^{Cover Image: Father-and-daughter duo Derek and Shaquita Nannup perform in Which Way Home. Image by Dana Weeks.}

In the whitefella version of the traditional road movie the protagonists travel from their homes into unknown terrain where they have new experiences and find themselves (or, in the 1969 Dennis Hopper classic Easy Rider, go “looking for America”). 

In the blackfella version of the road movie, the heroes go in the other direction: from the world they struggle to connect to, back to Country — back to where their mob still live and the land that still nurtures and sustains them, if only through memory (Wrong Side of the Road and Bran Nue Dae are examples of such First Nations road movies). 

Such a journey was taken by Queensland writer Katie Beckett, who is from the Murriwarri and Yuggerah mobs, with her father, Les, not long after his sixth heart attack. Les had raised Katie as a single parent when her mother and aunt died in a traffic accident when Beckett was just five years old. 

Beckett said the journey from Ipswich to his home in Goodooga was a thank you for the racism Les had endured while raising her as a single parent, and a chance to bond with her father. 

“I started to realise how hard it would be in the 1990s as an Aboriginal man trying to rear children,” Beckett told the Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s basically an open love letter to say thank you for everything that he’s done for us.” 

Despite the traumatic subject matter, Beckett has created a highly entertaining and marvellously optimistic work that celebrates black resilience and, most importantly, a good Aboriginal man. “I got sick of going for roles as an Aboriginal woman being voiceless, being a victim, being raped and our males being the perpetrators and abusers. It’s not what I grew up with,” said Beckett. 

The coup of Yirra Yaakin’s production of Which Way Home is the casting of father-and-daughter performers Derek and Shaquita Nannup, who have an ease with each other and chemistry that would be hard to replicate with actors who are not related. 

Apart from their physical likeness, the Nannups effortlessly channel a lifetime of love and irritation, with Derek clearly having a ball embodying Beckett’s show-pony father, who got around town in a pair of orange fluro shorts and believed he looked like Sidney Poitier, and Shaquita charming as a held-in modern young working woman yearning for her free-wheeling younger days on Country. 

Shaquita quickly and cleverly nails her alter ego, Tash, in the opening moments of the play, as she fusses over every detail of their upcoming road trip to far north Queensland, laying out a schedule that she expects her father to stick to. 

Her livewire dad, of course, has other ideas, as he demands stops for sightseeing, snacks and toilet breaks, all of which irritates Tash, who is anxious to stick to their plan and constantly reaches out to Siri for directions. 

The friction sends Tash back in time as she recalls her growing up on country, the Edenic world which was shattered after the death of her mother, and the struggle of her father to bring up a little girl during a time when there would have been pressure on him to give up his child. 

The backbeat of the play — and this is what gives it a sophistication and subtlety beyond its knockabout surface — is that in taking Tash away from their small town to give her a shot at a better life he deprived his daughter of her family and the connections to community and to country. 

While the tragic irony of Tash’s father relocating the family in the wake of Tash’s mother’s death is the heart of Which Way Home, it doesn’t resonate strongly enough for it to be a truly first-rate work. 

I love that the comedy injects resilience and high spirits that push back against the victim narrative Beckett is challenging, but it jumps along a bit too quickly for the dramatic interludes to play out and take hold. 

We don’t get enough of Tash’s city life with her boyfriend to fully understand her need for Country. And I wanted to know more about Tash’s absent mother, who has left such a gap in her life, and her father, still unable to talk about it. 

There’s nothing wrong with subtlety and suggestion, but a little more fleshing out of the story of Tash and her dad would strengthen Which Way Home. 

But all the other elements work well, with director Cezera Critti-Schnaars (Nyaki-Nyaki), and Designer Charlotte Meagher creating both a true sense of a journey and the notion of literal and emotional baggage with the simplest of means, with the family’s possessions being used to create the vehicle driven by Tash and her father. 

By journey’s end we have forgotten we’re in a fake car on a stage in Subiaco and have been transported to Country and to a place where the sky seems higher, as Tash’s dad claims, and where he’ll soon be looking down from above, watching over the daughter he’s spent a lifetime protecting. 

Which Way Home is on until May 9.