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How does The 7 Stages of Grieving use dramatic form and Indigenous storytelling traditions to dramatise collective Aboriginal Australian grief?
Detailed dramatic analysis of The 7 Stages of Grieving by Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman (1995), including form, structure, performance style and themes
A focused answer to the HSC Drama core dot point on The 7 Stages of Grieving. The seven-section structure based on the Kubler-Ross grief stages, the solo performer convention, the integration of monologue with song, dance and visual imagery, and the relationship between personal and collective grief.
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What this dot point is asking
NESA expects detailed knowledge of The 7 Stages of Grieving. Structure, performance form, the formal integration of monologue, song, dance and ceremony, the specific scenes, and the relationship between personal experience and collective Aboriginal Australian history. Strong answers analyse Enoch and Mailman's formal choices, not just the themes.
The answer
The play and its history
- Premiered
- Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, Brisbane, 14 September 1995, directed by Wesley Enoch, performed by Deborah Mailman. Then to Belvoir Street, Sydney, 1996. Then on tour nationally and internationally including the 1997 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
- Authors
- Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, with material developed collaboratively in the rehearsal room. The published text is credited to Enoch and Mailman.
- Original performer
- Deborah Mailman, whose performance has come to define the role. The play has subsequently been performed by other actors including Chenoa Deemal in revivals.
- Length
- Approximately 60 to 75 minutes, played without interval.
The seven-section structure
The play is divided into seven sections. The published edition labels them roughly as follows (different productions vary slightly):
- Sorry Day. Set against the National Sorry Day movement. Direct address to the audience about reconciliation.
- Photo Story. Photographs of family members placed on the floor; the performer narrates relationships and losses.
- Murri Gets a Dress. A more personal, almost domestic scene of growing up Aboriginal Australian.
- Suitcase Opera. A metaphor of luggage and dispossession. The suitcase carries multiple meanings: removal of children, displacement from country, the labour of carrying a history.
- Black Skin Girl. A scene about racial identity and being looked at.
- I See, Whose Eyes? On surveillance, on being watched.
- Acceptance. The closing movement. Not a resolution, but an arrival.
Different editions and productions sequence and name sections slightly differently. The published Currency Press text is the standard reference.
The seven structure loosely echoes the Kubler-Ross stages of grief (Shock, Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Testing, Acceptance), but Enoch and Mailman explicitly use the framework as scaffolding rather than as a literal mapping. The play insists on cyclical and shared grief, not on linear individual recovery.
Dramatic form
- Solo performer
- One Aboriginal Australian woman on stage throughout. The convention is theatrically declarative: this is one body carrying many stories.
- Direct address to the audience
- The performer speaks to the audience as themselves, not (mostly) through a character. The fourth wall does not exist for most of the play.
- Integrated song and dance
- The play moves between spoken word, song (often traditional, sometimes contemporary), and physical sequences including dance. Indigenous performance traditions inform the structural integration.
- Use of objects as ceremony
- A block of ice that melts. Photographs of named family members placed on the floor. A suitcase. Dirt. Each object carries symbolic weight beyond its literal function and is treated with ceremonial care.
- Bilingual and multilingual elements
- Aboriginal language phrases appear alongside English. The play does not translate all of its language for the non-Aboriginal audience; the audience is asked to sit with not understanding everything.
- Music and sound
- Original and traditional music. The sound design is integral to the experience, not background.
Key images
- The melting block of ice. A body. A history. A weight that will not last but is real while it lasts.
- The suitcase. Dispossession. Movement. The labour of carrying memory.
- The photographs placed on the floor. Named individuals, named families. The performer walks among them.
- The red dirt. Country. The performer's relationship to country.
- The dress, the hair, the body. Aboriginal Australian femininity, surveilled and lived.
Themes
- Personal and collective grief
- The body on stage stands for an individual and for a community. The play refuses to separate the two.
- Aboriginal Australian history
- Stolen Generations, deaths in custody, the colonial frame, dispossession from country. The play does not lecture; it performs grief specific to these histories.
- Reconciliation
- The play was first performed at a moment when National Sorry Day, the Bringing Them Home Report (1997) and the wider reconciliation conversation were forming. The Sorry Day section addresses this context directly.
- Identity, family, country
- Three Aboriginal Australian concepts that the play insists belong together.
- Sustained life alongside sustained loss
- The play is not only about grief. Comic moments, joyful moments, and ordinary moments sit alongside the mourning. The play insists on Aboriginal Australian life as continuing.
The play in performance
Productions of The 7 Stages of Grieving have used minimal set: usually a bare stage with the objects of the play placed and moved through the action. Lighting is integral; long pools of light hold the performer in solo address, then open to wider washes for dance and group song sequences (though the cast is one).
The Belvoir Street production (1996) and its tour cemented the play's national reach. Subsequent revivals include the Queensland Theatre Company production (2008, directed by Enoch) and the Belvoir 2014 anniversary revival.
The play and the wider Indigenous theatre movement
The 7 Stages of Grieving was not the first Aboriginal Australian play, but it was the breakthrough into the mainstream institutional repertoire. After it, Jane Harrison's Stolen (1998) became the other touchstone of late-1990s Indigenous Australian theatre. Together the two plays established a tradition that Nakkiah Lui, Leah Purcell, Andrea James, Andrea Briggs and others have continued.
How the play is examined
Section I excerpts from The 7 Stages of Grieving typically present one scene and ask candidates to analyse Enoch and Mailman's dramatic choices. Strong answers identify the section, name the dramatic technique, and link to the play's wider structure.
Section III essays often ask candidates to consider Indigenous Australian theatre as a movement, with The 7 Stages of Grieving as one of two prescribed works. Strong essays move between detailed analysis and contextual placement.
Past exam questions, worked
Real questions from past NESA papers on this dot point, with our answer explainer.
Practice (NESA)6 marksHow does The 7 Stages of Grieving use form to communicate Aboriginal Australian grief?Show worked answer →
A 6-mark "how" needs three formal choices with named scenes.
- The seven-section structure
- The play is divided into seven sections that loosely follow the Kubler-Ross grief stages (Shock, Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, Testing, Acceptance), reframed for collective Aboriginal Australian experience. The structure refuses linear narrative: each section is a different mode of grief rather than a step in a plot. The audience experiences grief as cyclical and shared, not as a personal journey.
- The solo performer
- The original performer was Deborah Mailman. One woman performs all the voices, embodying a collective experience. The convention of the solo performer asks the audience to recognise that the grief on stage is not one person's; the body on stage stands for many.
- Integration of multiple forms
- Monologue, dance, song, direct address, ceremony, dialogue with the audience, the use of objects (the suitcase, the dirt, the photographs). Indigenous storytelling traditions inform the structure. The play does not stay inside the conventions of Western naturalistic theatre.
- Specific images and ceremonies
- A block of ice melts on stage in one section. Photographs are placed on the floor. Dirt is scattered. Each image carries weight beyond its literal function: the ice is the body, the photographs are the dead, the dirt is country.
Markers reward specific scenes, attention to form, and the link between form and content.
Practice (NESA)10 marksDiscuss the relationship between personal and collective grief in The 7 Stages of Grieving.Show worked answer →
A 10-mark "discuss" needs a thesis, three or four developed paragraphs and named scenes.
- Thesis
- The play deliberately collapses the distinction between personal and collective grief, using one performer's body to dramatise Aboriginal Australian grief across a continent and across generations.
- The personal frame
- The opening, "Murri Gets a Dress", grounds the play in a specific Aboriginal Australian woman's life. The performer addresses the audience as herself; the experience is autobiographical in register. Personal mourning for a grandmother appears in several sections.
- The collective frame
- "Mum's Story" connects the personal grief to a wider collective history. The deaths in custody section names recent deaths and the systemic context. Photographs of Aboriginal Australian people placed on the floor invite the audience to read individual portraits as members of a larger family.
- The bridge: ceremony and the body
- Funeral and grieving ceremonies feature throughout. The solo performer's body becomes the site where the personal and the collective meet. When she dances, when she sings, when she addresses the audience, she is at once the individual and the representative.
- Specific scenes
- The "Suitcase Opera" carries the metaphor of luggage and dispossession. "Photograph Story" places named family members on the floor. The deaths-in-custody section uses recent dates to refuse historical distance. The "Sorry Day" section places the play in a national reconciliation conversation.
- Conclusion
- The play uses formal choices (solo performer, integrated dance and song, direct address, photographic objects) to dramatise grief that is at once one woman's and a nation's. The two cannot be cleanly separated.
Markers reward specific scenes, named formal choices, and a sustained argument about the formal-political link.
Related dot points
- Indigenous Australian theatre as a major movement in contemporary Australian drama, including Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, Jane Harrison, Andrea James, Nakkiah Lui, Leah Purcell, and the dedicated Indigenous theatre companies
A focused answer to the HSC Drama core dot point on Indigenous Australian theatre. Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving (1995), Jane Harrison's Stolen (1998), Nakkiah Lui, Leah Purcell, and the companies (Ilbijerri, Yirra Yaakin, Moogahlin) that have built sustained Indigenous theatre infrastructures.
- The historical and cultural context of Australian theatre, including the development from colonial entertainment through to a distinctive national tradition from the 1950s onwards
A focused answer to the HSC Drama core dot point on Australian theatre history. The colonial heritage, the postwar Australian Performing Group and New Wave, the rise of state theatre companies (Belvoir, STC, MTC, QT), the prominence of Indigenous theatre from the 1990s, and how this history informs HSC prescriptions.
- Contemporary Australian playwrights of the 2000s and 2010s, including Andrew Bovell, Hannie Rayson, Michael Gow, Patricia Cornelius, Joanna Murray-Smith and the major institutional companies that produce them
A focused answer to the HSC Drama core dot point on contemporary Australian playwrights. Andrew Bovell, Hannie Rayson, Michael Gow, Patricia Cornelius and Joanna Murray-Smith; the institutional companies that produce them (STC, MTC, Belvoir, QT); and the formal range of twenty-first-century Australian theatre.