AustLit

'no matter the cost, no matter the consequence.

'“He’d been shoving her around for a while now. I knew that. Sometimes she’d tell me, sometimes not, but I could always tell when they’d had a blue. But she was my girl and sometimes things were better left unsaid.”

'Well-meaning, teenage misfit Millie comes home from work one day to discover her old childhood friend Annie bruised and bloody on her doorstep. Millie picks her up, dusts her off and puts her in the bath. Lying in bed together, the two reminisce on a childhood that occurred a lifetime ago and recall an old promise to care for one other “until the end of the earth, no matter the cost and no matter the consequence.” As Annie sleeps, Millie vows to honour her friend in the one way that seems fair; revenge.

'Set in the outskirts of metropolitan Melbourne, KEROSENE is a relentless and unsympathetic character study exploring the complex, ugly and dangerous symptoms of love. It is a homage to the blind loyalty that accompanies lifelong friendships and the realities of what it means to grow up young, quiet and forgotten in modern day Australia.'

Source: Theatre Works.

'In collaboration with Worawa Aboriginal College, St Martins presents a work that overturns common assumptions about First Nations’ girls. In 2017 St Martins was invited to run workshops at Worawa and so began a relationship with the school and some of its Year 10-12 girls, who come from the remotest parts of Australia and board in Healesville to get an education, grow in confidence and claim ownership of their identities and abilities. Many leave home being the first or only girl to get a secondary school education. They hope to finish Year 12, continue onto tertiary study or go back as leaders in their own communities.

'Balit Liwurruk: Strong Girl is a performance made with a mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists that speaks out about strong and smart girls. Often the girls are multilingual, with English not their first language. Aunty Lois Peeler, the school’s principal, Aboriginal Elder and sister of founder Hyllis Maris (Wurundjeri and Yorta Yorta woman), refers to the girls holding the ‘parallel realities’ of Aboriginal lore and Western culture - at the school they learn to ‘walk the two worlds’. With these coexisting realities as a departure point, the project asks what it takes to carry language and culture whilst being a girl today.

'In a rite of passage from girl to woman, twelve girls turn the classic myth of Hercules inside out, repossessing its masculine notions of being strong into their very own 12 tests of strength. Balit: Liwurruk: Strong Girl is an invitation to contemplate the Herculean determination, depth and pride of girls emerging from Country across our vast Australian continent.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.