Kevin Gilbert, poet, playwright, visual artist and activist was born in central NSW. His play The Cherry Pickers is often framed as a transformative moment, the first time an Aboriginal artist achieved public profile for his theatre writings. He was billed, at the time of the first production/rehearsed reading of The Cherry Pickers in 1971, as the ‘first Aboriginal playwright to have his work performed’. In the 1960s, Gilbert was serving a life sentence for murder – a sentence and charge he was contesting. In 1957, when he was twenty-three, Gilbert was charged and convicted of murdering his wife. Their relationship had always been stormy and there was an incident one night when they ended up struggling for a gun and the gun went off. In prison Gilbert found that the basic living conditions were substantially better for prisoners than for Aboriginal people on reserves, there was running water, decent shelter and beyond these basics the added benefit of access to a library. Gilbert was ‘allowed to read three books a week', so he did. On the negative side the prisoners were not allowed to write. In prison all writing was clandestine. And Gilbert wanted to write. Initially he wrote poems then threw them away before they were confiscated. He also wrote a novella about Aboriginal life.
In 1968 Gilbert wrote The Cherry Pickers, which according to one story in the tradition of Genet and Gramsci, was smuggled out of gaol on sheets of toilet paper. Gilbert described the play as a story about ‘seasonal workers', focusing on ‘spiritual searching and loss, my people pushed into refugee situations'. Based on the experiences of itinerant rural workers, the play explores issues of family, spirituality and dispossession. The text presented non-Indigenous Australians with one of the first examples of Aboriginal Englishes written by an Aboriginal person as standard language use. There was an initial reading of the play in 1968. In 1970 the play was nominated for the Captain Cook Memorial Award and was highly commended. In the same year another play by Gilbert, The Gods Look Down, was produced at the Wayside Theatre, a small alternative theatre in Sydney. The production, directed by Barry Donnelly, was described as a dance drama. Gilbert’s notes describe it as ‘an emotional fantasy using subconsciously emotive scenes based on modern spiritual drift and identity loss, which is actually the present search for a spiritual force or a god’. It is a semi-abstract text and movement based exploration of love and sexuality. Throughout the 1970s Gilbert wrote a number of plays and sketches, including Ghosts in Cell Ten, which appear not to have been produced.