![]() A sense of counterfeit persists throughout the show, a feeling that lyricism is being translated into the merely picturesque. Rather, it’s mediated through nature documentaries and zoos, as our wild places vanish into a haze of nostalgia. Rather than carrying a message about protecting our environment, it reflects an increasing sense that the human experience of the natural world is no longer primarily firsthand. Thiele’s fable about the cruelty of men reads differently in 2019. It’s brilliant to see the MTC putting serious resources into a mainstage show for young people and, in many ways, especially in its visual richness, this Storm Boy is a charming show.īut the production carries an unsettling dislocation. Thiele’s landscape no longer exists … the wetlands of the Coorong are now on the verge of ecological collapse.Īnd now Tom Holloway’s 2013 stage adaptation is back, in a new production by Sam Strong at the Melbourne Theatre Company, before it heads north for a Brisbane season. In the four decades since Thiele’s book was published, our world – and the world of Storm Boy – has utterly changed. Its subtext, by all accounts, has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He would probably have been enraged by the 2019 remake, which features Geoffrey Rush as the adult Storm Boy reflecting on his childhood. Thiele was reportedly angered by a scene in this adaptation, in which men hoon around the sand dunes in a beach buggy, because of the crudity of its environmental message. Stebel, does create some backstory for both we learn that Fingerbone, given a charismatic performance by Yolngu actor David Gulpilil, is estranged from his people because he broke kinship law, and that Storm Boy’s mother died in a car accident after she and Tom separated. Henri Safran’s acclaimed 1976 film, adapted by Sonia Borg and Sidney L. Women don’t exist in this imaginative world, it seems even the pelicans are all Misters. ![]() In Thiele’s original text, we know almost as little about Fingerbone Bill as we do about Storm Boy’s dead mother, who is mentioned just once. Thiele deploys Fingerbone Bill as a stock character – a black man in a white-centred story who selflessly helps the white protagonist a trope that has come to be known in the United States as the “magical Negro”. Storm Boy’s only friend is Fingerbone Bill, an Aboriginal man who acts as the conduit for wisdom. ![]() The book follows the boy’s relationship with the pelican: how he tames it, how he loves it, how it is destroyed by the violence of men. After he releases them back to the wild, one of the birds, Mr Percival, returns. Storm Boy rescues three baby pelicans who are orphaned by hunters. Storm Boy is a coming-of-age fable about a child who lives with his reclusive father, Hide-Away Tom, in a shack on the Coorong on the Ninety Mile Beach. Re-reading it as an adult, it’s not hard to see both the story’s charm and its limitations. As was also normal at the time, I read myself into the protagonist – the books I related to most were about boys. When I read it as a country child, the fable of the lonely boy who rescues and tames a wild creature wasn’t very far from my own experience. Now we have a new word, “solastalgia”, coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to describe the existential sorrow caused by environmental destruction.Ĭolin Thiele’s children’s book Storm Boy was first published in 1964. ![]() Not long ago, it was possible to imagine the natural world as something that transcended human pettiness and greed, the baseline of continuities that would endure beyond our mortal lives. It turns out that we are the worst natural disaster of all, and we don’t even know how to perceive the scale of the catastrophe. Alienated from the ecologies that nurture us, we are unable to fully understand what is happening to our world. More people now live in cities than in the country for the first time in history. In the space of my lifetime, our relationship to the natural world has changed irrevocably.
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