The heartbreaking question at the core of a queer Indigenous love story

2 weeks ago 2

By Cassie Tongue

September 24, 2025 — 12.35pm

THEATRE
Whitefella Yella Tree
Wharf Theatres, Sydney Theatre Company, until October 18
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★★

Whitefella Yella Tree is a new, great Australian love story, and it’s set in the time before this place was forced into that name, and forcibly changed, by colonisation.

Ty (Joseph Althouse), teenage apprentice storyteller for his River Mob, and Neddy (Danny Howard), a young Mountain Mob warrior in the making, have been appointed messengers for their people. At a meeting place near a lemon tree, they share information about the new white people who have arrived on their Country.

As they exchange stories, bicker, and talk, they fall in love. It’s giddy and glorious.

Joseph Althouse and Danny Howard in a touching scene from Whitefella Yella Tree.

But that new lemon tree is growing. The boys stand on the cusp of mass dispossession, violence, and change, and are going to have to make impossible choices about how to survive. How do you hold onto each other when a shocking new force wants to drive you apart?

Palawa writer Dylan Van Den Berg has crafted a connection that sings and zings, making you smile and blush along with the pair as they try to impress each other, find new ways to tease each other, and learn to flirt together. It’s a love story to fall in love with, and it’s no surprise that the play and production has been picked up by Sydney Theatre Company after its beautiful first season by Griffin Theatre Company in 2022.

Watch this poetic, tender and deftly plotted play become a new Australian classic.

This is a story that restores queer identities and relationships to the sacred places they have held in Indigenous culture for thousands of years, before they were hidden and turned sour by restrictive colonial ideas of sexuality and gender, often imposed via conservative Christianity. We see this great loss begin to happen in the play, and we also see that Ty and Neddy’s love is precious and jewel-like: it glows. You want to hold it in your hand and protect it. It aches to know you can’t.

Joseph Althouse and Danny Howard in Whitefella Yella Tree – will their love survive the tumult brought by the arrival of the colonists?

Althouse and Howard, both new to the production (the roles were played at Griffin by the brilliant pair of Guy Simon and Callan Purcell), are excellent, with an endearing and lovably awkward sense of self-discovery that’s richly funny and quietly moving. Co-directors Declan Greene and Amy Sole have lovingly built Ty and Neddy’s intimate world, shaping scenes that come alive with conversation and embrace the new physicality of people growing into their own bodies.

Now in a bigger theatre than the play’s first home at Griffin, the scenes still feel intimate, though Mason Browne’s set has to work harder to frame and hold them in space. Kelsey Lee and Katie Sfetkidis’ lighting design holds them too, with rich afternoon suns and cool evenings and sudden shifts into darkness and danger, their sky a friend and warning; composer Steve Toulmin helps the love story echo through time.

If you didn’t see Whitefella Yella Tree in 2022, don’t miss your chance to see it now. You’ll want to say you were there at the beginning – that you watched this poetic, tender and deftly plotted play become a new Australian classic.

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