Drama Log 2

Date: 29/07/10
What we did:

Today we had another theory lesson on the Aboriginal culture. We started the lesson by making an Acknowledgement of Country “I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land, the Darug people, and call on the Spirit Ancestors to walk with us today as we share and learn together.” Ms Webb expressed her disappointment at the Acknowledgement of Country made in assembly today - how there was a notion of shame attached in the order of the acknowledgement with the Indigenous people being preceded by the Queen.
Afterwards, Ms Webb continued discussing about the displacement of the Indigenous race and culture by white settlers. She talked about how the European settlers had forcibly snatched away the possession of sacred sites such as Uluru from the original custodians of the land, saying it was equivalent to strangers stamping across the graveyard of our own ancestors. This disturbing analogy really helped me feel the extent to which the non-Indigenous people have inflicted suffering upon the Indigenous race.
Afterwards, everyone received a booklet containing a collection of Indigenous literature, ranging from poems such as the Municipal Gum by Kath Walker, dreamtime stories to plays about the Stolen Generations. The booklet also included an outline of the drama assessment for term 3, which will be a 4-6min group performance appropriate to Aboriginal theatre, based on Indigenous literary works. Before embarking on these assessment tasks, Ms Webb emphasised that we must not distort the meanings of Indigenous literary works and that we must not make a mockery of the Indigenous culture in our performances. She also drew attention to the need to recognise Indigenous authors’ intellectual property rights, which are the rights that the creators/inventors of literary works are entitled to. Ms Webb underscored the fact that we have already forcibly displaced and inflicted incredible pain to the Indigenous people, the oldest living civilisation in the world, and we MUST NOT repeat this by stealing their literary works as well. She said that we needed to seek permission from the Indigenous elders prior to our performances. So I did some research on the net, in an attempt to find the contacts of Indigenous elders of the Darug tribe. I found a website dedicated to the Darug people: http://www.darug.org.au/, and I decided to write a small letter to the President of the Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation which read like this:

To the president of the Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corportation,
My name is Helen and I am a student of James Ruse Agricultural High School. I am currently studying drama as an elective, and for term 3 we have started a new unit of drama which focuses on Aboriginal Theatre. Our drama class recognises the importance of respecting the intellectual property rights pertaining to Indigenous literary works (which we will use as stimuli for our assessment tasks) and therefore I wish to seek permission from the Darug people, the traditional Custodians of the land on which James Ruse High School was built, for our own drama performances based on Indigenous literature.
Our drama class would also be delighted to have a Darug elder visiting our school, so on behalf of my drama class 10DR1, I would like to invite a Darug elder to come and enrich our understanding of the Indigenous people and culture. If you would kindly accept this request, please contact me via my email helenmoon2@hotmail.com . Thankyou for your time.

I am yet to receive a reply, but I really hope a Darug elder can visit our school to educate us about Aboriginal culture and theatre!!