Dear Josipa & Stephanie,

I wish you all the very best with the Color Blind Project. I think this festival is very important in recognizing that Australia has a need to show its vast multicultural and Indigenous talents. There needs to be a claiming and honoring of who we are and who is here. All too often the impression out there is that Australia is an Anglo Saxon nation. I have prayed and hoped that in this new century, that we would start to reveal who we truly are. Every time you turn on the TV you do NOT see who we are, or in the media, or on posters, in adds, in music etc. If we are present, its often token. The time has come for change. Its time. The Color Blind project is a symbol and beginning of that change.

- Paul Capsis

For the Colour Blind Project 2010:-

One of the brilliant aspects of my job is that I read a great number of plays and the best of them are fired by fury or humour or astonishing insight, or sometimes all three.

I hold out great hopes for this responsive, genuinely plastic and surprisingly ancient art-form. Writers observe and report, interpret and re-interpret, appal and delight, make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, all the while sharpening our understanding of our world - and good playwrights do so in real time in front of an audience.

Good playwrights are hard to find - who can afford to live on spec while writing a play that may or may not get produced?

And even if someone is gagging to write a play they will be stymied by lack of real access to theatre companies. Australian theatre companies just don’t read new plays. Their doors are closed to new writers.

And for writers from culturally diverse backgrounds, writers that speak English as a second-language, or who are from a minority culture, what professional theatre company has produced one of their plays recently in Sydney?

When one in four of us are born overseas, with 1 in five speaking a language other than English at home and with over 200 languages spoken in our community, we’ve got great stories everywhere but a real problem getting them to our stages.

This is the beauty of the Colour-Blind project, an organisation committed to changing the way things are done, and the people who are doing it. It is not about being politically correct but professionally correct.

It is an attempt to open doors literally and metaphorically.

But let’s not just open the doors, let’s kick them down.

The Colour Blind project is an important step to be taking as a culture in order to ensure that we can bring new stories and new audiences to our theatres – an innovative artist led event that connects artists from all backgrounds in non-literal ways to great works of art.

New visions and new voices offer us superb new insights, and complex and critical visions for the future.

I am very much looking forward to the Colour Blind Project 2010 and wish it all the very best.

Yours faithfully,

Chris Mead

Artistic Director, PlayWriting Australia

To this day I still get recognised as the Philipino/Koori/Maori/Japanese/mixed race girl from Girlfriend. I had a lot of young girls in particular that were identifying or relating to me because I was the closest person to their colour in the public spotlight. When I look around at my local shopping centre I see a real mixed bag of colours cultures & hairstyles. Wouldn't it be great to turn on to Summer Bay and see a true representation of Australian people and colour.

- Robyn Loau