Andrea James’ latest work, The Black Woman of Gippsland, currently on stage at Melbourne Theatre Company’s Summer Theatre, is more than a play, it is a piercing reckoning with Australia’s colonial past and its ongoing legacy. Set against the backdrop of the 19th-century frontier wars in Gippsland and brought into the present through the perspective of a Gunaikurnai academic, this production tears at the seams of the foundational myths that have long justified colonial violence and land theft.

The story unfolds through Jacinta, a contemporary Gunaikurnai woman and scholar, who investigates a long-circulated colonial tale: the alleged abduction of a “white woman” by Aboriginal people in Gippsland. This story, repeated in newspapers, courtrooms, and colonial archives, provided moral justification for violent raids, killings, and the seizure of Aboriginal land.

But playwright Andrea James invites us to question the foundations of that story. What if it was never true? And more importantly, what purpose did it serve? The play reveals that the question of the woman’s presence, whether she was abducted, complicit, or entirely fictional, may ultimately be beside the point. Instead, it asks with increasing urgency: what if there was no white woman at all? What if the story was a useful fiction, crafted to legitimise frontier violence? Rather than offering fixed answers, James leads the audience to interrogate their own understandings of colonial history. If we are willing to confront the scale and intent of the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples and their cultures, we are compelled to draw our own, unsettling conclusions.

This is not a simple detective story. As Jacinta delves into the archives, she is met with the resistance of academic gatekeeping and institutionalised racism and haunted by the grief and rage of her ancestors. The stage becomes a site of struggle between oral memory and written record, between official history and lived truth, between the colonial project and the ongoing fight for Aboriginal sovereignty.

James’ writing is sharp, unflinching, and deeply political. She refuses to sanitise the brutality of the colonial project or offer cheap gestures toward reconciliation. Instead, the play forces audiences, particularly those accustomed to the comforts of current society, to confront the violent lies embedded in Australia’s national identity. The “white woman of Gippsland” was never just a story. It was a weapon, used to legitimise murder and dispossession in the name of colonialism.

But the power of the play lies not only in its historical excavation but in its refusal to isolate the past from the present. Jacinta’s academic struggle is not abstract. Her voice is disbelieved, her work dismissed, her presence unwelcome in the very institutions that claim to study “truth.” The play makes clear that colonialism is not an event, but a structure. The same systems that allowed for massacre in the name of myth are still alive in universities, in police lockups, in land policy, and in cultural institutions that refuse to cede power.

Yet amidst the rage and pain, The Black Woman of Gippsland offers a profound sense of resistance. Not the liberal, tokenistic kind, but a deep resistance grounded in cultural continuity, memory, and refusal. Jacinta is not alone; she is accompanied by the voices of her ancestors, by the knowledge passed down in story, by the very land that bears witness to history. This is a play about what it means to survive the archive, and to fight back against its erasures.

For those committed to dismantling the colonial foundations in Australia, this is essential viewing.

It calls into question every official narrative and comforting national myth. It reminds us that the stories we inherit shape the violence we permit, and that rewriting those stories is part of the revolutionary task.

The Black Woman of Gippsland runs until May 31, 2025. Don’t go expecting a fun night of entertainment. Go prepared to be unsettled, to be challenged, and then take that discomfort and turn it into action, because change does not come from watching a play. It comes from struggle.