Heart is a Wasteland

Heart is a Wasteland begins as a sort of rom com that becomes a road trip - with some noir thrown in – of four days and nights up the Stuart Highway - from Cooper Pedy to Alice Springs.  But this ill-matched indigenous couple, Raye and Dan, carry the heavy burdens of their own pasts - and the pasts of their indigenous people: poverty, child removal, addiction, land theft, and despair.    

Raye (Monica Jasmin Karo) is a would-be country and western singer.  She’s good – talented & attractive but unlikely to be ‘discovered’ or even make a living doing one-night gigs in small town country pubs and selling a few demo CDs.  She’s a single mother who’s left her ten-year-old kid Elvis in Alice, in the care of her self-righteous mother, a once abusive, addictive woman but who has now ‘found God’.

One night in Cooper Pedy, a young FIFO miner, Dan (Ari Maza Long) is smitten by Raye’s singing – and her.  More than a little tanked, he clumsily comes on to her.  He’s nice in a goofy, jokey way and one thing leads to another.  Raye decides.  She’s in control – of this, at least.  Next morning, he reveals he’s (deliberately) missed his plane back to Darwin.  She’s got a car and he persuades her that they can travel together: he’ll be her roadie and CD seller.  So begins a febrile, on-the-road relationship, intensely sexual but also at times fractious and hostile as their stories – and needs - are revealed. 

Their progress is suggested to us by a video of an endless straight road in a travelling car’s head lights and a projection of white-on-black animation of the road, the pubs, the birds overhead…  We feel the distances, the silences, and the emptiness…

Design is by Emily Barrie with AV design by Sean Bacon.  Lights are by Niklas Pajanti, Sound by James Henry (Yuwaalaraay/Yorta Yorta).

As Raye and Dan travel north, the British bomb test ‘prohibited areas’ of Maralinga and Emu Field lie to their west.  Whose heart is a wasteland?  Their country?  Or Raye’s and Dan’s hearts?  It’s both.  Dan is an ex-community and youth worker, now a miner.  Something went very wrong for Dan, and he can’t get over the guilt and failure.  He describes his struggle in secret nightmare monologues as being overwhelmed and enveloped by a ‘black mist’. 

But Raye, more politically and historically aware than Dan, refers to a real ‘black mist’.  (It was the result of a 1953 British bomb test that went wrong: a ‘sticky black mist’ enveloped the land at Wallatinna and Mintabie, dropping radioactive material on indigenous people and causing vomiting, diarrhoea, skin rashes - and deaths.  All denied by the Australian and British scientists.)  For Raye that mist is a shorthand exemplar for the whole betrayal of indigenous people and the desecration of their land – the very land through which she and Dan are travelling.

Playwright Harvey’s intention to draw these parallels, analogies and metaphors can feel a little forced – and give the actors problems in switching from lovely, slangy teasing into high-flown or preachy dialogue.  But director Rachel Maza (Yidinji/Meriam) focuses performances on the characters’ emotions – and these are conveyed powerfully. 

Monica Jasmin Karo (Gunai/Gunditjmara) can turn in an instant from sexy to angry to sad.  She finds the plaintive melancholy in the C&W songs by Lydia Fairhall (Worimi) with new arrangements by Gary Watling (Wiradjuri), who’s live on stage.

Jasmin Karo’s Raye knows she has to be tough, and she dominates the relationship and the stage.  Ari Maza Long (Yidinji/Meriam) can be sweet and funny but behind his front of the jokey bloke he’s dependent and weakened by his past traumas.  Dan believes Raye can save him.  She needs all her strength to save herself. 

Here we have a reinterpretation by Rachel Maza of the very successful 2017 Malthouse production with Ursula Yovich and Aaron Petersen and presented previously at the 2021 Darwin Festival.  It’s now a part of Iljiberri’s 30 Year celebrations.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Tiffany Garvie