Jane Franklin: An Examined Life

Presented by Silkweed
Albert Hall, Thursday 26th August

Lady Jane Franklin serves as a figure of fascination as much as anyone in Tasmanian history. Unlike the fondly remembered bushrangers, she was a member of the establishment, but her reforming instincts have endeared her to a wide range of Tasmanians.

Zero Project

I speak to Tina, who is busy stripping leaves from lengths of Phragmites Australis, the common reed. Now that I know what they are, I see just how common they are, upright and swaying in the cool westerly wind gusting at the foot of the Tamar River. A few reeds hang from string and click away like knitting needles. Something she prepared earlier.

Sex, Death and a Cup of Tea

Four playwrights were immersed in four of the most regional of Tasmanian communities, - Zeehan, Swansea, Miena and King Island - and four very different plays address the dilemmas of transient populations, of people who leave and never come back, of people who settle down to die.The strongest of the plays Sex, Death and Fly-fishing, is a powerful depiction of the relationship between a young visitor to a freezing highland community and a dying, elderly man who has found his rest in fishing. Carefully balanced between narration and dialogue, Adam Grossetti's short play is an affecting vision of a lake's apotheosis in quiet, willing eyes.

The other plays have their strengths: an easy command of vernacular in Swansea; the humour of an overly-enthusiastic swimmer (or is he a seal?) who sets a relationship back on track on King Island; but one doesn't feel they quite inhabit the towns as members of the local population. They may be passing through, spending some time, but they're not quite locals yet.

Poetry Wall

Six poets have reacted in wildly different ways to the phrase ‘Open Camouflage’. Tim Thorne’s bleak treatise on modern warfare; Joy Elizabeth’s chilling true account of the abuse of female international students; North Hobart’s football oval on an autumn afternoon…