A person who intimately touches every disparate crevice of her soul: tenderly embraces every wayward part of flesh and blood: gathers-up each amiable, gentle leaf and robust, wild blade of love in her heart: such is the woman those, who knew her best, named “Kabbarli”. Or rather, such is actress Robina Beard embodying that woman in the play “Tales of Kabbarli”.

“Kabbarli” is the name Aboriginal people bequeathed. Others knew her as Daisy Bates.

Robina Beard does not perform the role. When she moves on stage, she viscerally incarnates Kabbarli:Beard breathes Kabbarli into life: dances through gesture and intonation: softly disrobes the audience with poetry.

For Daisy Bates tapped language to name both the exquisite mystery that springs from being of the land, as well as its desecration.

Who better captured the sensuous trembling of time-immemorial dawn and the usurpation of its lifeblood?

Who better brings to life on stage the ancient mystery, and its savage betrayal, than actor Robina Beard?

Writer/director Geoffrey Sykes collects the opal-gems of Bates’s activist/anthropological writings, as well as the ochre-grit of her lyric prose, in a rich tapestry that is the playscript he and Beard have refined.

“Tales of Kabbarli” is playing at the Horizon Theatre, Wiley Park. Future productions of the play are to be mounted. For more information email playscript1@gmail.com.