AustLit

'My father has been dead for fifty years. He was going on for seventy-two, and had been doing, on that Friday in late October 1971, what he had done for most of his life: labouring in a tannery. As usual on Friday nights, he brought home fish-and-chips and a bottle of Fourex, to fall asleep in front of the television. My mother could not wake him.' 

 (Introduction)

'In January 2022 I performed my three one-woman pieces—whitenoise: 12 ghosts—over three nights at Theatre Works Mullet Festival. Each piece focused on a different form of violence: Laying Down the Law looked at the gendered violence of the Lindy Chamberlain case; What Happened Was This was the story of LebaneseAustralian Mamdouh Habib, his kidnapping, imprisonment and torture; Credibility Gulf, the third, focused on the first Gulf War. These were significant and iconic moments that have settled deep into our collective memories and cultural/political unconscious. I wanted to put the bodies and stories back together, reassemble them differently to create a new, more human, empathetic, and politically aware re-assessment of what really happened. I wanted whitenoise to re-contextualise these events, allowing the audience to re-member and re-appraise their impact: to activate an awareness of why re-engagement with these iconic events and characters—their ghosts—is necessary. I hoped to give the audience some conceptual and creative tools to extrapolate to similar events, including those taking place today.' (Introduction)