Wiradjuri and Gumbaynggirr writer Dalara Williams sets her debut play in Redfern, where she grew up and still lives. It’s the Sydney suburbs of 1966, in the lead up to the Indigenous referendum in 1967. The backdrop is one of The Beatles and the Vietnam War, the 1965 Freedom Ride, and the Wave Hill walk off led by Vincent Lingiari in 1966.

Williams spent her life listening to her family tell these stories. But it wasn’t until flicking through a photo album and seeing a picture of her great-grandmother at the 1938 Day of Mourning, a child on her hip and another holding a sign reading ‘Aborigines Claim Citizenship’, that she thought to write them down. Later, in her third year as drama student at NIDA, Williams sat down with a pot of tea and a tape recorder to chat with three of the most important women in her life: her grandmother and her two great aunts.

The result is Big Girls Don’t Cry, which she began as a screenplay but completed as a piece for theatre in 2022, the year she spent as the Balnaves Fellow at Belvoir. A superb cast of...