Interview with Nigel Featherstone
Nigel Featherstone on his brand-new theatrical work, The Story of the Oars, and why hidden things can’t remain hidden forever
Nigel Featherstone is an award-winning novelist, librettist and now playwright based in Goulburn. While he was raised in Sydney, it is the landscapes and characters of the Canberra region that have often inspired Nigel’s creative works. In fact, it was the expanse of the ephemeral Weereewa/Lake George that offered him a vision of two oars, protruding from the dry lake-bed—a mystery to be pieced together. The Story of The Oars has grown from Nigel’s surrounds (natural and societal) and his relationship with music, which first blossomed at the keys of his mother’s piano.
Nigel spoke to MARION just before rehearsals commenced for this evocative ‘mystery with music’. The Story of The Oars will have its world premiere at The Street Theatre, Canberra on Fri 19 – Sun 21 September 2025. Watch the trailer.
Nigel Featherstone
Photo Credit: Philip Le Masurier
What draws you to getting beyond the novel and ink and paper and introducing these extra textures, like music, into your work?
Nigel Featherstone: I do just like working in different ways. The very first things I did 30 years ago were poems, and they became short stories, and then I started working on novels, and then I started doing some book reviews and interviewing artists for newspapers. I've never just wanted to be one thing.
From maybe ten years ago I started to move into the theatre, and that was because I was commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium to write the libretto for a new song cycle. At first I said, ‘no’, because I didn't think I could do it, but then I thought, well, maybe I can. That project, The Weight of Light, was also developed through The Street Theatre, which was fantastic. I've also branched out into music projects and spoken word projects. It's all narrative, it's all problem solving, it's all creativity, and I just like working in different ways. I don't see much difference between trying to write a play with music and trying to write a novel – you just have to make something you love.
As writers, we only ever know what we've already written. We don't know how to write our next project. If I was ever to start another novel, just because I've had three published doesn't mean I actually have any idea how to do the next one, because it’s probably completely different. To write in different ways is really refreshing, it's really energising, and after 30 years of being an artist, it just keeps things exciting.
I've got a lifelong commitment and love of music, so when the Hume Conservatorium approached me for The Weight of Light, they said, ‘Look, because of your love of music and writing, we really think you'd be great at this.’
I'd just turned 50 and I thought it could be interesting to see where it goes. I worked with a fabulous composer called James Humberstone, from the Sydney Conservatorium. To see that work on stage and have that immediate response from an audience—it’s terrifying but wonderful to see how people engage. We don't get that, really, when we're writing novels.
Was there music in your house growing up?
Nigel Featherstone: Yes, there was an upright piano. My mother was an early childhood educator of that era where part of their skill was to play the piano, so you'd get the kids to sing. This piano just turned up in the house, and it's a mystery as to why. I have two older brothers, and we all had childhood asthma, so we played brass instruments as well to help our lungs. I think maybe we just enjoyed music from there.
Jay Cameron and Nigel Featherstone
Credit: Nathan Smith Photography
Could you please introduce us to The Story of the Oars? Where did it come from and what's it about?
Nigel Featherstone: Around 2019 I finished Bodies of Men, a war novel, mostly set in Egypt. I'd finished The Weight of Light, and so both those things were out in the world. The Street Theatre advertised a music-theatre masterclass with a maestro called David Sisco, who was visiting from New York. I spent a week with one writer and about a dozen singers, and Sisco.
I remember driving between Canberra and Goulburn where I live, and thinking: I don't want to write a musical, but I do love music, and I love stories, so I wonder if I could bring them together in a different way?
I was driving past Weereewa, otherwise known as Lake George, which is now full, and I thought, ‘What if there was a pair of oars sticking up out of the ground? How did they get there?’
I went back to my computer and started a file called ‘The Story of the Oars’, because I just wanted to know what those oars were doing. Over the last six years it's been slowly developing. The premise became: five teenagers go for a sail on this massive 150 square kilometre ephemeral lake. Four drown. One makes it ashore.
Thirty years later, a father and son turn up at the lake, and things go haywire very quickly. It became a bit of a mystery to solve, but it also became much more abstract and much more political. Slowly we worked through The Street Theatre to knit the text and music together.
Callum Doherty, Louise Bennett, Sally Marrett, Nigel Featherstone, Jay Cameron, Shelly Higgs and Craig Alexander
Credit: Nathan Smith Photography
Tell us about that ‘knitting’ process with the Street Theatre’s support.
Nigel Featherstone: I wouldn't exist as a playwright or a theatre artist without The Street Theatre. That's just fact. Even though the Hume Conservatorium where I live in Goulburn commissioned The Weight of Light, it was The Street Theatre that worked with me and James Humberstone to make it happen. Then again, without the Hume Conservatorium’s vision, the project would never have got off the ground!
I took the The Story of the Oars idea to The Street, and Caroline Stacey, the artistic director and CEO, said, ‘Well, let's keep in conversation and see.’
I like to pursue projects to the end and take them as far as I can. I got two lots of funding from Create NSW. One was to work with Wollongong-based dramaturg Anne-Louise Rentell on developing the story. The other was to work with Jess Green, a jazz composer and singer-songwriter who at the time was living in Canberra. Jess spent a week with me exploring where the music could go.
We did a lot of stuff via Zoom to develop the work, then towards the end of the pandemic, I thought, ‘Why don't I just have a crack at the music myself?’ I’ve got the piano that I had as a child in my house, and it was a case of fingers-to-keyboard and start making sounds. I wrote all the songs, really just as proof of concept. I then gave the whole lot to Caroline Stacey and she suggested we find a musical director.
Our composer for this project, Jay Cameron, was living in Canberra at the time, and now lives in Perth. Jay was brought on about three years ago to arrange what I’d scratched on the back of the envelope, so to speak, and come in as the professional ‘architect’.
Then thanks to artsACT last year we had significant funding to spend two weeks with actors, and Jay, and a dramaturg, and we nutted everything out. We experimented, threw stuff away, and rejigged the whole work—that was absolutely essential—and now here we are. Jay’s been an absolute marvel.
You have a professional, creative life of accepting and working with feedback, but what was it like on this scale? Was it sometimes uncomfortable?
Nigel Featherstone: It's brilliant but horrendous! As writers for the page, we might send a piece of writing to a colleague, or an agent, or another writer, or even a friend or partner. They give you feedback. That can be confronting. But then you can reflect on it and you can spend weeks, months, years, or even start again, and that's okay. It's a much more linear process, I think, when we're writing for the page.
But writing in these collaborative environments—I can work really hard on the story, the scripts, and the lyrics, but then you get four actors around the table. You get a director and a dramaturg, an artistic director, and they'll read the whole thing out loud.
Then they go, ‘Well, that's great, thank you, Nigel. Why don't we actually start at the end of the play and reimagine it from there? What if we set it in 1840? What if we have four women? What if we have four men? What if we have four children?’ And your head explodes!
The other thing that I find absolutely fascinating is they may ask me to go away and make a scene stronger, so I go home and do that, then go back to the theatre, and they'll look at it and say, ‘Well, that's terrific, thank you. We're just going to pop that aside and get these two actors to imagine …’ and the actors, they just do it, and I'm watching this scene come alive right in front of me. Magical!
Sure, I created the scenario, and I've created the characters, but the actors can just embody scenarios and dynamics. I can work on a play for years and never show it to anybody, and think it's the best thing, but until you get it into the theatre in a developmental process, you have no idea whether it's flying or not. It’s absolutely exhilarating, and, yes, horrendous.
Callum Doherty and Craig Alexander in The Story of the Oars
Credit: Novel Photographic
You mentioned that the work evolved and took on a political dimension. It does seem to exist in your other works as well; that scrutiny you apply to Australian culture and the narratives that we have nationally.
Nigel Featherstone: Well, I think Australia is built on the worst possible foundations of sexism and racism and gendered violence and homophobia and environmental degradation. That's the colonial capitalist project, isn't it? Though we're also, in many ways, very lucky to experience these First Nation Countries that we live on.
I think also Australia is very good at lying about its history, and it moves so very slowly on resolving some issues.
I think all my work explores those things, but I've always wanted to be the sort of artist that creates something where if people are just entertained, that’s great. On the next level down, if they start to think, ‘There was more going on there, wasn't there?’, well, that's great too.
But more specifically, I really wanted to write a play about the ramifications of telling the truth. And because it is set on this ephemeral lake, when the water disappears every few decades for long periods of time, truths get revealed. We started to settle on this theme that something hidden can't remain hidden forever.
Do you have some truth-telling Australian texts that you can recommend?
Nigel Featherstone: I think Helen Garner is someone who tells the truth, doesn't she? Probably the best reading experience I've had in the last 10 years or 15 years has been reading her diaries. They're just extraordinary … The Spare Room is amazing—how honest she is about, ‘I've had this friend who was dying, and I said, come and stay with me, and I found it really difficult.’
I think Charlotte Wood is amazing—The Natural Way of Things, telling the truth in that way. I think Christos Tsiolkas is also someone who is very good at not filtering himself. Writers like Alice Pung and Tony Birch and Melissa Lucashenko and Claire G. Coleman—they're telling truth to power, and it's much needed.
The Story of the Oars - Louise Bennet, Sally Marett, Callum Doherty and Craig Alexander
Credit: Novel Photographic
Could you please tell us about the cast and who is bringing this to life?
Nigel Featherstone: The Story of the Oars is a four-hander: we have Craig Alexander, Louise Bennett, Sally Marrett, and Callum Doherty, plus Jay Cameron will be performing live on stage as well, working a deconstructed, sort of ‘exploded’ piano. It’s directed by Shelly Higgs, who's an absolutely fabulous director and dramaturg.
Craig and Sally were involved in the development phase, but Louise and Callum weren't, so they're new to this work. The amazing privilege of working with an organisation like The Street is that, in terms of the casting, they tried a lot of different combinations, and they also make sure that they’re drawing on the talent in the Canberra region.
The Street Theatre is the professional theatre company for adventurous, new, independent work. They pay artists properly, and they're committed to developing all sorts of theatre artists, making sure we have a range of skills and making sure that audiences get to see different faces in productions. The cast and creatives for The Story of the Oars are brilliant, and I feel very lucky.
What does being enmeshed in this region give you as an artist?
Nigel Featherstone: The Canberra region is one of the most creative places I know. We have these amazing landscapes. Twice a week I drive past a lake that's 150 square kilometres and six years ago it was just paddocks. Now, it's lapping up the road and there’s flocks of black swans everywhere. Then you've got the Brindabellas, and the Snowy Mountains, and then we've got the coast, and all these creative little villages doing really wonderful stuff. Tucked away in these little communities are internationally recognised visual artists, poets with a national reputation, Miles Franklin-winning novelists, theatre artists and musicians who have international standing.
Then we have the cultural institutions like the National Library. I spent last Sunday at the National Gallery absorbing a show. You can go to the National Archives, you can go to the Portrait Gallery … and there are all these other wonderful arts organisations, like The Street Theatre and MARION.
But then—because I'm a terrible hermit—at the end of all that, I can just drive 80 kilometres north, and be home and not talk to anyone, apart from going to Woollies in my tracksuit pants, because we can do these things in country towns, can't we? It's just wonderful.
When you have arts organisations that are on fire, and they really know what they're doing, they've got a clear mission, then it's a real thrill to be involved. And I think they're quite welcoming. You can knock on the door and say, ‘I'm keen on working on this project’ and they say ‘come on in’, but they also have really high expectations, too, and I think that's what you want as an artist, so you keep growing. This region is so much more than just politics.
The Story of The Oars will have its world premiere at The Street Theatre, Canberra on Fri 19 – Sun 21 September 2025. Find out more and get your tickets here.
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer for the page, stage, and music. His most recent work is The Wreck Event, a 16-song spokenword-and-music album under the moniker Hell Herons collaboration with award-winning poets Melinda Smith, Stuart Barnes, and CJ Bowerbird. Nigel’s most recent novel, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, was published by Ultimo Press (Hardie Grant) in 2022. It has been described as ‘Epic in its intimacy–a triumph of a book’ (Peter Polites), ‘A remarkable look at Australian masculinity and its meaning’ (Newtown Review of Books), and ‘Yearning and intimate’ (West Australian). Nigel’s war novel, Bodies of Men, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards, and received a 2019 Canberra Critics Circle Award. His short works - prose and poetry - have appeared in numerous literary journals such as the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit, Island, The Millions and the Chicago Quarterly Review. In terms of theatre, Nigel’s play with spokenword songs, The Story of the Oars, will have its world premiere on 19 September 2025 at The Street Theatre. As commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium, he wrote the libretto for The Weight of Light, which was developed by The Street Theatre and had its world premiere in 2018. As a freelancer, Nigel’s work has appeared in a variety of mastheads and journals, including the Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian Australia, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He has been supported by artsACT, Create NSW, and Creative Australia. In 2022, Nigel was named the ACT Artist of the Year.