Jane Harrison – January 7 2018

Jane is a descendant of the Muruwari people of New South Wales, from the area around Bourke and Brewarrina but she grew up in the Victorian Dandenongs with her mother and sister. Jane began her career as an advertising copywriter before becoming a playwright, novelist, writer and researcher. Her other plays include The Visitors, On a Park Bench and Blakvelvet. She has also written the novel Becoming Kirrali Lewis and short story Born Still.

Stolen
Currency Press, 2006; ISBN 9780868197975
Full length play; 3 female, 2 male
This is the story of five young Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents, brought up in a repressive children’s home and segregated from society from their earliest years. Not all of them successfully manage their lives when released into the outside world. The pain, poignancy and sheer desperation of their lives is seen through the children’s own eyes as they struggle to make sense of a world where they have been told to forget their families, their homes and their language. This tender and moving story, awash with childlike humour, brings the tragic history of the Stolen Generations to the Australian stage.

Rainbow’s End
Published in Contemporary Indigenous Plays, Currency Press, 2013; ISBN 9780868197951
Full length play; 3 female, 1 male
Set in the 1950s in the northern Victorian area of Shepparton and Mooroopna, this is a snapshot of a Koori family to dramatise the struggle for decent housing, meaningful education, jobs and community acceptance. It tells the simple, yet complicated story of three generations of Aboriginal women; young Dolly, her mother the happy-go-lucky Gladys, and the wise and stern Nan Dear, living in their shanty perched on the flats of the Goulburn River in 1950s regional Victoria.