Scott Rankin – August 23 2020

International Day against Nuclear Tests – August 29

Photo: Frances Andrijich

Scott is an award-winning writer and director whose work has featured on TV and at festivals nationally and internationally. He enrolled in an Arts degree in Sydney, but did not complete it, instead working in a retirement village and offering music workshops to homeless youth. After moving to north west Tasmania, Scott worked in social welfare and drop-in centres and following the closure of Burnie’s paper mill in 1992, he created the arts charity, Big hART. Scott’s other plays include Namatjira, RiverlanD and Hipbone Sticking Out as well as many collaborative works such as Box the Pony, co-written with Leah Purcell, What the World Needs Now, co-written with Stephen Helper, Leaves Falling at Midnight, co-written with Glynn Nicholas, and StickybrickS, created for and with the tenants of Northcott Public Housing Estate in Surry Hills, Sydney. Although initially writing for theatre, Scott has diversified into film, video and art installations. His film, Career Highlights of the Mamu, co-written with Trevor Jamieson, dramatises the impact of the 1950s Maralinga bombings on South Australia’s Indigenous population. Scott was nominated Tasmanian Australian of the Year in 2018.

Ngapartji Ngapartji (published with his play Namatjira)
Currency Press, 2012; ISBN 9780868199221
Full length; 1 principal performer (male); 8 other actors; plus musicians and choir
Co-created with Trevor Jamieson and taking its name from the Pitjantjatjara concept of exchange and reciprocity (‘I give you something, you give me something’), this play is a deeply affecting experience of Indigenous history. Exploring themes of dispossession and displacement from country, home and family, the play tells the story of a Pitjantjatjara family forcibly moved off their lands to make way for the testing of British atomic bombs at Maralinga.

Sample photo

Beasty Girl: The Secret Life of Errol Flynn
Premiere: Perth Festival, 2003
85 minutes; 1 female; 0 male
Born in Tasmania, Errol Flynn became the biggest Hollywood star of his generation. A prolific womaniser and frequent resident of Jamaica, he drank himself to death by age 49. Beasty Girl is a fictional, multimedia piece with text structured as poetry. The play focuses on Flynn’s ‘illegitimate’ Jamaican daughter Carly. Flynn is also portrayed at various stages of his life, as are three of his sexual conquests in Jamaica (his “beasty girls”), and an elderly female called Thyla, the last Tasmanian thylacine.
“… through the stage presence of … an Indigenous Australian actor, who performs all of the roles, the play comments on the marginalization of mixed-race ‘illegitimate’ children of colonialists, the genocide of Indigenous people in Tasmania, and the extinction, through hunting, of animals such as the Tasmanian tiger.” – Karina Smith, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021989417726106