Usually I have some sort of a summer break. Between Christmas and New Year, and at least a couple of weeks of January. It’s a quiet time in the industry, and it’s hot. (Mostly. I do live in Melbourne after all…) Often my summer break will involve some time at the beach and some time hiking. This year, however, the break was short, because I was in the middle of rehearsing ‘Wittenoom’. Also, I got Covid for the first time, so quite a lot of my holiday was spent lying down watching the Australian Open and reading.
Wittenoom
We started rehearsing ‘Wittenoom’ in December and then continued on January 9. It’s a beautiful new Australian play written by Mary Anne Butler about a mining town, Wittenoom, in the Pilbara in Western Australia. Blue asbestos was mined in Wittenoom from the 1940s to the late 60s with devastating consequences to the workers, their families, and the land itself. Blue asbestos is highly toxic, the tiniest thread of it, lodged in the lungs, can cause mesothelioma, a very painful and nasty cancer. The site itself, the land, is contaminated now from all the mining and highly dangerous. This contamination covers 50,000 hectares, making it the largest contaminated site in the southern hemisphere. Mountains of poisoned tailings remain, continuing to spread when there’s a flood or a dust storm. The town wasn’t de-gazetted until 2006, the last residents left in 2022, and it wasn’t until this year, 2023, that the remaining buildings were removed and the site properly fenced off.
Mary Anne’s play is a beautiful, funny and moving ode to the landscape, the town and the people who lived and worked there. It centres on a mother and daughter, Dot and Pearl. Like many of the workers, Dot goes there to make good money, to change their fortunes. And change they do.
Our season of the play, at Red Stitch in February, went very, very well. We had a wonderful director: Susie Dee, and creative team: Dann Barber, Rachel Burke and Ian Moorhead, and the show had great audiences, a lot of interest, and was received very positively. So many people hadn’t heard of Wittenoom, didn’t know the story, so it helped spread the word a little bit further about this environmental and social catastrophe. We are hoping to remount it at some point because it’s a great play and also so that perhaps more pressure can be brought to bear on the federal and state governments, as well as the mining companies involved, to properly clean it up.
End of a Childhood
Towards the end of the run of the play, I was asked by a colleague and friend, Mark Wilson, in an email entitled ‘An insane project!’ (always alluring…) if I’d be interested and available to play a role in a film he’d written and was directing, based on a short story by Henry Handel Richardson called ‘End of a Childhood’ which is a kind of coda to her amazing novel ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney’. When I was at university studying Literature, in the 1980s, I’d done a subject on Australian Literature and had read ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney.’ I remembered it quite clearly because I’d found it incredibly moving. In fact, it crumpled me. I started crying well before the end, and after finishing it, I just lay in bed and wept. For ages. The tragedy, very classical in its structure, accumulates slowly through the story, as we watch Richard make error after error, dragging himself and his family with him. ‘End of a Childhood’ is the final chapter of the tragedy.
Of course I said yes. It was insane, but also wonderful. Mark assembled a fabulous team and group of actors, and managed to shoot a feature film in black and white, using mostly natural light, over five days. I haven’t seen it yet. He’s edited it, submitted it for festivals, but we haven’t been able to have a screening because we’re all so crazy busy.
Adelaide Festival
Then I managed a little break, and went on a road trip via the Coorong to the Adelaide Festival and feasted on theatre, music, art and nature. It was a wonderful time in which we saw many beautiful works. Highlights were Ivo van Hove’s production of ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara, A concert by Lorde, visiting Hans Heysen’s house and studio, and driving out to Eukaria, a gorgeous purpose-built venue, looking out at nature and listening to a performance of Haydn’s String Quartet in B-flat major, Sunrise; and Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A, Kreutzer.
‘A Not So Easy Death’
In March and April I had a concentrated period of time working on my book, ‘A Not So Easy Death’. I had the good fortune to be awarded a mentorship with Mireille Juchau through ‘Kill Your Darlings’, so her feedback is providing clarity and purpose as to the way forward, and I managed a good couple of months of productive and regular writing.
‘June: A Monologue about Not Speaking’
Overlapping and juggling work was obviously already becoming the flavour of the year (not uncommon of course…) so in March and April I also started work with director Emily Tomlins on ‘June: A Monologue about Not Speaking’ written by Patrick McCarthy, which was to be performed at Theatreworks in late July. Not only did each of our other work commitments mean that Emily and myself simply couldn’t do a standard 4-5 week rehearsal, but also for this work, a big piece, we both really wanted a lot of lead time, a lot of preparation time, thinking time, and also time in between rehearsals for me to learn the lines. So in March we started meeting, talking, working, slowly uncovering the text.
‘Shhhh’
In April and May, I also began part time rehearsals at Red Stitch for ‘Shhhh’ a wonderful play by American playwright Clare Barron, who wrote ‘Dance Nation’ which I did in [check]. ‘Shhhh’ is a wild, funny and clever play about consent, growing up, love, relationships, and family. This project was a total joy from start to finish. It was my first time working on a full production with Emma Valente, co-artistic director of The Rabble, and she is a marvellously skilled director. It was a fabulous cast, and a brilliant creative team, and together, safely, we made a wild and exciting piece of theatre. I loved my character, Sally, who was a postal worker and a witch who did ASMR on the side. You nearly always expand as a person, with every project you do, but in this show the expansion felt greater and deeper than usual. It was a blessing.
‘June’
Once ‘Shhhh’ opened, rehearsals for ‘June’ began in earnest, and we opened for a short ten day run at the end of July at Theatreworks. The opening line of ‘June’, spoken by June, is ‘I haven’t spoken to another person in over a year’ which is a great line, and a great premise for a show. Gradually the audience discovers more about June and her family, and the reasons why she fell silent for over a year. The play is a marvellous meditation on regret, choices, grief, and loss; the power of solitude and silence; but also the importance and necessity of human connection and forgiveness. This was another blissful rehearsal, where Emily and myself had the luxury, but also the patience and courage, to work slowly, intuitively and with the body, right through the text, so that when we came to block it, it came together easily, all the pieces making sense. And the work was supported so beautifully by lots of intense, hard work by Lisa Mibus on lighting, Jess Keeffe on sound and Zoe Rouse on the set and costume.
Larapinta
And then two days later we flew to Alice Springs/Mparntwe and embarked upon the Larapinta Trail. Walking and camping for 20 days, west, along the West MacDonnell Ranges. It was a blissful time of being within the environment, peaceful but totally absorbed. A perfect way to decompress and re-set.
‘A Not So Easy Death’ and ‘The Newsreader’
Now, I’m back at my desk, back at home, attending to the many things which were put on the back burner whilst I was so busy. Red Stitch business, La Mama business, and house and family business. Recording audiobooks and doing auditions. Cleaning. Gardening. Going to the theatre. Watching films. Watching the second season of The Newsreader. And trying to write every day, trying to get a full draft of ‘A Not So Easy Death’ completed by the end of the year. It should be possible.