{"id":860,"date":"2023-12-05T20:23:55","date_gmt":"2023-12-05T20:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/?p=860"},"modified":"2023-12-29T15:41:52","modified_gmt":"2023-12-29T15:41:52","slug":"outback-upfront-playwriting-around-youth-in-regional-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/28\/outback-upfront-playwriting-around-youth-in-regional-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"Outback Upfront: Playwriting Around Youth in Regional Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Megarrity<\/strong>*<\/a> and Jenna Gillett-Swan<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Over a quarter of Australia\u2019s population lives in rural, regional and remote areas. Often shaped by forms of research with young people, scripted drama about regional youth in Australia tends to emanate from its major cities. In framing themselves as \u201clending voice\u201d to this demographic, these scripts about the \u201cOutback\u201d are often upfront about their dramaturgical basis in co-creation and consultation. This article surveys how paratexts of thirty plays represent regional young people. Analysis suggests congruences across themes and provenance, including an absence of the unadulterated voices of young people and concomitant concerns around authenticity.

Keywords<\/strong>: \u03a4heatre for young people, regional Australia, playwriting, child voice in research, regional youth<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a quarter of Australia\u2019s population live in regional rural and remote areas (AIHW) and many of these people are young. David Berthold asserts that \u201cour stages ignore them, mostly\u201d (qtd. in Enright vii). Darwin-based Mary Ann Butler suggests that even being a regional playwright sometimes \u201cfeels synonymous with invisible.\u201d Despite this, dozens of plays representing the experience of regional youth in Australia have been written and performed over the last few decades (2001\u201323).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand the dramaturgical landscape of playwriting representing regional youth experiences, a review of play texts from publishers and online repositories at Playlab Theatre<\/a>, Australian Plays Transform<\/a> and Currency Press<\/a> was conducted, augmented by AuSstage<\/a> and Austlit<\/a>, databases capturing performed and published works respectively. A focus on scripted drama will, of course, exclude rich traditions of unpublished, non-text-based and collaboratively devised performances as well as original drama practice happening within educational institutions that are rarely included in these repositories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though they emanate from many different parts of Australia and were made in many different ways, at different times over the last thirty years, the scripts surveyed here suggest some likenesses across the field not only of representative settings, themes and characters related to playwriting regional youth, but also a range of apparently consultative strategies designed to authenticate the stories they stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sections that follow outline some commonalities in themes and content in addition to claims of authenticity implied by the involvement of young people at some stage in their creation. This survey\u2019s focus is the writing that frames<\/em> each script such as \u201cblurb,\u201d bios, keywords and synoptic material. This paratext is key to framing each text\u2019s intended origin and purpose (Skare) and provides additional insight into what these scripts purport to offer the reader. These materials literally and figuratively \u201clocate\u201d the plays in the field, strongly suggesting how a reader may find<\/em> each one in terms of online search terms, geography (real or fictionalised) and the more subjective domains of reception and interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sample is a broad slice of text-based theatre for young people created in Australia between 2001 and 2023 which identifies as being for and about young people living in rural, regional or remote areas. While each of these geographical categories has its own properties, they are labelled for ease of reference in this paper as \u201cregional.\u201d The broad age group of Young People is located as being between the ages of 12 to 25. The paratext of these scripts in search terms or landing pages often includes keywords such as \u201cyoung people,\u201d \u201cgrowing up\u201d and \u201ccoming of age,\u201d alongside phrases such as \u201ccountry versus city,\u201d \u201csmall town life\u201d and \u201cgeographic isolation,\u201d among more specific issue-based content descriptors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Raising Voice<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Regionality inflects these dramatic explorations of youth social issues with themes of environmental exigencies, liminality expressed through transit and conflicting desires to stay or leave, First Nations perspectives and the risks, dangers and life events that accelerate or complicate socialisation and identity formation. Themes of climate change are observably more frequent from 2010 onwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living in the country suggests close proximity to the effects of climate change. Burnt<\/em> (Nantsou and Lycos, 2011) \u201cwas born out of the true stories of people from regional Australia struggling with . . .continued drought impacts on families and young people.\u201d Very Happy Children with Bright and Wonderful Futures<\/em> (Maxwell, 2021) follows the bushfire season \u201cthrough the eyes of five teenagers living regionally,\u201d exposing the effect of the global upon the local.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Firefighting at Hillview North of Adelaide River. Originally posted to Flickr<\/a>. Photo: Web\/Wikimedia<\/a>\/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Australia\u2019s \u201clocal\u201d can be very, very large. The nation is wider than the Moon, so many of these plays can be found on the long roads to and from the outback. From the suburban fringes outwards, transport infrastructure performs as dramatic setting. Truck Stop<\/em> (Philpott, 2012) and Eating Ice Cream with Your Eyes Closed <\/em>(Brown, 2004) see young people on the edge of things, on or near the road, or after a good time and almost always in trouble. North West of Nowhere<\/em> by Kamarra Bell-Wykes has its young protagonists Wyatt and Nella: \u201cpiling in to Cuz\u2019s ute headed one way for Sydney. Nella\u2019s got her heart set on the big smoke and a whole new life, Cuz has other ideas and Wyatt can\u2019t help thinking they should all just turn back now\u201d (Bell-Wykes, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Themes of family, culture and identity emerge in the strongly autobiographical works of (often female) First Nations authors when the word \u201cCountry\u201d captures not only geographical zone but also a deeper sense of \u201cthe lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected. The term contains complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family and identity\u201d (AIATSIS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personal, cultural and economic experiences of First Nations peoples flow strongly through texts such as Crow Fire<\/em> (Milroy in Harding 2002), The Fever and The Fret<\/em> (Clerc, 2015), and The Daly River Girl <\/em>(Rose and Clerc, 2020). A Closer Sky<\/em> (Helfgott, 2004), set in the Peel indigenous community of Mandurah in Western Australia is about \u201ca young Indigenous girl grappling with identity, employment and housing problems.\u201d With at least 61 percent of Australia\u2019s First Nations people living in regional and remote locations (AIHW), the experience of First Nations writers speaks with increasing strength in staging stories of regional young people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanessa Bates\u2019s Trailer <\/em>(2018) is set \u201cbetween the beach and the bush . . . on a train line with a city at either end. Waiting,\u201d suggesting a kind of suspension between places, as an analogue for the liminal states between childhood and adulthood that regularly characterises adolescence. Presence or absence related to the protagonist\u2019s family of origin (and found family and friends) also drives dramatic tensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absences of information and secrets often recur as well as mixed feelings about death and bereavement. The verbatim April\u2019s Fool<\/em> (Burton and Tickell, 2010) begins with the real-life death of a young man, who is not represented onstage. Julia-Rose Lewis notes in the foreword to her play Samson<\/em> (2016) that for her rural adolescent protagonists, \u201cgrowing up at the arse end of the arse end of the world . . . the death of someone important can be the start of something excellent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Risks and dangers tend to come with the territory in dramas focussed on regional adolescence, as if death and violence are synonymous with being young in these places. Kate Mulvaney\u2019s 2017 adaptation of Craig Silvey\u2019s novel Jasper Jones<\/em> begins with the sadly mainstream trope of a young woman\u2019s death as an inciting incident. A dark seam of the Australian Gothic haunts a number of these works, including Children of the Black Skirt<\/em> (Betzien, 2005).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Richard Jordan identifies a period in mainstream Australian theatre writing, from Michael Gow\u2019s 1988 Away<\/em> onwards, in which a \u201cyoung character\u2019s death would become an essential element of the genre . . . a space where to be young is to be tragic, transient, and dangerous\u201d (44), and though that quality resonates across quite a few of these scripts, it is hardly ever voiced by young people themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lending Voice<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Excluding the few verbatim works in this survey, it is very rare for the voices of regional youth to emerge unadulterated in these scripts, and if it does, it is probably from the pen of someone who is probably no longer from the age group or location they are writing about. This may well be because public funding for arts projects tends to be concentrated on urban areas, but the foreword of This Was Urgent Yesterday<\/em> (2020) strongly asserts that: \u201cregional voices are still often missing in our national cultural conversations [. .  and are] still often told from voices outside our communities, and often rely on outdated stereotypes that do not reflect and represent what it is like to be a young person living in regional Australia here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This publication, the only one here exclusively featuring the playwriting of regional young people, collects monologues created by young writers in South Australia, the result of Writing Place<\/em>, a project \u201cdirectly modelled on the Australian Theatre for Young People\u2019s (ATYP) annual National Studio,\u201d teaming young writers with adult mentors. The Sydney-based ATYP is frequently involved in the commissioning and publication of the scripts in this survey. The ATYP Foundation Commission, noting a paucity of scripts for young people aged 10 to 17, aimed to generate \u201ca body of new work to engage and excite young artists and audiences across the country for years to come\u201d (ATYP). Other works in this sample emerge from similar developmental initiatives or award schemes, so in addition to commonalities in content, theme and representation, there are some observable similarities in their provenance, in particular, claims of engagement or consultation with young people as part of their creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While creative linkages between adult artists and regional young people focussed on amplifying their experience through scripted drama are often referenced across these plays, many aspects of exactly how this \u201cvoicing\u201d process works often remain behind the scenes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n