The Long Forgotten Dream review – play prods old wounds of colonisation

Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, Sydney
Wayne Blair gives award-worthy performance in relatable yet profound examination of grief, dispossession and survivor guilt

For years Australian Indigenous peoples have been fighting to bring the remains of their ancestors back to home soil. Snatched from mortuaries, cemeteries and on colonial battlefronts in this country’s frontier wars, the bodies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people ended up in universities, medical schools and in the hands of private collectors across the US, UK and continental Europe. Even Australian collecting institutions still keep Indigenous remains in cardboard boxes.

In his new play The Long Forgotten Dream at Sydney Theatre Company, playwright Howard Lawrence Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri man from South Australia’s Coorong region, examines deep spiritual scarring these colonial practices inflicted on generations of Aboriginal people, weaving the violent past with an unsettling present on earth and in the spirit world.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mRtRN5