Treehouse Theatre

We are passionate about giving “The Refugee Experience” a genuine and empathic face.

The resilient young refugees with whom we work, offer us their life’s stories with open-hearted grace, and thus hand us the privilege and the responsibility of finding a way to give these stories voice and audience.

We long for all Australians to hear these kids. We yearn for affluent and safe Australians of every colour to feel these stories. We crave other kids of all backgrounds to connect these (genuine!) vibrant faces with the word “refugee”.

And so “The Tree of Life Project”, a theatre and mentoring project, was born, and later, Treehouse Theatre as its formal vehicle.

We are old friends, having met in our work with young refugees, Catherine as a Psychologist and School Counsellor, and Ruth as a Drama teacher and teacher of English as a Second Language.

We both love theatre, and believe in the power of stories to enliven and transform, and in the “tangled magics” (to quote Tim Winton) of live theatre to take us inside the experience of the story-teller.

Previous audiences of “Tree of Life” have testified to feeling both enlivened and transformed by the stories of “our” kids, and we listen to the sounds of audiences sobbing, and then shouting with laughter, with full hearts.

We delight in the growth of confidence and happiness in our young refugees, as they discover that Australians are fascinated by what they have to say.