A Home Away From Home

Larissa Behrendt – Indigenous Person of the Year

Larissa Behrendt finishes off an email, documents piled up around her, spilling over like the spare contents of her mind. Author of an acclaimed novel, Home and an array of seminal non-fiction works it seems Behrendt has mastered the life of a polymath as both an accomplished writer, and an activist lawyer. Behrendt’s passion for justice first emerged when hearing her grand-mother’s story as a stolen generation child, and the xenophobia and shame her father took on growing up in a country boarding school. As a young lawyer, holding on to the hope of a bright future for indigenous Australians, her views on education and the telling of story as the salve to the problem of indigenous rights were thrown into disarray when the Howard government disregarded the Bringing Them Home Report. From here Behrendt was convicted for a deeper form of change, and went on a search for the root cause.

“Because of my family’s direct personal experience with the removal policy, when Howard’s office said that it is only 1 in 10 that were taken away and that it was for their own good and that it wasn’t genocide it enraged me - I wasn’t going to let the government wipe out the stories of my family,” asserts Behrendt. From the anger experienced in those years, and the struggle of confronting the reality of racism and the indigenous plight in Australia was the important step that led her to diverge from governmental advocacy and her work as a pro bono lawyer to write her first novel, Home. The novel works as a fictional account of Behrendt’s family history, capturing the space between two characters from vastly different eras; Candice, a young rights lawyer, and her grandmother, Garbooli a member of the stolen generation. From this process she has developed an out self-confidence and an inner biography of both the nation she emerged from and the one that exists today.

As part of the process of writing and before studying at Harvard University, Behrendt travelled to her grandmother’s tribal lands around Walgett and Brewarrina in Northern NSW. Her time spent there allowed her to piece together the jigsaw of her father’s past, and in so doing her link to her people. “I think it says a lot about the memories of Aboriginal people that when they look at the landscape it’s like they’re reading a history book… (returning to the community) was a very powerful moment for me because it was a reminder that it didn’t matter how poor policies were that there has been something so resilient about Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal families.” Out of it came a renewed vision for lasting social infrastructure and a community undergirded by the Human Rights required for a substantive form of reconciliation. For Behrendt, there was no longer a past denial of identity, but a newborn strength shaped in the crucible of homesickness for Australia in America.

“I felt as Aboriginal there as anywhere else… I was much less concerned with my choices and I knew that I could be a Prada-loving, very comfortable urban Aboriginal person. I don’t think I would’ve felt as confident with my aboriginality if I haven’t been somewhere where there were no trappings of it,” muses Behrendt. For Behrendt, the place our nation needs to consider is ‘home.’ It is this place where Australia will find the source of the problem of Indigenous disadvantage, and the solution in the guise of reconciliation. It is this inbetween space we must go to when our sense of self is shaken. “Identity is such a complex amalgam. It’s almost as if it were one hundred percent nature and a hundred percent nurture. There’s no dichotomy around you in a sense,” says Behrendt.

As we turn the conversation from her own identity to the deeper questions of indigenous rights and law, Behrendt sports an acute academic dexterity and radiates the sensitivity of a life lived in the tensile gap between worlds. She envisages a fresh future in the auspice of an Australian Republic where the stories of the past become an ossified part of our constitution; where story is weaved into a constitution in touch with the diversity of Indigenous Australia. “People need to see the move to Republic as not just a simple legal change that changes the head of state and a few words in the constitution… but we really need to take it as a national building exercise and as an opportunity to make a more inclusive Australia.” It’s not until the policy-making of Australian governments matures from an impoverished dialogue between white and indigenous Australia, and see indigeneity as an intimate part of our history. The personal substance of Behrendt’s testimony naturally demands the respect that surpasses the clanging cymbals of political correctness and rhetoric.

In light of the rigorous political and community-based career she has pursued, it is easy to see why Behrendt was donned the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee Indigenous Person of The Year for 2009. It seems that her views have touched a deeper place in the indigenous community, which stands as a testament to her natural strength as both an indigenous women and, social justice lawyer. She maintains hope, and the tenacity to strive for a form of justice rare in our society’s constant pursuit of the quick-fix pragmatism which has failed its indigenous people and redressing the injustices of the Stolen Generations. “It has been incredibly disheartening to see that now, despite the apology and despite the endorsement of the declaration on the rights of indigenous people, policies haven’t changed at all and that this government has been as tenacious about hanging onto the policies of the last government,” asserts Behrendt.

Behrendt’s next novel Legacy is coming out this October, and takes a sympathetic view of the rights movement in Australia as our next step in developing a system that has caught up with other developed nations with inbuilt Human Rights and moved beyond the horrors of the past and the current atrocities of the Northern Territory Intervention.

“Legacy’s a very different book, it really focuses on a relationship between a father and daughter - one in the rights movement and middle class educated daughter. It tries to look at the legacy of the civil rights movement and to counter those statements that people make so flippantly that rights movements haven’t worked… I think there will be a time when Australians will be comfortable with a leader who has a fairly strong social justice stance,” says Behrendt.

Legacy is released on the 26th of October.

Crying Havoc for New Theatre

“Cry Havoc sums up an attack on bad art: Cry havoc! – shake it up a bit! Try something new! Be risky, be brave! No more safe theatre. No more museum pieces. No more two people on a couch. No more TV in the theatre. No more static space, domestic theatre. We want the big stories, the big experiences and the big visceral time in the dark,” declares the fresh-faced and audacious Kate Revz.

As a former alumnus of UTS in Media and Arts Production, Kate has gone on to a directing degree at NIDA under the tutelage of Egile Kipste. From this expert training, she has gained the skills to hatch her childhood dream of her own theatre company. Having completed her Assistant Directorship with the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of God of Carnage, Revz is in a prime position to achieve her dream. Her upbeat approach and enterprising attitude have garnered the vital support of family and the big wigs in the industry such as Cry Havoc’s patron Marcus Graham, and the sponsorship of Sydney Theatre Company.



Cry Havoc is no longer the naïve high school whim that she shared with her now creative accomplice and co-founder, Gemma Pranita but is now an ever-surprising reality replete with hard work. However, Revz is adamant that the pros far outweigh the cons. She sports the confidence to authenticate her optimism. “We learnt very quickly at drama school that it’s not just going to happen… I really believe in big vision and big concept but you can’t have that without strong performances that are informed by truth and the intricacy of the text,” muses Revz.

As she recounts the story of school-day infatuations with musical directors, and the intensity of her often premature infatuation with the works of William Shakespeare as a teenager, it is quickly evident that Revz’s relationship to theatre has grown into a fully-fledged love affair with the practical traction to awaken and rebuild a thriving theatre scene.

“I believe you’ve got to go for the gut rather than the head. I try and make theatre that I want to see. I do like thinking but I prefer to be provoked to thought… You can think and think and analyse when you go to the theatre but how wonderful is it when you ‘stop thinking,’ and you just feel it and it naturally converts itself to enlightened thought,” Revz muses.

Her vision is larger than solely dramaturgy and directing. Revz is crying out for a new generation of arts activism and a renaissance that echoes the Nimrod Theatre days born of the collaboration of Australia’s theatre legends, John Bell, Richard Wherrett and Ken Horler.

“[It’s] poetic, but we like to think we are starting a new era in theatre and the revolution comes from the idea that Australians are quite comfortable with mediocrity and often there’s a lot of good theatre around but not much great theatre around… Cry Havoc for us is going to be the next premier theatre company in Sydney and we want to do this for forty years, and we want to leave a legacy… and it’s not just so we get picked up by STC,” Revz asserts.

Her fresh tenacity and determination are a product of a particular view of theatrical practice. For Revz, it is the infusion of contemporary concerns with classical theatrical texts that provide the richest crescent for the creation of compelling and bold theatre.

“You can speak about today through the great classic texts because there was a climate in Ancient Greece, and in Renaissance London and in the turn of the century Germany of saying big things through art. I don’t think it’s gone away but there seems to be another renaissance now of us realising that these big texts hold the key to our existence. I do think we are text starved. That’s where the revolutionary idea came from and the central mission of the company,” says Revz.

The company’s first production, Julius Caesar, which debuts on the 27th of October, holds a particular sentimentality as her favourite Shakespearean play, but also as a text that makes manifest the company’s own ethos and vision.

“You’re breaking bread with the dead when you work in a revolutionary way with these kinds of texts… you’re sitting on the shoulder of greats and if you start there then the sky is the limit. I’m an atheist but if I had a religion it would William Shakespeare. I’m fanatical and I defend Shakespeare if anyone threatens his authorship, and I arch up like I’m talking about Jesus. I have this profound respect for him and all his work, and I find it quite a ritualistic and religious kind of experience to work on his plays,” muses Revz.



The production difficulties and obstacles don’t seem to deter her either. The love of resurrecting a play, and getting under the skin of an audience keep her anchored. “I think we’re actually doing Shakespeare justice by taking Julius Caesar and throwing it against the wall and seeing where it breaks and of course always with the deepest respect for the work… but reading it with a contemporary angle and trying to breathe it back to life,” says Revz.

As we turn the conversation to the future, Revz’s outlook is optimistic, as if she is on the tip of a new vanguard of Australian theatre, expecting nothing less than a mutinous effect. “It’s this ephemeral process that I hope keeps working; where it’s a deep respect for the past with a strong vision towards the future, and they collide in the Molotov cocktail that is Cry Havoc,” muses Revz. It seems in these young hands we can rest assured that the future of Australian theatre is looking up.

“Our strength is that we all have the same vision, and it is one really strong factor that none of us are in this as a star vehicle, or as a step on the way to larger things,” says Revz.

Julius Caesar debuts on the 27th of October at the Wharf Theatre. See www.cryhavoc.com.au for more details.