Excerpts from the book by Rosita Henry Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Fellow of the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia called ‘
“In July 1979, a group of twenty-one Kuranda residents met on a piece of Shire Council land within the town of Kuranda. The land was to be the site of a community performing arts venue, the Kuranda Amphitheatre.
Before the influx of the 1970s settlers, Kuranda township had a population of less than 350, a number that excluded the Aboriginal people who would then have numbered about twenty. Along the main street, there were two hotels, a news agency, a post office, a grocery store, the Returned Service-man’s League (RSL) Hall and a bakery.
With a sudden influx of people from urban areas into the Kuranda region in the 1970s – an influx that during the 1980s and 1990s included entrepreneurs eager to take advantage of the tourist boom – the Mareeba Shire Council was suddenly forced to deal with newcomers who posed a threat to its conservative rural identity. Many of the new settlers were artists, craftspeople, musicians and performers, and they thought of themselves of being the enlightened ones in a region of rednecks and bigots.
The concept of the amphitheatre was born out of this democratic displacement of the older settlers. By creating their own performance venue, the news settlers could also satisfy their desire as newcomers for a connection to – and control of – place. This desire was couched in terms of the concept of ‘community’. The newcomers saw themselves as building a new community by creating a space where experiences could be shared through performance. They would emplace themselves by placing themselves on stage.
Joan Dods – who had been living in Kuranda longer than most of the other new settlers, having moved to Kuranda in 1964 – was approached to investigate the possibility of making a ‘community performance space’ in Kuranda. She promptly wrote to the Mareeba Shire Council and managed to secure a ten-year lease on six acres of land, part of a forty-acre site that had been gazetted for recreational purposes. A group of four trustees was then appointed to manage the project and liaise with the Council.
It was decided to call for community volunteers to create a structure symbolic of democracy: an amphitheatre. There were also grand plans eventually to construct a much bigger community complex, with funds for the construction to be raised from future performances at the amphitheatre. These plans called for a town hall, a library and a botanic garden. Large and well-supported working bees were held. The Shire Council assisted with the water connection and contributed funds toward the fencing, but the creation of the amphitheatre was mostly done by enthusiastic volunteer labour.
People viewed the project as a labour of love. Through the moulding and planting of the earth into an enclosed womb-like space the newcomers saw themselves as creating a place for the birthing and nurturing of ‘community’ and for experiencing, through touch, smell and taste, the very earth they were making their own.
The amphitheatre was not only seen as a place built by and for the community but it was also seen as a place which actually made the community. This was expressed by Eve Stafford, a 1970s settler who was involved in the amphitheatre as a volunteer for many years, who wrote in a community arts publication: “What began as a community building a stage, became a stage moulding the very life of a community’ (Stafford 1984: 4).
In their creation of a ‘mimetic organ’, this womb-like pocket in the rainforest, the new settlers saw themselves as giving birth to a community. They saw themselves as ‘localising caring’, as nurturing their environment, and in the process, as becoming emplaced…
… Many Kuranda residents can claim to have served at one time or another on the amphitheatre committee, in the kitchen, behind the bar, at the gate. Others have performed in productions, worked as stagehands, sewed costumes, or operated the lighting. Being able to claim involvement at some time or another in the creation and continuing operation of the amphitheatre has become a marker of belonging, of being a true Kurandan. Today, one of the ways that new residents attempt to find acceptance in the town is by volunteering their skills and labour in the amphitheatre, or by participating in one way or another in a staged performance there.
The amphitheatre provided the new residents of Kuranda with opportunities for emplacement through participation in performances of place, performances that played out, tested and contested the idea of community and made it possible to experience differences within that community.
The amphitheatre also provided an outlet for much local Aboriginal talent. Aboriginal people were particularly influenced by the success of a band formed by some of the hippie settlers called ‘The Rainbow Country House Band’. The band developed a wide following in North Queensland, and its popularity gave impetus to some Aboriginal youths from a reggae band that they called ‘Mantaka’ after the settlement along the Barron River where they had grown up and to where their families had been moved when the mission closed in 1962.
Mantaka’s efforts were rewarded when the band was given the opportunity to perform at the bottom pub and then at the inauguration of the Kuranda Amphitheatre on 30 May 1982. The band came to be viewed by some people as the Kuranda Amphitheatre band, and there was an expectation that the band would become the official support band for all visiting bands.
The Amphitheatre is one of the places in Kuranda where Aboriginal people say they feel comfortably able to mix with white people. Aboriginal people take the term community to include them when it is used in connection with the amphitheatre and have taken part in many of the community theatrical performances staged at the venue. Indeed, the Tjapukai Dance Theatre was born out of a community theatre production: An Odyssey You’ll Ever See, produced and directed by Don Freeman, based on the history of the Palmer River Gold Rush, and featuring Aboriginal performer David Hudson.
…the amphitheatre also brought a number of Indigenous dance groups to the attention of the local Aboriginal people. For example, the Saibai Island Dancers performed at the amphitheatre in 1981, the Yarrabah Aboriginal Dancers in 1982, and the Lockhart River Aboriginal Dance Group (winners of that year’s Cape York Dance Festival) in 1985. Dancers from the Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea featured along with the Yarrabah Aboriginal Dancers during a cultural day on 7 August 1983, and the Air Niugini Dance Troupe performed together with the Saibai Island Dancers and Mantaka on 6 August 1985.
The amphitheatre has certainly been instrumental in fostering a heightened awareness of the political potential of dance and music as self-conscious practises of identity among Kuranda Aboriginal People. For both the new settlers and Kuranda Aboriginal People, the amphitheatre became a space that provided opportunities to reach out and harness global cultural flows while at the same time attempting to produce a sense of local community identity. The way senses or experiences of community are produced can be best illustrated a with more detailed look at three of the larger community theatre productions performed at the amphitheatre: Babble on Babylon, Timewarp and The Multicoloured Dreamboat.
Babble on Babylon (1984)
Babble on Babylon, showpiece of the 1984 Spring Festival, was the first big theatre production to be staged at the amphitheatre. Babble on Babylon, which played three times (7-9 September 1984) was advertised at the time as an example of ‘improvisational community theatre’. The idea behind such community productions was the participants had the freedom to create their own parts and dialogue within broader parameters and a central theme. Over sixty Kuranda residents contributed to the production either as performers or behind the scenes.
Timewarp
The Multicoloured Dreamboat (1993)
Multiculturalism was most obviously celebrated in the 1993 amphitheatre production The Multicoloured Dreamboat, which was staged to mark the International Year of Indigenous Peoples. The production was directed by one of the new settlers, Diana Moynahan, and was developed as a community training program. In the course of developing the stage performance, which included a one-act play and a variety concert, participants were trained in various theatrical arts, including acting, makeup, set design, lighting and sound, as well as in video production. The community venture was supported with funding from the Australia Council of the Arts and Queensland Arts Council. Of the four actors in the one-act play, entitled The Foreman, three were Aboriginal People who had never before performed on stage. The compere of the variety show was an Aboriginal woman from Mantaka, Rhonda Brim, and among the acts was an Aboriginal children’s dance group under the tutelage of Aboriginal musician Maxi Snider, who had writted the song that the children sang for their finale; ‘Koah, Mona Mona is another place, Kuranda too’. Other acts included a Celtic song group accompanied by a didjeridus, a Torres Strait Islander dance group from Mareeba, and a group of Aboriginal women from Kuranda who sang in Djabugay. Several rock and reggae bands also performed. The grand finale of the show was a song titled ‘Melting Pot’.
The Multicoloured Dreamboat celebrates community as a container of human diversity in which differences are respected but at the same time mixed and ‘melted’ together so that radical colour categories of black, white, red or yellow are broken down to form a single ‘multi-coloured’ society. Thus, the community production throws tensions between the concepts and policies of assimilation and multiculturalism into the limelight.