Rainbow's End

Rainbow's End is a play by the Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison, first performed in 2005. It follows three generations of Koori women, Nan Dear, Gladys and Dolly, living beside the Goulburn River near Shepparton in the 1950s. It is studied in the HSC English Standard Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

Jane Harrison is a Muruwari playwright, and Rainbow's End, first performed in 2005, dramatises three generations of Koori women - Nan Dear, her daughter Gladys, and Gladys's daughter Dolly - living in a humpy on the banks of the Goulburn River near Shepparton in the 1950s. The men are away at work, so the play belongs to the women, and its scale is deliberately domestic: laundry, rabbit skins, radio quiz shows, a job interview and a flood. For settler Australia the 1950s were a decade of postwar prosperity; for Aboriginal people they were a decade of dispossession and control, with Protection Boards deciding where people could live and work, and full citizenship withheld.

Gladys, devoted to the Queen, is stung that the government has hidden the humpies behind hessian for the 1954 royal visit. Errol, a white encyclopedia salesman from Melbourne, arrives by mistake, is drawn to Dolly, and keeps returning. A government Inspector recommends assimilation and "interim housing"; Gladys, refusing to be shamed, walks Dolly into the bank and pushes the manager until he offers her a trainee position. At the ball, white guests mock Dolly's curtain-made dress and a cousin assaults her outside. Errol proposes and asks Dolly to leave for the city; she refuses, choosing family and Country. A destructive flood then forces the family off the Flats to the concrete Housing Commission blocks at Rumbalara, where Nan drives off an intrusive rent collector with eggs, and the play closes on Gladys's direct-address speech demanding decent housing and full citizenship, with Dolly's newborn holding out hope for the referendum era to come.

The pressure on the family is not personal cruelty but a system, and Harrison represents racism as environmental rather than episodic - something the women breathe. The Inspector's polite "The Aborigine needs to be absorbed into the community" and the Bank Manager's coded "What I'm wondering is how she'd fit in" are the everyday face of state control, while Dolly feels it on her body: "It's me that gets stones thrown at her when I walk down the street." Nan carries the older wound of the Cummeragunja walk-off - "They forced us to leave. Forced us to leave Cummeragunja. Our home." - the anaphora and broken final fragment enacting dispossession as living memory.

Against that pressure Harrison sets the fierce, funny, argumentative love of three women. Nan's caution - "Don't ever get too clever, my girl" - is love shaped by injury, a survival quality rather than a failure of nerve, and her insistence that the goomees "might be drinkers, but they're still our people" defines community by kinship rather than respectability. Gladys answers with hope: "She needs to know the world is bigger than just this."

Gladys is the play's engine of aspiration, and Harrison stages her longing directly in lit dream sequences - "My girl, a graduate" - that snap back to reality to measure the gap. Her fight for Dolly at the bank, "She deserves a break. One little break.", uses repetition and the diminutive to measure exactly how modest the demand is and how much resistance it still meets, and her claim to want "what any mother, black, white or brindle, wants for her daughter" insists the hope is entirely ordinary.

Belonging is settled in Dolly's refusal of Errol. Against his well-meant but unexamined offer of "a real home, for the first time", Dolly redefines home as relationship - "A real home is where there are people looking out for each other." - and stands her ground: "This is my place. I'm staying right here with my mum and my nan." When Errol calls the family "from another country or something", her two-word answer, "We are.", claims a prior sovereignty older than the nation that will not count her.

The play's staging carries its argument: the hessian "a band-aid over a sore", the recurring standard of whiteness, Nan's eggs turning a domestic economy into defiance, and finally Gladys's closing speech breaking the frame - the private "I want" becoming the collective "We demand the right to control our own destiny."