Many Aboriginal playwrights have emerged since that time, and brought to the stage the humour, the pain, the poetry, the drunkenness, the courage, and the bloody-mindedness that make up Aboriginal life today. The new writing is better structured and is being performed by a growing band of skilled actors, but the banter between the child’s voice echoing inside the tub and her voluminous, self-satisfied grandmother, still remains in my mind as a quintessentially Australian image.

This version of The Cherry Pickers, published this Bicentennial year, is much expanded from the original. It retains the original play as its spine; and the new material is for the most part polemical, introducing discussion of imposed White initiatives like contraception, and the inequities of working and living conditions between black and white. One speech is recent enough to contain a joke about AIDS. The new material is full of interest, but the new structure is less assured.

The play now has a prologue in mock-heroic verse describing the founding of the colony:

Look Look! From yonder bushes peer

a face lit up with lights, its eyes a'coal

of burning fury on the wings of time

200 Years, five hundred thousand burn­

ing native souls

aglow aglow demanding justice done

the war drums pound, the broken spear

reset

in plastic with a new technology.

This is followed by a comic mystery play in which a colloquial black God, called I Am, creates a black Adam:

1st ABORIGINAL MAN: Hey, old man! What you pushin’ an’ carvin’ me about for like that? I was havin’ a nice sleep. What for you want to wake me up?

I AM: I didn’t wake you, I just created you. Now, listen, the meek are to inherit the earth. Now to do that, the meek have to understand all about the earth – to love and know and cherish it. You are made of rock, and clay is sacred, see? – because I created that too. All the Law is carved into these rocks, this earth, to guide you. I’ve scattered a few ribs around, so go out and multiply.

lst ABORIGINAL MAN: I’ll be in that like a shot!

This ten-minute piece establishes the Aboriginal character in its native state as fun-loving, irreverent, a happy hunter-gatherer and womaniser. The women are presented as lively, quarrelsome, and exploited. Captain Cook then enters and we see the first shooting of an Aboriginal and the poisoning of a waterhole, in a style not unlike the prologue to Robert Merritt's The Cake Man (1975).

This sets the style for the main action of the play, in a camp of black seasonal workers gathering at the start of the cherry-picking season. The women play cards, drink, and talk about sex and the need to populate. A drunk wanders in. A simple-minded boy trails a dead rosella. They are all awaiting the arrival of Johnollo. Johnollo will know when the picking must start. King Eagle, the biggest, oldest cherry tree, is also awaiting Johnollo.

The time passes desultorily, punctuated with quarrels between frustrated women and unloving husbands, tales of old injustices, and debates on the conflict between the old hunter-gathering life and the new dependence upon handouts, casual work and processed foods. And the White Law.

The second last scene takes place in the shade of King Eagle, where Tommlo and his wife Zeena have brought a sacred Churinga. Tommlo prepares for a ritual dance and an argument erupts. Tommlo believes that the only way to retrieve the lost Aboriginal identity is to resurrect the old ways. Zeena is embarrassed by a return to nakedness and sees it as a retreat.

ZEENA: I want to help. I would do anything Tommlo to have stopped our babies from dying. I would do anything to bring my babies back to life and make our living easier – but we can't! We can’t go back. We can't change what has happened!

TOMMLO: We've got to. We've got to find our place! Our rightful place. Not a ‘place’ where we've been kicked and trodden, smashed and starved, killed and conquered until we take the shape of whitemen – imitation whitemen. I'm gunna live as a man, and by the livin' Jesus I'm gunna die as a man! …

The dilemma of the White Law of property and the Black Law of communal life reaches its climax in the last moments of the play when news comes that Johnollo has died in a car crash and that he had stolen a sheep for tucker on the journey. ‘That ain’t doing no wrong when you're hungry – ain’t it? Everyone ‘uman is entitled to eat. If they got to take their tucker ‘cause they ain’t got money or jobs it ain’t their faults ain’t it?’, cries one of the mourners.

The Cherry Pickers is an angry play. The voice of the author runs through the text passionately and often violently, but not always translated into the life of the characters. The work has clearly been revised many times since its original performance: an example of its politicisation is the ending. The burning of King Eagle by the mourners is now followed by an epilogue in which the boy Phonso receives a parcel from the dead Johnollo.

(PHONSO withdraws Aboriginal flag from parcel and flaps it aloft, running in circles he shouts jubilantly in rising crescendo.) WATTA WE WANT! WATTA WE WANT! WATTA WE WANT!

As an historical document the published text is impressive, and the variety of its writing styles demonstrates how rapidly black playwriting is moving away from its Western origins and towards a more indigenous rhythmic form. But dramatically, I remember the original with special affection.