Jack Davis (1917 - 2000) was centrally involved in the Aboriginal Rights Movement in Australia from the 1960s onwards and became an outstanding figure in Indigenous Australian literature by his editorship of the first Aboriginal journal of literature and of his collections of Aboriginal poetry and plays, but especially by his celebrated volumes of poetry and his successful plays written between 1970 and 1994.
He continued his fight for Aboriginal rights in his literary work, with a strong emphasis on antiracism and a reevaluation of Indigenous Australian culture and values, at the same time employing a great variety of literary techniques from mixing Western collage and Brechtian alienation to Indigenous Australian dance, song, and language. This makes his works outstanding both from a political and a dramatic point of view as well as interesting to the current discussion about cultural hybridization.
The paper analyzes both the development of Jack Davis’s views on art and politics as well as his development as a playwright. In my analyses of his plays special regard will be given to antiracist and emancipatory themes and techniques, from Kullark (1979) to Wahngin Country (1992). I will particularly deal with his last play, Wahngin Country, a monodrama (a new form used by Davis), which was performed, with himself in the role of the homeless Aborigine as the only actor, in an unusual ambience, the grounds of the University of Western Australia, in 1992.