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Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, in Tribunal, an interactive performance piece held at the MCA
Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, in Tribunal, an interactive performance piece held at the MCA. Photograph: Alex Wisser
Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, in Tribunal, an interactive performance piece held at the MCA. Photograph: Alex Wisser

Tribunal: the participatory performance making Australians face up to forgotten people

This article is more than 6 years old

The piece forces audiences to bear witness to the damage carried out against Indigenous people and asylum seekers

Darug-Yuin elder Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor is cloaked in a large possum fur coat, with a white owl and a sarsaparilla leaf – a bush medicine high in vitamins – etched into its lining. For more than 50 years, she has been a cultural educator of parliamentarians and the public, building on the legacy of her father’s fight for Indigenous legal rights, which was forged in the tent embassy opposite federal parliament in Canberra in the 1970s.

Aunty Rhonda grew up around the Waterloo-Erskineville area of inner Sydney but, until recently, spent six of her 66 years couch surfing, effectively homeless. It is Saturday evening, a week after the Uluru Statement from the Heart was issued, which proclaimed that a “makarrata”, a Yolngu word for treaty, would be the culmination of Australia’s first people’s agenda. Tonight, however, Aunty Rhonda is focused on connections with mistreated newcomers.

She stands on the first floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in front of a wall mural painted by the exiled Hazara artist Khadim Ali, to be introduced, one by one, to a group of male Hazara refugees, repeating each of their names. “Welcome to our country,” she tells each man.

Waiting on the third floor is an office set up as a makeshift truth and reconciliation commission, where, through story, a little song and dance and then questions from the audience, we will bear witness to the hurt and damage done by successive Australian government policies to both Indigenous people and asylum seekers, and contemplate their resilience and creativity despite the odds.

Tribunal is a participatory performance project, which changes each night. Refugees always join Aunty Rhonda for the show but varying special guests with vested concerns are invited on stage: human rights lawyers, for instance, and activists. Tonight, two trauma counsellors will appear, to answer questions from a general public that has purchased tickets.

We have risen from our seats, in respect, as proceedings begin. “This is not our culture to treat people this way,” Aunty Rhonda reminds us, referring to offshore detention.

Two men have been holding aloft white flags with the name of this show, Tribunal, printed in black ink. Mahdi Mohammadi and Jawad Yaqoubi are both 26 and both live in Merrylands, west of Sydney, after making the perilous voyage south on boats. They are actors in the sense they are applying stage dramaturgy to their lives – but every experience they relate happened to them.

Mahdi Mohammadi in Tribunal. Photograph: Alex Wisser

Mohammadi, dressed in a collared shirt and flashing an infectious smile, has been an artist-in-residence at Fairfield’s Powerhouse Youth theatre, where the production was created and first staged last year. Performance dates in Melbourne will soon be announced.

“As a kid, I had no idea that I was a Hazara,” he explains. He watched the 9/11 attacks on television in Afghanistan with his father and watched the US strikes against the Taliban, who persecute the Hazara and treat them as “dirty, worse than animals”.

Mohammadi’s parents wanted him to be a doctor but he loved art foremost. His father protested: “What is art? That is not a good thing.” Dancing, his dad said, was “sinful”. Nonetheless, Mohammadi directed theatre in Afghanistan: a show about human rights in a women’s prison; another in a girl’s high school about ethnic groups living together in peace. The two men dance for us now across the Tribunal floor.

Three women performers, colleagues of Mohammadi at the Kabul-based Papyrus Theatre Group, were deemed to have danced against sharia beliefs; Mohammadi himself was labelled an infidel, a charge that rang like a death sentence.

The women found asylum in Germany and Mohammadi risked his life making the journey to Australia by sea, in 2013. We see an aerial view of the now closed Scherger immigration detention centre in Queensland and Mohammadi points to the room where he contemplated his past and uncertain future. We then see an image of a friend who set out on a later boat and remains detained on Manus island, banned from entering Australia.

Seeing the faces of asylum seekers – faces that successive Australian governments have sought to suppress from public view – it’s difficult to turn away. When an audience member is asked to assume the role of a government official, reading to Mohammadi his narrow legal prospects as a new arrival, connections are made: this suppression of the rights of the refugees echoes the Indigenous experience.

Under arrangements adopted by the Gillard government in 2012, any asylum seeker arriving to Australia by boat can be transferred to regional processing centres on Manus Island or Nauru, we are told.

Aunty Rhonda then reminds us of how different states legislate for Indigenous protection, granting local governments unfettered power to remove Indigenous children from their families, and making Aboriginal people fearful of hewing to traditional cultural practices – music, dancing and, especially, language – lest they be seen as failing to conform to white society.

Aunty Rhonda tells us her family members had to write to mission managers to gain permission to visit family and friends. Her father, the late Dr Charles “Chicka” Dixon, treated his psychological trauma by becoming a “full-on alcoholic”, before becoming sober and fighting back as an Indigenous activist.

Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor and Mahdi Mohammadi in Tribunal. Photograph: Alex Wisser

But her grandfather would not speak his own language, for fear of the children being taken away. Mohammadi, too, recalls a recent moment when an Australian woman demanded that he speak English. Walking around Sydney’s streets he often looks to the ground, for fear engaging Australians with eye contact will also engage their anger.

An audience member asks a question that no doubt many, feeling paralysed, have pondered: “I don’t know how to overcome that sense of … powerlessness,” she says, with a quiver.

The only way to close the detention camps is not to give up, says Sarah Coconis, a mental health nurse and trauma educator who has been invited onto the Tribunal floor. “Whatever you do, don’t stay silent,” she says.

There are many ways to help, says Soraya Kassim, another trauma counsellor who has joined the performers: write letters to government, volunteer at asylum seeker centres. Engage with Australians who have never met an asylum seeker.

Having a cup of tea and engaging with those who have had first-hand experience spreads happiness, Mohammadi offers.

“Just listen,” he says. “Listen to the stories.”

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