It’s just a little disc. A useful, beautiful thing… it holds us together.

Two women live alone but side by side. One day they meet over a jar of buttons and an awkward friendship begins…

Poignant and funny, Button is about an awkward friendship, longing, life, death and the living in between.

The painful and sometimes farcical life of a defiant young poet, Sally Banner, as she attempts—through her school days, lovers, marriage and politics—to extract meaning from her environment. Music by Frank Arndt.

   

Published individually, and also available in Australian Women’s Drama and Dorothy Hewett's Collected Plays Volume I

Awards

• 1992 NSW Premier’s Literary Award - Play Award

In winter 1942, when 2000 American airmen are stationed near the small town of Warrabadanga, fifteen female workers battle to keep the biscuits baking. This rousing musical comedy showcases an entertaining slice of Australian social history.

The Golden Valley

A play for children in which a family of bush creatures adopt twelve-year-old Marigold.

A play for children in which the orphaned Willow makes her home near the half human, half seal 'Selchies', who are fighting to save Mystery Bay from Marlin Prawn and his ‘One Big Deal’. Music by Jim Cotter.

Inner Voices

The son of Catherine the Great, who has been locked away since childhood, is set upon the throne of Russia knowing only his name. Music by Sarah de Jong.

 

Also available in Plays of the 70s Volume 3

Albert Names Edward

A black comedy that demonstrates Nowra's early preoccupation with isolation and the exercise of power through imagination. An amnesiac takes shelter with an urban hermit.

This comic musical play celebrates life in a country town at the time of the Great War, conjuring its light and dark sides into an old fertility dance.

Jeremy Glass is an untroubled little boy until his seventh birthday, when he suddenly announces that he is really a grown man called Danny, who died some years before. How can his parents indulge his conviction that he must find his real family? And how can his eerie insistence on his true identity not resurrect painful memories for Danny’s widow?

   
With songs from Tim Finn adding expressionistic commentary on the action, Matt Cameron’s Poor Boy delivers a supernatural story steeped in loss, anguish and redemption.

Published in conjunction with Melbourne Theatre Company.

Awards

• 2009 VIC Premier's Literary Awards - Best Musical Theatre Script (shortlist)

Review

‘In this country, people are always talkin’ about dreams. You can be your dream. You can have your dream. You can live the dream. But that’s just a clever way of gettin’ people to shut up and stop complainin’.

When a great singer lets her voice float out over the anonymous crowd, or form the grooves of thousands of records, or flow through radios into millions of homes across the world, she makes countless unknown connections with people. The singer has her story and the listener hers, and should those stories touch each other, there can be magic. 

 

Awards

• 2012 Helpmann Awards - Best New Australian Work (shortlist)
• 2011 WA Premier's Award (shortlist)

An outback town, Boxing Day, 1945. The dust settles as the populace nurses a Christmas hangover. When Harold Slocum of Slocum’s Travelling Tent Show becomes stranded, emotions run high and the sedentary life of the town is disturbed by the remembrance of an illicit affair. In this bittersweet musical, which is at once humorous and sensitive, new life is breathed into the rural community.