Jan. 26 is Australia Day, a national holiday that commemorates the 1788 landing of England’s first fleet off Sydney Harbor, when they raised the Union flag. Over the years, Australia Day and its celebration of colonialism have been — to say the least — a complicated one, particularly for the Indigenous people who’ve lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years.  A play by Jane Harrison, “The Visitors,” reimagines that day and is currently playing in New York.

The play is set on a rock by what is now called Sydney Cove, where six Aboriginal elders and one young man meet to decide whether to welcome people from the eleven ships in the harbor or tell them to go away. Playwright Jane Harrison, who is a descendant of the Muruwari people of New South Wales, said she got the idea to write an Australia Day play almost twenty years ago.

“There hadn’t been a play about the Aboriginal’s perspective on that event,” Harrison recalled, “and so, I thought it’s time for us to get our voice out there.”  

The play premiered in 2013, was part of the Sydney Festival in 2020, and was revived in 2023, when it won a Sydney Theatre Award for best new work. Harrison has turned the play into both a novel and an opera.

Harrison imagines her characters debating how to handle the new arrivals off their shores. Some want to fight the intruders. Others want to welcome them. Harrison said she was very influenced by the Paddy Chayefsky play, “Twelve Angry Men,” about a jury debating to convict or acquit a murder suspect.

Also, she added “I wanted to give my characters western names but kind of slightly old-fashioned names like Walter, et cetera.”

In fact, Wesley Enoch, who’s directed three plays by Harrison, said the playwright wrote a stage direction on how to costume these characters.

“What Jane wrote in the play was they, ‘must wear suits as if they’re at a board meeting,’” he explained, “because contemporary Australia, in this case, the contemporary world, must give status to these characters; that they are not infantilized natives sitting on a rock, you know, that you can say is in the history. The story is absolutely made contemporary.”

Harrison says she’s playing with time. 

“There’s an Aboriginal concept of time which is the past, the present and the future co-existing together,” she said, “and that’s what I really wanted to bring to the fore. That idea that you know we live with the past; it’s in our bodies. The bodies hold the score of colonization.”

Enoch said Australia Day is quite contentious for the Aboriginal community.

“Because we go, yes, it’s the beginning of the colonial project in this country, but it also is the beginning of our oppression as Aboriginal people,” he explained. “Within two years of the colony being established, two-thirds of the Aboriginal population of the region died from smallpox, from frontier wars [or] even just the common cold.  And what Jane does is just subtly bring a lot of those elements into the play. And what I’m interested in is, is this notion of how the retelling of history can tell us something new about ourselves today.”

Indeed, as the elders debate whether to let the visitors in, an ancient custom is invoked.  

“’Welcome to country’ is a ceremony that Aboriginal people participate in, to this day,” Harrison said. “And it involves an elder welcoming the people gathered there in the place and they often talk about ‘you’re welcome to this country from the tops of the trees to the roots of the trees.’ And I think it’s such an act of generosity.” 

Even as the play demonstrates this Aboriginal generosity, Enoch said not all members of the cast were able to get visas to perform the play in New York.

“We had really big issues with visas getting into the United States,” he noted. “The kind of systemic criminalization of Aboriginal people over, you know, centuries has meant that there’s a lot of things in our communities that when we go to get a visa to come to the United States now — even if it’s something we did as kids — we can’t come, you know? And it’s one of those things that is a real shame.”

So, to perform the play in the US, Enoch had to bring in some new Aboriginal actors and leave others behind. Still, he added, “Our stories actually do resonate. We can teach each other how to be better human beings by listening to other people’s stories.”

“The Visitors” will be at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City through February 1st.

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