By Reviewed by Jason Blake
FOLEY
Opera House, January 24
Until Sunday
Gary Foley … delivers an absorbing lecture on Aboriginal Australia.
RECONCILIATION is a joke. Native Title is a fraud. So says Gary Foley, and his anecdote-strewn Australian history primer tells you how he came to hold these opinions - and why you should share them.
A career activist, reformed actor, long-time stirrer and, at 61, an academic, Foley's analysis of Aboriginal struggle for land rights and self-determination is the product of wide research and his participation in it.
Foley takes to the stage more like a stand-up comic than an academic, however. Dressed in wharfie-chic, his jacket emblazoned with a glittering Black Power salute (''very Sydney, eh?''), he wanders around a set made of cardboard and archive boxes cracking self-deprecating jokes and quoting Winston Churchill (''History will be kind to me for I intend to write it'') before launching into his absorbing 100-minute lecture. The subject? ''The history you should know, but don't.''
Foley takes us back as far as Federation, to governments obsessed with racial purity, and to prime ministers from Barton onwards who unashamedly played the race card. We learn of the electrifying effect of the Jack Johnson fight in Sydney in 1908 (which some of us have read about, probably) and Johnson's largely unreported visit to Sydney in 1907 to meet with the nascent Aboriginal rights movement (which was news to me and most others, I imagine). We might know something of the galvanising influence of Marcus Garvey in the US but what of the effect the establishment of chapters of his Universal Negro Improvement Association had here?
We see the ways in which the American civil rights movement shaped the struggle for Aboriginal rights: in Charles Perkins's Freedom Ride (which Foley saw as a child in northern NSW); in the writings of Malcolm X (which Foley and his mates routinely pilfered from Bob Gould's Third World Bookshop, he confesses); and in the media-grabbing actions of the Black Panthers, which leads into a very funny yarn involving journalist Simon Townsend, several jugs of beer and the implication that Foley and his housemates were in possession of a secret cache of explosives.
Foley's intent is to educate but that doesn't mean we can't have a laugh along the way.
Directed by Rachael Maza Long for Ilbijerri Theatre, Foley makes excellent use of photographs, video and graphics but the focus is squarely on the man throughout.
After a slow warm-up, Foley grows in confidence and fluency to dominate the theatre with the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his passion.