An update from Christine Davey

winner of The New Plot 2016

Words by Christine Daveys

In April this year, Christine was awarded The New Plot playwriting award for her short work, The Last Tiger. As part of the prize, she is currently undertaking a 4 week residency at Bundanon Trust to develop her script into a full length play, to be performed here at 107 as part of our 107 Presents 2018 program. We caught up with Christine to see how she’s doing.

It took twelve hours of driving, three major highways, and a thousand hair-pin turns, but I’m here at Bundanon Trust Estate – the artist in residence colony set up by the Arthur Boyd Foundation.

It’s a beautiful day. The sun shines, the baby wombat outside my window munches on tufts of grass, the kangaroos in the paddock sleep in the pockets of warmth. It’s incredibly quiet here. The occasional bird sounds her happiness, the odd snippet of laughter wafts over the valley, the water pump turns on and off at intervals.

I’m yet to fully acclimatize, yet to throw off the trammels of modern existence and embrace the ‘otherness’ of the place. There are literally hundreds of acres to explore. There are back roads, and dirt tracks, and winding rivers. There are plants I don’t recognise, and people I don’t know. There are artists tucked away in buildings working on their respective projects. Next door is Jen, a visiting American visual artist. Around the corner is Margaret, a sculptor. It’s all new and exciting, and of course, the one thing it’s about is help – to help artists explore, concentrate, breathe and create. Here’s to all that and more.