Rainbow's End by Jane Harrison - The Ultimate VCE Study Guide

Overview

Jane Harrison’s Rainbow’s End (2007) is a powerful Australian play set in 1950s regional Victoria, a period defined by racial segregation, dispossession, and government control over Aboriginal lives. Centred on the Dear family, three Indigenous women living on the fringes of Shepparton, the play intertwines personal aspiration with political struggle. Harrison situates the characters’ fight for dignity and opportunity against key historical backdrops such as the forced displacement from Cummeragunja, the development of the Rumbalara housing project, and the Queen’s first visit to Australia. Through this intimate family narrative, Rainbow’s End explores themes of racism, sovereignty, gender, and coming of age, revealing how systemic injustice shapes identity, dreams, and agency. The play ultimately foregrounds resilience and cultural strength, inviting audiences to reflect on Australia’s past and its ongoing responsibility to confront inequality and honour Indigenous voices.

Key Themes and Ideas

Racism and Systemic Control

Rainbow’s End exposes racism not as an isolated prejudice but as a system embedded within legal, social, and bureaucratic structures. Harrison interrogates paternalism, assimilation, and segregation as mechanisms that regulate Aboriginal lives under the guise of protection and progress. Through constant surveillance, restricted mobility, and conditional access to housing and employment, the play reveals how institutional power denies Indigenous people autonomy while normalising inequality. Racism is thus represented as structural and enduring, rather than episodic or accidental.

Sovereignty and Agency

Sovereignty operates as both a national and intimate concern within the play. Harrison foregrounds the contradiction of Indigenous people being rendered foreigners on their own land, exposing the ongoing legacy of dispossession and the myth of terra nullius. Simultaneously, sovereignty is explored through the body, particularly in relation to Indigenous women whose autonomy is repeatedly violated. Dolly’s struggle to retain control over her future and physical self becomes emblematic of a broader political struggle for self-determination, revealing how the denial of sovereignty is enacted at both structural and personal levels.

Family

Family functions as a paradoxical space in which protection, cultural continuity, and intergenerational trauma coexist. Harrison contrasts the communal, enduring nature of Aboriginal kinship with Anglo-Australian notions of individualism and social mobility. Through the differing worldviews of Nan Dear, Gladys, and Dolly, the play examines how survival strategies evolve across generations, shaped by historical trauma and shifting possibilities. While family sustains identity and belonging, it can also constrain individual aspiration, forcing painful negotiations between loyalty and selfhood.

Dreams, Hope, and Disillusionment

Dreams in Rainbow’s End operate as both imaginative refuge and political provocation. Harrison aligns individual hopes with collective aspirations for justice, revealing how optimism becomes an act of resistance within oppressive conditions. Yet the play remains acutely aware of the fragility of hope, acknowledging how repeated betrayal by institutions fosters cynicism and distrust. By juxtaposing dream sequences with harsh reality, Harrison interrogates the emotional cost of deferred futures while urging audiences to question the structures that make such dreams unattainable.

Coming of Age

As a coming-of-age narrative, the play critiques the premature loss of innocence experienced by Indigenous youth. Dolly’s transition into adulthood is marked not by empowerment but by violence, disillusionment, and enforced awareness. Harrison suggests that knowledge within a racist and patriarchal society is often acquired through suffering, exposing how systems of inequality accelerate maturity while denying genuine agency. The personal cost of coming of age thus reflects a national failure to protect and nurture Indigenous futures.

Key Characters

Nan Dear

Nan Dear functions as the moral and historical anchor of Rainbow’s End, embodying intergenerational memory, cultural authority, and survival forged through trauma. Her scepticism toward institutions, white men, and promised progress is shaped by lived experience of displacement, sexual violence, and systemic betrayal. While her pessimism can appear restrictive, Harrison frames it as a protective strategy rather than simple cynicism. Nan Dear’s authority derives not from formal power but from knowledge of land, history, and endurance, positioning her as a custodian of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural continuity.

Gladys Banks

Gladys Banks represents pragmatic hope and the desire to work within oppressive systems to secure material improvement for her family. Her belief in education, housing schemes, and respectability reflects both aspiration and internalised pressure to conform to white standards. Harrison charts Gladys’ transformation from tentative compliance to political assertion, culminating in her powerful speech at the public meeting. By claiming her voice in a male-dominated space, Gladys reasserts agency and articulates a demand for self-determination, symbolising a shift from accommodation to resistance.

Dolly Banks

Dolly Banks operates as the emotional centre and symbolic protagonist of the play. Her coming-of-age narrative parallels the broader political struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. Caught between Nan Dear’s protective caution and Gladys’ assimilationist hopes, Dolly seeks autonomy, self-definition, and control over her future. Harrison repeatedly places Dolly’s agency under threat, exposing how race and gender intersect to deny Indigenous women bodily and social sovereignty. Despite these violations, Dolly’s insistence on defining herself affirms a resilient assertion of identity.

Errol Fisher

Errol Fisher functions as a complex embodiment of white paternalism and moral ambivalence. Though initially presented as earnest and sympathetic, his assumptions about protection, opportunity, and improvement reveal ingrained racial hierarchies. His interactions with Dolly expose the limitations of liberal goodwill when it fails to respect Indigenous agency. While Errol undergoes some growth, Harrison resists framing him as a redemptive figure, instead using his character to critique structural inequality rather than individual prejudice alone.

Inspector and Rent Collector

Characters such as the Inspector and Rent Collector operate less as individuals than as embodiments of bureaucratic power. Their presence reinforces the constant surveillance and regulation imposed upon Aboriginal lives, highlighting how oppression functions impersonally and persistently. These figures underscore Harrison’s critique of institutional authority as a mechanism that enforces inequality while evading moral accountability.

Symbols

The Humpy

The humpy symbolises cultural autonomy, continuity, and Indigenous sovereignty existing outside white institutional control. Though structurally unstable and vulnerable to flooding, it is a space shaped by family labour, memory, and tradition. Its repeated destruction and rebuilding reflects both the precarity of Aboriginal life under colonial systems and the resilience required to endure it. Harrison positions the humpy as emotionally rich despite material hardship, challenging the notion that security is synonymous with assimilation.

Rumbalara Housing

Rumbalara represents the illusory promise of progress offered through assimilation. While structurally superior to the humpy, it is described as white and uninviting, emphasising its cultural emptiness and regulatory nature. The strict rules governing life within Rumbalara reveal housing as a mechanism of surveillance rather than empowerment. Harrison critiques the expectation that Aboriginal people must relinquish cultural identity in exchange for basic rights.

The Hessian Fence

The hessian fence erected during the Queen’s visit functions as a powerful symbol of segregation and deliberate invisibilisation. By shielding Aboriginal settlements from public view, it reflects white Australia’s desire to conceal the material consequences of colonial policy. Metaphorically, the fence represents a nation more invested in ceremonial display than in confronting the realities of dispossession.

The Colour White

The recurring presence of white objects, including gloves, clothing, housing interiors, and cleaning products, symbolises the dominance of white hegemony and the pressure to assimilate. Whiteness is consistently associated with cleanliness, respectability, and moral worth, exposing the racialised values embedded in everyday life. Gladys’ ritualised use of white gloves highlights how assimilation is performative and laborious, reinforcing its artificiality and exclusionary nature.

The Encyclopaedias

The encyclopaedias symbolise white epistemologies and the privileging of Western knowledge systems. For Gladys, they represent hope, education, and social mobility for Dolly. Nan Dear’s scepticism, however, exposes their limitations and questions whose knowledge is recorded, legitimised, and valued. Harrison uses the encyclopaedias to challenge the assumption that institutional knowledge is neutral or comprehensive.

The River and Flooding

The river embodies both a connection to Country and the destructive consequences of forced settlement. Its cyclical flooding reflects the instability imposed upon Aboriginal communities through displacement and marginalisation. Positioned at moments of emotional and narrative rupture, the river mirrors Dolly’s loss of agency and the family’s vulnerability within systems that normalise Indigenous suffering.

Dream Sequences and Lighting

Dream sequences function symbolically as spaces of imaginative resistance. Through altered lighting and sound, Harrison separates aspiration from lived reality, illustrating how hope sustains the characters despite structural limitation. These moments emphasise the political significance of imagination as a precursor to action, particularly in Gladys’ eventual assertion of agency.

Practice Prompts

1. “Rainbow’s End suggests that survival is not the same as freedom.” Discuss.

2. To what extent does Rainbow’s End present assimilation as a false promise?

3. How does Harrison use family relationships to expose the effects of systemic racism?

4. “Dreams in Rainbow’s End are acts of resistance." Do you agree?

5. How does Harrison use setting to reflect Indigenous dispossession and resilience?

6. “Hope in Rainbow’s End is fragile, but necessary.” Discuss.

7. "In Rainbow’s End, the experiences of women reveal the deepest injustices of colonial Australia." To what extent do you agree?

8. "Rainbow’s End suggests that progress without justice is meaningless." Discuss.

Final Thoughts

Rainbow’s End is a nuanced exploration of the intersecting struggles of race, gender, and sovereignty within 1950s Australia, framed through the intimate lens of the Dear family. Jane Harrison invites audiences to witness the resilience, hope, and agency of Aboriginal women as they navigate systemic oppression, personal trauma, and societal expectations. The play balances political critique with the coming-of-age journey of Dolly, demonstrating how personal and collective futures are inextricably linked. Through its vivid use of setting, symbolism, and character transformation, Rainbow’s End challenges audiences to reflect on historical injustices while affirming the enduring strength of culture, community, and imagination. Ultimately, Harrison’s work reminds us that the pursuit of dignity and self-determination is both timeless and essential, offering a story that resonates far beyond its historical moment.