Black Diggers

The Year 7 Drama students present “Black Diggers’, a site-specific promenade piece about lives and deaths of the thousand or so Indigenous soldiers who fought for the British Commonwealth in World War I. Written by Tom Wright and originally directed by Wesley Enoch.

One hundred year ago, in 1914, a bullet from an assassin’s gun in Sarajevo sparked a war that ignited the globe. Patriotic young men all over the world lines up to join the fight, including hundreds of Indigenous Australians. Shunned and downtrodden in their own country and in fact banned by their own government for serving in the military, Aboriginal men stepped up to enlist.

Undaunted, these bold souls took up arms to defend the free world in its time of greatest need. For them, facing the horror of war on a Gallipoli beach was an escape from the shackles of racism at home, at a time when Aboriginal people stood by, segregated, unable to vote, unable to act as their children were ripped from them. When the survivors came back from war, there was no heroes’ welcome, just a shrug, and a return to drudgery and oppression.