1. Ladies and Gentlemen, we would like to take this opportunity to warn members of the audience that the following performance contains names and visual representations of people recently dead, which may be distressing to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. All care has been taken to acquire the appropriate permission and to show all proper respects. Thank you.
Sydney Theatre Company would like to take this opportunity to warn members of the audience that this production contains names and visual representations of people recently dead, which may be distressing to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
All care has been taken to acquire the appropriate permission and show all properrespect .

2. Indigenous people ↓
indigenous ↑
Aboriginality
Aboriginal
Black

3. We were the only ones. We didn’t need to be identified. We had identity. The word Aboriginal means the first – a European word. Not only have we lost our people, our land, our culture, our language, we also use a title given to us by the people who took it all away and are still taking and will continue to take from our very souls if we allow it. (Carol Horne-Oates, 1993)

4. But what is Aboriginality. Is it being tribal. Who is an Aboriginal
But what is Aboriginality? Is it being tribal? Who is an Aboriginal? Is he or she someone
who feels that other Aboriginals are somehow dirty, lazy, drunken, bludging? Is an
Aboriginal anyone who has some degree of aboriginal blood in his or her veins and has
been demonstrably disadvantaged by that? […] an acceptance of the label ‘the most
powerless people on earth’? Or is Aboriginality, when all the definitions have been
exhausted , a yearning for a different way of being, a wholeness that was presumed to
have existed [before 1788]?
Kevin Gilbert
Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert, (1978), p.184.

5. 1. Aboriginal person interacting with other Aboriginal people;
2. the stereotypes which are created by the Anglo-Australians reproducing the existing stereotypes of Aborigines;
3. the construction of Aboriginality through the actual dialogues between Aborigines and non-Aborigines.
(cf. Marcia Langton, 1993)

6. Belonging where?
Caught in an abyss
Thousands of children
Heartache despair.
Stolen, separated
Leaving mothers behind
Lost to our Culture, Music, Dance
and Art.
Lost to Ourselves – our Families –
our Hearts.
As a child – wondering
What did I do wrong?
Who the hell am I?
A feeling so strong
The taunts of a childhood
All a whirl
‘Half-caste, half-caste
a little black girl.’
Italiano? Greek?
Maori or what?
Some of the questions asked a lot
Too black to be white.
Too white to be black.
Caught in the middle
Belonging nowhere.
By Lorraine McGee-Sippel (1997)

14. Most of us girls were thinking white in the head but were feeling black inside. We weren’t black or white. We were a lonely, lost and sad displaced group of people. We were brainwashed to think like a white person…[but] were not accepted because they were Aboriginal. When they went and mixed with Aborigines, some found they could not identify, because they had too much white ways in them. They were neither black or white. They were simply a lost generation.
Bringing them home (1997) National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (p.152)