Symbols in Black Diggers PDF

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This document highlights all the symbols in Black Diggers...

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Symbols in Black Diggers BERTIE’S CIRCUS SHOW When Bertie asks his mother to forge his birthdate so that he can appear old enough to sign up for the military, she reluctantly agrees only after comparing the war and the world to the circus show he always tried to attend as a child (but was never allowed to see because of Australia’s racism). Later, after he is buried alive under the soil with Tommy, Bertie writes home to ask his mother to reveal his real birthdate—but he is not allowed to say this literally because outgoing mail is censored; instead he writes about being “in the Show” and finally understanding “what the grown-up world is like.” While Bertie’s mother sees his exclusion from the circus show as symbolizing his inevitable exclusion from white-run Australian society, Bertie inverts this meaning. He says in his letter that he is now in the show to indicate his inclusion in the white world only insofar as he shares the horrific trauma his fellow white soldiers also experience. An exciting spectacle associated with childhood, the circus show actually symbolizes Bertie’s loss of childhood, showing that the seeming excitement and fanfare of the war were actually cover for profound cruelty. In short, the inversion of the meaning of the circus show demonstrates how the meaning of the war itself was inverted, turned from an opportunity for men to prove themselves, see the world, and win glory into a site of horrific trauma.

THE LOCK OF FRANK’S HAIR In 1916 at the battle of Pozieres, Bertie and Tommy watch another Indigenous soldier, Frank, die on the battlefield. They are unable to understand his last words and worry that his soul will get “stuck” in Europe and be unable to return to Australia if they cannot obtain the right plants for an Aboriginal funeral ceremony. Of course, they will not be able to get those plants, so they let the medic take the body away and instead take a lock of Frank’s hair. Later, both Bertie and Tommy are buried under the dirt and go home with severe trauma; back at home in New South Wales, Bertie passes his days motionless, staring into space, clinging to the lock of Frank’s hair. When Bertie and Tommy first cut the hair from Frank’s body, it symbolizes indigenous displacement: the irony of dying in Europe, the land of their colonizers, and the impossibility of following tradition as the world has grown interconnected and violent. The lock is a last-ditch attempt to make a genuine burial for Frank possible in the future, a symbol of the traditions that indigenous people remember but are unable to practice. When Bertie brings it home, it symbolizes not only his memory of Frank, the only soldier he watched die who looked like him, but also his own inability to go back and recover his childhood and traditional connection to Australia, which now for him stands only for the horrors of war.

ERN’S BULLET SHARDS In a long monologue set in 1956 near the end of the play, Ern explained that he returned to Australia and overcame much of his trauma from the war until World War Two, when his side started “oozing that lovely rich black blood” and he soon discovered a number of old bullet shards stuck deep inside. They came out slowly, over years, and he gave them to his grandchildren as gifts. This monologue uses physical injury as a metaphor for the long-term, gradual suffering of trauma, even if one represses it immediately upon arriving home; this is a commentary not only on the individual experience of war, but also on the way it is passed on to family (as Ern gives the bullet shards out as a reminder of his sacrifice) and society as a whole. In this latter sense, it is a commentary on the play itself, which seeks to dig up the buried relics of a collective injury that was never acknowledged in the war’s own aftermath. It is also a commentary on the uses of history—there is no doubt that the shards come out during World War Two because that is when the lessons of World War One become salient, and that this play in turn hopes to inform the future of Indigenous politics and Indigenous literature alike in Australia. -

bullet shards stuck deep inside. They came out slowly, over years, and he gave them to his grandchildren as gifts. Ern gives the bullet shards out as a reminder of his sacrifice

LETTERS Letters appear frequently throughout Black Diggers, from Archie’s periodic writings for Auntie May, to the scene in the second act when a number of anonymous letters fall from the sky, to Bertie’s coded letter asking his mother to help him get discharged, to Nigel’s letter condemning the Coinston massacre. In all these cases, the letters point to the simultaneous intimacy and distance of the soldiers’ relationships with their families, administrative sources of power, and the future. As the only form of communication back home from the battlefield, letters represent soldiers’ enduring connections to their families and rich, private emotional lives even when halfway across the earth from their loved ones. And yet, as Bertie’s circus show metaphor demonstrates, these letters were also censored, which points to the sense in which letters mediate between the soldiers and the state power that both oppresses them in Australia and allows them to serve in the military in Europe. This modern state structure, in which literacy and formality are prerequisites to be taken seriously by those in power, also demonstrates how Aboriginal Australians were systematically excluded from recognition as full human beings—for instance, the newspaper editors expect that Indigenous people will not write in about the Coinston massacre, and then when Nigel does, they are so impressed by his literacy that their story becomes about his handwriting. Finally, the predominance of letters in Black Diggers is also a continual nod to the play’s own circumstances of production: it was constructed out of anonymous archives, which researchers stumbled upon like anonymous letters falling out of the sky. There is at once an unbridgeable distance—in terms of soldiers’ identities and full experiences—and an undeniable intimacy to the anonymity of letters. This is, in turn, why the play is structured as

it is, with a number of short, pointed scenes that underline the emotional impact of the war as much as the anonymity of its soldiers.

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Anyone can be good in school, no matter the race Symbolises the importance of relationships as theyre apart...