Welcome to 2024 with Australian Plays Transform! 🎉
At APT, we’ve collaborated with Australian playwrights to bring teachers the Sustainability Collection – a collection of Australian plays that are in conversation with sustainability and climate change.
Sustainability is one of only three cross-curriculum priorities in the Australian curriculum. Australian plays are a rich resource to explore these issues and deepen students’ understanding of sustainability across several learning areas, including Drama, English, and the Humanities and Social Sciences.
This play collection is intentionally broad in scope – it includes plays suitable for exploration with primary through to tertiary students, with a diverse range of theatrical styles and themes represented. The plays in this collection encompass the voices and experiences of young people, people living in remote and rural areas, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. There are perspectives that are grounded in the challenging realities of the present, those that shine a light on the struggles of the past, and many that imagine a range of strange and dystopic futures.
You’ll notice that throughout the collection, playwrights have provided their expert advice on how teachers can approach their plays in the classroom – their invaluable insights are centred in this collection.
We encourage you to share this collection with colleagues who are interested in new and creative ways to explore sustainability in the classroom. And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback.
Zoe Hogan
APT’s Education Consultant
Here’s a snapshot of the plays included in the collection – check out our website to explore themes, playwright’s notes, and additional education resources.
RECOMMENDED FOR PRIMARY +
You and Me and the Space Between by Finegan Kruckemeyer
Black Sun, Blood Moon by Chris Bendall
The Last Boy on Earth by Brendan Hogan
LOWER SECONDARY +
The Visitors by Jane Harrison
Watermark by Alana Valentine
Scenes from the Climate Era by David Finnigan
Sprout by Jessica Bellamy
UPPER SECONDARY +
The Season by Nathan Maynard
The Turquoise Elephant by Stephen Carleton
They Saw a Thylacine by Justine Campbell and Sarah Hamilton
Image: photograph of Alana Valentine. Credit: author’swebsite
Cast size: 8 (4 female identifying, 4 male identifying)
A play to: Read, read aloud, study, perform excerpts in class
Form/style: verbatim, realism, drama
Themes: natural disasters, community, resilience
Synopsis: Based on written and oral testimony from survivors, the play chronicles the physical and psychological devastation of flood in a small town.
Recommended for: Secondary, Year 7+
A note for teachers from Alana Valentine
Playwright, dramatist, director. Writer of collection highlight Watermark
Watermark was written to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the 18 metre flood which wiped out the NT town of Katherine in 1998. The play was researched and written with the involvement of the Katherine community in 2007 and performed there in 2008, reprised at the Katherine Festival in 2009 and Darwin Festival in 2010. In 2011 it won the Australian Writers Guild Award for Best Community Theatre work.
In my book BOWERBIRD: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn From Life, I dedicate a chapter (Chapter 27) to the process of making Watermark. Teachers may like to investigate that book further for all aspects of the verbatim, or as I call it ‘close work’, theatre making process that they can explore with their students.
In addition to the issues and ideas raised in this chapter I would offer the following provocations and prompts for teachers and students to consider when studying Watermark:
In Watermark, a dispute arises between people in some part of Katherine about whether others who did not lose their homes (but still lost their town) have as much cause to be saddened by the flood disaster.
What instances have students seen of the human tendency to rank and judge the comparative suffering of others during a natural disaster?
Do students agree that humans like to insist that suffering is always proportional to perceived loss, rather than accept that suffering is relative to who the person is and what their circumstances are/were before the disaster?
Or do students disagree with this entirely and think only those who have lost property and/or loved ones have a right to grieve?
In recent years an eclectic body of work has emerged from Australian playwrights, in conversation with sustainability, climate change and threats to the natural world. Carleton & Hay (2020) describe this as a “groundswell of work… in a range of different modes and genres, including magical realism, eco-critical gothic, sci-fi, solo performance and variations on naturalism.”
Beyond APT’s Sustainability Collection, we encourage teachers and students to explore the following plays:
We acknowledge that we live and create on unceded lands. We pay our respects to the First Peoples of Australia, and to their elders past, present and future.
