"To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane." -- Jane Harrison
Jane Harrison (born 1960) is an indigenous Australian writer and playwright.
A descendant of the Muruwari people of New South Wales, from the area around Bourke and Brewarrina, Harrison grew up in the Victorian Dandenongs with her mother and sister. She began her career as an advertising copywriter, before beginning work as a writer with Ilbijerri Theatre Company. Her best-known work is Stolen, which received critical claim and has toured nationally and internationally.
"A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.""Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious - friendship and learning.""To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman."
In 1992, the Ilbijerri Theatre Co-operative commissioned Harrison to write Stolen, a play about the lives of five Aboriginal people from the “stolen generations” .
Tackling the issue the Stolen Generations, Stolen premiered at the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne in 1998, and has had productions every year since - in Melbourne and country Victoria, Sydney, Adelaide, and Tasmania, the UK (twice), Hong Kong and Tokyo, along with readings in Canada and New York ( 2004). In Sydney, it was performed at the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Wayne Blair.
Stolen won (along with Aliwa! by Dallas Wimmar) the Kate Challis RAKA award. It was studied on the VCE English syllabus, and the NSW Higher School Certificate syllabus.
On a Park Bench
On a Park Bench was created through workshops at Playbox and the Banff Playrites Colony. The play was a finalist in the Lake Macquarie Drama Prize.
Rainbow’s End
Rainbow's End or Rumbalara tells the simple, yet complicated story of three generations of Aboriginal women; young Dolly, her mother the happy-go-lucky Gladys, and the wise and stern Nan Dear, living in their shanty perched on the flats of the Goulburn River in 1950s regional Victoria. The play was directed by Wesley Enoch.
Rainbow’s End premiered in 2005 at the Melbourne Museum, and toured to Mooroopna, and to Japan in 2007.
Blakvelvet
Blakvelvet, Harrison’s most recent play, won the 2006 Theatrelab Indigenous Award.
Harrison also contributed a chapter to Many Voices, Reflections on experiences of Indigenous child separation, which was published by the National Library of Australia, Canberra. This work was also related to the theme of the stolen generations.