Desert Stages: The Place of Theatre in the Barkly Region's Creative Ecology

This article explores theatre in very remote Australia, where both academic and policy discourse have so far been extremely limited. The Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) designation of ‘very remote’ is the last on a scale of five classifications of remoteness that are used to inform research and policy development. They were formulated on the basis of a measure of relative access to services, and consist of: major cities, inner regional, outer regional, remote and very remote. The vast majority of Australia’s landmass has been designated ‘very remote’, and although much of this is largely uninhabited, there are many small towns, communities, camps and settlements scattered throughout that are home to 0.8 per cent of the total population Examining theatre in this context represents an interesting case. While their geographical, cultural and social diversity means that Australia’s very remote regions certainly cannot be described in monolithic terms, the proportion of the population that is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in very remote regions is much higher than non-Indigenous;5 they are (as defined by the ASGS structure) extremely isolated from major towns, cities and services, and they therefore differ markedly from what might be termed ‘mainstream’ Australia in terms of culture, landscape, lifestyle and livelihoods.