Seven Writers | Three Days | One Play
Led and produced by Augusta Supple
Over three days in August, myself and other 6 emerging Western Sydney playwrights gathered in some of Parramatta’s most storied places, from a colonial cottage to a civic library to a historic orphan school, to write one new play together. Guided by Augusta Supple, we listened to the city’s histories, people and changing identity and wove them into a single story, which was shared in a public reading at Parramatta’s Lit! 2026.
Parramatta River
Hambledon Cottage
Female Orphan School/ Whitlam Institute
Across three sessions, we walked beside the Parramatta River, stepped inside Hambledon Cottage and the old Female Orphan School, and listened as locals and volunteer tour guides shared the stories these places hold. Parramatta takes its name from Burramatta, the Dharug word for “the place where the eels lie down”, and standing on that ground I began to feel how many generations of stories it has carried. I was a newcomer to this land, so I wrote from that feeling: Thu, a character much like me, new to this place and still learning it, listening to everything the land has to tell.
THU, 27, from Hà Nội, a freelance photographer with a second-hand film camera and now a student at Western Sydney University. Having left a marriage that was supposed to be happy, along with the expectations that came with it, she has come to Parramatta alone to start over, still learning the city, the language and what she wants for herself.
Thu, read by Mây Trần (Photo by James AM Crawford)
“I kept thinking about the girls who lived here two hundred years ago. Girls barely the age of my younger sister. Sewing. Cleaning. Making beds. Serving tea. Learning how to become the kind of woman the world around them expected them to be.
[…]
In the drafty silence of that orphan school, brushing my fingers against the same cold brick, it felt as if those girls were whispering straight through the mortar: “No. You were not wrong to run.”"
