The Drover's Boy by
Ray Mooney
at Athenaeum 2 from
July 29, 1998
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
Reviewed July 1998
The wrongs done our
aboriginal population by the English are myriad. We know about stolen land and
children, murdered tribes and disease. Many other abuses go uncatalogued. Ray
Mooney's play, The Drover's Boy, deals with one.
Last century, drovers travelled with flocks over vast tracts
of the outback. It was illegal for black women to 'fraternise' with white men,
so drovers who were attached to an aboriginal woman took her on the track
dressed as a 'drover's boy'. Was this abuse or genuine attachment?
Mooney's play began in 1985 as a one-acter which director
Peter Oyston combined with others by Jack Davis and Jennifer Playnter. Its
characters appeared in Black Rabbit (Playbox 1988) but it has taken 13 years
for The Drover's Boy to be staged.
Archie, the seasoned drover, (Jim Daly) travels with his
flock accompanied by callow youth, Stanley (Wilde Mooney) and Jackey, an
aboriginal 'boy' (Pauline Whyman) They cook, yarn and tease. Archie teaches
Stanley about the wild and tells him stories of the tribes.
They listen to the wild life, stop mid-sentence to watch an
owl, listen to a dingo, stare at a snake. Time is elastic. The night seems
endless. The space is enormous, the light is startling and the land is dry and
ominous.
Their quiet world changes radically when Macca, (John
Brumpton) the racist violent drover hunting for a sheep thief, invades.
The Drover's Boy is a worthy work. The script, like a Bertholt
Brecht play, is didactic, educating us without involving us in the victims'
emotional torment. Mooney peppers the play with poetic language, snatches of
drover's songs, rhymes and old Aussie slang.
My reservations are that the narrative leaves us craving
more information about the 'boy' and there is a too sudden dramatic leap
towards the end, although this does lift the level of dramatic tension.
Daly plays Archie with an edge of lunacy and as Jackey,
Whyman is engaging. Brumpton brings a whiff of danger and Wilde Mooney, the
writer's teenage son, makes a fine debut as the ingenuous Stanley.
Director, Greg Carroll, takes risks, sometimes
unsuccessfully. The style is inconsistent with some awkward moments but the
sense of the wildness of the environment is strong, enhanced by Joe Dolce's
soundscape and the splashing of real rain through the old roof of the
Athenaeum.