For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm

For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm

For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm

For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm

For more than fifty years, Howard Barker has been one of Britain’s most influential and uncompromising contemporary dramatists. To mark his eightieth birthday, Flinders Drama Centre honours Barker’s extraordinary contribution to contemporary theatre with Wrestling with Catastrophe, a major ensemble production celebrating a writer whose provocative, poetic plays have challenged, divided and inspired generations of theatre-makers while remaining unlike anything else on the modern stage.

Directed by one of Howard Barker’s closest artistic collaborators, Gerrard McArthur, Wrestling with Catastrophe has been created by the graduating Honours actors of Flinders Drama Centre and brought to life by performers, directors, designers and theatre-makers from across the Drama Centre. Together they have crafted an original theatrical journey through scenes drawn from across Barker’s remarkable body of dramatic work.

Violent, beautiful, darkly funny and intellectually exhilarating, Barker’s dramas refuse easy answers. Love becomes political. Beauty becomes dangerous. History is shaped as much by private desire as by public power. Rather than offering certainty, Barker’s theatre invites audiences to embrace contradiction, complexity and imagination.

The production also celebrates Adelaide’s distinctive engagement with Barker’s work, from the Australian premiere of No End of Blame in 1981 to Brink Productions’ (a company founded by Drama Centre graduates) acclaimed exploration of his plays throughout the 1990s. In continuing this tradition, Wrestling with Catastrophe offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the exhilarating, uncompromising theatre of one of Britain’s most original dramatic voices.

Performances 29 July – 1 August @ 7:30pm and 31 July @ 2pm

Disabled characters are often written for screen before disabled actors are invited into the creative process. What changes if that invitation comes earlier?

This research event explores disability representation, screenwriting, and consultation through the development of Growing Pains, a comedy-drama feature screenplay written by Assemblage HDR member and Screen PhD candidate and filmmaker Lily Drummond. Developed across multiple drafts in consultation with AACTA Award-winning actor, writer, and advocate Hannah Diviney, Growing Pains follows two best friends in their final year of high school as they navigate friendship and differing ambitions.

Join us for a presentation from Lily about her PhD research and the development of Growing Pains, followed by a table read of selected scenes from the screenplay performed by Hannah Diviney and students and alumni of the Flinders University Drama Centre. Lily will then be joined by Hannah in conversation, to investigate how consultation shaped the work. They will analyse how story and character evolved through collaboration, and discuss aspects of access, agency and creative responsibility.

Lily Drummond is an Adelaide based screenwriter and director. Her films include ‘With Love, Lottie,’ ‘Hypothetically, the End,’ ‘The Bear Hunt,’ and ‘Illustrating Sam Newton,’ which have screened at festivals such as Sydney Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, SXSW Sydney, and St Kilda Film Festival. Lily’s film ‘With Love, Lottie’ won the 2025 Iris Prize Youth Jury Award, and two South Australian Screen Awards. Her work champions joyful, complex, authentic disabled and queer characters, and she pushes for deeper representation and inclusion in Australian film.

Hannah Diviney is a writer, disability advocate,  actress, screenwriter, speaker, author and media personality. Her disability advocacy has garnered global attention thanks to both a viral petition encouraging Disney to create a disabled Disney Princess and a successful campaign encouraging both Lizzo and Beyonce to change ableist lyrics. Her debut book, I’ll Let Myself In, a collection of personal essays chronicling what it means to come of age in a world not built for you, was released in 2023.

Join Mariana Enriquez – Flinders’ 2026 Writer-in-Residence and “master of the macabre” (Sydney Morning Herald) – for an wide ranging Q&A about  her incredible life and career, from a childhood under the Argentine dictatorship to her bestselling horror fiction that has electrified the literary world and gathered profiles in outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian. Mariana will also be discussing her latest project, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, a travel memoir about the world’s most distinctive cemeteries, which was listed as a Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2025.

Following the conversation with Lecturer in Creative Writing Alex Cothren, Mariana will take questions from the audience and will be available for book signings and further networking.

After touring the world, the Flinders residency is Mariana’s first visit to Adelaide, so we hope you can be part of this special event.

The event is free. Bookings required via EventBrite and subject to availability.

Join Mariana Enriquez—“the queen of Latin American literary horror” (The Saturday Paper)—for a special visual tour of the places that inspired her writing. From the haunted neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires that have terrorised contemporary horror lovers to the famous (and infamous) cemeteries explored in her essay collection Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave (Time Magazine Must-Read Book 2025), Enriquez will guide audiences through the real places behind her work. Accompanied by a projection of photographs hand-selected by Enriquez herself, this special event offers a rare glimpse into the landscapes that have shaped some of the most acclaimed gothic writing of the twenty-first century.

The event will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

Sponsored by Flinders University and the Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research.

Cost: Free, register via EventBrite

Location: Hetzel Lecture Theatre

Date: Wednesday 19 August 2026.

Time: Entry at pm for 6:30pm start

Flinders University at Tonsley is proud to host the third GPN workshop for the year in Adelaide.

Thanks to our partners and sponsors, GPN is free and always will be!

In this workshop we’ll be making a program with the BBC MicroBits to create a Bop-it style game! Come along to learn about electronics, making your own buttons and embedded programming.

Students don’t need to have any programming experience to come along, we’ve got something for high school aged girls and gender-diverse students of all levels. We’ll cover the basics if you’re new to Python and show you some extra cool stuff if you’re already a programming pro.

Build creative projects, get mentoring & find friends!

🍕 Everything provided, including computers, pizza & snacks 🍬

Free coding workshops
A friendly community for coders of all levels

Topic: Making a program with the BBC MicroBits to create a Bop-it style game!
Where: Flinders University, Tonsley Campus
When: Sunday August 30 – 9.30am – 4pm

Event rego is open!

Visit the Girls’ Programming Network Adelaide Term 3 page for more information

Extension Studies at Flinders University is a program that allows high‑achieving Year 12 students to study real university topics while still at school. It’s a chance to experience uni early, boost your ATAR, and even secure guaranteed entry into a Flinders degree. Join us for an online information session where you’ll learn more about the program and how to apply for 2027.

Register to attend: 

Flinders University at Tonsley is proud to host the second GPN workshop for the year in Adelaide

Thanks to our partners and sponsors, GPN is free and always will be!

Build creative projects, get mentoring & find friends!
🍕 Everything provided, including pizza & snacks 🍬

Free coding workshops
A friendly community for coders of all levels!
Topic: TBC
Where: Flinders University, Tonsley Campus
When: Sunday November 1 – 9.30am – 4pm

Event rego is open!

Visit the Girls’ Programming Network homepage for more information

Make a film within a day – Join the November Session

New session added, this is a repeat of the April session.

You are invited to discover Film and Television at Flinders University, Bedford Park. Explore the campus, meet passionate teachers / filmmakers, and learn about jobs in the film and television industry. Over the course of the day produce, film and edit a micro short film, and record a filmmaker statement that can be used in your portfolio application.

This interactive filmmaking workshop is open to current Year 12 students.

No experience required, but bookings are essential as places are limited. Please note: students may attend one session (April or November), but not both.

Free to attend.