August 7, 2022 • 23 mins
Peta Murray is a recovering playwright, best known for her plays Wallflowering and Salt. A late-blooming academic, she is also a Lecturer in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University where she writes extravaganzas with preposterous titles, performs essays, coins neologisms, collaborates on loopy approaches to memoir, queers the q(a)antata, and makes mischief with The Symphony of Awkward as they stake claim to world domination in the emergent discourse of diarology.
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Episode Transcript
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Peta Murray (00:00):
So my name's Peter Murray and I am a recovering
playwright and para academic.
So parody of an academic orsomeone who works para the academy.
So alongside the academy,
Nat Grant (00:18):
Welcome to season six of the prima Donna podcast, Sonic
portraits of Australian artists.
This audio was recorded andproduced on Wurundjeri country.
I pay respects toelders past and present.
The first episode in thisseries features playwright
and academic Peter Murray.
To find out more about the projectand to hear more episodes like this
(00:39):
one, visit prima Donna podcast.com.
Peta Murray (00:47):
I think that that's was my sort of self soothing
term for my estrangement.
from the theater.
I had a long life as a professionalplaywright, and that was how I
identified professionally vocationally.
And I think there's a little, possiblya little tinge of rancour in there in
(01:11):
terms of how disposable playwrightsare, and especially women playwrights
and especially aging women playwrights.
So I think that the recoveringplaywright thing is, is
me just pushing back.
It's also for manyyears, I thought, right.
I've written my last play.
And now I don't think like that anymore.
I, I now.
(01:32):
I'll continue to havea writing practice.
And if it needs to take the form ofa play, that's the form it will take.
So it's just a different relationship,really with theater as, as an industry,
it's daily practice now, but inspite of me in a lot of ways, it's
(01:55):
something I've struggled with my wholelife, and I've always carried around.
Fantasy that if I was a proper writer,I would be up at four o'clock in the
morning doing the morning pages orleading the life that I think it's
Steven King describes, you know, whereyou, you work until midday and then
you play a round of golf and thensomeone brings you a meal and a whiskey.
(02:17):
I love that idea.
I love the romantic ideaof that artistic life.
That has never been my reality.
When I was a full-time playwright,I had to drag myself screaming to
the desk and the act of writingwas always the last thing.
It was the last step.
It's almost like the tidyingup of a creative process.
(02:41):
So it's not even fun.
These days my writing is so atomizedand, and it has so many different
kinds of outlets, whether it's throughblogging, whether it's through this
bonkers thing I'm now doing in spiteof myself on Facebook, whether it's
(03:02):
through making up a bespoke word forsomebody, I feel like I now do write
each day, but I don't even notice it.
And very rarely will I sitdown and, and formally go, oh,
I'm going to do writing now.
I don't have to do that anymore.
It's such a joy, honestly, to be throughthe years and years of, of torture that
(03:25):
I experienced trying to be a writer.
And now just find, you know, I'vegot not that I've got a lot to say.
I've just got a lot of outletsthese days for different
kinds of thinking and making.
So that's what I do.
(03:47):
It's probably doesn'thave to be like that.
It's almost..
That's the great secret that, ormaybe it's a myth that one writer
inflicts upon another writer, youknow, is, and I think about this in
relation to the students, "come and bea writer and enter a world of pain".
I don't want to do that.
(04:08):
And I don't want that to be whatthe, the young artists I'm working
with think about creativity.
So one of the things I'm at painsto do in my working life is to try
and disabuse them of that and totry to recover, you know, where my
writing voice comes from is a childin me who loves words and still loves
(04:31):
words and what you can do with words.
I mean, you will go throughkind of agony, anyone who wants
to express themselves, they'reputting themselves on the line.
You know, of course you will,you will grapple with that and
that will be painful and, andyou will always fall short.
(04:56):
I think that's the other thing youhave this sense of what it is that
you're trying to make and you makeit and you make it and you make
it and it's out there and it'sclose, but it's not quite what you
sensed that it was supposed to be.
So those things are painful, but Idon't think it has to be the, you
know, agonising, turn yourself insideout and spill your guts thing that my
(05:20):
generation was told it was going to be,
I hated my father for making medo it, but I went to university
on a teacher's scholarship andhad a few years service as a, an
English history drama teacher in theschool system, in New South Wales.
(05:43):
And with my trusty dip ed, onceI became a writer or started to,
to try to live the writer's life,I was able to get extra work.
So it's always been my second stringand everywhere I've lived I managed
to somehow find a CAE or some kindkind of adult ed thing or whatever.
(06:05):
And then gradually over the last20 years, it's sort of segued
into something more serious.
Firstly, in vocational educationand training, and now in higher ed,
you share the skills, you sharethe tools because there are
tools and, you know, there arethings that you can play with.
(06:28):
And muck around withand see what they do.
But basically you teach writingby getting out of the way of the
writer and allowing them to seewhat their own voice can do and
what their they're capable of doing.
So I see my job asmessing with their heads.
(06:52):
Trying to expand their sense of whatwriting is mainly through reading or
through taking in other kinds of, youknow, reading these days goes by many,
many different guises, so it could bewatching things, listening to things.
I just subscribe to the viewthat everybody is creative.
(07:15):
I can't bear it when somebodysays, "oh, I'm, you know,
well, wish I was creative".
Did you decide what to wear today?
Of course you're creative, youknow, so it's trying to just
give people the confidence thatit's their birthright to do that.
And if they want to do that,playing, making a mess, trying
(07:35):
and failing and trying and
failing, you will discover whatworks and what doesn't work.
And that's how I do it.
I was a very serious young insectfor a long time, but something's
(07:56):
changed and I don't reallyknow how to explain it to you.
It's probably partly to do withgetting older and having fewer
fucks to give about things.
I've seen the valuein a playful mindset.
I've seen that if that's how youapproach things, then failure is
(08:18):
built in all play, comes with a,you know, a lot of padding for
falling over and for bumping things.
And, and so it gives you that kind of,it allows for a degree of resilience,
it allows for experimentation, itallows for tropes and the repetition
(08:38):
of things that you know you can do.
And I think the other thingis that these days I prefer
to work collaboratively.
I'm not that interested in my soloexpression and play is the best
way I know to work collaboratively.
It's an invitation.
(09:12):
So this is an Australian researchcouncil fund discovery project,
which in academic world isquite a dazzling thing to have.
This one's led out of Monash universityby professor Stacy Holman Jones.
And it's basically about two things.
One is trying to recuperate the missingstories and the missing people try and
(09:38):
find out who they are, who they were
and what they made and extendingthat idea beyond the typical
ideas of what theatre might be.
So we're talking to the circusperformers, we're talking
to the burlesque artists.
We're trying to make sure thatwe don't just have the writers
and directors in the room, but wehave producers and performers and
(10:00):
designers and things like that.
So in part it's a historical project,it's looking at Australian theatre and
women is defined in a very broad way.
And that's part of everything wedo is to, to make sure that we let
people understand that it's a veryinclusive definition, but we are
(10:21):
looking at around 1970 through to now.
So trying to find evidence of allof those works that were really so
significant during a kind of a, what Istill think of as a bit of a golden age
in the late eighties, early nineties.
But also stuff that'sbeen happening since then.
(10:41):
So we're trying to find those works.
We're trying to talk to those artists.
And through that, we are tryingto also extrapolate what feminist
strategies there might be thatare shareable and repurposed.
Repurposable in the name ofsocially engaged cultural change.
(11:02):
So that's what we're working on.
It's very ambitious.
It's an unusual research projectto be funded because it not
only has the, the usual academicoutput, so a book and, you know,
journal articles and all of that.
But we are also making an onlinelibrary of legacy letters where women
basically dedicate a message to somebodywho was deeply influential to them.
(11:27):
And we're also making a performancework and those are all going to be
counted as formal academic outputswhich is quite radical with a small r
it's almost like there has been enforcedculture of, of amnesia and of forgetting
(11:54):
around so many things in this country.
It's one of the thingswe're really good at
art is activism, especially this sortof stuff I'm talking about, which
is sort of prankfull you know, the,the prankster spirit in the artist.
I think that's activism.
(12:15):
I think about, you know, being ayoung artist in the eighties and
was when AIDS was really, you know,capturing or not capturing the public
interest and what a role that artistactivists like say the sisters of
perpetual indulgence or bugger up,you know, the graffiti artists played
(12:38):
in challenging public perceptions andgetting the issues into the limelight.
The thing about art asactivism is its efficiency.
What you can do in half an hour orart compared to what you can do in 30
(13:01):
weeks of policy making, you know, it'sa no brainer and I just don't get it.
Actually.
I don't get why we don't useart, not a utilitarian, not a, an
instrumental kind of a way, but as atool for communication, it just cuts
through it, cuts through the shit.
(13:23):
And you know, one of the firstthings I ask my students when
I'm working with people is whatis it that is indelible in you?
What artistic experience haveyou had that you couldn't
forget, even if you wanted.
that capacity that art has tochange us physically viscerally
through the impact of the encounter.
(13:44):
I don't know.
It just, it drives me nuts when I thinkabout so many of the public health
issues that could be addressed artfully.
And I don't mean, you know, inthat kind of dull, earnest, worthy,
patronising way, but in ways thatexcite people and allow people to
(14:08):
actually it's that thing that I'vealways loved about art is that, you
know, those moments where you feellike, oh my God, I can see that now.
And I couldn't before half anhour ago, I didn't know that.
But something about the experienceI've just had, has allowed the
scales to fall from my eyes.
And I see that now, andI will never unsee it.
(14:30):
And I just, I know it getsme very excited about that.
The play, this dyingbusiness, which I wrote.
in 19 93, 19 94 was commissionedto open the first international
(14:54):
conference on hospice andpalliative care in Australia.
Nobody was talking arts hyphenhealth at that point, but I accepted
the invitation to write that playbecause I was really curious, really
curious about death and dying.
Terrifi.
. Um, and so it was an opportunity for meto get up close and personal with people
(15:18):
who worked in that space and people whowere dying and their families and so on.
And I've always used that asthe kind of testing device for
whether I wanna do a project.
Is, does it scare me?
Am I interested?
No, is there, are there gapsin my knowledge, what are the
questions that I have about that?
So another play that was written undersimilar kinds of circumstances was a
(15:43):
play called the law of large numbers.
And that's a play about women in poker,machine addiction, again, a kind
of community or public health issue.
And I was just fascinatedby, by that addiction.
It is an addiction that wasbeing cultivated, was being
offered to women here, come andget addicted to poker machines.
(16:04):
In this country, town, yourlife will be so much better.
You won't have any money, but youknow, your life will be so much
better if we can just hook you tothese flashing lights and, and sound.
And I just found thatreally interesting.
And then the years of work withthe Groundswell project really
drew that to the fore because.
The whole offer from Kerry Newman,who co-founded that organization
(16:26):
with me was what can we do if wehitch art to this, uh, big sigh,
because the groundswell project haskind of no more to me, it came to
a very ugly ending for me and for.
under circumstances that were not ofour control and that we still don't
(16:49):
fully understand, but we were kind ofremoved Kerry first and then me, but
the groundswell project is O an idea.
That's now lived in the worldfor over 10 years and it was
forged through a chance meeting.
Between myself and Kerry Newmanwho's a clinical psychologist,
a very long story behind that.
(17:11):
Really a series of accidents, happyaccidents, where she had had an idea
for a while about just what we'retalking about now, how to change the
culture around death and dying and her.
suspicion was that working with the artswould have something to do with that.
And we accidentally met, we didn'tknow each other, two strangers from
(17:34):
completely different worlds, completelydifferent generations and backgrounds.
And for some reason, she got me at amoment when I was saying yes to things.
And I said, oh yeah.
Why not?
Not probably not thinking.
What that, what happened would happen?
So within a couple of months ofour accidental meeting, we had
(17:56):
deductible gift recipient status,which is almost impossible to
get now and was very hard then.
And we were a bonafidecharitable entity.
And we had a first partner inPenworth high school in Sydney
and a very forward thinking dramateacher there called Nicole Bonfield.
(18:20):
And so in our first year we launcheda project with year 11 drama
students making work about deathand death and dying based on a
kind of a peer to peer education.
So it wasn't about us as adults going inand trying to educate kids about death.
It was about kids asking all thequestions that they wanted to ask
(18:42):
about death and dying, and thenperforming something that they had
made about that to their peers.
And that went all the way upto the state drama festival.
So I just love those kinds ofexponential projects where the
amplification is just a naturalthing, you know, and they
were performing these things.
And we did that for three years withPenrith high, and then we broadened
(19:05):
out and we did a lot of other differentkinds of projects and partnerships.
So we partnered with the organ andtissue donation authority and did
a project called film life, whichagain, brought young people in,
taught them basic filmmaking skills.
And got them to make community serviceannouncements for their own generation
(19:27):
about organ and tissue donation.
They were fantastic.
Some of them were justmind bogglingly good.
And you know, it just went on like that.
For nearly 10 years with us justgoing, oh, we could do that.
Yeah.
Why not do that?
Just bumbling.
You know, we were never verygood at the vision statements
(19:47):
and the mission statementsand all of that sort of stuff.
We just bumbed our wayalong doing things with
communities who had the will.
finding the money where we couldand growing it towards this sort of
compassionate city's ethos, which is nowa worldwide thing of returning death,
(20:09):
just as we have returned birth in a lotof ways to the community and, you know,
asking the medical profession to stepback and the funeral industry to step
back and the community to step forward.
With that, that embodied knowledge thatyou have, if you have the privilege
to attend somebody to their death,
(20:38):
as I get older, I'm much more interestedin all of this stuff as having a kind.
I'm gonna say a word.
I, I probably wanna take back latersacred a sacred element to it.
Whereby any group of peoplewho gather together for any
purpose, have some kind of a.
(21:01):
shared energy in the academy.
It's called communitas that canbe harnessed to do things and
no one person can do it and noone person can influence it.
It must make itself known sort oforganically within that community.
(21:24):
Now I had a Catholic childhoodand we don't have enough time
to go into the deep residues ofthe congregational experience.
But I think that one of the fewgood things that I still have from
my Catholic childhood is a senseof, of that communal energy.
(21:46):
And in that sense of what happenswhen we gather to witness or
to listen, or to share somekind of a communal experience.
And I'm very interested in, in thatkind of lateral experience, I'm I have
very little time for the hierarchy.
I've always been interestedin different kinds of shapes.
(22:08):
It's one of the reasonsI'm a playwright.
I think, you know, thatplaywriting is shape making and
shape making with an audience.
What kinds of shapes can you make?
In that kind of interplay betweenthe audience or the congregants and I
call 'em congregants and withnesses.
(22:28):
Um, and what happens when you canbring tho those kinds of energies
together and in the classroom situation?
I also think it's like an audience.
I think about a classroom asbeing a poly headed organism.
And, you know, I've noticed I can noticeit if one there's might be a particular
student who brings a particular energyand they're away next week that organism
(22:49):
is going to behave in a different way.
It's gonna have different capacitiesthat just really interest me.
So it does rely on trust.
And, and I ask that of my students.
I ask them to try and be as, asopen and as authentic as they can.
And to bring themselves into thespace, even if it's, if it's rough
(23:14):
and unformed and a bit shameful,
human beings are endlessly fascinatingand best seen best understood in.
In groups,
Nat Grant (23:35):
you've been listening to the prima Donna podcast to find
out more about this project and tohear more episodes like this one,
visit prima Donna podcast.com.
So my name's Peter Murray and I am a recovering
playwright and para academic.
So parody of an academic orsomeone who works para the academy.
So alongside the academy,
Nat Grant (00:18):
Welcome to season six of the prima Donna podcast, Sonic
portraits of Australian artists.
This audio was recorded andproduced on Wurundjeri country.
I pay respects toelders past and present.
The first episode in thisseries features playwright
and academic Peter Murray.
To find out more about the projectand to hear more episodes like this
(00:39):
one, visit prima Donna podcast.com.
Peta Murray (00:47):
I think that that's was my sort of self soothing
term for my estrangement.
from the theater.
I had a long life as a professionalplaywright, and that was how I
identified professionally vocationally.
And I think there's a little, possiblya little tinge of rancour in there in
(01:11):
terms of how disposable playwrightsare, and especially women playwrights
and especially aging women playwrights.
So I think that the recoveringplaywright thing is, is
me just pushing back.
It's also for manyyears, I thought, right.
I've written my last play.
And now I don't think like that anymore.
I, I now.
(01:32):
I'll continue to havea writing practice.
And if it needs to take the form ofa play, that's the form it will take.
So it's just a different relationship,really with theater as, as an industry,
it's daily practice now, but inspite of me in a lot of ways, it's
(01:55):
something I've struggled with my wholelife, and I've always carried around.
Fantasy that if I was a proper writer,I would be up at four o'clock in the
morning doing the morning pages orleading the life that I think it's
Steven King describes, you know, whereyou, you work until midday and then
you play a round of golf and thensomeone brings you a meal and a whiskey.
(02:17):
I love that idea.
I love the romantic ideaof that artistic life.
That has never been my reality.
When I was a full-time playwright,I had to drag myself screaming to
the desk and the act of writingwas always the last thing.
It was the last step.
It's almost like the tidyingup of a creative process.
(02:41):
So it's not even fun.
These days my writing is so atomizedand, and it has so many different
kinds of outlets, whether it's throughblogging, whether it's through this
bonkers thing I'm now doing in spiteof myself on Facebook, whether it's
(03:02):
through making up a bespoke word forsomebody, I feel like I now do write
each day, but I don't even notice it.
And very rarely will I sitdown and, and formally go, oh,
I'm going to do writing now.
I don't have to do that anymore.
It's such a joy, honestly, to be throughthe years and years of, of torture that
(03:25):
I experienced trying to be a writer.
And now just find, you know, I'vegot not that I've got a lot to say.
I've just got a lot of outletsthese days for different
kinds of thinking and making.
So that's what I do.
(03:47):
It's probably doesn'thave to be like that.
It's almost..
That's the great secret that, ormaybe it's a myth that one writer
inflicts upon another writer, youknow, is, and I think about this in
relation to the students, "come and bea writer and enter a world of pain".
I don't want to do that.
(04:08):
And I don't want that to be whatthe, the young artists I'm working
with think about creativity.
So one of the things I'm at painsto do in my working life is to try
and disabuse them of that and totry to recover, you know, where my
writing voice comes from is a childin me who loves words and still loves
(04:31):
words and what you can do with words.
I mean, you will go throughkind of agony, anyone who wants
to express themselves, they'reputting themselves on the line.
You know, of course you will,you will grapple with that and
that will be painful and, andyou will always fall short.
(04:56):
I think that's the other thing youhave this sense of what it is that
you're trying to make and you makeit and you make it and you make
it and it's out there and it'sclose, but it's not quite what you
sensed that it was supposed to be.
So those things are painful, but Idon't think it has to be the, you
know, agonising, turn yourself insideout and spill your guts thing that my
(05:20):
generation was told it was going to be,
I hated my father for making medo it, but I went to university
on a teacher's scholarship andhad a few years service as a, an
English history drama teacher in theschool system, in New South Wales.
(05:43):
And with my trusty dip ed, onceI became a writer or started to,
to try to live the writer's life,I was able to get extra work.
So it's always been my second stringand everywhere I've lived I managed
to somehow find a CAE or some kindkind of adult ed thing or whatever.
(06:05):
And then gradually over the last20 years, it's sort of segued
into something more serious.
Firstly, in vocational educationand training, and now in higher ed,
you share the skills, you sharethe tools because there are
tools and, you know, there arethings that you can play with.
(06:28):
And muck around withand see what they do.
But basically you teach writingby getting out of the way of the
writer and allowing them to seewhat their own voice can do and
what their they're capable of doing.
So I see my job asmessing with their heads.
(06:52):
Trying to expand their sense of whatwriting is mainly through reading or
through taking in other kinds of, youknow, reading these days goes by many,
many different guises, so it could bewatching things, listening to things.
I just subscribe to the viewthat everybody is creative.
(07:15):
I can't bear it when somebodysays, "oh, I'm, you know,
well, wish I was creative".
Did you decide what to wear today?
Of course you're creative, youknow, so it's trying to just
give people the confidence thatit's their birthright to do that.
And if they want to do that,playing, making a mess, trying
(07:35):
and failing and trying and
failing, you will discover whatworks and what doesn't work.
And that's how I do it.
I was a very serious young insectfor a long time, but something's
(07:56):
changed and I don't reallyknow how to explain it to you.
It's probably partly to do withgetting older and having fewer
fucks to give about things.
I've seen the valuein a playful mindset.
I've seen that if that's how youapproach things, then failure is
(08:18):
built in all play, comes with a,you know, a lot of padding for
falling over and for bumping things.
And, and so it gives you that kind of,it allows for a degree of resilience,
it allows for experimentation, itallows for tropes and the repetition
(08:38):
of things that you know you can do.
And I think the other thingis that these days I prefer
to work collaboratively.
I'm not that interested in my soloexpression and play is the best
way I know to work collaboratively.
It's an invitation.
(09:12):
So this is an Australian researchcouncil fund discovery project,
which in academic world isquite a dazzling thing to have.
This one's led out of Monash universityby professor Stacy Holman Jones.
And it's basically about two things.
One is trying to recuperate the missingstories and the missing people try and
(09:38):
find out who they are, who they were
and what they made and extendingthat idea beyond the typical
ideas of what theatre might be.
So we're talking to the circusperformers, we're talking
to the burlesque artists.
We're trying to make sure thatwe don't just have the writers
and directors in the room, but wehave producers and performers and
(10:00):
designers and things like that.
So in part it's a historical project,it's looking at Australian theatre and
women is defined in a very broad way.
And that's part of everything wedo is to, to make sure that we let
people understand that it's a veryinclusive definition, but we are
(10:21):
looking at around 1970 through to now.
So trying to find evidence of allof those works that were really so
significant during a kind of a, what Istill think of as a bit of a golden age
in the late eighties, early nineties.
But also stuff that'sbeen happening since then.
(10:41):
So we're trying to find those works.
We're trying to talk to those artists.
And through that, we are tryingto also extrapolate what feminist
strategies there might be thatare shareable and repurposed.
Repurposable in the name ofsocially engaged cultural change.
(11:02):
So that's what we're working on.
It's very ambitious.
It's an unusual research projectto be funded because it not
only has the, the usual academicoutput, so a book and, you know,
journal articles and all of that.
But we are also making an onlinelibrary of legacy letters where women
basically dedicate a message to somebodywho was deeply influential to them.
(11:27):
And we're also making a performancework and those are all going to be
counted as formal academic outputswhich is quite radical with a small r
it's almost like there has been enforcedculture of, of amnesia and of forgetting
(11:54):
around so many things in this country.
It's one of the thingswe're really good at
art is activism, especially this sortof stuff I'm talking about, which
is sort of prankfull you know, the,the prankster spirit in the artist.
I think that's activism.
(12:15):
I think about, you know, being ayoung artist in the eighties and
was when AIDS was really, you know,capturing or not capturing the public
interest and what a role that artistactivists like say the sisters of
perpetual indulgence or bugger up,you know, the graffiti artists played
(12:38):
in challenging public perceptions andgetting the issues into the limelight.
The thing about art asactivism is its efficiency.
What you can do in half an hour orart compared to what you can do in 30
(13:01):
weeks of policy making, you know, it'sa no brainer and I just don't get it.
Actually.
I don't get why we don't useart, not a utilitarian, not a, an
instrumental kind of a way, but as atool for communication, it just cuts
through it, cuts through the shit.
(13:23):
And you know, one of the firstthings I ask my students when
I'm working with people is whatis it that is indelible in you?
What artistic experience haveyou had that you couldn't
forget, even if you wanted.
that capacity that art has tochange us physically viscerally
through the impact of the encounter.
(13:44):
I don't know.
It just, it drives me nuts when I thinkabout so many of the public health
issues that could be addressed artfully.
And I don't mean, you know, inthat kind of dull, earnest, worthy,
patronising way, but in ways thatexcite people and allow people to
(14:08):
actually it's that thing that I'vealways loved about art is that, you
know, those moments where you feellike, oh my God, I can see that now.
And I couldn't before half anhour ago, I didn't know that.
But something about the experienceI've just had, has allowed the
scales to fall from my eyes.
And I see that now, andI will never unsee it.
(14:30):
And I just, I know it getsme very excited about that.
The play, this dyingbusiness, which I wrote.
in 19 93, 19 94 was commissionedto open the first international
(14:54):
conference on hospice andpalliative care in Australia.
Nobody was talking arts hyphenhealth at that point, but I accepted
the invitation to write that playbecause I was really curious, really
curious about death and dying.
Terrifi.
. Um, and so it was an opportunity for meto get up close and personal with people
(15:18):
who worked in that space and people whowere dying and their families and so on.
And I've always used that asthe kind of testing device for
whether I wanna do a project.
Is, does it scare me?
Am I interested?
No, is there, are there gapsin my knowledge, what are the
questions that I have about that?
So another play that was written undersimilar kinds of circumstances was a
(15:43):
play called the law of large numbers.
And that's a play about women in poker,machine addiction, again, a kind
of community or public health issue.
And I was just fascinatedby, by that addiction.
It is an addiction that wasbeing cultivated, was being
offered to women here, come andget addicted to poker machines.
(16:04):
In this country, town, yourlife will be so much better.
You won't have any money, but youknow, your life will be so much
better if we can just hook you tothese flashing lights and, and sound.
And I just found thatreally interesting.
And then the years of work withthe Groundswell project really
drew that to the fore because.
The whole offer from Kerry Newman,who co-founded that organization
(16:26):
with me was what can we do if wehitch art to this, uh, big sigh,
because the groundswell project haskind of no more to me, it came to
a very ugly ending for me and for.
under circumstances that were not ofour control and that we still don't
(16:49):
fully understand, but we were kind ofremoved Kerry first and then me, but
the groundswell project is O an idea.
That's now lived in the worldfor over 10 years and it was
forged through a chance meeting.
Between myself and Kerry Newmanwho's a clinical psychologist,
a very long story behind that.
(17:11):
Really a series of accidents, happyaccidents, where she had had an idea
for a while about just what we'retalking about now, how to change the
culture around death and dying and her.
suspicion was that working with the artswould have something to do with that.
And we accidentally met, we didn'tknow each other, two strangers from
(17:34):
completely different worlds, completelydifferent generations and backgrounds.
And for some reason, she got me at amoment when I was saying yes to things.
And I said, oh yeah.
Why not?
Not probably not thinking.
What that, what happened would happen?
So within a couple of months ofour accidental meeting, we had
(17:56):
deductible gift recipient status,which is almost impossible to
get now and was very hard then.
And we were a bonafidecharitable entity.
And we had a first partner inPenworth high school in Sydney
and a very forward thinking dramateacher there called Nicole Bonfield.
(18:20):
And so in our first year we launcheda project with year 11 drama
students making work about deathand death and dying based on a
kind of a peer to peer education.
So it wasn't about us as adults going inand trying to educate kids about death.
It was about kids asking all thequestions that they wanted to ask
(18:42):
about death and dying, and thenperforming something that they had
made about that to their peers.
And that went all the way upto the state drama festival.
So I just love those kinds ofexponential projects where the
amplification is just a naturalthing, you know, and they
were performing these things.
And we did that for three years withPenrith high, and then we broadened
(19:05):
out and we did a lot of other differentkinds of projects and partnerships.
So we partnered with the organ andtissue donation authority and did
a project called film life, whichagain, brought young people in,
taught them basic filmmaking skills.
And got them to make community serviceannouncements for their own generation
(19:27):
about organ and tissue donation.
They were fantastic.
Some of them were justmind bogglingly good.
And you know, it just went on like that.
For nearly 10 years with us justgoing, oh, we could do that.
Yeah.
Why not do that?
Just bumbling.
You know, we were never verygood at the vision statements
(19:47):
and the mission statementsand all of that sort of stuff.
We just bumbed our wayalong doing things with
communities who had the will.
finding the money where we couldand growing it towards this sort of
compassionate city's ethos, which is nowa worldwide thing of returning death,
(20:09):
just as we have returned birth in a lotof ways to the community and, you know,
asking the medical profession to stepback and the funeral industry to step
back and the community to step forward.
With that, that embodied knowledge thatyou have, if you have the privilege
to attend somebody to their death,
(20:38):
as I get older, I'm much more interestedin all of this stuff as having a kind.
I'm gonna say a word.
I, I probably wanna take back latersacred a sacred element to it.
Whereby any group of peoplewho gather together for any
purpose, have some kind of a.
(21:01):
shared energy in the academy.
It's called communitas that canbe harnessed to do things and
no one person can do it and noone person can influence it.
It must make itself known sort oforganically within that community.
(21:24):
Now I had a Catholic childhoodand we don't have enough time
to go into the deep residues ofthe congregational experience.
But I think that one of the fewgood things that I still have from
my Catholic childhood is a senseof, of that communal energy.
(21:46):
And in that sense of what happenswhen we gather to witness or
to listen, or to share somekind of a communal experience.
And I'm very interested in, in thatkind of lateral experience, I'm I have
very little time for the hierarchy.
I've always been interestedin different kinds of shapes.
(22:08):
It's one of the reasonsI'm a playwright.
I think, you know, thatplaywriting is shape making and
shape making with an audience.
What kinds of shapes can you make?
In that kind of interplay betweenthe audience or the congregants and I
call 'em congregants and withnesses.
(22:28):
Um, and what happens when you canbring tho those kinds of energies
together and in the classroom situation?
I also think it's like an audience.
I think about a classroom asbeing a poly headed organism.
And, you know, I've noticed I can noticeit if one there's might be a particular
student who brings a particular energyand they're away next week that organism
(22:49):
is going to behave in a different way.
It's gonna have different capacitiesthat just really interest me.
So it does rely on trust.
And, and I ask that of my students.
I ask them to try and be as, asopen and as authentic as they can.
And to bring themselves into thespace, even if it's, if it's rough
(23:14):
and unformed and a bit shameful,
human beings are endlessly fascinatingand best seen best understood in.
In groups,
Nat Grant (23:35):
you've been listening to the prima Donna podcast to find
out more about this project and tohear more episodes like this one,
visit prima Donna podcast.com.
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