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Director Petra Kalive discovered the life-changing power of personal stories early in her career. As an ensemble member and later co-artistic director of the improvisational theatre company Melbourne Playback, she worked with the African community in Footscray, refugees in Dandenong, with teachers and health professionals.
“I learned so much doing that for seven years,” says Kalive. She is seated in her office in Adelaide, where last year she was appointed artistic director of the State Theatre Company South Australia (STCSA).
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Danny Mulvany loved the heat, evident in his tanned, leathery skin. The Ten Pound Pom from Nottingham immigrated to the red dirt of Derby in the West Australian Kimberley as a young man, then raised a family in remote coastal Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth, never wanting to move back to England.
Taking a labourer’s job with Western Australia’s Main Roads Department, Danny travelled in his old ute, which smelled of earth and toil, sometimes plucking his eldest child, Kate, out of primary school from the age of six onwards. Together, they would head northeast to the dusty desert of Yalgoo or southeast to the wildflowers and wheat of Mingenew, wherever his job took him.
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Auckland-born and raised artist Lisa Reihana is ever the optimist, creating two new works signifying social cohesion to hang outside two Australian arts venues just as dark divisions seek to undermine the value of migration and Indigenous sovereignty.
“All humans want to belong to some community, whatever you call it—clan, mob, whatever,” says the 60-year-old, seated in the regional gallery Ngununggula, a Gundungurra language name meaning belonging, in Bowral in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.
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