A missing woman, an ancient mystery. Finally, a new story emerges

The Age

24-04-2025

In the 1840s, so the story goes, a white woman survived a shipwreck off the coast of Victoria and was later spotted living among the local Gunaikurnai. From here, the official record begins to lose its course: was she a captive or had she sought their refuge? What were the blood-stained items left in her wake? Were the rumours of a deceased infant true? Which ship had sunk, and why did search parties keep coming up with nothing?
The rumours of the White Woman of Gippsland entered the realm of folklore, but one detail remains constant in every record from the era: they're all written by whitefellas.
Playwright and director Andrea James grew up with her mob's version of the tale.
'I first heard about it when I was 10 or 12 through stories, through yarns. Our uncle Phillip was ... our story-keeper, and he had also written a book on it and collaborated with a historian as well. Then when I went to uni, I did a unit on first-contact histories. This story came up again. I was like: 'This one's following me around.''
James' previous play, Sunshine Super Girl, was a celebration of the life of tennis great Evonne Goolagong; her 2022 MTC production won the hearts of audiences. The company felt like the right venue to explore this new corner of history, too.
'Melbourne has a connection to this story that I felt was important for the city to know. I also rather selfishly wanted to write a story that connected me to my grandmother's country, because I grew up on my grandfather's Country, Yorta Yorta. It was a really nice way to walk back onto the Gunaikurnai Country and use this play to connect me further with family who live there.'
When James began to investigate the historical record, she found a wealth of material to wade through: newspaper articles, diary entries, reports to the governor and accounts by later historians.
Then there were the 'spin-offs': the myth of the white woman inspired locals to pen novellas, while poets went off on their own tangents. 'These random, completely romanticised versions of it,' James says. 'There is a lot of writing and so I dug into those archives. I went and sat in the library and tried to decipher handwriting. I kind of got lost in that for a good year, going, 'what did happen?' It is a bit of a magical mystery, right?'
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What happened is a question that artists and historians approach differently. The Black Woman of Gippsland isn't a period piece offering an authoritative account of the facts behind the legend. Instead, it follows Jacinta, a contemporary academic trying to piece together the real meaning beneath the wildly divergent legends. James' script unfolds with all the tense urgency of a contemporary thriller: Jacinta is dogged in her pursuit of this historical enigma, but as with many great mysteries, there's a tragedy hidden behind the accepted version of events.
The work shifts between historical eras but James was determined that the overarching setting be contemporary. 'At the time of writing, there was a spate of Aboriginal women's deaths in custody ... every six months, there was another death in custody and I just couldn't ignore that. Here I am looking at all this stuff about this search for this white woman and our women were being killed every six months in jail. It was really important for me to draw out these parallel histories.'
Chenoa Deemal, who plays Jacinta in the upcoming production, had never heard of this particular myth: 'I'm from Queensland, Cape York,' she says. 'We have our own legends about white women.'
Colonial history is rife with stories that echo the Gippsland tale. So many of these founding myths are records, not so much of real events, as the anxieties and desires of those who wrote them. They're riddled not just with factual inconsistencies but also skewed perspectives, unconscious biases and misunderstandings.
Deemal understands the obstacles that Jacinta faces when attempting to pinpoint the truth. 'I've been writing about my people as well. You have trouble finding information on your mob and I directly relate to that. There's nothing from a black perspective written from those times. We can go by what the archives say, but what were the people actually feeling? What were they going through? What were their experiences? We don't have those on record.'
Jacinta's detective quest is very much a personal one, but she also encounters resistance from the university where she's studying. Only a few scenes focus on this, but they reflect the experience of many black female academics.
'A lot of the things that are in there are actual anecdotes that women have told me about these various kinds of things that they've come up against and had to move through,' says James. 'They're absolutely taken from experience, from women that I've spoken to who've encountered these things in the system.'
Deemal relishes the chance to play a character whose professional pursuit of the truth is counterbalanced by her personal investment in its outcome. 'It's a huge emotional journey, but she's trying to stop the emotion ... I find that there's more dramatic tension in that. Having that struggle within your character makes it feel more real and it gives you a momentum throughout the play. I get to actually go through those emotions within the play, and it actually can pass through my body, which is the cathartic thing about the way the script is written.'
Earlier this year, James took her team down to the Country on which their play is set.
'It's been amazing, learning the history down here because it's such a different culture,' says Deemal. 'Seeing the possum skin cloaks, the yellow sand as opposed to the white sand at home. The big waves. Back home, the reef stops the big waves from coming in. It meant a lot to actually go on Country and experience that.'
During their journey, they were welcomed by Uncle Wayne Thorpe, who James says gave his visitors an essential piece of advice. 'He could tell we were all wigged-out city dwellers, so any chance we got, he'd tell us to touch the Country. Feel the warmth of the land, put your feet in the waves. It was a real gift that he gave to the project.'
There's the history that you find in books, after all, but the land is its own form of memory. As James says: 'How can anyone do a play about Country without being on it? Because it's not just the stage, it's our Country. It has to reflect that.'