Remembrance and Memorialisation – Tom Wright’s Black Diggers (2015) and the Anzac Myth

Abstract

The timely premiere of Black Diggers, a play written by Tom Wright and directed by Wesley Enoch, at the Sydney Festival in 2014, brings into focus the lives of Indigenous soldiers who fought in the Australian armed forces during World War I. The first performance in the context of the centenary commemoration of the Australian participation in the ›Great War‹ foregrounds the political importance of the play, which is inevitably both, part of the centenary boom of Australian commemorative culture as well as commentary on and criticism of its implications. Black Diggers re-members the stories of Indigenous soldiers and probes into notions of cultural and national memorialization: its foundations, its mechanisms, and its aims.