Brian Gregory Syron (19 November 1934 – 14 October 1993) was an actor, teacher, Aboriginal rights activist, stage director and Australia's first Indigenous feature film director; who has also been recognised as the first First Nations feature film director. After studying in New York City under Stella Adler, he returned to Australia and was a co-founder of the Australian National Playwrights Conference, the National Black Playwrights Conference, and the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust. He worked on several television productions and was appointed head of the ABC's new Aboriginal unit in 1988.
Life Brian Syron was born on 19 November 1934 in the inner Sydney suburb of Balmain. His mother, Elizabeth Murray, was from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, and his father, Daniel Syron, a general labourer, was a Birrippi-Worimi Aboriginal man. Brian was one of eight children.
Syron also spent half of his childhood living with his paternal Birripi-Worimi grandmother, Susie Syron, in his ancestral Worimi lands at Minimbah, New South Wales, up the Coolongolook River from Forster. Minimbah means "home of the teacher" in the Birrippi-Worimi shared language of Gathang. His traditional country encompassed Taree, Forster and the Great Lakes area of the Wang Wauk and Coolonglook rivers on the North Coast. His paternal Dreaming was the eagle, although he described himself as a magpie – half black, half white. He was also exposed to Aboriginal reserve life at Purfleet and Forster through the 1930s and early 1940s, and spent time as a 14- and 15-year-old in Grafton Correctional Centre. Even with this background, Syron told the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) on 15 November 1992: I have no mortgage on being dispossessed or having a tough life. We've all had it. Every Aboriginal person I know of in my generation has had one hell of a time. Nobody has a mortgage on that. We've all been through it. Our obligation, our mandate, as artists is to communicate with our people first.{Syron, HREOC, 15.11.92}
Brian Syron died of leukaemia on 14 October 1993 in Sydney and was buried in Botany Cemetery in Matraville.
Theatre Syron did not identify as Aboriginal through the 1950s and 1960s. He moved to King's Cross in Sydney, and began his artistic career in 1960 at the Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli, Sydney under the guidance of New York-trained American actor/director and esteemed teacher of the Strasberg Method, the late Hayes Gordon.
New York and London Syron decided to go to the United States because he was unhappy with the English style of acting being taught in Australia. He was forced to deny that he was Aboriginal in order to obtain an Australian passport. This was because Indigenous Australians were not allowed to have passports.Eckersley, M. (2012). Australian Indigenous Drama. Tasman Press. Altona. Syron left Australia in 1961 to work in Europe as a fashion model with Dior, Cardin and Balenciaga. In 1961, he moved to New York City, living initially on Fifth Avenue with one of Australia's first "supermodels", Pauline Kiernan. He was accepted as a student with the Stella Adler Studio, where he studied with fellow students Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty and Peter Bogdanovich, and became a teacher himself.
Completing his American training, he spent 12 months in Britain studying with Cicily Berry as well as Doreen Cannon, head of acting, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before returning to New York. There, he co-founded a theatre company based around the Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs in 1966, upstate New York while touring as a director with the Boston Herald-Traveler's Shakespeare Company and doing stints as a teacher for Adler's studio. Syron then returned to New York, where he worked as an actor on various American Shakespeare festivals and with the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and The New Theatre, and also toured through the southern states. Return to Australia Syron returned to Australia, in 1968, following the 1967 referendum. He moved first to Perth, where he directed at Aarne Neeme's The Playhouse, for a short time, before being invited to return to Sydney and direct Fortune and Men's Eyes at his old alma mater the Ensemble. For this he received the inaugural Drama Critics' Award for Best Production and his leading man Max Phipps received Best Actor for his role of "Queenie". He began teaching master classes to in the Stella Adler method to Aboriginal students.
Syron was invited to join Sydney's Old Tote Theatre by Robert Quentin, Head of Drama at the University of New South Wales, and Robin Lovejoy, Artistic Director. He was the first Indigenous Australian to work as a director in the mainstream Australian theatre industry and in 1972 was appointed Theatre Consultant for the Aboriginal Arts Board of the inaugural Australia Council for the Arts, headed for the first time by an Indigenous person, the artist Wandjuk Marika.
Australian National Playwrights Conference
The following year, 1973, Syron co-founded the Australian National Playwrights Conference (ANPC) with Katharine Brisbane, which continued to take place annually until at least 2006. Lloyd Richards, then head of acting at Yale University and artistic director of the American National Playwrights Conference wrote to the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council in September 1993: The National Playwrights Conference of Australia exists because Brian Syron visited the National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. and recognised it as an important idea for Australia, and he went back to champion the possibility. Others visited and the rest is history." {Lloyd G. Richards, 9.5.1993}
Syron returned to the theatre again in 1976 with his direction of Dimboola (written by Jack Hibberd) in Newcastle as well as at Bonapartes Theatre Restaurant, Kings Cross, Sydney, where his stage production ran continuously for the next two years and four months. He followed "Dimboola" with a production of the American play Falling Apart by Monte Merrick at the New Theatre, Newtown, Sydney, and in 1978 he played the role of "The Actor" in a production of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths which ran for six weeks at the Sydney Opera House. In this same year, he opened the New Group Theatre at the All Nations Club, Kings Cross, where he directed among other productions A Tribute to Tennessee Williams, before the ongoing costs of keeping an independent theatre going forced Syron to close after 12 months.
Aboriginal Theatre Company
He co-founded the Aboriginal Theatre Company (ATC) in 1981 with scriptwriter/playwright/director Bob Merritt in order to tour Merritt's play The Cake Man, under Syron's direction, to the 1982 World Theatre Festival in Denver, Colorado, where the play received a tremendous audience response.Katharine Brisbane, Theatre Critic, Sydney Morning Herald Following this success, the play then toured various colleges around the United States. The Cake Man was performed at the World Theatre Festival in Denver, Colorado, Returning to Australia, Syron directed a season of The Cake Man at the Universal Theatre in Fitzroy, Melbourne after which it was funded by Australian federal government's Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs to play at the 1983 Warana – Commonwealth Arts Festival, Brisbane in Queensland where it was performed at the Edward Street Theatre.Eckersley M. (2012). Australian Indigenous Drama. Tasman Press. Altona.
In 1986, Syron, on behalf of the Aboriginal Arts Board, published a "Questionnaire seeking support for establishment of National Aboriginal Theatre Company", ahead of a National Black Playwrights Workshop at James Cook University in Townsville.
National Black Playwrights Conference In January 1987, Syron founded the National Black Playwrights Conference (NPBC), which was held at the Australian National University, Canberra. In an interview with Angela Bennie, Australia's leading Indigenous actress Justine Saunders commented : It was Brian Syron, in fact, who was the instigator not only of the first National Black Playwrights Conference but the National Playwrights Conference. Syron always said our culture is an oral one, it comes through our painting, through our singing, through our stories that's how we pass down our laws, that's how we have passed down our history for 60,000 yearsBennie, Angela, "A Modern Stage for Stories yet Unheard" Sydney Morning Herald, 6.28.1993:19
Eva Johnson was writer/director of the conference. During the conference, the delegates awarded Syron the 1987 inaugural Harold Blair Award for his Lifetime Achievements in the Performing Arts, which brought with it the additional honour of the title "Elder".Eckersley. M.(ed.) 2009. Drama from the Rim: Asian Pacific Drama Book. Drama Victoria. Melbourne. 2009. (p7-9)
ANTT
As a result of the first NBPC, Syron, as a member of a steering committee which included Rhoda Roberts, Kevin Gilbert, Lydia Miller, Michael Johnson (who presented two SBS Television series in 1989Guide to the moving image recordings from the production of First in Line by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), 1989, via AIATSIS and 1991), Suzanne Butt, and Lesley Fogarty, with Justine Saunders as adviser, proposed and co-founded the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust (ANTT).
ANTT was constituted as a limited company in May 1988, and was staffed by Aboriginal artists who were committed to the promotion and protection of all Aboriginal arts. It founded a National Aboriginal Theatre, and provided advice to a number of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous production companies, theatre companies and educational institutions, and individuals.
In May 1988 ANTT staged The Keepers, by Bob Maza, at the Belvoir Street Theatre, which was the first all-Aboriginal production staged in Australia.
The Second National Black Playwrights Conference was held in 1989 at Macquarie University, which gave rise to the Corroboree of Aboriginal National Storytellers.
In March 1990 ANTT staged the world premiere of Munjong, by Richard Walley and directed by Vivian Walker (son of Oodgeroo Noonuccal), at the Victorian Arts Centre. The actor David Field (brother of Rhoda Roberts' partner Steve Field) played a violent husband of Roberts' character, a woman who doesn't know that she's Aboriginal. Roberts later related a story about an elderly Aboriginal woman, who had never been in a theatre before and was sitting in the front row, who got up to help protect the actress from the husband's blows. Roberts said: "That was when I realised we'd really made a point. Aboriginal people were seeing art that mirrored their lives".
In June 1991, after its board of directors in protest against the lack of financial support from government, the ANTT ceased operations.
Last work
Syron carried out a two-week workshop, a stage reading, plus a production in 1991 at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Redfern, Sydney of Mudrooroo Narogin's "courageous and brave new play"Syron, Kicking Down the Doors: 370 The Aboriginal Demonstrators Confront the Declaration of the Australian Republic on 26 January 2001 with the Production of "Der Auftrag" by Heiner Muller and starring Justine Saunders, Michael Watson, David Kennedy, Pamela Young, Ray Kelly and Graham Cooper. The play and the production are also the subject of Mudrooroo Narogin's book The Mudrooroo/Muller Project – A Theatrical Casebook, with a chapter by Syron and edited by Gerhard Fischer in collaboration with leading Indigenous academic Paul Behrendt and Syron. Syron was too ill to do more than direct the stage reading of the play.
Teaching