Talking to ghosts: Dylan Van Den Berg's award-winning play Milk asks the hard questions

To sit with a person - a ghost, most likely, with nothing to lose from telling the truth - and hear all the stories you were never told as a child. To finally understand the silence and fill the gaps.

For 28-year-old Canberra actor and playwright Dylan Van Den Berg, it was a scenario rich with possibility. A Palawa man of mixed heritage, he had grown up in Tasmania with his own questions about where his family had come from.

"When I had questions of the people that I wanted to ask, I couldn't," he says.

"And then I thought, what if I just did? What would I find out, and would I like everything that I found out?"

His own questions have, after four years of development, turned into a play, Milk, produced by The Street Theatre and due to open there next month. He has also just won the prestigious Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the NSW Premiers Literary Awards, a massive vote of confidence for a first work that has evolved into something so simple and pared back, it's set on a metaphysical island with three characters don't even have names.

They are just A - a woman who bore the brunt of the oppressors' violence, B - her granddaughter who escaped from and hid the truth of her past, and C - a young, modern-day Palawi man desperate for answers.

All three are based, loosely, on the women in his own family, the ones he's heard about through the stories passed down and filtered through the generations.

"I guess each character is kind of a combination of a number of different people," he says.

"Character A is based on potentially an ancestor from the early 1800s in Tasmania who experienced first contact. B is a combination of a number of family members who were alive over a period of time in the mid-1900s."

Van Den Berg knows he has an ancestor who was among the women who, in the late 18th century, were removed from their mainland tribes and taken to Bass Strait to live with the white sealers who settled there.

The play, a conversation between the young man and the two women - one alive, the others ghosts - is both gut-wrenching and unexpectedly funny. A experiences loss and violence - and reveals an act of betrayal that has echoed down into the present. B never wanted any of her past, and did everything she could to hide her true identity. And now C wants to know why, and what was at stake.

"Finding out what actually happened to this group of women who were taken to the Flinders Island, it was pretty harrowing," Van Den Berg says.

"And then the guilt associated with that - I'm descended from them, my life hasn't been anything like that. So do I own their stories? And do I have a right to tell them?"

We are sitting on a temporary set in the rehearsal room of The Street Theatre, on the edge of the Australian National University campus. It's a precinct he knows well; he arrived in Canberra more than 10 years ago to study drama and Indonesian, and train as an actor.

He had his first roles at The Street, and, when the time came that he began writing down his ideas, it was The Street's artistic director, Caroline Stacey, who saw the germ of an idea and encouraged him to cultivate it.

The set - sparse, just rocks and wooden benches, really - gives an idea of the play's bleak subject matter.

But the costume donned for the first time by actor Katie Beckett, who plays B, is a hoot - a fuchsia nightie with matching negligee, fluffy slippers and topped with a 60s wig. There's some bawdiness there, a devil-may-care approach that many women - especially Indigenous women - would have needed as they made their way through a world that did not respect, much less understand, their stories.

"She's based on a certain woman from the time I think, kind of no nonsense, who really would do anything to survive, but are kind of vulnerable in their own way as well," he says.

Van Den Berg has always known about his Indigenous heritage, but he says it wasn't until relatively recently that he understood the shame that had been attached to this kind of background, especially in Tasmania.

"In my family, you know, I have people who embrace our heritage and celebrate and others who choose not to acknowledge it," he says.

"It's really interesting. But then writing the play was a way to understand that because I thought, why would you want to hide this? And it became clear that it was really a means of survival. You know, if you got off Flinders Island, in the early 30s, and 40s, you were known as a half-caste. And so if you could integrate into Tasmanian society and pass as white, then you would do that."

It was a chance conversation overheard years ago on the street that gave him the kernel of an idea for a play and later, its title.

"It was around someone talking about 'passing as white' and talking about having milky skin. It stuck in my brain," he says.

"Also there are lots of references to motherhood and nurturing and so on throughout the play as well."

Throughout the writing process, he has been guided by his own aunt, Gaye Doolan, who has been a cultural advisor and family sounding board. It's no accident that both the other characters in the play are women - his life has been shaped by them, both living - his mother and grandmother - and long gone.

His own position in the world is both defined by his ancestors, and as far away as it's possible to be from the ordeals of Indigenous people who experienced first contact, and their descendants bearing the brunt of mid-century white Australia.

Educated, middle-class, living in Canberra and winning awards for his writing, he is, nevertheless, descended from two very different peoples that converged, at some stage, and created new stories.

"One of the big questions of the play... is that C is descended from this incredible line of resilient Aboriginal people, and then also the coloniser as well," he says.

"One of the lines in the play is that he's got one hand gushing with blood, and the other hand is holding a knife. And so he's both sides of that story.

"Coming to terms with that, and where you identify and so on, is pretty difficult. And I'm not even sure I have an answer."

But in many ways, the theme of the play - a man who takes a metaphysical journey back to the land of his mob, to find out where it all began - plays perfectly into our times.

What began as an idea six years ago - one it took him a while to address - was ready to be presented in full to the world in 2020.

But the world, as we know, had a different plan that year.

Street director Caroline Stacey says in many ways, COVID helped the play develop further, and take on a different form to what would otherwise be presented.

"Dylan, as an artist, has been part of the Street family for a good decade, and one of the things that we do here is we do take a long-line approach to artists," she says.

"So we think about their careers, and have ongoing conversations with them about what they're doing, what they want to do and where they want to be."

Dylan first came to The Street as an actor, appearing in several plays and working on various projects.

When he began to talk about his ideas for what would eventually become Milk, Stacey said she could scent its potential from the start.

"There was something about the personal nature of this story, and what was surfacing for Dylan and how he was talking about the material that just felt like it was important for him to pursue," she says.

"[It was] that he might find his voice as a writer in the pursuit of really a story about himself and his ancestors and his relationship to Australia, from both an indigenous and non-indigenous perspective."

He became part of The Street's writing program, and then of its First Seen program, whereby audiences can watch actors read the play and help workshop its development.

But as the pandemic descended and the year was put on hold, writers like Van Den Berg had the opportunity to delve further into such projects.

"In actual fact, the interruption of COVID enabled us to do another development and actually quite a deep investigation of sort of mining of characters and relationships," she says.

It's possible, too, that this extra year of development helped the play to win the Nick Enright Award. Van Den Berg, for one, is thrilled at the validation it has brought - apart from the very welcome $30,000 and a trophy for his shelf.

"It's a real vote of confidence, that someone's going oh, you know, yeah, you're not too shit at this," he says.

"And to receive an award named after Nick Enright, one of the country's great writers of stage and screen is just - I'm still speechless about it, to be honest."

So what does he think the judges saw in the work?

"I think, potentially the play is speaking to a moment in Australia, where, you know, last year we had our own Black Lives Matter revelations.

"I felt, I think, as an indigenous writer that deaths in custody have been kind of swept under the rug or haven't been spoken about, and that we all have a responsibility to shine a light on some of the things that are still impacting on our communities.

"So I felt an increased responsibility to contribute in that way."

Stacey says Van Den Berg's award is a win for Canberra as much as for him.

"I was also incredibly excited for Canberra, it is wonderful for us to have a significant playwright and playwriting award actually come to Canberra and for work that has arisen from the work that's been done here," she says.

In practically the same week, Stacey took another call, this time from Andrew Myer - of the Myer dynasty - informing her that The Street had won the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award.

"These are incredibly prestigious awards on the Australian landscape, and you don't apply for them in any way, so literally, it did come out of the blue," she says.

"It's an award that recognises the journey an organisation has been on, so really our last decade of work, championing new work made in Canberra."

The Street is a relatively young institution, a year shy of 25 years old, and Stacey has been at the helm for 15 years. Last year was not an easy one for the arts - particularly for theatre - but The Street was able to continue to produce work, if not live to audiences, then behind the scenes in preparation for whatever the future was set to bring.

"It's a huge affirmation for, actually, a community, because so many people make up the work that happens at The Street," she says.

"We're really trying to speak to how we experience the world now, and that hopefully we're capturing a point in time and we're contributing to the Australian canon of theatrical work...

"In a way, it's anchoring, if I could put it like that.

It's such an unstable profession, and last year was so dynamic, we just never knew what was happening."