Cirrus@Austlit

'This is a new work for the stage that speaks to our current climate crisis. Written in the wake of the devastation of the 2019 bushfires it asks: What’s happening to winter? In hot, bushfire-prone Australia, our winters are becoming warmer and shorter. Will climate change eventually erase the season, leaving it to exist only in paintings, fairy tales and historical accounts? The End of Winter is about loss and resilience. From the award-winning team who created Good With Maps comes another sinewy, poetic and thought-provoking piece.'

Source: Griffin Theatre Company.

'Scratchland is poetry with a performative tilt. A topography of voices, of casual and perhaps not so casual encounters. A car park attendant, a neglected child, a crow with a mordant sense of humour...a possible crime. Creatures and plants scratching an existence (and occasionally flourishing) in the urban margins. People struggling to make their lives into stories and make those stories known to others.

'A collection in two parts, Scratchland is about wild frontiers the wild frontiers of our cities (Scenarios & solos from a mixed landscape) and the wild frontiers of our TV viewing (True crimers).'   (Publication summary)

'Early evening. Autumn 1954. In a house beside the Nepean River a young woman is crying. Iris is chopping onions while Leo cooks the wild mushrooms he picked that morning. Iris is growing up at the foot of the Blue Mountains. Leo is making a new life for himself after fleeing war-ravaged Europe.

'Yellow Yellow Sometimes Blue is the story of Iris and Leo. They’re two outsiders peeking in at a world of money, power and gossip as they prepare canapés and cocktails for a debaucherous gathering of Sydney’s cultural elite. Tracing the roots of Sydney’s early Modernist thinking, it is performed by Adam Booth and Kate Worsley, designed by Katja Handt and features the live music of cellist Me-Lee Hay. It’s a 60ish minute story of surviving and thriving as an outsider looking in.'

Source: Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre.

'Some plants have sustained empires and sparked wars. Some have ignited public outrage. Think tea, opium, tulips - and thistles.

'In 1852 South Australia passed its Thistle Act, probably the first weed control legislation anywhere in the world. 

'The word 'thistle' refers to a large and widespread group of plants. Several hundred species within the Asteraceae family, plus a bunch of other plants we call thistles - even though technically, botanically, they're not. Google 'thistles' and many of the sites will tell you how to get rid of them. Dig a little deeper, however, and from this weedy territory other narratives begin to emerge. 

'Part accidental memoir, part environmental history and part exploration of the performative voice on the page, The Book of Thistles is about the cultural and social life of this group of plants we call thistles.' (Publication Summary)

'Teacup in a Storm is a window into an unseen world of crashes, laughter and carrying on.

'Carers make up one in eight Australians and account for 1.9 billion hours of unpaid work annually. Teacup in a Storm draws on a series of detailed interviews with a number of these carers from the local region, exploring their personal experiences. ' (Publication summary)

'When the world map was full of gaps, the Amazon topped the list of places unknown to western explorers. In 2016 are there any ‘unknowns’ left? On a trip to the Amazon, the writer ponders this and other questions as she struggles to deal with her father’s journey through Parkinson’s disease towards what is perhaps our last great unknown—death.  Sometimes sad and confronting this performance essay also funny and thoughtful and celebrates the power of reading and literature to transport us to places both real and imagined. ' (Production summary)

'Sturt, Leichardt, Eyre, Strezelecki - Australians know these names which are deeply etched into the country's landscape and national story. They live in our place names, in plant names, in our history texts. Less well-known is the name of Johann or John Lhotsky, a maverick from central Europe engaged in much the same nineteenth century enterprise of exploring and collecting. Yet although he published political pamphlets, scientific papers, correspondence, an account of his Journey from Sydney to the Australian Alps, and much else, Lhotsky remains an elusive and little-known figure.

'Writer Noelle Janaczewska first heard of Johann Lhotsky when she came across a brief reference to him in a second hand book. This was the beginning of a longstanding fascination with this intriguing character; one which would see her travel the globe in search of traces of Lhotsky, and into some of the great archives and libraries of the world.

'The other Polish explorer explores the beguiling story of botanist, geologist, social commentator, radical and talented linguist Johann Lhotsky.'

Source: ABC.

'According to playwright Noëlle Janaczewska, cooking just might be Australia’s favourite sport. Complete with star players, teams of highly trained professionals, enthusiastic amateurs, and masses of spectators. TV food programs proliferate; Nigella and Jamie are household names; all of us eat and most of us cook. But how do you approach it? Did you learn it at your mother’s knee, do you avoid it, embrace it, enjoy it or find it a chore? And what part might cookbooks play in the whole exercise?

'My Life in Cookbooks blends cultural features, interviews, quotations, soundscapes, music, humour, and philosophical reflection with an essayistic personal voice. Although it acknowledges our fascination with phenomena like MasterChef and Jamie’s 30–Minute Meals (the fastest–selling non-fiction book of all time, apparently), it charts an altogether more idiosyncratic and unexpected course. It interrogates the stories behind our cookbooks to explore the associations and the emotions they arouse in us.'

Source: Radio National.

'Dorothy Hewett belongs to a long line of women who spoke out of turn.

'So does Sally Banner.

'Dorothy Hewett blazed a trail for women writers, and for Australian playwrights (of all genders) interested in theatrical innovation.

'I like to think that I’m part of that lineage.' (Introduction)