Beautiful One Day

Palm Island. An Aboriginal man is arrested, allegedly for insulting a police officer. Within 90 minutes, he lies dead on the watchhouse floor, his liver cleaved in two. The community protests, the police station is torched. A Senior Sergeant stands trial for manslaughter but is acquitted. Questions are raised about manipulation of evidence and a court suppression order. A protestor, jailed for inciting a riot, is out on parole on condition that he speaks to no-one.

Beautiful One Day is a theatrical documentary made by a group of Australians (black and white) seeking to interpret these events against the full sweep of the island’s history. It seeks to grasp the ordinariness of brutality, charting the course of repression, resistance and racism but also the astonishing resilience of the people who call Palm Island home.

Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre Company (Jack Charles v The Crown) is a champion of Indigenous storytelling. Version 1.0 (The Bougainville Photoplay Project, A Certain Maritime Incident) have turned tough, patient enquiry into an artform. Together with Belvoir they have set each other the task of trying to understand the horror of circumstance that we all find ourselves in.

To close the 2012 Belvoir season, three outstanding companies – Belvoir (represented by Eamon Flack), Ilbijerri (represented by Rachael Maza Long) and Version 1.0 (represented by David Williams and Bougainville Photoplay Project ‘lecturer’ Paul Dwyer) – join forces to tell the as yet ongoing story of Cameron Doomadgee and Palm Island.

“It’s really great to be doing something that is a piece of indigenous theatre that is really overtly political again,” says artistic director Ralph Myers. “And to be able to pick at a running sore on the Australian national psyche, I suppose, and get somewhere closer to healing it.”