As a theatre director, I am always hungry and on the lookout for works that are bold, current and vibrant, works that resonate and are unafraid to tackle all corners of the Australian psyche.

I was lucky enough to meet Mary Anne Butler at a National Playwriting Festival many years ago in Brisbane. I remember her eyes, her directness and her liveliness.

But I was a director based in Melbourne and she, a playwright based in Darwin.

She contacted me a few years later, sending me her award-winning play Broken. Having read it, I was immediately taken with the characters, the poeticism and the vivid landscape she had managed to capture. We joined forces and pitched it to a couple of main stage companies, but with no joy. Then, we were lucky to have Lab Kelpie, (a small independent company) pick it up and produce it at fortyfivedownstairs theatre in Melbourne in 2018. Mary Anne joined us for rehearsals, and it was a joy to have her in the room - she was thoughtful, insightful and gracious, and we both knew this would be the start of an honest, dynamic working relationship.

We started a dialogue again In 2020, this time on a new work originally titled Tiny Bones of Love (part of Red Stitch Actors Theatre’s INK Program), a work we both found ourselves struggling with. After a couple of early drafts and a flurry of emails and zooms I finally had the chance to visit Mary Anne in Darwin in 2021, where she showed me for the first time a new monologue that started like this:

The dogs of the apocalypse lie at her feet, ears alert.

…waiting…

They can feel it in their flesh-bones; under their fur

sense the rising of the soul into the night

as she floats, barely present;

not quite ready

to face the great emptiness.

I was immediately hooked, excited and curious to see where it could lead. Mary Anne was just about to depart in her campervan with her beauty of a dog, Chet, on a road (and research) trip from Darwin to Broome. Then, on this journey, she came across the story of a town in the Pilbara called Wittenoom - and its deadly legacy. She then saw how to frame and house this vivid story of death and dying.

In Wittenoom, the play, we see a mother and her daughter move to a remote mining town where a joyous life and looming death dance side-by-side in the blue asbestos dust. Two narratives slowly unfold, one set in the past where life is in full swing and the other in the present, about a body that is diseased and dying. They are, first and foremost, stories about fecundity and the giving of life, but also of the taking of it and an awareness of time running out. They revolve around loss, love, memory, betrayal and grief and in them Mary Anne manages to capture ‘humanity’ in its most raw and fragile state.

In both Broken and Wittenoom, Mary Anne gives us a series of rich and multi-layered characters while also capturing the vast Australian outback, all in her typically spare, poetic style. Her writing, rich with imagery, visceral in its rendering, is also full of ideas that challenge and surprise. She has a gift for embedding humour and pathos into all of her plays, her wit sharp and bold and her heart ever present. For a director, all these elements are a gift, and in working on Wittenoom in preparation for its recent Red Stitch season, we had the luxury of having a short development with the two actors and composer present. Hearing the voices come alive off the page gave Mary Anne the opportunity to rethink the structure of her script, which in turn brought a whole new dynamic to the work.

Mary Anne’s writing is in so many ways potent, exemplary and courageous. She tackles and unpacks ideas head-on, with boldness, craft and gusto. She understands the demands of theatre in a way few writers do and working with her once again has been an absolute pleasure.

Susie Dee

Wittenoom the play wouldn’t exist without a hugely fortuitous combination of people and factors: Susie Dee, Janine Baines and the Red Stitch INK program were crucial in supporting and encouraging me to find the story. An Australia Council Literature Board grant was pivotal in providing me time to write it. Actors Caroline Lee and Emily Goddard, composer and sound designer Ian Moorhead and Ella Caldwell joined Susie to form the development team behind the work, giving intelligent feedback to an early script which moved it forward in massive leaps.

…but in truth, it first started when I stalked Susie Dee at a PlayWriting Australia conference

in Brisbane, in 2010…

It was my first conference as an attendee, and what stood out for me in the presented works

was Susie’s direction. The pieces she worked on were different, interesting, engaging in their

interpretation. At the end of the conference, I plucked up the courage to ask if I could speak

with her. She looked around the crowded room full of massive networking potential, nodded

her head and gave me fifteen minutes of her full and undivided attention: every bit of her

keen intelligence, intense curiosity and big heart focussed on an unknown playwright in a

massive act of professional and personal generosity. At the end of my stumbling ‘pitch’, she

gave me her email address and told me to send her what I had. I walked away from that

conference on a glowing cloud of hope.

I followed up via email, and unfortunately Susie couldn’t do the dates for that project.

Theatre being a long game, I remained hopeful that I would get to work with her at some time

in the future. Flash-forward to 2018. I met Susie for a coffee in Melbourne, and asked if she

would consider directing my next play, Broken. Broken had already had two sold out Darwin

Festival productions under the stunning direction of Gail Evans, and a Sydney season at Darlinghurst Theatre Company directed by Shannon Murphy in a powerful ‘radio program’ version, complete with radio

mics and live foley on stage.

As a playwright, it’s a great privilege to see your work re-imagined over time, and Susie

Dee’s fortyfivedownstairs production was riveting: sparse, and evocative, and enticing –

drawing audiences deep into a world layered with surprising imagery; drawing in a stellar

design team which made those bare boards rich with the imagery, sound and light of

Australia’s Central Desert. Between our Melbourne meeting and the production, Susie had

made her own trip to Central Australia to experience first-hand the unique landscape and

light where the play was set. She asked me to send her the research that had helped shape the play’s world: images, articles, sound grabs, interviews – and then she captured this world

with such absolute truth and integrity that it made me hungry to work with her again.

In 2019, Susie and I applied to the Red Stitch INK play development program as a writer /

director team. Red Stitch accepted the proposal, and from there we hunkered down to create a new work together.

I fail often as a playwright. Either I start with an idea which I don’t have the passion to live with for the three to five years it take me to research and write the play, or my craft skills aren’t yet quite up to the execution of possibilities which play around in my head so the wrack of self-doubt shipwrecks me and the work beyond rescue, or the idea / writing become trite and cliched, and I end up hurling at against the wall.

The less said about my first drafts for the INK program, the better. Suffice it to say they were

hurled up against the wall, with Susie Dee’s gentle encouragement. This is another reason

that I love working with Susie. Her honesty and directness in feedback are cased inside such

a massive heart and keen dramaturgical intelligence, that she urges me to push myself further

in my craft; and the work is always the better for it.

For the INK play I tuned deeper into my gut, which held a story I’d been quelling for years. It

was the story of my mother - Sally Butler - who died of lung cancer in 2001. I’ve never been

able to write about her. It’s been too close, too brutal. And now here she was, finally. Bubbling up inside me, demanding to have her story told.

Susie was due in Darwin in a fortnight, coming up for a few days development on a work I

hadn’t written yet, so I did what I call ‘the vomit’ – an intense and uncensored writing period where I let the words churn out of me without thinking about form, or structure, or character or storyline. I read a lot of poetry when I write, and during this ‘vomit’ period I came across the Barbara Kingsolver poem Hope; An Owner’s Manual in which she says: “Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping in the shade of your future.” I saw my mum, dying of cancer, with two Dogs of the Apocalypse lying at her feet, waiting for her to die. This image

started a flow of words which were – essentially – the recording of my mum’s death, from her initial diagnosis to her end. I wrote this up as an uncensored 17-page monologue.

Susie arrived for our development and I handed her these pages. She took them into her

room, emerged 30 minutes later, and said “I love it. It’s not a play yet. You know that, don’t

you. But we can definitely work with this.”

…we were on…

The next week I headed off on a trip to Broome, a research trip for my PhD in Literature; a

novel and exegesis exploring the question: How do you write hope into the creative literature

of the Anthropocene? I stopped off in Kununurra for a night with my friend Jo Roach –

whose daughter Janine Baines was there. We listened to a Midnight Oil song, Blue Sky

Mine, and Janine told me that this song was written about the blue asbestos mining town of

Wittenoom, in WA’s remote Pilbara region.

I’d never heard of Wittenoom, or blue asbestos. I was gobsmacked by what Janine told me,

and ashamed that I’d never heard of the town before. John Gordon’s Foreword in this

publication offers up a deeply informed context of the history and ongoing issues resulting

from this purpose-built town, so I won’t repeat his vast and detailed knowledge here. But this

town lodged in my gut, and I knew instantly that I’d found the other half of my play.

I completed my road trip and hunkered down in the Broome library for three days,

researching Wittenoom. The characters of Dot – a single mother – and her daughter Pearl

came to me through reading and listening to some of the stories told by Wittenoom’s ex-

residents. While informed by my research, and while facts found on public record are

mentioned in the play, Wittenoom is a work of fiction; an imagining of what it would have

been like to live and work out in the remote Pilbara in the early 1960’s.

The play came out quickly after that road trip, shaping itself into a structure which jumped

between the present - Dot’s experience of mesothelioma (informed by my mum’s cancer

journey) – and the past; an imagined version of life in Wittenoom in the early 1960’s.

Another few days development courtesy of Red Stitch with more intelligent interrogation by

the development team tweaked the script until we felt it was ready to go. Then Red Stitch

programmed Wittenoom for 2023, and the amazing development team grew into a stellar

production team under the helm of Susie Dee, welcoming Rachel Burke as lighting designer,

Dann Barber on set and costume design, Cassandra Fumi as AD and stage manager, and

Georgie Bright as assistant SM.

There are many people and organisations I would like to thank for this journey: Susie Dee,

Ella Caldwell, Caroline Lee, Emily Goddard, Ian Morehead, Rachel Burke, Dann Barber,

Janine Baines, Lyniece Bolitho, Tanya Heaslip, John Gordon, Gail Evans, Ciella Williams,

Kelly Beneforti, Red Stitch Ensemble, Brown’s Mart Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts,

Michelle Broun, Jo Roach, Martin Pritchard, Robin Chappel and Angela Di Pasquale, whose PhD Sistemazione and death: the role of the Wittenoom asbestos mine in the lives and deaths of Italian transnational workers was a pivotal research document.

Wittenoom was written under the development support of the Red Stitch INK program, the

Brown’s Mart Build-Up program and the writing was supported by a grant from the

Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

Thank you to all the organisations and individuals who support the development of Literature

in all its forms, and who support and advocate for the new Australian theatre works.

Mary Anne Butler
Naarm (Melbourne), December 2022