The Sunshine Club celebrates the postwar equivalent of social media for Indigenous people, says writer and director Wesley Enoch: “The only way you got the gossip, or you met new people, or you got to exchange knowledge.”
This month The Sunshine Club returns to Queensland Theatre 23 years after it debuted, in a joyful celebration of resilience.Remembering our history
Local audiences will likely recognise 'the cannery' in The Sunshine Club as the Golden Circle Cannery, where a lot of Indigenous people — including the renowned artist Tracey Moffatt — worked. As Frank Doyle explains in The Sunshine Club, Indigenous people were subject to a curfew that prohibited them from crossing that boundary after dark unless they held an exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act.
"I'm almost like the embodiment of The Sunshine Club: you fight against something, and you try to make a difference. Then by making a difference, you then take charge, you take over a bit more," he says. Enoch says these kinds of clubs were fertile ground for what became the 1967 Referendum because they provided a space for people to talk.
"There's this addiction to being a juvenile, to being an adolescent. When in fact we are Elders, when we think culturally about this landscape," Enoch says.
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