Peta Murray

It's also for many years, I thought, right. I've written my last play. And now I don't think like that anymore. I, I now. I'll continue to have a writing practice. And if it needs to take the form of a play, that's the form it will take. So it's just a different relationship, really with theater as, as an industry, it's daily practice now, but in spite of me in a lot of ways, it's something I've struggled with my whole life, and I've always carried around.

Fantasy that if I was a proper writer, I would be up at four o'clock in the morning doing the morning pages or leading the life that I think it's Steven King describes, you know, where you, you work until midday and then you play a round of golf and then someone brings you a meal and a whiskey. I love that idea. I love the romantic idea of that artistic life. That has never been my reality.

When I was a full-time playwright, I had to drag myself screaming to the desk and the act of writing was always the last thing. It was the last step. It's almost like the tidying up of a creative process. So it's not even fun.

These days my writing is so atomized and, and it has so many different kinds of outlets, whether it's through blogging, whether it's through this bonkers thing I'm now doing in spite of myself on Facebook, whether it's through making up a bespoke word for somebody, I feel like I now do write each day, but I don't even notice it. And very rarely will I sit down and, and formally go, oh, I'm going to do writing now. I don't have to do that anymore.

It's such a joy, honestly, to be through the years and years of, of torture that I experienced trying to be a writer. And now just find, you know, I've got not that I've got a lot to say. I've just got a lot of outlets these days for different kinds of thinking and making. So that's what I do. It's probably doesn't have to be like that. It's almost..

That's the great secret that, or maybe it's a myth that one writer inflicts upon another writer, you know, is, and I think about this in relation to the students, "come and be a writer and enter a world of pain". I don't want to do that. And I don't want that to be what the, the young artists I'm working with think about creativity.

So one of the things I'm at pains to do in my working life is to try and disabuse them of that and to try to recover, you know, where my writing voice comes from is a child in me who loves words and still loves words and what you can do with words. I mean, you will go through kind of agony, anyone who wants to express themselves, they're putting themselves on the line. You know, of course you will, you will grapple with that and that will be painful and, and you will always fall short.

I think that's the other thing you have this sense of what it is that you're trying to make and you make it and you make it and you make it and it's out there and it's close, but it's not quite what you sensed that it was supposed to be.

So those things are painful, but I don't think it has to be the, you know, agonising, turn yourself inside out and spill your guts thing that my generation was told it was going to be, I hated my father for making me do it, but I went to university on a teacher's scholarship and had a few years service as a, an English history drama teacher in the school system, in New South Wales.

And with my trusty dip ed, once I became a writer or started to, to try to live the writer's life, I was able to get extra work. So it's always been my second string and everywhere I've lived I managed to somehow find a CAE or some kind kind of adult ed thing or whatever. And then gradually over the last 20 years, it's sort of segued into something more serious.

Firstly, in vocational education and training, and now in higher ed, you share the skills, you share the tools because there are tools and, you know, there are things that you can play with. And muck around with and see what they do. But basically you teach writing by getting out of the way of the writer and allowing them to see what their own voice can do and what their they're capable of doing. So I see my job as messing with their heads.

Trying to expand their sense of what writing is mainly through reading or through taking in other kinds of, you know, reading these days goes by many, many different guises, so it could be watching things, listening to things. I just subscribe to the view that everybody is creative. I can't bear it when somebody says, "oh, I'm, you know, well, wish I was creative". Did you decide what to wear today?

Of course you're creative, you know, so it's trying to just give people the confidence that it's their birthright to do that. And if they want to do that, playing, making a mess, trying and failing and trying and failing, you will discover what works and what doesn't work. And that's how I do it. I was a very serious young insect for a long time, but something's changed and I don't really know how to explain it to you.

It's probably partly to do with getting older and having fewer fucks to give about things. I've seen the value in a playful mindset. I've seen that if that's how you approach things, then failure is built in all play, comes with a, you know, a lot of padding for falling over and for bumping things. And, and so it gives you that kind of, it allows for a degree of resilience, it allows for experimentation, it allows for tropes and the repetition of things that you know you can do.

And I think the other thing is that these days I prefer to work collaboratively. I'm not that interested in my solo expression and play is the best way I know to work collaboratively. It's an invitation. So this is an Australian research council fund discovery project, which in academic world is quite a dazzling thing to have. This one's led out of Monash university by professor Stacy Holman Jones. And it's basically about two things.

One is trying to recuperate the missing stories and the missing people try and find out who they are, who they were and what they made and extending that idea beyond the typical ideas of what theatre might be. So we're talking to the circus performers, we're talking to the burlesque artists. We're trying to make sure that we don't just have the writers and directors in the room, but we have producers and performers and designers and things like that.

So in part it's a historical project, it's looking at Australian theatre and women is defined in a very broad way. And that's part of everything we do is to, to make sure that we let people understand that it's a very inclusive definition, but we are looking at around 1970 through to now. So trying to find evidence of all of those works that were really so significant during a kind of a, what I still think of as a bit of a golden age in the late eighties, early nineties.

But also stuff that's been happening since then. So we're trying to find those works. We're trying to talk to those artists. And through that, we are trying to also extrapolate what feminist strategies there might be that are shareable and repurposed. Repurposable in the name of socially engaged cultural change. So that's what we're working on. It's very ambitious.

It's an unusual research project to be funded because it not only has the, the usual academic output, so a book and, you know, journal articles and all of that. But we are also making an online library of legacy letters where women basically dedicate a message to somebody who was deeply influential to them.

And we're also making a performance work and those are all going to be counted as formal academic outputs which is quite radical with a small r it's almost like there has been enforced culture of, of amnesia and of forgetting around so many things in this country. It's one of the things we're really good at art is activism, especially this sort of stuff I'm talking about, which is sort of prankfull you know, the, the prankster spirit in the artist. I think that's activism.

I think about, you know, being a young artist in the eighties and was when AIDS was really, you know, capturing or not capturing the public interest and what a role that artist activists like say the sisters of perpetual indulgence or bugger up, you know, the graffiti artists played in challenging public perceptions and getting the issues into the limelight. The thing about art as activism is its efficiency.

What you can do in half an hour or art compared to what you can do in 30 weeks of policy making, you know, it's a no brainer and I just don't get it. Actually. I don't get why we don't use art, not a utilitarian, not a, an instrumental kind of a way, but as a tool for communication, it just cuts through it, cuts through the shit. And you know, one of the first things I ask my students when I'm working with people is what is it that is indelible in you?

What artistic experience have you had that you couldn't forget, even if you wanted. that capacity that art has to change us physically viscerally through the impact of the encounter. I don't know. It just, it drives me nuts when I think about so many of the public health issues that could be addressed artfully.

And I don't mean, you know, in that kind of dull, earnest, worthy, patronising way, but in ways that excite people and allow people to actually it's that thing that I've always loved about art is that, you know, those moments where you feel like, oh my God, I can see that now. And I couldn't before half an hour ago, I didn't know that. But something about the experience I've just had, has allowed the scales to fall from my eyes. And I see that now, and I will never unsee it.

And I just, I know it gets me very excited about that. The play, this dying business, which I wrote. in 19 93, 19 94 was commissioned to open the first international conference on hospice and palliative care in Australia. Nobody was talking arts hyphen health at that point, but I accepted the invitation to write that play because I was really curious, really curious about death and dying. Terrifi.

. Um, and so it was an opportunity for me to get up close and personal with people who worked in that space and people who were dying and their families and so on. And I've always used that as the kind of testing device for whether I wanna do a project. Is, does it scare me? Am I interested? No, is there, are there gaps in my knowledge, what are the questions that I have about that? So another play that was written under similar kinds of circumstances was a play called the law of large numbers.

And that's a play about women in poker, machine addiction, again, a kind of community or public health issue. And I was just fascinated by, by that addiction. It is an addiction that was being cultivated, was being offered to women here, come and get addicted to poker machines. In this country, town, your life will be so much better. You won't have any money, but you know, your life will be so much better if we can just hook you to these flashing lights and, and sound.

And I just found that really interesting. And then the years of work with the Groundswell project really drew that to the fore because. The whole offer from Kerry Newman, who co-founded that organization with me was what can we do if we hitch art to this, uh, big sigh, because the groundswell project has kind of no more to me, it came to a very ugly ending for me and for.

under circumstances that were not of our control and that we still don't fully understand, but we were kind of removed Kerry first and then me, but the groundswell project is O an idea. That's now lived in the world for over 10 years and it was forged through a chance meeting. Between myself and Kerry Newman who's a clinical psychologist, a very long story behind that.

Really a series of accidents, happy accidents, where she had had an idea for a while about just what we're talking about now, how to change the culture around death and dying and her. suspicion was that working with the arts would have something to do with that. And we accidentally met, we didn't know each other, two strangers from completely different worlds, completely different generations and backgrounds. And for some reason, she got me at a moment when I was saying yes to things.

And I said, oh yeah. Why not? Not probably not thinking. What that, what happened would happen? So within a couple of months of our accidental meeting, we had deductible gift recipient status, which is almost impossible to get now and was very hard then. And we were a bonafide charitable entity. And we had a first partner in Penworth high school in Sydney and a very forward thinking drama teacher there called Nicole Bonfield.

And so in our first year we launched a project with year 11 drama students making work about death and death and dying based on a kind of a peer to peer education. So it wasn't about us as adults going in and trying to educate kids about death. It was about kids asking all the questions that they wanted to ask about death and dying, and then performing something that they had made about that to their peers. And that went all the way up to the state drama festival.

So I just love those kinds of exponential projects where the amplification is just a natural thing, you know, and they were performing these things. And we did that for three years with Penrith high, and then we broadened out and we did a lot of other different kinds of projects and partnerships. So we partnered with the organ and tissue donation authority and did a project called film life, which again, brought young people in, taught them basic filmmaking skills.

And got them to make community service announcements for their own generation about organ and tissue donation. They were fantastic. Some of them were just mind bogglingly good. And you know, it just went on like that. For nearly 10 years with us just going, oh, we could do that. Yeah. Why not do that? Just bumbling. You know, we were never very good at the vision statements and the mission statements and all of that sort of stuff.

We just bumbed our way along doing things with communities who had the will. finding the money where we could and growing it towards this sort of compassionate city's ethos, which is now a worldwide thing of returning death, just as we have returned birth in a lot of ways to the community and, you know, asking the medical profession to step back and the funeral industry to step back and the community to step forward.

With that, that embodied knowledge that you have, if you have the privilege to attend somebody to their death, as I get older, I'm much more interested in all of this stuff as having a kind. I'm gonna say a word. I, I probably wanna take back later sacred a sacred element to it. Whereby any group of people who gather together for any purpose, have some kind of a. shared energy in the academy.

It's called communitas that can be harnessed to do things and no one person can do it and no one person can influence it. It must make itself known sort of organically within that community. Now I had a Catholic childhood and we don't have enough time to go into the deep residues of the congregational experience. But I think that one of the few good things that I still have from my Catholic childhood is a sense of, of that communal energy.

And in that sense of what happens when we gather to witness or to listen, or to share some kind of a communal experience. And I'm very interested in, in that kind of lateral experience, I'm I have very little time for the hierarchy. I've always been interested in different kinds of shapes. It's one of the reasons I'm a playwright. I think, you know, that playwriting is shape making and shape making with an audience. What kinds of shapes can you make?

In that kind of interplay between the audience or the congregants and I call 'em congregants and withnesses. Um, and what happens when you can bring tho those kinds of energies together and in the classroom situation? I also think it's like an audience. I think about a classroom as being a poly headed organism.

And, you know, I've noticed I can notice it if one there's might be a particular student who brings a particular energy and they're away next week that organism is going to behave in a different way. It's gonna have different capacities that just really interest me. So it does rely on trust. And, and I ask that of my students. I ask them to try and be as, as open and as authentic as they can.

And to bring themselves into the space, even if it's, if it's rough and unformed and a bit shameful, human beings are endlessly fascinating and best seen best understood in. In groups,