Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this article contains references to people who have died

It's 1839. Three Gunaikurnai people come across a wet lump on the beach.

On closer inspection, it turns out to be a body, with face down in the sand, lips blue.

The woman is a survivor of a shipwreck, perhaps the Britannia or the Britomart, both ships that were lost in the Bass Strait that year.

This story is told in the opening scene of The Black Woman of Gippsland, a new play written and directed by Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai theatre-maker Andrea James (Sunshine Super Girl), presented by Melbourne Theatre Company for YIRRAMBOI festival.

The Gunaikurnai people give the woman food, water and a possum-skin cloak, and she follows them when they move camp. Eventually, she becomes "kin": "And Auntie makes her a daughter / And Uncle makes her his wife."

According to colonial legend, the woman on the beach is the White Woman of Gippsland, who colonial settlers believed was captured by local Gunaikurnai people in the 1840s.

The story transfixed Melbourne at the time but had tragic repercussions for Gunaikurnai people that are still felt today.

Though never confirmed, the woman's rumoured existence sparked several rescue expeditions. It resulted in the arrest of a Gunaikurnai lore man known as Bungelene, who died along with his wife after being imprisoned without charge for 18 months.

"The capture of this woman was pinned on him, and he died in custody. He was one of our first black deaths in custody in this country," James tells ABC Radio National's The Stage Show.

A colonial legend

The play's protagonist, Jacinta (Chenoa Deemal), is a researcher completing her PhD, a "blakademic" who James says she modelled on women she admires, including Lou Bennett, a senior lecturer in Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, writer Romaine Moreton and artist Fiona Foley.

"I've been influenced by so many incredible Aboriginal women scholars … so I knew I wanted this woman to be uber-smart, tussling it out in academia."

Through Jacinta, we learn about the legend of the White Woman of Gippsland, the subject of her thesis.

In 1840, Angus McMillan, a Scottish-born pastoralist and early coloniser of Gippsland, stumbled upon a group of Gunaikurnai people near Port Albert.

"He said that he saw a woman clad in a cloak who kept looking back at him," James says.

The group disappeared, leaving behind them a collection of objects typical of what might wash ashore after a shipwreck: clothing, tools, sewing supplies, blankets, bottles and a Bible.

In a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1840, McMillan — who went on to perpetrate numerous massacres of Gunaikurnai people, including the Warrigal Creek massacre in 1843, where 150 people were shot — suggested the woman was European and "a captive".

McMillan also found the body of a two-year-old baby wrapped in a kangaroo skin bag, who he believed was also of European descent.

"They assumed that it was this woman's baby. And so, from that, a legend was generated," James says.

As rumours of sightings of the woman continued to circulate, the city's power brokers, meeting at the exclusive Melbourne Club (still in existence today), decided to act.

"By then, all sorts of letters to the editor are being written about this poor, fluttering pigeon in a nest of vultures," James says.

"They raised money to find this damsel in distress … [and] they sent this expedition party out."

The rescue party pinned handkerchiefs embroidered with messages in English and Gaelic to trees, in the hope the woman, who was said to be Scottish or Irish, would find them.

"There's a family on Gunaikurnai country who has one of these handkerchiefs in their possession," James says.

Although the woman was never found, the story made its way into Gunaikurnai culture, too.

References to shipwrecks and a white woman appear in traditional songs, which feature in the play.

"There's [also] a story about a legend of a woman with long red hair who lived in a cave," James says.

In these stories, the Gunaikurnai people don't hold the woman captive; they help her.

It shows how the official historical record can mislead, James says.

"[The colonisers are] thinking they're seeing one thing, but actually another thing is happening from our point of view.

"It's about reading between the lines."

Who are the missing women?

Setting the story in the present day was a deliberate choice.

"If it was just a purely historical telling, then people would say, 'That happened in 1840 — we've moved on,'" James says.

When Jacinta goes off-grid to throw herself into her thesis, she inadvertently triggers a missing-persons case.

Her Auntie Rochelle (Ursula Yovich) has to return to the police station where her sister, Jacinta's mother, died in a cell years earlier.

"For her to put in a missing-persons report and to find her missing niece, she has to return to the scene of a crime," James says.

James wrote the play against a tragic backdrop: the scourge of Aboriginal deaths in custody, including that of Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day, who died in a police cell in 2017.

At last count, there have been at least 590 Aboriginal deaths in custody since 1991.

As James was writing the play, "these deaths in custody just kept happening", she says.

"I couldn't help but feel the irony, the juxtaposition between all of the resources that were poured into this white woman that may never have existed, as opposed to the absolute violations that were happening right now to Aboriginal women.

Or, as Jacinta puts it, "They spent all this time and money looking for a white woman … But who are the women who are really missing and dying?"

A contradictory historical record

The play also explores the tension between Indigenous and Western understandings of history.

Jacinta has reached an impasse in her research; she's read her way through the archives, but "it feels like something is missing".

She tries to explain the conflict to her PhD supervisor, who doesn't quite get it.

The historical record is "contradictory", she tells him.

She wants to yarn with her Elders; he wants her to seek approval from the ethics committee to conduct formal interviews.

When he tells her the archives should be her primary source, she responds, "How valuable can they be when my people's voices are absent and the language is offensive and racist?"

It's a conflict that still plays out today.

Several monuments to McMillan remain in Gippsland, despite efforts by the Gunaikurnai community to have them removed or altered to explain his role in frontier conflict.

"That's why it's really important to keep telling these stories because only one side of this story has been told for a very, very long time," James says.

The Black Woman of Gippsland is at Southbank Theatre The Sumner, as part of YIRRAMBOI festival, from May 5-31, 2025.