The cells were covered with Aboriginal blood.” Prof Marcia Langton, now chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, recalled in Darlene Johnson’s 2014 documentary The Redfern Story (which will be screened as part of Party, Protest, Remember), the local police cells “were called the abattoirs. Police brutality and regular arrests and raids on the Empress hotel in Redfern had spurred many Aboriginal people into activism and in turn the arts. It was a visit by Palm Island-born actor and playwright Bob Maza to the National Black Theatre in Harlem in 1970 that opened his eyes to Black theatre’s potential. The National Black Theatre grew out of street theatre staged during protests over land rights and mining on Aboriginal sacred sights. “He was looked on as another brother boy, another community person.” Merritt went on to establish the Eora Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts in Redfern in 1984.Īt the Party, Protest, Remember event, Penrith will also read from the provocatively titled Here Comes the Nigger, written by the late Bundjalung playwright Gerry Bostock and staged at the National Black Theatre in 1976.
Her uncle Bob was a “rebel” but he “wasn’t looked on as a criminal in Aboriginal communities”, Penrith says. For me, that was the ultimate way of creating, out of resistance.” “I am a child of the revolution, of the people who did it their way: all Black leadership, Black actors. ‘I am a child of the revolution’: Angeline Penrith, the daughter of activist Aunty Bronwyn Penrith and the niece of playwright Robert Merritt.
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