Harlene Hercules

I Still Call It Home

Cassandra Tytler

Harlene Hercules, Isabelle Bennett

I Still Call It Home is a genre implosion of melodramatic horror and Brechtian didacticism. It takes place inside a haunted house, and a haunted society … we have a dark history and it’s bubbling up on our skin. In the words of Tom Cruise, characters scream “I Want the Truth!” but as the teacher tells us, “truth” is ideologically malleable. “There is something in the house” and that house is Australia. Language can grant us liberty when a past wrong is admitted, but language can also confine and restrict us. I Still Call It Home wrestles with these contradictions in its free-wheeling exploration of the policing of bodies through language and denial.