13.11.25
Kia ora e te whānau,
October has left us, and spring has arrived in Kings Cross (this is where we live). The jacarandas are letting go of this year’s ashes—their petals a kind of silent disco across the footpaths. This brutopia of an emerald city shimmers under a soft king tide of purple. Down the road near Green Park, the floating world of Darlinghurst hums: coffee brewing, life blooming, the familiar chaos of creation in full swing—presence. Prima facie, it almost feels like a hoax.
I’m Daley Rangi, Griffin’s new Literary Associate: the person lucky enough to wade daily through this savage river of ideas, holding space for those dogged playwrights as they test ideas, build worlds, and chase burning stories that might shift something inside us, get caught in our throat like a fishbone, or even sometimes make us wake in fright. For the literati who are speaking in tongues late at night to make sense of the world, I’m here to listen, to offer a strategic plan when the story feels slippery and to support those early drafts, the hopeful sparks, the nucleus of what will become theatre.
Last week, we held our annual Playwrights Briefing, which was a chance for the Griffin team to share with writers and dispel any masquerade about what we program and why, how writing is developed inside the company and our current slate of opportunities. It was also a moment to spend time in community, we wicked sisters of storytelling.
Our Griffin Ambassadors Program is still open for applications—inviting young theatregoers and makers, movers and shakers, to answer the call. They’ll arrive as curious onlookers and leave as superheroes, wide-eyed and ready to rewrite the world. It feels like witnessing a city of gold being built in real time and reminds me that the next generation of artists are already dreaming the future from the front row. The kids are alright.
Griffin Studio applications close tomorrow, the golden blood running through next year’s creative veins. Studio is where writers and theatre-makers stretch, experiment, and sometimes splinter wide open—a safe space for the almighty sometimes of risk and revelation, to sit under the bleeding tree and wonder.
And then, on Tuesday 2 December, the annual Griffin Award opens its doors for applications once more, aligning with our family values to celebrate new Australian writing. It’s our invitation for playwrights to leap, to take the plunge, to send in work that might just become the next feather in the web of Griffin’s rich lineage.
Meanwhile, on stage, Whitefella Yella Tree by Dylan Van Den Berg is just about to open tonight at The University of Melbourne Arts and Culture, and Naturism by Ang Collins is closing this Saturday at Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company. It’s our final bow for the year, our sunset at the end of the year: warm, irreverent, and full of heart. If you haven’t yet basked in the glow of either show, don’t be ghosting the party—pony up and get your tickets before they’re gone.
Soon, I’ll be heading briefly away to Aotearoa, to let my whenua love me tender—to breathe, to listen, to swim and let the ocean reset me, to sit between two waves. I’ll spend December beached, resting and remembering—diving for pearls in the quiet places before returning to Griffin in the new year with new stories, new energy and maybe a bit of sea salt still in my hair.
I know, I might still be the turquoise elephant in the room, lurking with my play library in the depths of this grand, old terrace next to a great, empty sandstone hole but in this role, I can feel the lineage of those who’ve written before me, before us, way back when. The Griffin canon, wherever she wanders, is a living map, this much is true—one that proves that storytelling, at its best, can be both wound and salve. As above, so below.
Here’s to the playwrights who keep making meaning out of madness and to the audiences who meet them halfway.
Aroha nui—ka kite anō!
Daley
Daley Rangi
Literary Associate
