Signs of Life (Perth)

Overview:

By Tim Winton

WORLD PREMIERE

Alone in her farmhouse on the riverbank one night, Georgie Jutland hears noises out on the highway – car doors, voices, weeping. She’s recently widowed and a little spooked. It’s not just her – the entire world feels wrong, as if the land beneath her feet is dying. It hasn’t rained for years. The river has dried up and the olive grove is beginning to wither around her.

After the longest wait, a figure slowly emerges from the darkness. A man, an Aborigine, seeks help. He says he needs petrol. His sister is out in the car, screaming. They’ve been sleeping in it for days. Can Georgie help? Should she trust them? And what do you do when guests settle in and show no inclination to move on?

Signs of Life is a story about people with uncertain futures navigating with only shreds of the past to guide them. It’s about the mutual incomprehension between white and black – the anxiously safe and the pragmatic dispossessed – in country where nobody is really sure they belong anymore, and where everyone’s fate seems to have been determined by those who came before. Bitter and funny, Signs of Life reflects on the ways in which people with radically different histories form awkward, spiky alliances in order to survive.

Warning: Some adult themes

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Image by Robert Frith

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