In Their Own Words
"[We're] building in the stories of both British and Australian veterans into the one play. And we think that is quite viable because they actually complement each other very nicely. There's a lot of common experience, but also some quite marked difference in how the British and Australian servicemen experienced Maralinga."
Paul Brown, Playwright/Academic - Interview 2005
"We reached the point half way through 2004 where we had a rough draft script that we were reasonably comfortable was doing justice to the Australian Nuclear Veterans story. [...] [And we wanted to find] a way to link the white and black stories together. It's interesting, they don't link easily. The Australian Nuclear Veterans say very little about the aboriginal experience, they don't know it, they hardly ever saw Aborigines.
Interestingly, talking with the British Veterans here, they have a much stronger recollection and experience of the Aboriginal people than the Australian servicemen. [...] And equally if you talk to aboriginal people about their experience of the test series, they very rarely mention the soldiers, the armed forces that were there. [...] To them it was another experience of invasion and being dispossessed of their lands. And that's their main concern, apart from the radiation effects which aboriginal people experienced directly from the tests. [...] There's a lot of aboriginal testimony from which you can easily build up the black side of the story.
So we had this long range plan for a quite long work, something that would take 4 ½ hours. [...] That is the long range plan, that there would be this integrated work that would bring the white and black stories together; perhaps not together in the sense of being in the one play, but being in the one event. So perhaps you would see two plays, one from the black perspective and one from the white perspective. And they would talk to each other so to speak. [...] So that¹s our attitude at the moment, that it can be, it can emerge in readings and productions and then integrated works that bring in the black story across the next few years."
Paul Brown, Playwright/Academic - Interview 2005
"What have we been doing? Well, we imagined this as a verbatim theatre piece and what we did with that group of young researchers, I say young, but I mean people in their 20s mostly. They developed skills in interviewing was one thing we did, apart from schooling ourselves in the history of this from documented sources. They then went out and met with and formed relationships with individual veterans, or their wives or widows, or in some cases, the children of veterans. Through that process we made thirty interviews, in 2003, and by the end of 2003, we presented a reading of the first assemblage of material. Between the interviews and the material there was probably one key process that this project depended on and that's very careful transcription of those taped interviews. And when I say that I mean every 'um' and 'ah', every pause every moment of laughter or getting up to make the tea or any of the things that happened in the interview setting. To somehow record and attempt to capture the details of the vernacular; the way people speak is just as important as the content of what they're saying."
Paul Brown - Workshop Presentation 2005
"Then of course you're cutting and pasting all over the place, so it's highly constructed. It can't claim to be the truth. It's no more or less than any other dramatist would do to construct a play that has structure and drama and all that. And I said [it was about] 95% [verbatim]. [...] And, I suppose a rule was that we were allowed to signpost scenes. So at the very start of scenes, just 5 or 6 words [were] added, which turned the audience from the previous scene into the next one. It might just be adding in the name of somebody, which you need to remind the audience of, or just tiny little flags or signposts that link it in."
Paul Brown, Playwright/Academic - Interview 2005
"It's very important in Australia, as I said before, that this story doesn't disappear as these veterans themselves die."
Paul Brown, Playwright/Academic - Interview 2005
