arts&entertainment
More for our Melissa By Helen Musa
WHEN former Lake Ginninderra College student Melissa Georgiou enrolled in the year-long Open Program at the National Institute of Dramatic Art last year, she got more than she bargained for. For one thing, there was a lot of hard work, involving weekly trips down to Sydney and heavy-duty studies of accents, movement, voice and all the other things that go up to make a performer. For another, one of her tutors introduced her to a role in John Patrick Shanley’s play “Women in Manhattan”. "He said, I’d be fantastic for the part,” Georgiou told me as she prepared to produce, direct and star in the play she sees as Australia's answer to “Sex and the City”. Billed as a one-act play about three Aussie women making it in New York, “Women in Manhattan” was written in 1986 by American playwright Shanley, better known for the script of the film “Doubt” starring Meryl Streep. “Women” was described by a critic in 1999 as "universal without being timeless”, but nonetheless Georgiou and
and the City” love one another. Shanley’s play revolves around the lives of three women who are living in Manhattan and whose emotional lives are a mess. But their situations change for the better. Georgiou has done a few commercials and played in G-String Productions show "Rent" in 2005. These days an entrepreneurial streak is coming out in her, and she tells me “I love making Canberra work for me". She gets to play the part of Judy, who, like Carrie in “Sex and the City,” loves clothes and shoes, but who has other strings to her bow. She starts off as a cynic, but grows. “She's tough, but transformed into a soft woman”. The other characters are Billie, “a 30-year-old very dramatic person” played by Melissa Twidale, RhondaLouise, played by Nicole Nesbitt-Allen. And there are two blokes, too. “This is a one-act play that runs for 120 minutes with no interval,” she says, “but it's different… each scene is an insight into each girl’s life.”
Melissa Georgiou… “I love making Canberra work for me". her team have adapted the characters to “Women of Manhattan”, Canberra become Australian, who, like the girls in “Sex Theatre’s Courtyard Studio, July 8-12.
Eye-opening look at convict women By Helen Musa ONE of the favourite myths of Australian history is that the women of early Australia were either damned whores or God's police. This exhibition puts paid to that idea through a fascinating set of stories represented visually by photographs, convict shirt remnants, letters, bookmarks and a christening gown, as well as by paintings by colonial artists Augustus Earle and John Skinner Prout. The focus is on a selection from the 9000 to 10,000 convict women transported to Australia who were forced to work in convict female factories – as dairymaids, housemates, handloom weavers, fishing net makers, seamstresses and even teachers. The chief theme developed by curator A watercolour miniature on ivory, by an Gay Hendriksen, from the Parramatta unknown artist, of Sarah Lawson, who was Heritage Centre, is that these women had tried in the Essex assizes in 1814 and sen- an identity, that most survived the harsh tenced to transportation for seven years. circumstances and went on to become She later married explorer and pastoralist mothers, pioneers, businesswomen William Lawson. (State Library of NSW) and farmers who helped to define the
EXHIBITION
"Women Transported – Life in Australia's Convict Female Factories" At the National Archives until July 19. Reviewed by Helen Musa Australian character. Hendriksen has summarised them as "mothers of the nation." While this is an eye-opening exhibition, it grapples with the familiar problem for the National Archives of how to tell stories and histories in a visual way. Undoubtedly, the stories themselves are more fascinating than the convict shirt remnants. The solution has been to select a number of key survivors and to match blown-up photos of them with stories in large print. "Women Transported" succeeds in making the point that the much-maligned Australian convict women were not lazy, illiterate or genetically flawed, but were pretty much like you and me, in different circumstances. A cutdown version of this exhibition will tour nationally after leaving Canberra.
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