Out bush somewhere live farming couple Ray (Colin Friels) and Floss (Kerry Armstrong). They’re plenty used to hard times around here, but we’re meeting them in a period of maximum stress. Drought pushed them to the edge and now heavy rains have arrived, stranding and drowning dozens of heifers, which now have to be hauled from the mud and buried. Debts to the bank are mounting and the gun-happy neighbours – a local dynasty of crooks and stock thieves – are becoming more and more troublesome.

Pretty much par for the course, you might think. Australian farming life in a nutshell. But Ray and Floss are getting on and their health isn’t what it was. Their resilience and ability to push through to the next season is waning. Talking in the kitchen or on the porch, their exchanges are brief but loaded. That nobody actually says “she’ll be right”, seems like a tacit acknowledgment that, this time, she won’t be.

Kerry Armstrong and Colin Friels in Into the Shimmering World. Photo © Daniel Boud

Into the Shimmering World is the third instalment of Cerini’s ‘gothic trilogy’ of bush-set plays, the first...