He used to steal food. A night at the theatre changed everything

Declan Furber Gillick’s origin story sounds like that of any wannabe artist: “doing bits and pieces, working as a removalist, working in bars, or just not working. Doing it really on the cheap, skipping meals or stealing meals or skipping the bus and walking everywhere.”

That was back in 2018, when he first decided to become a playwright. He might have fit the stereotype of the starving artist, but he certainly wasn’t a lazy one. Within a year of starting out, he was winning awards and playing shows at Brisbane Festival and Melbourne Arts Centre. A few years later he began receiving commissions from the Melbourne Theatre Company. In April his play Jacky won one of the highest accolades in Australian theatre, a Green Room award for the most Outstanding New Australian Writing.

He’s 33 now. He thinks he only saw his first professional theatre show when he was 27. He was living in Alice Springs – he’s an Arrernte man who divides his time between Central Australia and Melbourne – and somehow found himself in the audience for a production of US playwright Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles. It was a night that would change his life.

“If I saw that play now or read it I’d probably think, ‘That’s pretty interesting, there are some interesting concepts in there,’ and it’s a well-made play. But at the time it really struck me. It had me on the edge of my seat.”

A fire had been lit. “The next day I literally started writing plays. I went home and said, ‘Whatever that is, I’m going to teach myself to do that.’”

Like many people in their teens and 20s, he’d tried on various artforms to see if any fit. He’d written music and played in bands, performed slam poetry and spoken word.

“I’ve got friends who could always sing, or could always play piano, painting or whatever was part of their upbringing. That wasn’t the case for me, but what was the case was that I was always exposed to story and language and argument and ideas. I was always challenged to inquire and to mount substantive arguments that had solid, firm bases. That was my creative upbringing.”

What had struck him so forcefully in that Alice Springs theatre was how drama can be so many things at once.

“A playwright can interrogate and bring together and force into collision multiple worldviews and perspectives. Through having them clash together, they can draw out meaning, can demonstrate all these ways of thinking about the world.”

It’s certainly something he’s brought to his own work. Reviews of Jacky called it “hugely entertaining and deeply serious at the same time,” “complex and multilayered”, and “hilarious and heartbreaking”. The work explored how the lives and experiences of Indigenous Australians can be radically different to one another, even within one family. Its MTC production last year put paid to the misconception of main stage subscribers not wanting to hear from new voices: it was a play about gender, race and the sex industry that saw white women in their 70s approaching the playwright to offer their thanks.

His earlier work Bighouse Dreaming – which was nominated for six Green Room Awards and won three – was another play praised for the way it tackled subjects such as youth justice, homelessness and institutional racism in ways both accessible and challenging.

Furber Gillick says he thinks of himself as an Indigenous writer, “but far from exclusively”.

“The things that I think about as an Aboriginal man in contemporary Australia, that’s what grips me the most and what I choose to grapple with the most. It’s the political, intellectual and cultural cutting edge of the contradictions that lie at the heart of this settler colonial nation.”

Australia’s main stages are part of that colonial narrative, and they’ve traditionally been a way of maintaining social barriers. If you haven’t been educated in their cultural codes – how to behave in a theatre, what to appreciate and whose name to drop – they can seem like alien spaces.

That’s what Furber Gillick discovered when he took up a one-year masters in writing for performance at VCA.

“I felt the weight of being an outsider. I felt the weight of not being a theatre kid at school, not having read Ibsen, not having read Brecht, not knowing who Joanna Murray-Smith was. But increasingly my peers were like: hey, we think you’ve got something. Forget all that.”

He struggled with a serious case of imposter syndrome. Halfway through the year he was ready to finish the course and chalk it up to experience, when something clicked. He quickly produced a flurry of pages that were unlike anything he’d written before. “I broke out of this sense of trying to make what I thought theatre should be and I really went with the gut.”

That piece was inspired by the Great Emu War, a historical event in which the Australian military waged war (and lost) against the emus of WA. Furber Gillick put his audience on the side of the emus, exploring the event as an attempted colonial land grab. With unexpected outbursts of song. His classmates told him it was very Brechtian but he wasn’t sure what that meant. He thought his wild experiment would be proof that he didn’t belong at VCA.

“Everyone’s going to say this is so stupid. It’s so far from what theatre is meant to be. And that’s the stuff where people went, ‘Holy shit. We’ve never heard anything like that before.’”

Just a few years later he has an agent. He receives commissions. He can work while enjoying a sense of stability (and can pay for dinner).

Currently he’s working on Upside Down Country, which exists in the same universe as Jacky but brings together a very different set of concerns, and a TV adaptation of Melissa Lucashenko’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel Too Much Lip.

The latter has been revelatory. “At first I was resistant to that because I found it kind of limiting but I really embraced the parameters of the 55-minute form and the demands when you don’t have a captive audience. You’ve got people who will watch 30 seconds and then they’ll watch something else. It forces a kind of democratic impetus on the writer because you can’t expect someone to sit through philosophical waffle. You’ve got to get them and pull them in.”

He might be courted by the institutions that once felt so alien, but he’s clear on his terms. “It’s a question I had going into the halls of power. I went in with the assumption that anything I wanted to write, that I believed in, would never get programmed there. So I wrote with a kind of bald refusal, with a pessimism that was like, ‘OK, you want to give me a year here and a stipend, but just so you know, I’ll write what I want to write and if you don’t want to program it I don’t really care.’”

He’s more than happy to take notes and feedback, he says, and he’ll write his plays with his audience in mind. “If they’re going to help me pay my bills and do my work, I’ll get in there and I’ll make as good a piece of theatre as I can make.”

But along the way, he says, “I’ll change every mind and heart that I can.”

Jacky is available from Currency Press.