It seems a world away since 1968 when Kevin Gilbert and Brian Syron got together a group of untutored Aboriginal actors in the back garden of Judge Frank McGrath’s house in Centennial Park, Sydney, to read the first draft of The Cherry Pickers. Amy and Frank McGrath, dedicated theatre-lovers, had turned their stables into the Mews Playhouse and, in that time of extraordinary theatrical nationalism, were, for a short space, one of its most innovatory influences.

The play was not complete, as I recall, but I remember with clarity the opening scene at the cherry pickers’ camp, in which an upturned tub on which a cheerful old woman sits, is discovered to contain her granddaughter, enduring a customary punishment for allegedly stealing damper and dripping. There was something so outrageous and authentic about the scene that I felt that for the first time I, as a European Australian, was being allowed to enter the private, domestic life of Black Australia.