“Olivia Has Lost Her Voice!”: An Audience Reception Study of Children's Response to New Australian Play Spirits in Bare Feet

Abstract

In 2009, the world premiere of children's play Spirits in Bare Feet was produced and presented at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. This play and its live production were the culmination of consultation with custodians of an Australian Aboriginal Stone Arrangement Site of Significance—Gummingurru. An audience reception study of children's responses to the production was conducted applying methods of observation, group discussion, movement and aural exercise, and drawing. Children aged seven to twelve years old recalled the storyline, characters, and moral of the play. Humor, moments of retribution or resolution, and the Australian Indigenous content were of primary interest.

Notes

¹With a population of more than 90,000 people, Toowoomba is Australia's largest inland regional city. The city is located in Southeast Queensland, atop the Great Dividing Range and 130 km west of the state's capital of Brisbane. Its major industries include manufacturing, wholesale, agriculture, and education (it houses more than twenty-three private schools, three state schools, a technical college, and university) (Toowoomba Regional Council 2011).

²In 1948, white Australian farmer Ben Gilbert took ownership of the land where Gummingurru stands and found that a decade or so later his young daughter Jean began speaking of her games among the “fairy rings” on the farm (Gilbert 1992). Upon investigation of the fairy rings, Gilbert remembered from his youth the so-called “Aboriginal playground” in the local area, and so in 1960, he called upon the Queensland Museum to examine the stone arrangements (Ross 2008). The museum confirmed that the site was part of an Aboriginal Bora Ground. Gilbert understood that “This site is of the same importance to the Aborigines as a cathedral in a capital city is to us” (Kruger 2009). From this time, he sought to return the land to the local Indigenous community. Jarrowair elder Uncle Brian Tobane eventually became custodian of the site, and the land was officially given to the Gummingurru Land Trust in 2008.

³The Rainbow Snake is one of the “… Dreaming Ancestors who rose up beneath the earth to give shape to an existing, yet amorphous world. … The Dreaming is both sacred knowledge and moral truth … expressed through myth, ceremony, and song cycles. … (It) demonstrates that the cosmos is a living system that reproduces itself by each part of the system maintaining a balanced relationship with all other parts. … Rain, characterized as the Rainbow Snake, lives in permanent waterholes, is wet and cool and washes the earth clean, thus renewing cycles of regeneration” (Hume 2002, 24–26).