I was hoping there might be a Bunyip in Dead Puppet Society’s The Riddle of Washpool Gully.
If you’re hoping for one, too, don’t be disappointed because there’s another creature that may be related. Or I’d like to think so.
Dead Puppet Society’s creative director David Morton tells me that the creature in this show (now on at QPAC during a national tour that ends in Adelaide in April) is “like a mashup of a number of different mythical creatures”.
It has a ghostly quality and is part kangaroo, with the tail of a crocodile and antlers. Yikes!
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“It’s a conglomeration,” Morton explains.
Aimed at schoolchildren but, like all Dead Puppet’s work, suitable for everyone, The Queensland company’s blurb describing this show is promising:
“Far beyond the outskirts of the big city, near a tiny town that nearly everyone forgot, lay a dry creek bed of no special significance. Once upon a time it had been called Washpool Gully. But the world had moved on from insignificant things, and no one had time for dry creek beds. Except in Washpool Gully something was stirring. Shaken by the rumble of engines and darkening of the sky, something long asleep had decided to wake up.”
Combining old-fashioned storytelling with contemporary puppetry and miniature sets, The Riddle of Washpool Gully is a reimagined tale of Australian mythology about the incredible creatures that might still live in the uncharted corners of our vast country.
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And it is also about a boy and his interactions with a creature he discovers and the emotional dimensions of their relationship. Morton says there has been some trauma in the life of the boy and his mum, and this is something of a coming-of-age story.
The idea for this show came about 15 years ago while Morton and his partner, Dead Puppet executive producer Nicholas Paine, were driving in the country and came across the gully that inspired this show.
If you Google Washpool Gully you will find a number of gullies with this name, but these are not Morton’s Washpool Gully, which is a figment of his imagination, inspired by a dry creek bed that was underneath a bridge in the middle of nowhere.
Driving on, Morton recalls wondering about what creatures might live there.
Then in 2017 Hobart theatre company Terrapin, the oldest continuously running Australian puppet company, commissioned Dead Puppet to write a new work. Terrapin’s goal as a company is to build a thriving organisation that can support emerging creatives, and this goal led them to reach out and commission Dead Puppet, which came up with The Riddle of Washpool Gully, initially commissioned as a Tasmanian school touring show. (It was created around the same time as their hit show The Wider Earth.)
The Riddle of Washpool Gully toured Tassie but never made it to the mainland. Until now. This is a new version, tweaked for a national tour.
The Riddle of Washpool Gully plays the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, until March 21; The J Noosa, March 26-27; Gasworks Creative Precinct, Melbourne, April 8 to 11; and Adelaide Festival Centre, April 16 to 18.
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