Palawa playwright Dylan Van Den Berg has been working in the idiom of the Aboriginal Gothic for some time now, though it took a design element in a production of his earlier play, Whitefella Yella Tree, to help him realise it.
āWhen I was working on Whitefella Yellow Tree, I went to the preview performance and I realised that the way that it had been interpreted by the directors [Declan Greene and Amy Sole], with this spooky lemon tree at the centre of the set, was incredibly Gothic ā this piece of nature that was tainted by colonisation and that haunted the characters at the centre of the play,ā Van Den Berg tells ArtsHub.