Presented as part of Ngalawan: We Live. We Remain., join Leanne Tobin and Utp for a preview of Bulunggayi—the first major Dharug theatre work of scale, over a decade in the making. Part living Dharug archive and part speculative response to the colonial frontier now known as Western Sydney, the play follows the semi-biographical history of Leanne’s family.
“It’s still urgent that this story is told because a lot of people don’t know first contact stories, and this is a story of an amazing woman, my great-great-great-grandmother, Maria Locke; or Bulunggayi, as we’ve come to know her.”
Bulunggayi (Maria Locke), was a formidable Dharug advocate who found herself fighting for justice and equality in the newly established colony of Sydney Town. Her many triumphs in the face of early frontier settler-colonialism are yet to be told.
Now, Leanne Tobin and a self-determined team of esteemed First Nations performance makers, will tell Maria Locke’s story through the matrilineage of four generations of women navigating their own survival in 1980s Western Sydney.
Leanne Tobin is a multidisciplinary artist of Irish, English and Aboriginal heritage descending from the Buruberong and Wumali clans of the Dharug, the traditional Aboriginal people of the Greater Sydney region. Often working collaboratively with community groups, local schools and institutions, Tobin uses her prolific and extensive interdisciplinary practice to tell local stories, evoke an environmental conscience, and encourage respect towards the land and its original people. Her art practice seeks to encourage an open and honest dialogue about the past and to nurture, respect and care for Country, paying homage to our Old People and their legacy.
