The play

For Neil, the South Australian coastal town of Whyalla is a place of hidden beauty. Just a short drive from his caravan park, a few metres under the water, are hundreds of thousands of cuttlefish in their natural breeding ground: Sepia apama.

But now things are changing. The desal plant has been approved; the cuttlefish are going missing; and Neil is finding his family is further away then ever.

Can Whyalla still be all he thought it could be?

SEPIA premiered at Adelaide Fringe 2012 and played to sold out houses. It won the Tour Ready award, supported by Melbourne Fringe.

Commissioned by RiAus (the Royal Institution of Australia), SEPIA is based on the recent controversy around the planned desal plant and the potential effects on the largest known breeding ground of the Giant Australian Cuttlefish. It is Emily Steel’s second play combining science-based stories with the lives of regional South Australians. Rocket Town, the RiAus/Emily Steel production for Adelaide Fringe 2011, told the story of two teenagers growing up in Woomera. It was praised by critics and audiences, won the Adelaide Festival Centre inSPACE:development Award, and has toured to Sydney and regional SA.

Moving to South Australia from London in 2010, Emily has written for BBC radio and for theatre companies in the UK. She was inspired to write SEPIA when she discovered that the sepia tone in old photographs was made from cuttlefish ink. To develop SEPIA, Emily spoke to marine scientists and residents of Whyalla.

Directed by Nescha Jelk (The Lesson, Alice and Peter Grow Up), winner of the 2011 Helpmann Academy Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Award.

Cast: Matthew Gregan, Holly Myers and Rory Walker.
Designers: Myf Cadwallader (set), Lachlan Scown (sound).

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About Whyalla

Whyalla is a city on the coast of the Eyre Peninsula, about 400 km from Adelaide. Around 21,000 people live there. The area has been home to the Barngarla people for approximately 40,000 years.

When the town was founded in 1901 by the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP), it was called Hummock Hill. It was established as a port to transport iron ore from the Middleback Ranges to the Port Pirie lead smelters on the other side of the Spencer Gulf.

In 1914, Hummock Hill became Whyalla. As the operations of the town developed, the population slowly grew. In 1939, BHP started building a blast furnace and a harbour, and the construction of shipyards also began. Two years later, the blast furnace became operational, and the first ship, HMAS Whyalla, was launched.

The Whyalla steelworks opened in 1965. The population was growing rapidly as people arrived in Whyalla to work, and the government made plans for a city of 100,000.

The city population, however, peaked at 33,000 in 1976, and in 1978 the shipyards closed. The iron and steel industry also declined. In 2000, the steelworks was spun off from BHP to form part of a new business called OneSteel.

In the last decade, the South Australian mining boom has brought people back to Whyalla, but in 2011, OneSteel reported large financial losses from their steel manufacturing division. The closure of the Whyalla steelworks remains an option.

For more information about Whyalla, visit www.whyalla.com

About the cuttlefish

The Australian Giant Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, is the world’s largest cuttlefish. These cuttlefish can grow up to one metre in length, and can weigh over ten kilos.

Like other cuttlefish, they have an internal shell (the cuttlebone), eight arms and two tentacles. They have w-shaped pupils in their eyes, and can see the polarisation of light. They are able to rapidly change their colour and texture at will, which enables them to camouflage themselves from predators and communicate with other cuttlefish.

Australian Giant Cuttlefish live around the southern coastline from Western Australia to southern Queensland. Each year between May and August, great numbers of them gather in the shallow waters near Whyalla, at a place called Point Lowly, to breed. This is the only known mass cuttlefish breeding ground in the world.

During the breeding season, competition for a mate is fierce. At times there can be as many as eleven males to each female. A female may mate with a number of males before attaching her eggs to the underside of rocks or in rocky crevices. The eggs hatch in three to five months. Sepia apama is a semelparous species, which means each cuttlefish can only reproduce once in its lifetime.

The breeding ground near Whyalla was discovered by divers in the 1990s. In 1998, to protect the cuttlefish, commercial fishing was closed during the breeding season, and in 2004 this closure became year-round. Since the fishing closures, numbers of cuttlefish each year have reached into the hundreds of thousands. Tourists and divers come to Whyalla from around the world to see this phenomenon.

In the 2011 breeding season, however, the numbers of cuttlefish migrating to the breeding ground were drastically reduced. Speaking to the Sunday Mail in June 2011, Adelaide University ecologist Professor Bronwyn Gillanders said:

“I don’t think anybody has any idea about what could be causing it. The reason it is so concerning is that cuttlefish die after mating. A species like snapper can have a bad recruitment year but the same fish can still come back and lay more eggs. The cuttlefish can’t come back and breed again.”

For more information on Sepia apama, visit:
Marine Biology - University of Adelaide
Whyallacuttlefish.com
The Australian Museum
Wikipedia

About the desal plant

BHP merged with Billiton in 2001. BHP Billiton acquired the mining centre at Olympic Dam, near Roxby Downs, in 2005. The mine produces copper, uranium, gold and silver. The company soon began considering an expansion which would dramatically increase the mine’s production rate, and would make Olympic Dam the largest open-cut mine in the world.

The expansion would require around an extra 200 megalitres of fresh water every day. To supply this water, BHP Billiton proposed the building of a desalination plant at Point Lowly, Whyalla, close to the cuttlefish breeding ground. The desal plant would extract seawater from the Spencer Gulf, and discharge high salinity brine back into the sea. The fresh water would be piped up to Roxby.

Conservationists, fishermen, and some Whyalla locals were critical of these proposals. Marine scientists expressed concern at the effects this high salinity brine from the desal plant might have on marine life. The cuttlefish, in particular, might be threatened. The Spencer Gulf has naturally high salinity levels, and an increase in salinity could kill cuttlefish and eggs, and prevent the adult cuttlefish moving into their breeding grounds.

In 2009, BHP Billiton published their Draft Environmental Impact Statement, addressing the potential effects of the mine expansion and the desal plant. Their research indicated that the brine would be diluted and dispersed enough to be safe for all Spencer Gulf marine species – even during dodge tides when tidal movement is very low – and that it would not affect the cuttlefish breeding ground.

Protest against the plans continued. Opponents to the desal plant argued that the risk to the unique environment off Point Lowly was too great, and urged BHP Billiton to put the plant somewhere else. In mid 2011, the mining company released a Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement, taking account of the written responses to the proposals.

In October 2011, the state and federal governments approved the mine expansion and desal plant, with some strict environmental and social conditions. BHP Billiton promised that the expansion would create thousands of jobs and boost the South Australian and national economies.

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Contact

For press enquiries contact Jane Howard.

For general enquires contact Emily Steel.

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Media

Download the media release here.

For press enquiries contact Jane Howard.

Reviews

Mar 21, Rose Pullen, Lip Magazine
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Mar 16, Michael Coghlan, Rip It Up
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Mar 8, Kat Nicholson, Glam Adelaide
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Mar 8, Noriko Wynn, Adelaide ArtBeat
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Mar 2, Clare Peddie, The Advertiser
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Mar 8, Brian Godfrey, Adelaide Theatre Guide
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Features

Mar 6, Radio Adelaide, Emily Steel interviewed by Julia Wakefield
(listen below)

Feb 27, RiAus, Interview with the cast
Read

Feb 17, ABC News, Fringe sales strong as festival season starts
Read

Feb 17, ABC North and West SA, Cuttlefish controversy takes centre stage
Read

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Bios

Emily Steel – Writer

Emily Steel is originally from Wales and is now based in Adelaide. Her play Rocket Town was co-presented by the Royal Institution of Australia (RiAus) as part of Adelaide Fringe 2011, and won the Adelaide Festival Centre inSPACE award. She is currently working on a new play, Rabbits, for the inSPACE:development programme, along with a radio play for the BBC and stage plays for companies in the UK. Her previous work in the UK includes Boom Boom for BBC Radio 4, Station and Six for Sherman Cymru theatre, and Things Beginning With M for Omidaze theatre. In 2008 she was selected for the BBC writersroom/ Royal Court Theatre ‘24 degrees’ project to develop emerging writers. She has also completed the Writers Programme at the Royal Court Theatre, London. She trained as an actor at the Oxford School of Drama, and she has a degree in English from Oxford University and a master’s in Science, Medicine, Technology and Society from UCL/ Imperial College London.

Nescha Jelk – Director

Nescha graduated from the Flinders University Drama Centre directing course in 2010 with First Class Honors and a University Medal. During her time at the Drama Centre she directed a workshop production of David Williamson’s Third World Blues, Patricia Cornelius’ Slut, Polly Stenham’s Tusk Tusk, and a number of Raimondo Cortese’s pieces from his ‘Roulette’ Series. She has also co-devised an intercultural children’s play, adapted from a short story by Japanese writer, Kenji Miyazawa, called Matasaburou the Wind Spirit. Nescha has assisted Corey McMahon on Osama the Hero (Fivepointone), Catherine Fitzgerald on The Give and Take (STCSA) and Anne Thompson on The Life and Death of King John (Eleventh Hour, Melbourne) which featured in the Adelaide 2010 Festival of Arts. For Accidental Productions, she directed Ionesco’s The Lesson for Adelaide Fringe 2011. She is a founding member of Milk Theatre Collective, and directed their first show, Alice and Peter Grow Up, for the Festival of Unpopular Culture. She will assistant direct for Belvoir (Sydney), Brink and the State Theatre Company of SA this year. Nescha won Helpmann Academy’s Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Award for the top 2010 graduate from Helpmann’s partner schools.

Matthew Gregan – Matt

Matthew Gregan is an actor and musician. He graduated from the Acting course at the Adelaide College of The Arts in 2011. He was recently seen in The Laramie Project directed by Geordie Brookman, the self-devised piece It Started with Swing and the 2011 Adelaide Fringe Award nominated Bird Calls, which also played the 2011 Melbourne Fringe under the name Just Like The Movies and will be returning for Adelaide Fringe 2012. Matthew has also worked with the Adelaide Duende Collective on its productions of Playtime and Theatre Ltd. directed by Alan Grace. His theatre credits include: Hamlet, Richard 3rd and As You Like It directed by Terence Crawford; Familiar Lies directed by Jacqi Phillips and Tis Pity She’s A Whore directed by Peter Dunn; and the musicals Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Rachel Moorhead and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, directed by Michael Hill. Matthew also composes soundtracks for stage and screen and performs as a singer and guitarist both solo and in numerous Adelaide acts including Suited Swamp Rockers, The Monster Society of Evil and Leather clad Doo-Wop group The Hightowers. His band Encarta plan to release their first full-length album in early 2012.

Holly Myers – Emma

Holly is home after three years as a guest of Columbia University NYC, Theatre Arts Department in the MFA program. She is now 1 of 120 people in the world to become a Designated Linklater Vocal Coach. Since graduating from the Centre for the Performing Arts, Holly has performed with State Theatre Company of South Australia, Shakespeare & Company USA and Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company. Holly has coached voice & directed Shakespeare for the inmates at Los Angeles Juvenile Hall, The World Economic Forum Fellows in NYC, Boston Shakespeare Company, Urban Myth Theatre of Youth and The Vineyard Playhouse, Martha’s Vineyard USA. She has had regular leading roles in TV series Blue Heelers, The Hollowmen, MDA and Chuck Finn. Her film credits include Cut, The Bank, Selkie, Hating Alison Ashley. Recently, she has been nominated best actress in the UK & USA for short horror film Alistair. Holly is also a Voice artist and records in all the sound houses in Adelaide and all the radio stations for National and International television and radio commercials and documentaries. Holly dedicates this show to her dear brother Barny Myers who was a civil and water engineer. A scientist, inventor and magician.

Rory Walker – Neil

Rory Walker graduated from the Centre for the Performing Arts many moons ago and has been a proud Actors Equity member since 1988. He has appeared with Junction Theatre Company, Patch Theatre Company, The Border Project, Flying Penguin Productions, Windmill Theatre Company, State Theatre Company of SA, and Slingsby. Rory is a Brink Productions board member and ensemble member and has developed Land and Sea, Skip Miller’s Hit Songs, The Hypochondriac, This Uncharted Hour, and When the Rain Stops Falling. He has also helped develop many new Australian works such as Disappearance (The Border Project), When I was Crazy (Slingsby), Boo (Windmill), Erskinville Kings (Brink, Marty Dennis), Dr Ryusch (Vitalstatistix, Hilary Bell), Wormhole (Patch, John Rommeril) Holy Day (STC, Andrew Bovell) Hotel Paradise (Jack Hibberd) The Secret Death of Salvador Dali (Stephen Sewell). Musical Theatre Credits include: SCAM and Co-Opera’s Treemonisha, Mahagonny and Brunndibar for Windmill Theatre Company. Rory can be heard reading poems and plays for ABC radio’s Poetica series and has also appeared in numerous feature films and short films (Best Actor for the YAP 2008 awards). Rory is currently developing his own solo work for theatre – Of My Days with Eliza Lovell.

Jane Howard – Production Manager

Jane Howard is as a freelance performing arts writer (No Plain Jane, The Adelaide Review, Arts Hub, Australian Stage Online) and researcher (Flinders University/AusStage, University of Technology Sydney/The Australia Council), and administrator in film and media (Media Resource Centre/Mercury Cinema). She holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Adelaide, majoring in Genetics and Microbiology & Immunology, and has previously worked in genetics research as a technical assistant for the Adelaide Zebrafish Facility.  Sepia is Jane’s first role in professional theatre production.

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