During the month of August the Sydney Theatre Company, together with Albury’s Hothouse Theatre Company, presented a production of Campion Decent’s powerful doco drama ‘Embers’at its Wharf 1 theatre.

Decent’s play was about the 2003 Victorian bushfires which represented one of the worst national disasters in Australian history. Decent extensively researched his play, conducting interviews with fire fighters (volunteer and paid), farmers, business proprietors, children, council workers, families and volunteers,travelling nearly 3,000 kilometres through isolated bushfire affected areas in late 2003 and early 2004.

‘Embers’ was a powerful testimony to the community spirit and sense of Australian mateship that held the townships together. A pool of seven actors were selected to tell the community’s stories.

Maeliosa Stafford took the directors chair and brought together a strong cast that included Annie Byron, Tracy Mann, Mark Pegler, Tim Richards, Amber Todd, John Walker and Matthew Zeremes. Each actor gave passionate, committed performances.

A feature of ‘Embers’ was the very strong production values; Martin Kinnane’s great lighting design, Steve Francis’s atmospheric score with plenty of use of the violin, and Gordon Burns’s set design with its rural landscape backdrop, and the stage floor speckled with embers.

Most of all ‘Embers’ will be be remembered for some of the anecdotes to come out of the disaster. My favourite was an amazing survival story, a wildlife sanctuary worker who sought refuge from the fires in a mineshaft, staying underground with kangaroos, wallabies and a corgi, and keeping the embers at bay by using a saturated mattress to block the mineshaft.