The Mission by Tom Molyneux Photo: Sarah Walker The widespread use of Acknowledgement of Country throughout the theatrical community is a good reminder that we live and work and tell stories on a land that has been home to Australia’s Indigenous people for forty-thousand years. Any Fringe show presenting work on the lands of the Wurundjeri people in the Birrarung are continuing a very long tradition. Performer Tom Molyneux’s Acknowledgement of Country feeds directly into the story of The Mission ; “sovereignty has never been ceded” is a strong jumping-off point for a story about our Indigenous population’s autonomy. This personal history begins thirty-thousand years ago at the forming of Budj Bim, a volcano in Western Victoria. The Budj Bim area is a very important one to the Gunditjmara people, a site where they developed a system of aquaculture, thousands of years before European settlement. After European settlement, it was the site of Eumerella Wars, where the
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