SWEETOWN

‘I’m sorry Hazel. I haven’t done a stitch. I quite forgot to make anything. I’ve been much too busy remembering things. I’ve been remembering things all week. All sorts of things that I thought I’d completely forgotten until I remembered them. It was almost worth forgetting them just so I could remember them all over again.’

The welcome sign to Bingara, the town on which the mythical Sweetown is based.

“With Sweetown, Reeves is established as one of Australia’s finest playwrights. The denizens of Sweetown learn about a 19th Century Aboriginal massacre just in time for Sweetown’s sesquicentenary. Apartheid is swiftly and insidiously stepped up to sweep this colonial genocide under the carpet.. Sweetown is a healing force, written with fondness and regard. The play is rich in argot nuance, character, substance, subtext, courage honesty and droll humour. Reeves finds lyricism and despair in ordinary Australians.” Peter Goers, The Advertiser.

“With gentle humour, rich character work and a shrewd text, Melissa Reeves examines the way we construct history.” Murray Bramwell, The Adelaide Review

SWEETOWN, first performed in 1992, is a bleakly comic portrait of a small Australian country town in 1965, that in repressing the memory of a massacre, has completely lost its memory.

In 1965, a local man and amateur historian from Bingara, a small town close to the site of the Myall Creek massacre, found what he thought were the hinges of the stockyard gate where 28 unarmed aboriginal people were imprisoned in a stockyard and murdered by 8 colonists in 1838. He enlisted the help of the local Apex club to build a commemoratory gate. But the local historical association joined forces with the small local newspaper to shut the idea down and the gate never got built. Sweetown tells this story though the clubs and institutions of the town – the school, the CWA, the Historical association, and the Apex club.

Sally Hildyard as Miss Faversham in Sweetown. Photo - David Wilson

Ulli Birve as Pamela in the Red Shed’s Sweetown. Photo - David Wilson

PRODUCTIONS:

Red Shed Company

Adelaide 1991

Tour to SA 1991

Tour to Northern Territory 1993

Deckchair Theatre Co. 1995, directed by Angela Chaplin

AWARDS:

Won -

Jill Blewett Award (South Australian Premier’s Literary Award)