ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF COUNTRY By Allan Sko Actor and playwright Dylan Van Den Berg is a theatrical treasure. Scooping writing accolades such as The Griffin Theatre and The Rodney Seaborn Playwright Award winner, and recent winner of the Nick Enright Award for Playwriting in the 2021 NSW Literary Awards, Dylan also impressed with his excellent acting turn in Metamorphosis at The Street Theatre at the end of 2019. Now, with Milk, Dylan is finally able to present his most important work to date as both writer and actor. “I’m terrified,” Dylan confesses. “It’s been the longest lead up in history. And the added pressure is that this will be The Street’s return to life. So it’s double the usual anxiety!” Also fuelling Dylan’s healthy nerves is that Milk is a very personal story, and an important one. The premise is thus: On the precipice of something life changing, a young Palawa man plunges into an exploration of self and Country. Carried with the winds of a metaphysical Flinders Island, the land of his mob and the place where it all happened, he is drawn back to the dawn of colonisation. To a woman who bore the brunt of the oppressors’ violence, and then forward to her granddaughter, who buried the truth as a means of survival. Stirring up stories together, with parts both achingly sad and unexpectedly funny, what unfolds reveals by slow degrees painful but important truths. A compelling tale, no question. So, why the title Milk? “It exists for a number of reasons,” Dylan explains. “The story is about three Aboriginal ancestors from different periods of time converting in this metaphysical space, kind of Flinders Island. And each of them are grappling with the reverberations of colonisation; one of the characters is from first contact and PAGE 28
PAGE 28
another is from the ‘60s in Tassie. And another one is from the present day. He is a fair-skinned Aboriginal man. So the title Milk comes from the fact that at some point in the play, someone describes him as having skin like milk. “And there are references to motherhood and children, so there’s that connection as well. But the clearest one is around skin color, and with skin that doesn’t reflect his ancestors, this young man asks: do the stories of the past belong to him? “Funnily enough,” Dylan recalls after further chat, “the title of the play came to me before the story, about six or seven years ago. There was a comment, something overheard in a cafe or somewhere, that gave me a sense that it would be an interesting title. It’s just been with me for so long now that I’ve almost forgotten where it exactly came from.” With delicate themes such as race and identity, and the tricky idea of to whom a story belongs, Dylan went about his work with great care. “I think the big question of the play is: what are the stories we’re allowed to tell?” Dylan muses. “That we’re entitled to tell? It’s certainly something I grappled with a lot. And of course, the answer is, yes, you are entitled to tell the stories. “In the last few years I really started to explore what it means to be fair skinned and still be Aboriginal,” he says. “There’s a lot of privilege that comes with that; you haven’t suffered in the same way that your ancestors might have. However, there’s a great loss that you’ve suffered as well. It was the policies of the colonisers that resulted in us having light skin so there’s a real cultural deficit.” With the present day character being a younger playwright, one could assume an autobiographical element to be at play. @bmamag
