In Neil Armfield’s recent production of Dallas Winmar’s play Aliwa – about the struggle of the Davis family in Western Australia in the 1930s to avoid becoming members of the stolen generations – the character of Aunty Dot Collard, Jack Davis’s sister, was played brilliantly by Deborah Mailman. Aunty Dot herself, flown over to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, introduced the show and then sat on the side of the stage on an old red sofa smiling benignly, and interfering occasionally, as she watched her history being performed. But which was the ‘real’ Aunty Dot was something the show left up to the audience to decide.

Greg Dening, in Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1993), quoted Roland Barthes to point out that history is a performance. Performance, in turn, is a powerful way of strategically (re)presenting history. The theatre uses space to stage place, and it uses people to stage subjectivity. Because it is always experienced in the present – even when narrating past events – and because it is so good at reflecting on itself, it is a very good medium for problematising the ‘natural’. Theatre can explore the fragmented colonial subject because its performers are present in different modes, and can keep drawing their audiences’ attention to that fact. It can show borders because it is itself a liminal space. In its most interesting contemporary forms, it is a site of instability and, at least in the fascinating collection of plays in this anthology, of resistance.