Identity played out on stage Playwright Andrea James, third from left, and director Leah Purcell, checked shirt, with the cast of Winyanboga Yurringa in Perth. Picture: Nirme Marie Source: The Australian FOR the past few years, a short play about Aboriginal identity has been burning a hole in Andrea James's pocket. It's a work that draws on unlikely sources -- a notorious column by Andrew Bolt and the SBS miniseries Women of the Sun -- for a story that confronts sensitive topics in indigenous Australia. "That whole question of our identity and our skin colour is probably one of the burning issues of the last decade," James said. It's something that really continues to be an issue and a challenge for the community. Her work, conceived in Sydney and developed in Victoria, was at the weekend brought to life in Perth in front of industry figures eager to find new talents for the stage. It was one of seven local works selected for the National Play Festival, an annual event that attracts representatives from theatre companies around the nation to readings that are also open to the public. Winyanboga Yurringa -- the name roughly translates "women of the sun" into the Yorta Yorta language -- was commissioned in 2010 by Sydney's Belvoir as part of a broader work. That project was to have been directed by James along with other directors, including Wesley Enoch and Wayne Blair. But the project never went ahead, leaving James with a script without a home. Then in October, her work was selected by Playwriting Australia to be developed in a workshop setting, and Leah Purcell came on board as director. "I've not ever seen seven Aboriginal women on stage doing their stuff and that for me was just really exciting," James said. It was like, 'Wow, here we are, telling our story, seven women on stage. It was really quite beautiful to see'. The play was shown yesterday as a "moved reading" in Perth in a performance that James hoped would demonstrate its potential. "For me the wheels really started to turn when Leah came on board," James said. It's just so wonderful to have an Aboriginal woman who's also an Aboriginal actor and an Aboriginal theatre-maker who absolutely gets it. James, the artistic associate at Sydney's Carriageworks, is the first indigenous playwright to have work appear at the four-day festival. And her play boasts a strong line-up: in addition to Purcell, seven Aboriginal women with credits that include The Sapphires and the recent adaptation of Kate Grenville's Secret River. In her work, James bases one character on artist Bindi Cole, one of the Aboriginal people who sued Bolt for racial discrimination. The resulting story draws on the controversy surrounding Bolt's column, with his words quoted in the script, in a play that asks deep questions about Aboriginal identity. "That is one of the major concerns in the play, identity, and how Aboriginal women with lighter skin continue to assert their identity and how the community deals with that as well," she said.