Reviews

Very rarely has this reviewer seen an entire audience rise from their seats as one to give a standing ovation! Nyilamum, featuring Dr Lou Bennett AM and the Australian String Quartet, have created a pivotal event in the bridging of First Nations’ and Western music. The effect is moving and an experience for the senses!

To colonisers of Australia, the unknown vastness and mysteries of this ancient continent must have been terrifying.  Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel about three schoolgirls and their French teacher who vanished at Hanging Rock in central Victoria – and then Peter Weir’s landmark film – is a masterpiece of this dark Gothic Australia.

Beth Paterson opens the show, sitting at a table, surrounded by archive boxes. There are dozens of books piled up on and around the table – the spines suggest history, culture, philosophy – and Barry Humphries.

Paterson tells us of her Saturday morning visits to see her Nana, bribed with a hot chocolate, and aged 14, watching the clock so she’d know when it was time to leave. She didn’t want to be there – her Nana, Niusia, might have been a holocaust survivor, a concentration camp hero, but to teenager Beth, she was a bitch.

Stirling Players licked off their 2025 Season with three one act plays under the banner Matriarchs, Mystery and Mayhem. The three plays were loosely associated by a theme of matrimony, with the first featuring a widow keen for remarriage, the second a silver wedding anniversary and the final play being set on the day of a wedding. The three plays were very different in style, but all were clever comedies.