Words are powerful, but what happens when they disappear? Of the 350-plus First Nations languages thriving before colonisation, fewer than 50 are widely spoken today . While more than 300 languages are spoken in Australia today – about one-fifth of Australians are multilingual – many of those introduced post-European settlement have also been lost across generations. St Martins Youth Arts Centre artistic director Nadja Kostich (left) and playwright Michele Lee.
Credit: Joe Armao In The Word, the latest play from St Martins Youth Arts Centre, two rival clans come together to save the world. They try to do so by overcoming prejudices ingrained through centuries of linguistic misunderstanding, which underlines the power of words. One of the South Yarra-based youth theatre group’s most ambitious productions, the show reimagines the Abbotsford Convent – a fraught historical space where “wayward” young women were forced into indentured labour – as an abandoned archive.
The cast of ‘The Word’ during rehearsals. Credit: Jason Cheetham “We talk about words as vessels, as containers, and so they carry form,” says St Martins’ artistic director and CEO Nadja Kostich, who also directs the show. “They carry our culture, our connections to place and family, and we sail them out into the future.
” Loading Between the cast and crew, there are connections to 30 languages, either spoken daily or ancestrally, including Yorta Yorta, Arabic, Hebrew, Kanien’kéha, Gael.
