We cannot blame Charles Dickens for not meeting our national Arts treasure Philip P. Pirip, but:go blame yr rottern Fate;whos flushs beat yr faces straightsIt could be said, though, Dickens did lend his major characters to Philip P. Pirip, although 'lend' might not be the best word; rather freedom opened the door to its wide-open spaces to allow them to escape and give vent to their grievances with their famous author, seeing as to how he never once mentioned the fabul...

You could say man into wolf and wolf into man got blasted into existence. You could also say the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Tasmanian Wolf got blasted out of existence too. It's called extinction and it lasts forever and, when Ihe the wolfman did the sums of early Tasmania, it all added up. This was except for one thing… the existence of the truly last Thylacine Wolf hiding out somewhere life-giving and life-preserving from the ever-hunters and the always-killers.This made it all ...

Surely you all remember Wi, a name especially chosen to fit our attention spans? Him, the world-record kidnappee, nabbee, swipee, snatchee, hoisted so many times even he's lost count? (How about those three times in five minutes effort? That takes real talent, that does.) I mean, if it wasn't for our Wi how many of these yabbers, yarns, shaggy dogs and yank-your-chain whoppers could I trot out for you? Even getting across one's not easy when it's always against the wind from people ...

WATER EXERCISES FOR EVERYONE: NON-SWIMMERS AND SWIMMERSAs current as the day it was first floated as one of the very first, if not the first, international book of water-fitness regimes!Experience the pleasure of exercising in water.Use the pool as a general-age gym for: general day-by-day fitness beauty body building sports training and injury recovery pregnancy help aches and pains relief the sheer enjoyment of ...

Stranded in his Sydney flat, the journalist John Rinner tries to explain his Dad-dud existence to his daughter by telephone. This is not easy since he hasn't seen her in 18 years and she is on the other side of the world working in an Amsterdam hotel with little time to listen to an excuse for a Dad.Just as his working life in the field with the UN Childrens Fund now seems only smoke-and-mirrors, so does Rinner's own life seem as it flashes past him in delusion and illusion, and wi...

The live-acted shadow play of today uses live actors to evoke fantasy combined with realism to illustrate a fully-rounded play narrated by a storyteller sitting in full audience view.It is not a puppet show. It does not demand actors contort themselves into amazing shapes like trees of elephants. It is a play-behind that theatrically lies in the unfurrowed field between mime and the theatre we conventionally know today. It has hardly, if ever, been attempted in a full play's setting...

Seven years after King Billy's death, Truganinni stood alone, arguably the most important living relic of her Tasmanian race. She would walk the streets of Hobart Town, resembling Queen Victoria in her voluminous skirts and headdress. She quite enjoyed the curiosity and finger pointing wherever she went. And she could go anywhere.Towards the end, she appeared to bear no malice towards her race's persecutors. Growing stoutish, she smoked a pipe and enjoyed a daily jug of beer. But s...

Bill and Billy are having marital problems but these pall when compared to the problems they have to face from their next door neighbour. If that wasn't enough, there is the general alarm put out to be on the alert for a serial murderer thought to be in the district.In the heavy night of the Mornington countryside, their weekender cottage offers scant protection from what is determined to befall them from the outside and what is determined to torment them from the inside.It...

He hadn't told his son he was adopted, nor that his son had a twin sister who hadn't been handed over with him when they travelled from Melbourne to India all that time ago to pick up both infants. Part of his silence was the guilt of being on the end of what was then undoubtedly a child-racketeering scam.Charged by his estranged wife to go back to India to find out more about the recent brutal murder of their son – and, consequentially, what had happened to the infant girl child, ...

An ensemble of actors who are about to start rehearsing a play about the Moree race riots visit Endeavour Lane in Moree to get a feel of the lie of the land. This is where the young Aboriginal 'Cheeky' McIntosh was shot and killed during the infamous 1982 rumble between local whites and blacks. The leader/director/writer of the ensemble has a more intimate knowledge of the site. Back in 1982 he remembers playing cricket with his school chums using, as a lark, a wicket made up of a piece of...

Dorothy is married to a south Indian surgeon who has been shot in a gang-related murder in Melbourne. She knows nothing about what's behind this but she feels obliged to travel to her mother-in-law in Chennai to relate what little she does know. This, she dreads doing, not just because this once-Australian, everyone's 'auntie' has always turned a blithe deaf ear to her, but more because the old girl is a scrawn, a whack job, a dizzy, shouting commands and bouncing around doing power-prayin...

Here are the award-winning or noted short-form plays whose productions range from a few minutes to lengthy one-acters. Each inclusion in this collection has been selected by the Australian Script Centre to be listed for viewing or purchase on its website Australianplays.org.These twelve plays are designed either for full production or as workshop exercises with allowances for a few or a goodly number of actors and theatre support staff. Some have been produced many times by groups ...