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The White Earth

$14.00

When eight-year-old William witnesses his father burn to death in a freak farming accident, William and his sickly mother are cast upon the charity of a mysterious uncle, John McIvor. Encamped alone in the ruins of the once great station homestead, Kuran House, the aging McIvor is desperate for an heir and sets his sights upon the boy. But the legacy of Kuran Station is a poisoned one and, as McIvor’s troubled past and Williams tortured present intertwine, they are each drawn into a surreal world of memory and madness, and into a landscape haunted by uniquely Australian ghosts.
Set against the backdrop of the Native Title debate, The White Earth is a Gothic tragedy of ownership, paranoia and self-destruction.

  • australian gothic drama
  • 0
  • 7 total
  • 3 female identifying, 4 male identifying
  • history
  • all ages
  • young adult, adult, teen
  • Playlab


  • MONOLOGUES
  • PRODUCTION HISTORY

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John

Male | Unspecified | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 52

EXTRACT: Welcome, members of the Australian Independence League, my friends, on this fine morning, to Kuran Station. Applause from the crowd. Welcome to this water hole. It is - as I told my nephew the other day - a sacred site. Sacred to me, and, I suspect, sacred to the Aborigines too, in years past. Now, we're going to be hearing a lot about Aboriginal history and sacred sites in the coming years, and it might seem strange that we, of all people, should meet in such a spot. But there's a message in this. The Aborigines are gone.


John

Male | Unspecified | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 17

EXTRACT: You live long enough in one place, there's nothing you won't know about that place. Me, I was born here. Oh, not in this House. It was out the back, in the old staff quarters. My father was the manager then, he ran Kuran station for the White family. Daniel McIvor was his name. A hard man, a big man, as men had to be in those days. Carried a gun in his belt every day. It was no easy business. [A hard stare at WILLIAM.] Forget about your little farm, Will. Tell me - what have you seen here?


Narrator

Gender Unspecified | Unspecified | under 3 minutes
Starts on page 9

EXTRACT: Then at last Kuran House was revealed through the trees, and William felt a deeper chill of premonition run through him. It seemed, in that first moment, that it was not so much a home he saw, as it was a great broken shipwreck, thrown up on the rocks from the dry ocean of the plains below.


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