The Golden Age ... and I don't mean Shakespeare!

A couple of weeks ago I attended a performance of The Golden Age - a play written by Louis Nowra in 1985.

The Golden Age - Synopsis

I found it interesting but also challenging as the "Lost Tribe" characters no longer spoke English but their own language based on Cockney, Irish and convict slang. Unlike at the Opera, there were no surtitles but the program did help a bit, but not that much.

Why "golden" I have not determined. Grim would have been a better description.

One by one the tribe members died, much like the Aborigines in Tasmania before them. These people were totally inbred, having been cut off from so-called civilisation for three generations, as their numbers dwindled. Their predecessors had gone mining, deep in the South West Wilderness.

It wasn't comfortable theatre and saddened me when the tribe were locked away in a mental asylum to hide them from the mainstream population.

We watched one young student, who had found the tribe, fall in love. His friend's father, a doctor became the translator for the tribespeople. But integration was never an option. And the doctor's obsession with observing behaviour and coping with his emotional response to their lives in incarceration by drinking himself insensible was unhelpful to the tribe's plight.

Much like the Government tries to silence anyone who dares speak out about the conditions in which we are holding asylum seekers in offshore detention.

Eco from the past

Over the weekend I saw online that Umberto Eco has died aged 84, but it was only this morning when I read a newspaper article that I realised that he was born in the same year as Jim.

I always found Eco's writing impenetrable, but much admired Sean Connery's performance in the film of The Name of the Rose.

And that reminded me how Jim had revered Joseph Conrad as a writer and had been amazed when he realised that Conrad's life had died just eight years before his birth.

As a teen, Jim had applied to join the Merchant Navy. In his 60s he asked his mother whether she had ever posted that application. "No" was the immediate and firm response. She had not wanted him to have a life on the ocean waves.

I sometimes wonder where Jim's imagination would have taken him, had he been allowed the opportunity of such a life.