Jimmy Chi’s multi-award winning 1990s musical Corrugation Road is a celebration of the power of Aboriginal culture and performance pitted against the enduring forces and legacies of settler colonisation. This is radical, uncompromising and unsettling theatre. In this paper, I explore my responses to the musical and discuss various strategies used to generate the sense of the uncanny and unsettledness that dominate the work. Beginning with the chaos and madness of a psychiatric ward and raunchy nightclub in Perth, the action shifts to a pilgrimage of return to the coast north of Broome. A chance remark by Jimmy Chi directed me to explore the significance of this stretch of sea as ‘sea country’, a living space of Aboriginal cultural knowledge, healing, sustenance and spirituality. Aboriginal cultural healing and the sea emerge as central themes in the musical’s narrative of return and redemption. The seeming absence but pervading presence of both in the musical is a vital strategy in creating its all-pervading sense of the uncanny and unsettledness.
Anna Haebich
Anna Haebich is a multi-award winning Australian author and historian, who is especially recognised for her research and work with Aboriginal communities, particularly the Nyungar people. Her partner is Nyungar elder Darryl Kickett. Her career combines university teaching, research, curatorship, creative writing and visual arts. Anna is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University. Her current projects include: Nyungar performing arts, past and present; Nyungar letter writing in government archives 1860-1960; and nineteenth century German botanical collections from the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. Her latest publication is Dancing in Shadows Histories of Nyungar Performance. Earlier works include Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, the first comprehensive national history of Australia’s Stolen Generations; the definitive history For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia 1900-1940; and her complex study of assimilation policy Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia.
