soldiers get kicked off their land again to make room for soldier settlements—but never get settlements themselves. When this happens to Mick, another soldier, he realizes that the war “[is] never going to end” for Indigenous Australians.

Ultimately, Black Diggers points out not merely the profound injustice in making the victims of colonial aggression in Australia fight against colonial aggression in Europe, or even the way that these people were lured into their service by the false promise of finally becoming seen as full members of the nation built on their own stolen land. It is, more fundamentally and more importantly, also an attempt to rewrite the myth of nationhood—that Australia is a white country built on “empty” land, which sent white soldiers to fight along white Europeans in World War I—by showing how Indigenous Australians continually lived the shadow of this story, suffering immensely in and through the Australian nation’s creation and nevertheless fighting valiantly for its interests in the war.