Anthurium

This anthurium grows in the shelter of a mango orchard next to our one‑bedroom miner’s cottage. I love the country—Hill’s hoist, rainwater tank, brush turkey mound, bats and birds to pollinate the garden—but if there were two of me, I’d wish for a parallel life of good times in the city.

Recently the city came to us, in the form of The Vagina Monologues, staged at the Majestic Theatre in Malanda. To enter the show, audience members walked beneath a giant sculpted vulva. There wasn’t a spare seat in the house, and the mostly female audience cheered, whooped and hollered throughout.

Yet Lib and I found the script problematic. There was no transgender monologue. The lesbian monologue concerned the statutory rape of a girl by an older lesbian, relayed in positive terms: “I love my rapist!” Africa was singled out for its association with female genital mutilation. I know it’s customary to refer to the entire cisgender female anatomy as the “vagina,” but I’d love to see a more accurate use of terms.

I found myself wishing for a different script entirely: one built on an international archive of stories that evolved over time and had the lives of lesbians at its centre.

The discussions we had on the drive home were certainly interesting, and perhaps this is the ultimate purpose of live theatre: to sprinkle the ideas of a playwright from a certain time and place (Eve Ensler, New York, 1990s) into the minds of an audience sometime later (Atherton Tablelands, 2026).

Reflecting on all this, I recognise country and city stereotypes aren’t always what they seem, and I remind myself of a very important fact: the soil in which this anthurium grows contains as much potential wisdom as anyplace else on earth.

Previous → Let There Be Docs! Back to Creative →