Riley was talented at finding lost people, using cultural knowledge that the powers he served were trying to wipe out. Now his descendants are telling his story on the stage
Abbie-lee Lewis in Tracker. Lewis has stepped into the role at the last minute.So just days before the Sydney opening, a new actor is cast in a gender-blind switch: actor and director, a Kalkadoon woman who will play the two male roles in Sydney. Pacing in rehearsals, her hair tied back in a ponytail, she learns her lines and marks her steps in yellow chalk on the black linoleum. She picks up a blue jacket weighed down with stones, as though cradling a baby.
Rachael Maza, speaking before she had to take her leave from the show,, noted that Riley was born only a century into British colonisation of Australia. “Further up the river massacres were still happening,” she says. “It was a war zone. So working for the police force, who were a tool of colonisation … there was a whole moral and ethical dilemma he had to navigate.”
Riley became a sergeant in 1941, the first Indigenous person to gain that rank in NSW. Two years later, he was awarded the King’s Police and Fire Services Medal for distinguished service. But when he left the force in 1950, he was refused his police pension due to institutional and broader racism, despite having paid into the fund. In
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