A ground-breaking community theatre enterprise,
Women in the West was created by and for regional Australian women. As Fiona Winning recalls in Eugène Van Erven's
Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (2001):
We would do a two-day theatre performance workshop in each town, spending the third day writing up and documenting all the stuff that had come out of the workshops and talking to the women about creating a small performance piece of their own for when we came back. So in each of those towns we had a short but very intense time. After doing sixteen towns, I wrote a script, Libby composed the music, and Ruby directed the resulting show. We then went back to all these towns. The local women's groups hosted our performance, publicised it, got am audience, did the catering, and performed in a local section that opened the night. And then we got on and did the professional hour-long show that was based on their lives. It was just fantastic. By chance Libby then became the Community Arts Office in Queensland after that project. She now had contacts in all these towns... and a whole lot of pilot projects started happening there as a result (p. 213).