“Once upon a time there was a little girl…”: Colonialism,“illegitimacy”,and speciesism in Scott Rankin’s Beasty Girl: The Secret Life of Errol Flynn

Abstract

This article argues that Scott Rankin’s play, Beasty Girl: The Secret Life of Errol Flynn, uses the life story of Errol Flynn as a metaphor for colonialism in order to contest colonial legal descriptors, such as terra, aqua, and filius nullius. The play focuses on the fictitious “illegitimate” Jamaican daughter of Flynn who travels to Tasmania to follow in her father’s footsteps. The more Carly, Flynn’s daughter, discovers about her father’s life, the more she rejects his colonial values and, by extension, whiteness.

Beasty Girl: The Secret Life of Errol Flynn, a one-woman show written by Australian playwright Scott Rankin, was performed by Paula Arundell when it was staged at Tasmania’s Ten Days on the Island festival in April 2003. Leah Purcell replaced Arundell when the play toured Australia later in the same year. Arundell and Purcell are both black women, of African and Aboriginal Australian descent respectively. In the advertising for the Ten Days on the Island festival, the play was described as follows: “Through the eyes of a woman claiming to be his illegitimate daughter, Beasty Girl digs beneath the glamour of [Flynn’s] life as a matinee idol to reveal a shy man with a silly moustache hamstrung by the bulge in his green tights”. ¹ Despite advertising such as this, Beasty Girl is a serious play which was written to “explode the myths around the Flynn legend” by looking at Errol Flynn’s life from the perspective of his fictitious “illegitimate” Jamaican daughter, Carly. ² Reviewer Kate Herbert states: “Beasty Girl is not a study of Flynn’s life. It is a lateral look at how his irresponsible behaviour affected the lives of an unacknowledged illegitimate daughter and her mother” (2003: n.p.). The play also explores the myths surrounding the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, which contributed to its being hunted to extinction. It revolves around two quest narratives: the “illegitimate” child’s search for an identity and her attempt to be written into the official family narrative, which, in this case, involves following in her father’s footsteps to prove her paternity; and the Thylacine’s quest to find a mate so that its species will survive. The play shows the ways in which the trauma of colonialism impacted on the colonized, humans and non-humans alike, in both former slave and settler colonies. Andrea Smith argues that there are three primary logics to white supremacy: slaveability, which anchors capitalism, genocide, which anchors colonialism, and Orientalism, which anchors war (2012: 68). Extending Smith’s formulation, Billy-Ray Belcourt adds anthropocentrism as the fourth logic. He writes: “Anthropocentrism […] is therefore the anchor of speciesism, capitalism, and settler colonialism” (2015: 4). In Beasty Girl, the first two of Smith’s logics and Belcourt’s additional fourth logic are explored in relation to Jamaica and Tasmania. Metaphorically, the play can be read as the colonized subject’s desire for recognition and belonging in the eyes of the colonizer, to be granted full citizenship within the national community, and to be recognized as fully human. At the same time, the play lays bare the erasure or disappearance of Aboriginal people, the destruction of the land, and the extinction of indigenous species of flora and fauna through settler colonial ideologies and practices. Through the eyes of Carly and the Thylacine, Beasty Girl tells the black history of both Jamaica and Tasmania in order “to challenge white supremacist ‘truths’ of history” (Watson, 2005: 40).

In an interview ³ with academic and documentary film maker Robert de Young (n.d.), Scott Rankin, who is also Artistic Director of Australian arts and social justice company Big hART productions, describes Errol Flynn’s life as a “metaphor for colonial behavior”. Flynn was the son of white settlers and grew up in Hobart, and his accounts of his family and young life emphasize his relationship to the sea and to Tasmania’s flora and fauna. In his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959), Flynn writes:

My primary interest became the sea. I listened to anyone who would talk of it, and I relished the occasional trips we took across the Bass Strait to Sydney. And so the two main streams of thinking in the family were very much of this earth: the primordial creatures of the nearly impenetrable Tasmanian wilderness, and the eternal ocean. (1959: 21)

Flynn had seafaring ancestors on his mother’s side of the family: Lily (Marelle) Flynn née Young was descended from midshipman Edward Young, one of the mutineers on The Bounty (McGinness, 2009: 38). Flynn’s father, a professor of biology at the University of Tasmania, trapped three Tasmanian tigers or thylacines, two of which he dissected, and Errol kept the third as a pet. ⁴ At the age of 17, Flynn travelled to Papua New Guinea, where he worked as a gold prospector. “[A]fter a few shady exploits”, he left the Pacific region in 1933, and “was never to set foot in Tasmania or Australia again” (De Young, 2012: n.p.). Later in life, when he was a famous movie star, Flynn was “shipwrecked” off the coast of Jamaica when his yacht, Zaca, was washed ashore. Falling in love with the island, Flynn bought the Tichfield Hotel in Port Antonio, and Navy Island, a small islet off the coast, where he built a home. Based on his knowledge of Flynn’s reputation as a womanizer, Scott Rankin suggests that there is a strong possibility that Flynn had “illegitimate” children in Jamaica, where he lived (on and off) for many years. Rankin points out in the interview with De Young (n.d.) that Flynn’s behaviour was “highly destructive for other people”. It is Flynn’s destructive behaviour and, by extension, the violence of colonialism, that are the focus of Beasty Girl. The play portrays Flynn’s and thereby Tasmania/Jamaica’s colonial past (and present) and attempts, as I will argue in this article, to explode the myth of colonial legal descriptors such as terra, aqua, and filius nullius.

In her book Roots and Routes (2007), Elizabeth DeLoughrey discusses the connections between islands, such as Tasmania and Jamaica, through the shared histories of colonial expansion via land and sea. She argues: “One of the central but unacknowledged ways in which European colonialism has constructed the trope of the isolated island is by mystifying the importance of the sea and the migration across its expanse” (2007: 2). The descriptors terra and aqua nullius “were used to justify territorial expansion” (2007: 3), simultaneously erasing both the brutality of seafaring colonizers and the existence of Indigenous people/s. Colonial expansion was built on nation-building, cultural imperialism, and the normativity of male subjects “who rely upon a feminized sea in order to imaginatively regenerate across time and place” (2007: 5). In Beasty Girl, Scott Rankin adds the third element of paternal disenfranchisement, filial nullius, meaning child of no one, ⁵ which disconnected the colonized child from his or her paternity and, by extension, inheritance — genealogical, financial, and cultural. Filial nullius can also be read as national (un-)belonging, which ensured that the colonized subject would not have any legitimate connection to the so-called mother country or, perhaps, more appropriately, fatherland. DeLoughrey writes: “Since the European has conquered his island, he departs to narrate the tale from the northern metropole, usually abandoning his island slaves, servants, mistress, wife, or children” (2007: 14). In the case of Carly and her mother in Beasty Girl, they follow Errol Flynn to Los Angeles in order to tell the counter-narrative to the “official” narrative told by (or rather silenced by) the (in)famous movie star, thus giving voice to those in the background of the movie star’s public life. In Beasty Girl, the people, places, and fauna that have been erased from the official record, or deemed empty or extinct, are able to tell the narrative of colonial expansion from their perspective.

Although Beasty Girl was written and directed by a non-Indigenous Australian man, Rankin’s theatre company, Big hART, works with communities to create “change through art” (Joseph, 2012: n.p.). Rankin has worked on many Aboriginal theatre productions, such as Box the Pony, which he co-wrote with Leah Purcell, and Njamatjira, created in collaboration with Albert Njamatjira’s descendants. Through community approaches to theatre-making, Beasty Girl draws on theatre forms that are utilized in both Caribbean and Indigenous Australian theatre to tell women’s stories, such as story-telling, direct audience address, and the transformation of the actor into multiple roles throughout the performance. Beasty Girl is constructed as a set of dialogues between Carly, her Jamaican mother Gracie, the Thylacine, and Errol Flynn; all the characters are performed by a solo performer, and the dialogue is in verse rather than prose. The play uses the life of a Tasmanian Hollywood legend as a point of departure to make political theatre about white settler colonialism in Australia, (neo-)colonial exploitation of New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), and white expatriate privilege in Jamaica. The sea, as DeLoughrey argues above, is the link between these three places which enables the histories of the islands to be put into dialogue with each other. By casting Paula Arundell in the first season of Beasty Girl, the trauma of transatlantic slavery and its legacies are placed in parallel with the experiences of Indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. Equally, casting Leah Purcell in the play’s second season adds another layer of meaning. Carly’s story is similar to that of Indigenous Australian and Papuan women who were also sexually exploited by white men and left with “outside” children. In the Australian context, the presence of Purcell on stage points to the genocide of Indigenous people, particularly in Tasmania where they were deemed symbolically extinguished via the infamous “Black Line” in 1830, ⁶ and systematically exterminated via their removal to Flinders Island in 1833, where most of them perished (Turner, 2009: 110); Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the Palawa, were alleged to have become extinct in 1876 with the death of Truganini (Berk, 2015: 149). Nicholas Smith points out that “the myth of Palawa extinction denied the existence of the Furneaux ‘Islander’ communities and other surviving indigenous Tasmanians” (2012: 283). The projection of film footage throughout the performance enables the solo performer to speak directly to images of Errol Flynn in order to confront him with his misdeeds and concomitantly raise awareness of the trail of destruction he, and other white colonialists, left in their wake.

In the context of Australian theatre history, Beasty Girl fits into a field of drama, staged from the 1950s onwards, that deals with Australia’s national identity, colonialism, and landscape (Akerholt, 2000). Further, it aligns with many Aboriginal Australian plays which explore individual stories of survival, loss of identity, and the fight for land rights (Casey and Craigie, 2011). However, Beasty Girl differs from these works, first, by making a more political statement about the destruction caused by settler colonialism in Tasmania which led to the massacre of Aboriginal people and the extinction of native species of flora and fauna, such as the thylacine; second, through making transnational links between the impact of British colonization in Tasmania (and wider Australia) with that of other former colonies such as Papua New Guinea and Jamaica; third, by placing an “outside” child at the centre of the narrative; and fourth, by giving an Australian marsupial — the thylacine — the opportunity to speak for itself. Yet two years ago a similar play to Beasty Girl, titled They Saw a Thylacine (2015), performed at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, discussed the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger through the eyes of the zookeeper’s daughter and a trapper, rather than from the perspective of the creature directly affected.

Land belonging to someone

At the beginning of the play, the audience is introduced to Errol Flynn through the stories that Carly’s mother, Gracie, tells her daughter about the movie star. Tasmania is represented as “a far away land full of strange creatures that roamed in the night” (Rankin, 2003: 3). ⁷ Notably, there is no reference to Tasmania’s Indigenous people, only to the island’s flora and fauna, thus demonstrating that the “official” narrative about Tasmania, told to Gracie by Flynn, perpetuated the myth of terra nullius or land belonging to no one. Belcourt writes: “settler colonialism operates through a militant and racist politics of territoriality whereby Indigenous lands are physically and symbolically evacuated to be re-made into settler spaces” (2015: 4). It is through the character of the Thylacine, performed by the actor using hand puppets, voice manipulation techniques, and film footage of thylacines, that the audience is made aware of Tasmania as an “isle of genocide” with an “evil past” (21). Brutally and intentionally, Aboriginal people were removed — either to the islands in Bass Strait or through murder and disease — because, as A. Dirk Moses points out, the colonization project would have collapsed if the settlers were forced to abandon the land: “driven by international market forces, they seized the land of Aboriginal groups without compensation or negotiation, and excluded them from their sources of food” (2000: 92). Thus ensued a struggle for survival between Aboriginal people and Europeans which resulted in deaths on both sides, the majority of which were Aboriginal. Because Carly claims to be Flynn’s daughter, and therefore part white, the Thylacine, whom she wants to trap, wonders if the capacity for colonial violence runs “in her blood” (21).

With the annihilation of Aboriginal people, white settlers assumed the role of conquerors and tamers of the environment, their mastery justified by the myth of terra nullius. As Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin write in their editorial for a special issue of Interventions on Green Postcolonialism, “European hegemony replaced such broken communities with hierarchical ontologies and European epistemologies imposed or imbibed through colonial institutions” (2007: 1). The hierarchical ontologies and European epistemologies to which Huggan and Tiffin refer are evidenced by the colonizer’s concurrent fear and fascination with the Other — the Other as “the site of both fixity and fantasy” in Homi Bhabha’s terms (1994: 110) — that occurred in Tasmania, wider Australia, and other former colonies. On the one hand, the belief on the part of settler colonials in Tasmania in the necessity of colonizing Tasmania for European-style agriculture, which resulted in the genocide of Aboriginal people and eradication of various species of flora and fauna. On the other hand, the insistence on the part of the same white settlers that only “full-blood” Aboriginal people were/are authentic and the establishment of zoology and biology departments at the University of Tasmania for the study of native species; and the creation of zoological parks for the enjoyment, initially, of Europeans. In Tasmania, the eradication of the thylacine became a high priority because it provoked fear in the settlers and was perceived to be a threat to their livestock; it was viewed as “the paramount pest to the sheep industry” (N. Smith, 2012: 272). Thylacine were hunted and killed, or captured and placed in Hobart’s zoo as a curiosity for the public. The thylacine’s “resemblance to other apex predators such as wolves fuelled assumptions that they were dangerous, and aroused the fear of settlers” (Attard and Wroe, 2012: 20). The Thylacine in Beasty Girl debunks this myth in the following way:

Thylacine:

Oh yes that’s right use me as a scapegoat,

Like you did back then

When your stupid dogs would kill your own sheep

You’d blame us and put a bounty ⁸ on our heads, till you’d

Nearly wiped us out,

But we were shy, and

We didn’t like your tasteless sheep, we

Preferred a more gamey flesh. (11)

Popular perceptions, based on colonial baggage rather than scientific knowledge, contributed to the thylacine’s extinction, which is, as Owen asserts, a symbol of the “wanton, careless destruction of the natural world” (2003: 25).

In Beasty Girl, the character of the Thylacine operates as a comic device, and as a commentator on Carly’s quest for recognition as her father’s daughter, which the young woman thinks she will achieve through trapping the last thylacine in Tasmania. In true Brechtian style, the Thylacine immediately makes clear that the audience is witnessing a play:

Thylacine:

I know what you’re thinking,

I don’t “exist,”

“Extinct,” Yes…? I am,

Just some “theatrical device,” am I right?

Well, look at her, a black woman, playing Errol Flynn…?

But you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for her…

Yes, I know,

From your great height at the top of the food chain,

It is easy to pronounce me “a fiction”…

I have decided to sit down,

For I now believe, that,

Across the wilds of my homeland, I,

Am the very last Thylacine… (6)

As Cynthia Willett suggests, “[a]nimals not only suffer from acts of cruelty but also assert a sense of their own defiant agency that at times takes a turn toward the comic” (2014: 26). Through direct address, the Thylacine (which is not only the last Tasmanian tiger but the last female of its species) provides the counter-narrative to that told by white settlers, as a “non-human witness to the violent process of colonialism” (DeLoughrey and Handley, 2011: 8), and confronts the audience with its own complicity in the species’ extinction. Through its anthropocentric characterization as an animal that can speak, and the sole, lonely survivor of its kind, the Thylacine (nicknamed Thyla in some versions of the play) tells the tale of its treatment at the hands of humans. It speaks of family members — aunts, sisters, and brothers — who were trapped by the settlers. Its aunt was shot by a settler after stealing a chicken to feed its young, her leg caught in a trap planted outside the chicken coop. “We all heard her calling… something about sorry” (15). Cousin Ben was put in a sack, “gone, caged, a zoo creature, a curiosity” (21). The Thylacine speaks of her cousin’s death after being neglected, ill-fed, and left outside during a Tasmanian winter after the zoo declined in popularity during the 1930s. ⁹

In its stories of the species’ road to extinction, the Thylacine confronts the audience with the notion that being at the top of the food chain does not guarantee one’s future survival. “There was a time, when we too, looked down, invincible | From the unreachable height of our food chain | Here on our faraway island” (7). Parallels are drawn with the life and career of Errol Flynn, who the play casts as a child neglected by his parents, who found solace among the thylacines, and ultimately left Tasmania under a cloud after being expelled from school. Despite being extremely privileged, the play suggests that Flynn was exploited by Hollywood. After making 53 films in which his life imitated his art, many of which were considered B grade, he was forgotten and never acknowledged for his contributions to the Hollywood film industry — presumably because he was “forever tainted” by his philandering, alcoholism, and the court cases alleging statutory rape, although he was acquitted (McGinness, 2009: 40). Beasty Girl makes known that Flynn was contracted to make films until he was both physically exhausted and his popularity had waned. James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull (2009) point out that British Empire films and Westerns emerged as major genres in the film industries of Britain and Hollywood in the 1930s because of “shared Anglo-American values”. Therefore, actors such as Flynn were able to move “effortlessly” between these two genres, both of which had “the narrative of expansion, the taming of the frontier, [and] the clash between civilization and savagery” at their core. In the same vein as forms of capitalist colonialism, Hollywood was focused on making money, and produced British Empire films for the very lucrative British market which “accounted for some 50 percent of all Hollywood overseas revenues” (Chapman and Cull, 2009: 6–7). The Hollywood film industry used narratives of imperialism and colonialism to build its own empire of cultural imperialism, using Errol Flynn’s face as one of its drawcards. Like the thylacine, which at one time was at the top of the food chain in Tasmania, Flynn falls from his position as the most famous face in Hollywood films of the 1930s to the obscurity of a has-been; his fame saw him trapped, like the Tasmanian tiger in Hobart’s zoo, an object of curiosity for the pleasure of the public.

Populated ocean

While the Pacific and the Caribbean did not experience colonialism in the same way or at the same time although there is some overlap in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Errol Flynn’s sea voyages connect the two regions, and his involvement in colonial enterprises such as trade networks, gold prospecting, maritime exploration, and tourism, not to mention the cultural imperialism of Hollywood, highlight the similarities in colonial exploitation of the people, the land, and the sea in both places. Although the sea features strongly in the life of the young Flynn, first in Tasmania and then in Sydney, it is assumed to be the property of Europeans and the source of their well-being:

Dream Flynn:

The grease and sweat and diesel soot,

Exotic ships and cargo, wrapped and craned,

Strange spicy men stare down, from ships’ railing, with,

Hairy tatts, with smoke on lip, with foreign grin,

Exotic seamen beckon. (17)

The lure of the “exotic” captures Flynn’s imagination and prompts him to escape “the home he hated” (18). Like many of Flynn’s roles in B-grade Hollywood films, the ocean is represented as a cardboard cutout world in the play, navigated by hand-puppet and model toy ships. The “real” ocean and islands are mediated through colonial film footage, which points to the fine line between fiction and reality which characterized the life of Errol Flynn.

Flynn’s adventures begin in New Guinea where he worked as a sanitation officer, gold prospector, copra trader, and ship’s captain. In My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn describes New Guinea as “the second largest island in the world” (1959: 38), ironically giving the island more status than it had been given in the colonial discourses which had shaped his thinking and had rendered New Guinea, and other islands in the Pacific, isolated and ahistorical (DeLoughrey, 2007: 98). In the performance of Beasty Girl, Flynn’s arrival in New Guinea is represented by a projection of palm trees with colonial footage of New Guinea “natives” in the background, foregrounding the stereotypes upon which colonial representations of the Pacific were based. The actor dons a beige safari jacket to signify Flynn’s colonial government job, which she promptly removes once it becomes clear that Flynn was accused of being in many unsavoury practices following his exploits in New Guinea, including being a nationalist sympathizer during the Spanish Civil War, and allegedly aiding the Nazis during the Second World War. Pacific Islander voyaging and sovereignty is erased in Flynn’s account of New Guinea, except for his references to a “delightful little native swimming hole” (19). While Flynn acknowledges the existence of New Guinean people and their “ownership” of a waterway, it is the woman swimming in the water hole who captures Flynn’s interest. Not only does he colonize the water hole for his own purposes, but he also initiates a sexual relationship with Maura, “the little native” he meets there (19). Alluding to the character of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Rankin references Flynn’s reflections on “going native” in order to satisfy his sexual desires. “The professor told me once, ‘Any man who has anything to do with native women, stinks in the nostrils of decent white men.’ I wrote back, ‘Dad, I stink’” (19). Flynn’s autobiography goes into much more detail about the movie star’s time in New Guinea, but suffice to say it epitomizes a particular kind of colonial narrative: the civilizing mission, get rich quick schemes through exploitation of the land and the people, sexual desire for the Other, and the dangers of voyaging along the Sepik River into the unknown or heart of darkness. Although each of these colonial enterprises is different from the next, Flynn was involved in all of them (as contradictory as that may be) in the various roles he took on in New Guinea. Rankin, through his representation of Flynn’s time in New Guinea, which is based loosely on My Wicked, Wicked Ways, brings to the attention of Australian theatre audiences Australia’s role as a colonial power in New Guinea and the wider Pacific, a role many Australians know very little about.

Flynn’s life story also includes a shipwreck narrative, which is one of the most pervasive colonial tropes in travel writing and literature — we need only think of Robinson Crusoe — which underpins the colonial construction of aqua nullius. And yet, caught in a hurricane and washed ashore in Kingston Harbour, Flynn had hardly landed on an isolated, unpopulated island; it was definitely not terra nullius, as other constructions of castaway islands have been. Instead, he had arrived in the capital of Jamaica, one of the most important sugar-producing islands in the British Empire, close to the United States, with a prominent position in colonial trading routes, most notably the transatlantic slave trade, as well as a centuries-long precolonial history of Taíno and Carib travel and trade across the waters of the Caribbean Sea. As DeLoughrey writes: “The colonial myth of island isolation, backwardness, and insignificance erases the vital contribution of island resources, landscapes and labour to the constitution of many European empires” (2011: 2). Yet, Flynn’s construction of Jamaica conforms to colonial accounts of island paradises: the island is the discovery of the colonialist, despite having been populated for centuries by humans and non-humans:

Two days, taking water,

No sleep or food,

Hurricane and then just as suddenly, gone again,

Hove to, where is this?

He looked around, delivered to paradise,

Kingston, Jamaica, God’s Own Country. (30)

Flynn’s account of Kingston ¹⁰ in the quotation above can only be read as ironic. In other narratives, the sight of Kingston is described less than favourably by those who arrive there. In Kerry Young’s novel Pao, for example, set in the same era as Errol Flynn’s arrival on the island, the main character describes the city as “the worst kind of shanty town I ever did see” (2011: 17). It is not by accident that Flynn makes Port Antonio on Jamaica’s north coast his home, an area of the island renowned for its beauty, its beaches, and, most importantly, its distance from Kingston. Gracie tells the story of Flynn’s arrival in the following way:

Carly’s Mother:

He anchored his boat and came to the Titchfield Hotel for

A Vodka Martini,

And he liked the bar so much, he bought the place,

Our whole family worked there, cooks and maids and my Pop was the iceman. (31)

In the play, the actor re-enacts a conversation between Pop and Errol Flynn in which Flynn is recognized by the Jamaican man as the film character Captain Blood rather than as the actor who plays him:

As Pop: (Recognising him to others) Hhh! Its Captain Blood!

Errol: Yes Pop, and I like my drinks cold and my women hot, (to audience) “but not necessarily in that order.”

Pop: Ya, ya, Mr Captain Blood sah. (31)

In one of the performances, Arundell adds a couple of lines that do not appear in the script in which Errol tells Pop to “drop the Captain Blood thing. Errol is fine”. While Flynn tries to lessen the distance between himself and his employees by insisting on being called by his first name, Gracie and her family become the property of the colonialist, purchased on a whim by Flynn, and as the play makes clear, dispensed with when the Titchfield Hotel burns to the ground. Of course, the owner did not suffer any hardship, as the hotel was fully insured. Here the “inherent slaveability” (A. Smith, 2012: 68) of Jamaican people is depicted, this time through their employment in the tourist industry.

Child of a certain man

Exploding the myth of filius nullius is one of Beasty Girl’s most important contributions. As Eleanor Conlin Cassella and Barbara L. Voss point out, investigating the connections between colonialism and sexuality has unearthed “hidden transcripts which we are only now starting to recognize, appreciate and interpret” (2012: 9). The stories of Carly and her mother Gracie are two such “transcripts” which attest to the underbelly that connects colonialism and the Hollywood film and glamour industry. Keeping “outside” children segregated through laws that erased the mother and protected the father was one way of ensuring ongoing colonial rule and also “whitewashed” colonial sexual encounters. Beasty Girl brings the “outside” child from the margins to the centre so that she can claim her heritage and family name, and in so doing deconstruct colonial and romance narratives which, as Doris Sommer (1991) argues, are entwined in the creation of foundational fictions. In Beasty Girl, Carly, travels to Tasmania to discover more about her father and to successfully trap a thylacine, with the idea that she will become as famous as Flynn, and in so doing publicly claim the movie star as her father. Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw link the extinction of species such as the thylacine with politics, power, and control (2013: 1) which are, to Carly, the basis for recognition in the eyes of the colonizer, Flynn’s family, the Academy of Arts and Motion Pictures, and the white world. Carly believes that by becoming a famous adventurer in her own right, she will gain the status that having a father bestows, and also the financial rewards that were denied her as an “outside” child (McDowell, 2000: 20). The reward and fame Carly hopes for can be read as a type of reparation for her disinheritance under child law in the Commonwealth Caribbean, which deemed her filius nullius, with the result that she was “accorded none of the legal rights and duties flowing from the relationship of parent and legitimate child” (McDowell, 2000: 30). Yet her actions are a form of colonial mimicry, which align her with settler colonialism rather than with those who have been violently oppressed by it. Andrea Smith makes the point that people may be “implicated in more than one logic simultaneously, such as people who are Black and Indigenous” (2012: 70).

In order to tell the story of Flynn’s arrival in Port Antonio, the actor puts on a sundress to transform into Gracie, Carly’s mother, who at the age of 15 was working at the Titchfield Hotel alongside the rest of her family. Although the play depicts the admiration that Jamaicans working at the Titchfield Hotel had for Flynn, the colour/class hierarchy of Jamaican society in the 1950s pre-Independence, which positioned men like Errol Flynn at its apex, is equally evident: “From the verandah, he’d watch, as her family were summoned, lined up, under Franga-panni below” (32). Flynn biographer, Thomas McNulty, suggests that while Jamaicans were diplomatic and tactful toward Flynn and his family,

there has always been an undercurrent of animosity in certain quarters of Jamaica, an animosity reserved for white people who reveled in their faux aristocratic superiority. Although they seldom voiced their opinions publicly, many Jamaicans considered celebrities like Flynn as nothing more than pompous Colonialists. (2004: 256)

While McNulty’s opinion may be disputed, it points to Flynn’s condescending attitudes and the exploitative practices he was engaged in. Gracie’s interactions with the movie star are an example of this. Flynn continuously comments on Gracie’s scent, reducing her to one of the frangipani growing on the hotel grounds. In the play, her story begins as a romance set to a steelpan accompaniment — “that summer the hurricane brought him to us | That was the summer that brought you to me” (31) — but quickly changes, enhanced through the use of sound and lighting effects to create a dark and stormy Caribbean sky amidst paper-cut out palm trees, to something far more sinister when it is revealed that she was raped by Flynn in his hotel room.

Through the course of the play, Carly goes from being a star-struck child who can only think well of her famous father, to an angry adult who wants to “clear her mother’s name” by proving that Errol Flynn is her father. Gradually, Carly’s “heroic image of Flynn shatters”, the more she learns of her father’s sordid life. After the Titchfield Hotel burns down, Gracie follows Flynn to Hollywood, to try to claim maintenance for the child. Through conversations between the actor on the stage and recorded voice-overs of Errol Flynn, Carly is able to confront her father’s ghost about his decision to abandon her mother, to whom he gave sexually transmitted diseases as well as a child, and who died in poverty working as a domestic in Hollywood:

Mum wrote to the family lawyers after you so conveniently died without telling a soul about us! “Join the queue” they said. She didn’t though did she, no. She died of liver failure from the hepatitis, the syphilis and the poverty you gave her! Didn’t know that did you!? I’m not doing this for some self-centered, narcissistic actor… I’m doing it for her! (25)

Beasty Girl explores the sense of dislocation experienced by the Jamaican “outside” child who desperately wants to know her father. Carly tries to follow in Flynn’s footsteps and, because her mother dies in poverty, attempts to achieve celebrity status herself. Because Flynn died before admitting paternity, which in Jamaican law had to be achieved “during the father’s lifetime” for legal recognition to occur (Thompson-Ahye, 2004: 20), Carly’s desire to trap the Thylacine and publicly proclaim Flynn as her father takes on more urgency. Ultimately, though, Carly accepts that she will never be formally acknowledged as the child of the famous movie star and creates her own life narrative and identity, thus rejecting colonial cultural values and, by extension, whiteness. As actor Leah Purcell says of Carly: “she realises she doesn’t need to do any of it, she needs to be herself” (qtd. in Webb, 2003: n.p.).

Human–animal interactions

In Beasty Girl, the relationship between Carly and the Thylacine offers new ways of thinking about the coexistence of humans and non-humans. Although Carly sets out to trap the Thylacine for selfish reasons, the Thylacine’s commentary on the young woman’s actions emphasizes the Thylacine, too, as a sentient being, and demonstrates that it has agency. While Carly believes herself to be the sneaky hunter, the Thylacine is fully aware of her strategies and traps:

Thylacine:

Shall I walk into it for her?

And be the first one trapped, since our brother Ben.

Think of the publicity for her father then… (21)

Further, the Thylacine makes jokes about Carly’s “identity crisis”, insignificant as it seems when compared with extinction: “You humans with your petty identity crises | You should try extinction and maybe you will.” (7). The Thylacine’s remarks are a critique of speciesism which, as Cary Wolfe asserts, is an institution which is “fundamental […] to the formation of Western subjectivity and sociality […], an institution that relies on the tacit agreement that the full transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the animalistic” (2003: 6). The play makes the point that human mastery over animals is the domain of the white, male, heterosexual colonialist who is provided with fame, fortune, and international recognition through its demonstration, because such mastery has been linked with the masculinist values of strength, skill, and precision.

Using a backlit screen with projections of gum trees, a cardboard cut-out model house perched on the edge of the stage, and a cardboard cut-out hand puppet of a thylacine, both of which appear life-size when they appear as shadows on the backlit screen, the actor crouches in the darkness of the stage and observes the Thylacine as she approaches the trap. Yet, Carly and the Thylacine are not merely hunter and hunted: they are both in positions of marginality. Carly faces erasure from official histories of nation, place, and family; the Thylacine will be preserved as a mythical beast whose image appears in advertising for Tasmanian products and tourist brochures. ¹¹ Carly makes mention of the connection between herself and the Thylacine as follows:

Carly:

She knows me,

Warts and all,

As I her,

Thoughts and all… (25)

Although racism and speciesism have been linked, and there are dangers associated with closely connecting the two because of the racist conflation of blackness and animality, Belcourt suggests that the “logic of anthropocentrism is […] militarized through racial hierarchies that further distance the white settler from blackness and indigeneity as animalized sites of tragedy, marginality, poverty, and primitivism” (2015: 7). Carly’s mother Gracie, like many women who were sexually exploited by white colonialists, was not deemed “marriage material” for a white man. As a consequence, Carly’s claims of paternity are not taken seriously by those she is trying to convince. At the end of the play, the Thylacine offers itself to Carly for capture but instead of trapping it, Carly looks into its eyes and decides to cut the tiger open and climb inside its skin. The combination of woman and tiger, a beasty girl, points to the formation of a new creature; a metaphor perhaps for starting from scratch, strengthening resistance to white supremacy, embracing a marginalized position, finding one’s own identity. The last line of the play, “Once upon a time there was a little girl…”, suggests a new beginning, a new story.

Conclusion

Through the use of Errol Flynn’s life story, Beasty Girl: The Secret Life of Errol Flynn puts in parallel the logics of white supremacy in Tasmania and Jamaica through the experiences of colonized humans and non-humans who were almost erased from official histories. The encounter between Carly, the “illegitimate” black daughter of Flynn, who is caught up in the logic of colonialism, and the Thylacine, which, alongside the genocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians, was marked for extinction, creates an alliance against ongoing settler colonial enslavement and destruction of land and people. Carly’s journey to Tasmania in order to trap a thylacine is analogous with settler colonial practices of killing and capturing indigenous Australian animals for personal fame and/or curiosity. Her desire to achieve recognition as an adventurer demonstrates that although she is black, she is not Aboriginal and does not share Aboriginal people’s connection to the land. By the end of the play, Carly changes her mind about the possibility of achieving such fame and the gains it will ultimately bring her. When she looks into the Thylacine’s eyes, she realizes that her future does not lie in white supremacist acceptance and recognition.

At the same time, through the story of Errol Flynn, as the descendant of settler colonialists, the play shows a vision of colonialism that is complex and ambivalent. On the one hand, Flynn demonstrates a deep connection to Tasmania, particularly to thylacines — as companion, not as prey — but, on the other hand, he was a sexual predator of women. While Flynn is an exploitative colonialist in Australia, New Guinea, and Jamaica, he himself is glamourized, sexualized, and exploited by Hollywood in its film-making ventures, many of which were based on reinforcing and packaging the ideologies of the British Empire and selling them to British audiences for the purposes of making profits.

Finally, by connecting Tasmania and Jamaica through Flynn’s sea voyages, the play is able to contest colonial legal descriptors such as terra, aqua, and filial nullius to argue that colonized lands, seas, and people have histories of their own that run counter to the official histories written by the colonizer; they were not empty, blank, or bereft of genealogy. Moreover, the play demonstrates that British colonization was not monolithic; it did not achieve its aims completely; it was not able to eradicate with certainty Tasmanian tigers or curtail the quest for knowledge and justice on the part of the “outside” children of colonialists.