No Sugar: Act 3, Scene 5 Summary & Analysis

Neville, formally dressed, delivers a speech to the Royal Western Australian Historical Society. He stands on a podium in from of a portrait of the King, the Union Jack, and the flag of Western Australia.

Neville is ending a long speech, and concludes with a look back to the early days of Australian colonization. Captain Stirling had laid out rules regarding the treatment of Australia’s extant Indigenous population. Neville quotes Stirling, who wrote that anyone found behaving in a “fraudulent, cruel, or felonious manner” towards the Aboriginal Australians would be prosecuted as though they had committed a crime against a white person in their home country. However, later in the proclamation he also called for men to enroll in the army to protect their colonized territory from “the attacks of hostile native tribes.”

Neville continues to recount the history of Stirling and his band of white colonizers. At first, Aboriginal inhabitants helped white explorers navigate and find food for the first eighteen months of their invasion, but when white settlers shot an Aboriginal Australian who stole some flour, it “was the beginning of the end.” Stirling and his white settlers waged a war on Australia’s native population, cutting off food and water supplies. Some Aboriginal men and women fought back, but white soldiers devastated their communities in retaliation.

Neville concludes his speech by bringing up the genocide of Aboriginal people in Tasmania, which once had a native population of six thousand, and in the end “only one was left alive.” Neville compares that to South Western Australia, which in over seventy-two years reduced its own native population from 13,000 to 1,419, half of whom where half white.