AWGIES awash with pink

Tony Ayres, Tommy Murphy and Campion Decent took out major categories at the 40th annual Australian Writers’ Guild awards last Friday.
Ayres’s film The Home Song Stories shared the best feature film (original) category with Clubland’s Keith Thompson, but narrowly missed out on the award for Outstanding Script of the Year to Thompson.
Murphy’s stage adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man took out the stage award.
Decent collected the Community and Youth Theatre award for his stunning verbatim-theatre piece Embers.
The Home Song Stories is a film about the life of Ayres’s eccentric and mentally unstable mother and her struggle to raise two young children in 1970s Australia. The main events in the film are based on Ayres’s real-life experiences.
The Home Song Stories has already won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Scriptwriting and has been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Awards.
Ayres’s past works have won numerous awards, including Best Gay and Lesbian Feature Film at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival for Walking on Water, and Best Short Documentary at the Washington Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for China Dolls.
He has also edited two plays, Thieving Boy and Like Stars in My Hands, which were originally written by Timothy Conigrave.
The stage adaptation of Conigrave’s best-known work, Holding the Man, now in its fourth season domestically, earned Murphy the Stage AWGIE.
“The moment I read that first page of Holding The Man, I knew it could be a play,” Murphy told SSO. “The honesty of Holding the Man is the most important aspect of this story. Tim does an extraordinary thing in the book by giving all the moral authority over to John. It is such a selfless act that you then trust him as a storyteller.”
Decent’s much-acclaimed work Embers was based on interviews and observations he made in the aftermath of the January 2003 bushfires, which swept through the alpine regions of southern NSW and Victoria.
Decent, a former editor of SSO, is now the artistic director of Albury-Wodonga’s HotHouse Theatre Company.
“The community angle has always interested me, as most of my work has evolved out of some kind of community basis,” Decent said of Embers.
“But this story is about human nature and the character of Australia. It seems to me, in the world we live in, where the individual often feels we have no control over bigger events, there is something in this story about how individuals come together into a community structure.”