Three Magpies Perched in a Tree

As we wait for Glenn Shea to come on stage, we range over Meg White’s resonant, evocative design.  There is a bare, dead tree, stark against what would be the sky.  There are outcrops of rock, some spread with skins – possum or kangaroo.  One outcrop holds a small pool of water – a sink for travellers.  Another a circular dish of whitefellas’ flour.  Upstage, a sort of battered, derelict structure of aluminium frame, cyclone wire mesh and missing panels. 

But most arresting of all in the design are the beautiful swirling lines that encircle all this.  Rivers?  Song lines?  All these elements suggest the past, the fraught present and the abiding natural world – and the three magpies of the title are part of the last. 

Indeed, what Three Magpies Perched in a Tree does is to juxtapose those elements and throw them into sharp relief in ways that are poignant, lyrical and horribly sad.

Glenn Shea comes on stage.  He’s a big man who radiates warmth and authority at once.  He has great stage presence, and he turns out to be a storyteller par excellence.  He plays ‘Peter’, an Aboriginal youth justice worker.  His first line is ‘I love this place.’  He describes the place as if in a poem.  He conjures up a coastal town and its country to which Peter is deeply connected – even if the town also has its enduring, sadly everyday human problems among the indigenous inhabitants.  (Peter doesn’t like that term, ‘indigenous’ or ‘First Nations’ either – he reckons they’re a way of avoiding the real issues.) 

Peter brings those ‘problems’ and his own troubled past vividly to life.  He creates characters for us as he deals with these problems - juvenile crime, sexual abuse, drug abuse and the youth justice system – as best he can.  These kids have lost their culture, their connections to the past and to nature.  Things look bad, insurmountable.  Things recur.  But Peter stays calm.  He keeps his ironic humour.  He’s a realist, he doesn’t judge.  He restrains his rage…  And he must sometimes retreat to his refuge, that place that he loves.

Bronwyn Pringle’s subtle lighting changes with the shifts in the narrative and Elissa Goodrich’s sound design enhances the narrative without drawing attention to itself.

At times, as Peter sits slumped, turned away from us, temporarily defeated, there’ll be a total blackout – and then we hear the familiar voice of Uncle Jack Charles (recorded before his death).  He tells us stories of the Dreamtime.  They have a simplicity that is sweet, sure and natural - and such a painful contrast to things in the present.  The present confronts us again as the light returns and Peter must set off again to deal with and help the town’s kids, deal with the cops. The three magpies are there when Peter wakes up.  Still there.  They warble their song.  It gives Peter hope and strength.  He loves this place. 

With this economic but allusive text and Glen Shea’s voice, Three Magpies manages be matter of fact and poetic at the same time.  Its finely chosen specific details suggest far more than themselves. 

Michael Brindley

(This 2024 production is a considerably revised version of the 2023 production and is the first part of a trilogy.)

Photographer: Darren Gill