'In Tamil we don't say goodbye. Only, I will go and come back.'

S. Shakthidharan's extraordinary multilingual play (English, Tamil and Sinhalese) Counting and Cracking traverses countries and decades to bring us an epic tale of family, love and politics.

On the banks of a river in Sydney, Radha and her son Siddhartha release the ashes of Radha's mother so she can be at peace with her ancestors. Into the water go the particles of one life, but unknown to Siddharta, Radha still holds onto the ashes of her beloved grandfather, brought with her when she left Sri Lanka 21 years before. And so begins a story that spirals out across Australia and Sri Lanka, taking in four generations of a family and their connection to a country that continues to give them equal measures of sorrow and joy.

It is an exhilarating, moving and necessary tribute to people of all backgrounds who are forced to live in exile and build a new home from the heart up.

යක්

'A story of survival and hope, of human connectedness, and our deep desire to understand three things - our history, our identity and what home means to us.' - Community response.

It's summer 1965 in a small, hot town in Western Australia. Overseas, war is raging in Vietnam, civil rights marchers are on the streets, and women's liberation is stirring, but at home in Corrigan Charlie Bucktin dreams of writing the great Australian novel. Charlie's fourteen and smart. But when sixteen-year-old, constantly in-trouble Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie's out of his depth. Jasper has stumbled upon a terrible crime in the scrub nearby, and he knows he's the first suspect. That goes with the colour of his skin. He needs every ounce of Charlie's bookish brain to help solve this awful mystery before the town turns on Jasper. Kate Mulvany's adaptation of Craig Silvey's award-winning novel is wise and beautiful. It features a cast of finely drawn teenagers and grown-ups, all searching for their own kind of truth. A coming-of-age story, Jasper Jones interweaves the lives of complex individuals all struggling to find happiness among the buried secrets of a small rural community.

Top criminal lawyer Tessa believes in the law, she believes in the system, she believes in playing by the rules. If you play by the rules, justice will be served. She has not only staked her career on these principles, she has placed her very faith in them.

But when the tables are turned and Tessa has to take the witness stand, she is forced to confront the shortcomings of the legal system and its patriarchal foundations of justice.

In the multi-award-winning Prima Facie, Suzie Miller delivers a one-woman tour de force - by turns wryly amusing and powerfully shocking - that exposes the failings of a system seemingly designed to further brutalise women who have experienced sexual assault, rape or harassment.

For Tessa, as for so many women, truth turns out to be less about reality and more about how you play the game. And in this court, nobody wins.

People of the internet, people of the world, you wanna see your Environment Minister SOLVE some shit, this is the soundtrack...

What happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immovable object of Australian politics?

Environment Minister Gwen Malkin's plan to stop climate change is rudely interrupted when a group of eco-terrorists storm Australia's Parliament House during a Fleetwood Mac concert. Blending fact and fiction, David Finnigan's bold new satire is a manic spin on a world on the brink of turmoil.

A daring new play that asks - what would it take to actually stop climate change dead in its tracks? Science? Recycling? Experts? Or maybe: techno, guns and revolution?

Hayaat and her family spend their days dodging curfews, trying to buy a week's groceries before the sirens blare, remembering their home among the olive groves before it was taken from them.

But when the curfew breaks and her beloved grandmother Sitti is taken to hospital, Hayaat sets out on a mission to retrieve a jarful of soil from the family's old farm so she can grant Sitti's last wish of touching the soil of her homeland once more. All Hayaat and her friend Samy have to do is cross the hated wall that divides the West Bank and traverse the most dangerous patch of land on earth.

Eva Di Cesare has adapted Abdel-Fattah's book into a daring adventure of freedom and friendship, exile and courage, family and love.

Navigating Islands: Plays from the Pacific brings together three plays by distinguished playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl. The islands of Sāmoa--often called the Navigator Islands on nineteenth-century maps of the Pacific--emerge to the fore, fully dimensional, in this dynamic collection. Of both Hawaiian and Sāmoan ancestry, Kneubuhl spent formative years in the islands as a young adult. Her love of Sāmoa, its culture and its people, is woven into the fabric of every scene. In the front matter of this book, fans of the author's theatrical productions, media work, and novels will be pleased to learn about her creative process and her broad influence on Pacific literature and storytelling.

Two of the plays are set at Vailima, Sāmoa, the former home of Robert Louis Stevenson and his family. Aitu Fafine portrays the final days of Stevenson's life in an unusual historical fantasy. Through myth and stage magic, the play examines the demonization of women, an author's role in shaping social attitudes, and the timeless power of story. Fanny and Belle explores the mother-daughter relationship of Fanny Stevenson and her daughter Belle Strong, two intrepid bohemian women who defied the conventions of their time and lived daring and adventurous lives.

Set in American Sāmoa in the early twentieth century, The Holiday of Rain reimagines Somerset Maugham's visit to Pago Pago when he wrote his famous short story Rain. While the play is a satirical romp that includes time travel, mistaken identities, and a play within a play, it thematically reviews the portrayal of Polynesian women by Western writers, and the fictionalization of Pacific places and people of color to suit perceived Western audience demands.

All three plays scrutinize how non-Polynesians interact with Polynesians when attempting to navigate through the subtleties of island life. They also ask readers and viewers to think about how the outside world's impressions of Polynesians are shaped by the perceptions and stories of foreigners. Perhaps the plays' most compelling connections involve women as they fight to achieve individuality in the face of unfair expectations, negative societal projections, and historical misrepresentations of female characters in literature.

On a sweltering day, 26 January, 1788, on a bluff high above Sydney Cove, seven Aboriginal men stand looking out to sea. Moored off-shore is a huge nowee (boat) then there are two, then more. Who are these visitors? Where are they from? What do they want? Should they be turned away by force or welcomed to country?

In the playscript The Visitors, Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison (Stolen, Rainbow's End) reimagines the arrival of the First Fleet from a First Nations' perspective. These senior men, carrying the weight of cultural responsibility in their very human hearts, must decide what action they'll take toward these unwanted arrivals. A decision, under pressure, that will have repercussions' unforeseeably and forever. Told with wit, charm, and a fierce intelligence, Harrison's playscript upends the dominant point of view of this pivotal event.

Annotated and with an introduction by Wesley Enoch.

'I do not doubt that The Visitors will take its place alongside Stolen as a touchstone of Australian theatre, and as an essential part of the continuing struggle to make sense of colonisation and multigenerational trauma.' - Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald

First Nations Monologues brings together over 30 bold texts, each an excerpt from a play written by esteemed playwrights such as Jada Alberts, Kodie Bedford, Wesley Enoch, Andrea James, Leah Purcell, and many more. These gritty and poignant monologues, from a range of genres including comedies, dramas, and biographies, are selected from plays that have captivated audiences in leading theatres, often breaking box office records.

First Nations Monologues pays homage to the diverse perspectives that resonate throughout the country, embodying a timeless ritual of storytelling that remains crucial as First Nations people continue to endure, resist, and thrive. Through this anthology, the voices and lived experiences of First Nations individuals are honoured, contributing to a body of work that seeks to decolonise and prioritise vital narratives.

Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison has curated a collection of monologues that speaks to the multivalent experiences and unyielding spirit of First Nations communities.

'We're second-class citizens in our own country. No, we're not even citizens. Heavens, and this is the fifties!'

History is about the heroes. Rainbow's End chronicles the lives of three generations of Koori women - unsung heroes who fight the good fight every day from their humpy on Yorta Yorta country. Matriarch Nan Dear, the emerging activist Gladys, and the aspiring nurse Dolly reside along a river that continues to rise, threatening their displacement (time and time again).

Faced with subtle, and not so subtle, racism in their daily lives, the Dear women stand their ground. Nan holds abundant space for her family (while keeping the family secrets). Gladys faces up to her demons and articulates herself bravely in public spaces while Dolly cherishes education as her greatest asset. And then there's Errol, the white Encyclopedia salesman who takes a wrong turn, bringing him into the sphere of this staunch family.

Jane Harrison's Rainbow's End is, above all, a story of how radical change unfolds in the most quotidian of exchanges, in the love shared by Aboriginal women within their families and their communities.

It's the night before Meg's wedding. She and her bridesmaids are planning to kick up their heels as the final hours before the big day tick down. However not everything goes according to plan as a last minute scandal threatens to ruin the whole affair. Elizabeth Coleman's delightful characters bring this seriously funny play to life. Never far from reality, Secret Bridesmaids' Business exposes the insanity that can be created as the wedding juggernaut threatens to swerve out of control. Marriage may be a wonderful thing, but after a night like this, well, could it really be worth it?

Ron Patterson has 111 minutes to live, so he decides to invite the kids around for sausage rolls, salads and a bit of quality time. As he attempts to tie up the loose ends of his life, all the juicy neuroses of this very dysfunctional family come out of the closet, and his well planned last party starts to unravel. It's My Party (And I'll Die If I Want To) is an excellent black comedy that keeps the surprises coming until the very end.

War makes things of people. The Jungle and the Sea is about a family who refuse to become things while they are still alive.

When violence escalates between the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Tamil mother vows to remain blindfolded until her family is together once again. Gowrie, Abi and Madhu search the jungles of northern Sri Lanka for estranged son Ahilan, while Siva and Lakshmi migrate to Australia for safety, awaiting their family's reunion. Separated by the ravages of civil war but buoyed by humour, playfulness and love for each other, so goes the story of many a migrant family that has wound up in Australia.

Co-writers S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack continue their collaboration that began with Counting and Cracking, threading personal testimony from the Sri Lankan civil war with two ancient epics - the Mahabharatha and Sophocles' Antigone. The war may have ended in 2009, but Tamil memory endures in The Jungle and the Sea, calling together lives that eternally revolve, intertwine and bear witness to each other.

Two powerful women, beloved by their people'one sits on the throne; the other is locked in a cell. Kate Mulvany's smart and witty adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart is a tale of two queens at war. In the legendary rivalry between Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, great forces are at play, with nations at stake and citizens ready to fight for the just cause. On the one hand there is principle and ideology; on the other, jealousy and pride. But there is also love. For who else could understand what torments a queen better than another queen? Mulvany turns her feminist lens on this brutal and moving story of cousins pitted against each other by politics and circumstance, trapped on different sides of history's coin.

Charlie, Elsa and Fay take you on a musical journey back to 1940s post-war Perth. Against a backdrop of curfews, and the fear of arrest for consorting, white and black manage to form their own club. For a night they can forget their worries and experience rare happy times singing, dancing, listening to music, and with a little luck... romance. Forty years on, as the club faces demolition, our three characters meet once again to stage a musical reunion and protest in an attempt to save their old stomping ground. As the trio reflects upon loves lost and found, old arguments and alliances resurface. Dark secrets and ghosts that have lingered for more than half a century are revealed, and we discover that reconciliation is more than saying sorry.

'Girls, I think your father's dead. I knocked his knees out. I conked his head. I shot that house clown in the neck.'

In a dirt-dry town in rural Australia, a shot shatters the still night. A mother and her daughters have just welcomed home the man of the house-with a crack in the shins and a bullet in the neck. The only issue now is disposing of the body.

Triggered into thrilling motion by an act of revenge, The Bleeding Tree is rude, rhythmical and irreverently funny. Imagine a murder ballad blown up for the stage, set against a deceptively deadly Aussie backdrop, with three fierce females fighting back.

Tarantino meets Deadwood in this full-throttle drama of our colonial past, written by the indomitable Leah Purcell. Henry Lawson's story of the Drover's Wife pits the stoic silhouette of a woman against the unforgiving Australian landscape, staring down a serpent'it's our frontier myth captured in a few pages. In Leah's new play the old story gets a very fresh rewrite. Once again the Drover's Wife is confronted by a threat in her yard in Australia's high country, but now it's a man. He's bleeding, he's got secrets, and he's black. She knows there's a fugitive wanted for killing whites, and the district is thick with troopers, but something's holding the Drover's Wife back from turning this fella in. A taut thriller of our pioneering past, The Drover's Wife is full of fury, power and has a black sting to the tail, reaching from our nation's infancy into our complicated present.

A country town. A festival. A local tragedy.

This tale of good days, bad days and everything in between catapults us right into the heart of this little town where everyone knows everyone, and where Ethan is hit by his past as Meg struggles with the present.

As the festival unfolds, Meg and Ethan's worlds collide and the community comes together for an event they'll never forget.

Euphoria is a rich and heart-warming story from award-winning South Australian playwright Emily Steel, inspired by conversations with regional communities. It brings an entire town to life with authenticity and unmistakeable wit.

'Funny, heart-warming, emotive, and thought provoking, Euphoria is an outstanding piece of theatre' - Limelight

Lily's grandmother was a beauty queen back in Hong Kong. She doesn't care that times have changed, that Lily lives in a new country and a new century. She sees a granddaughter caught between worlds. So Poh Poh pushes Lily into entering the highly competitive Miss Peony, and no matter how hard Lily tries to wriggle out of it, her grandma won't take no for an answer.

And to make matters worse, she's a ghost.

Glitzy and madcap, Miss Peony by award-winning writer Michelle Law is a bold new comedy about our good old need for connection to family, the past, the future, each other.