Theatre / “The Secret River”. At Lieder Theatre, Goulburn until September 9. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

A stunned silence greeted Chrisjohn Hancock’s production of “The Secret River” last night at Lieder Theatre on the very day Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had announced a date for the Voice vote.

At any time, the choice of Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s story of first contact would have been a significant achievement for a regional theatre company, but in this case Hancock’s astute engagement of the Goulburn region’s indigenous community paid handsome dividends for in a large cast, I could count at least 10 First Nations artists, many of them seasoned stage performers.

Among them, the narrator Dhirrumbin, symbolically representing the Hawkesbury River (“Dhirrumbin” is the Dharug word for the Hawkesbury) was performed by Alfie Walker, himself a member of the Pejar Local Aboriginal Land Council. Muffy Hedges, playing female tribe elder Buryia, is a Dharug speaker who coached her fellow actors on language and Peter Swain, as the elder Yalamundi, acted as a cultural adviser.

This engagement, Walker’s sympathetic presentation of the narrative and the use of many very young actors  for the children  both white and black, made this production uniquely different from others I have seen, for its humane understanding of the characters on both sides – the desperate, mostly illiterate convict settlers bent on making a new life for themselves on someone else’s land, and the original inhabitants, at home in their environment and initially convinced that the strangers might just be passing through.

Andrew Bovell’s version of Kate Grenville’s original novel sets the gold standard for such stage adaptations, as it cleverly telescopes the narrative of many years, uses old nursery rhymes to evoke the character’s longing for London, while never steering his central characters into stereotyped portrayal.

There was plenty of atmosphere, with Lieder Theatre’s stage and surroundings beautifully transformed with gumtrees and representations of rocks, but Hancock as director eschews the fireworks, presenting the daily lives of the characters in some detail to give us an idea of the contrast and values, but  mixing the naturalism with a presentational style.

This meant that with the exception of veteran Lieder character actor Martin Sanders as the loathsome Smasher Sullivan, who keep a Dharug woman as a sex slave,  the English characters did not speak with Cockney accents but as rather modern-day Australians, sometimes stepping out of their roles to comment. This worked well.

Walker held the audience in the palm of his hand as took us up the river and through the encounters, explaining the two clashing cultures and at one point almost (but not quite) defending the weakness of the central settler character, William Thornhill. But at one point it was almost too much for Waters and in the inevitable massacre, he came close to breaking down.

Not Hancock, though, who remained in perfect control and kept most of the scenes low-key, in a convincing way. Even the horrific massacre, performed to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down”, was sotto voce.

In this he was well supported by actors Joshua and Amanda Waters as William Thornhill and his wife Sal, whose unaffected performances show how insufficient education leads to misunderstandings. Their failure to pronounce the names of the Dharug people and their naïve belief that a cuppa can sort things out are cringe-making and hint at the moral vacuity behind what is in fact an invasion.