The Table of Knowledge

"I was at a barbecue in Adelaide in 2008 – a big boozy arts market junket barbecue – and after several glasses of wine I was well into an enthusiastic discussion about what the topic of Version 1.0’s next theatre production might be.

"At the time, there was this story in all of the newspapers about a town planner in Wollongong who was having affairs with developers whilst she was processing their development applications for enormous apartment complexes. It seemed like a very sordid, sleazy scandal, and making a show about it might be a lot of fun. Version 1.0 had recently finished Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue, a show about the AWB ‘wheat-for-weapons’ scandal, and after something big and complicated like that, a funny little sex scandal show sounded perfect.

"My drinking partners on this occasion were Simon Hinton and Anne-Louise Rentell from Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong, and they thought that this was a great idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this scandal had big implications for Wollongong’s citizens, and as the local theatre company, they were keen to make a theatrical response. It seemed like the perfect jumble of prurient interest and civic need – a show that had to happen. But maybe that was just the wine talking.

"Jump forward to 2011, and our quasi-drunken deal-making turned into a show, The Table of Knowledge. The Version 1.0 team has spent weeks trawling through transcripts of the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s investigation, went on walking tours of contested development sites around Wollongong, and tried to put ourselves into the shoes of the colourful characters involved in the scandal. It was a surprising experience, to say the least. The ICAC investigation exposed sexual obsessions, cash-filled envelopes paid to conmen in carparks, and a group of powerfully connected men that met every day at 6am to have coffee around a plastic table outside a kebab shop, describing themselves as the ‘table of knowledge’.

"As we made the show we joked, “This is a unique story, the kind of story that could only ever take place in a place like Wollongong. Or Port Macquarie. Or Randwick. Or Burwood. Or Warringah. Or three times in Melbourne." And all the other places where stories like this keep taking place.

"There have been at least 11 councils sacked in NSW from 1997-2008, and 32 corruption inquiries since 1989. Through the process of making The Table of Knowledge we realised that in the end all politics is local. The events, actions and inactions scrutinised in by ICAC have allowed us to consider what kind of relationship we want to have with the places in which we live, and with the governments that run these places. As citizens, we don’t seem to think about that often enough. Hopefully, this show might provide such an opportunity."