FIRST SUMMER

About the show

Deep in Queensland’s sun-baked cane fields in 1906, a secret romance takes root. Alani is hiding from the newly passed Pacific Island Labourers Act and its looming mass deportations. When Robert, a labourer who works at night, stumbles upon her, their collision sparks a forbidden love story that pushes them to the brink of sacrificing the only world they know. Thirty years later, the same soil is worked by two young (white) men embarking on their first grueling cane season, their eyes fixed on a triumphant trip to Melbourne for the layoff. But when one unearths something buried in the dirt, the past bleeds into the present. By revealing the Pacific Islander history that casts its long shadow over the Australian stage classic Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, ‘First Summer’ forges a (Black) love story in the face of colonial violence, offering an urgent reminder of the buried truths, deep connections, and love that have endured through all this land’s summers.