This category was included under the Special Award category for the 1999 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, but the script entries were not successful. In 2000 there was no Script award, however, the separate category was reinstated in the 2001 awards.

2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995 | 1994 | 1993

2006

Sardines - Hellie Turner
Tropic Sun Theatre Queensland
An accidental encounter by two damaged people has unexpected results in this absorbing two-hander. In the confined setting of a bed-sitter, Jason, an opportunistic thief, confronts and is confronted by Gloria, an agoraphobic physically and emotionally wounded by her past. With sensitivity Turner moves these very different characters seamlessly from a verbal battleground to a resolution, whereby they come to a tentative understanding of the other’s choice of lifestyle and offer each other a new way of looking at the world and their position in it.

2005

Last Train to Freo - Reg Cribb
(Sue Taylor Media)
The Midland-to-Fremantle train is the setting for Cribb’s suspenseful play. Two thugs, Steve and Trev, turn the journey into a brutal game, drawing in fellow passengers as unwilling participants – or are they? As the train moves closer to its destination, so pressure inside the carriage rises as Trev and Steve increasingly torment their victims and each other in a high-stakes battle of wits. Well-wrought characters, fast-moving dialogue and tightly framed setting ensure the tension remains high until the shocking denouement.

2004

Yandy - Jolly Read
Black Swan Theatre Company
Judges' Comments
Yandy is iconoclastic for its representation of Don McLeod as being "one of them," meaning a white to the Aboriginal people and not the blackfella’s friend he styled himself as. It is refreshing for its naïve representation of Dorothy Hewett as a young reporter for the West Australian who is looking for a story rather than a headline. But most of all it is informative for the way it documents and elaborates the details of the Aboriginal station-workers’ Strike of 1946, sometimes called "the blackfella’s Eureka": how the pastoralists were outraged, how the police took their side, and how the Aboriginal people took a stand and did not give in, not even to this day according to some of the old people who insist that they never returned to work on the stations. A dramatic illustration of how the master-slave relationship is ruptured when the slave says No.

2003

Last Cab to Darwin - Reg Cribb
Pork Chop Productions/ Black Swan Theatre
Judges' Comments
Reg Cribb has crafted an exceptional Australian play for our time. Using laconic and irreverent vernacular, he explores traditional topics like small-town life and rural decline along with the contemporary debate on voluntary euthanasia. Along the way he reflects on the perennial themes of love, friendship, identity, mortality and, without fuss, race. Although the driving force of the plot is Max's quest for euthanasia, which takes him on a long odyssey in his own taxi through the outback to Darwin, the play is far from morbid: its caricature, humour and satire are suffused with a characteristically Australian humour forged in defiance of adversity. This is a masterful work that continues to linger in the mind.

2002

Bench - Hellie Turner
Judges' Comments
Hellie Turner has created an absorbing play in telling the stories of three damaged women's lives through their meetings at a park bench. This is moving and provocative theatre, tightly written yet widely suggestive of women's resilience in the face of emotional adversity. While the individual stories of the three protagonists are bleak, there is a poignancy about the situation where their aloneness draws them together. In the sharing of the bench and their 'dark secrets' there is a growing honesty between them which carries its own epiphany. While there is no real dramatic climax, the individual stories carry an inherent drama. There is a strong feminist agenda which reaches its ironic height in the final scene, with the women sitting naked on the bench.

2001

Confessions of a Headhunter - Sally Riley and Archie Weller
Judges' Comments
Triggered by the decapitated head of Yagan, the Aboriginal warrior, this is a kind of allegorical return of the silenced, occluded Aboriginal subject. Frank and Vinnie are on a decapitating rampage as they choose important Australian statues (Forrest, Cook) to decapitate. Interwoven into this act of political vandalism are the murders of actual people that, one gathers, signify the murders that lay behind the celebration of Australian heroism. This work stands out as an original and ingenious means of making a powerful political point.

1998

Milk and Honey - Ingle Knight
Perth Theatre Company
Judges' Comments
Ingle Knight's adaptation of Elizabeth Jolley's Milk and Honey is an original work. It is enormously successful in its act of transformation: of shaping a story into another form, into a work for the stage that relies upon a range of different narrative qualities. The use that Knight has made of characterisation and suspense and, particularly, the skill of selection and assemblage is impressive.

1997 Perth Theatre Trust Screenwest Script Award

Merry-Go-Round-In -the Sea - Dickon Oxenburgh and Andrew Ross
Black Swan Theatre
Judges' Comments
Dicken Oxenburgh and Andrew Ross have written an adaptation of Randolph Stow's novel, Merry-Go-Round-in-the-Sea and carefully and skilfully employed both image and impressionism in the original work to make a powerful work for the stage. With seemingly simple threads from the novel, they have built a layered and affecting, and visually exciting, portrayal of a particular Australian experience of nostalgia and yearning and change. The text explores emotional ties between generations, and the incapacity of those who have lost their innocence to return to the stable and simple world they have left behind. The script does great justice to the original work and enhances it, as all good adaptations from one form to another attempt to do.

1996 Gio Australia Perth Theatre Trust Script Award

Culture Clash - Sarah Rossetti
Rosenbaum Whitbread
Judges' Comments
Sarah Rossetti's Culture Clash is a polished and professional script about the conservation of land and culture which is pitched with great accuracy at its intended audience.

1995 Gio Australia Perth Theatre Trust Script Award

Whispering Demons - Heather Nimmo
Perth Theatre Company
Judges' Comments
Heather Nimmo's Whispering Demons is a finely tuned, well crafted script. It deals with conflicts between situation and personal aspirations in a contemporary setting.

1994 Gio Australia Perth Theatre Trust Script Award

Meekatharra - Lois Achimovich
Black Swan Theatre Company
Judges' Comments
Lois Achimovich's Meektharra is an appealing script, its characters strongly written with poise and grace. It is a straightforward play with a strong plot that works well, uncovering layers of emotional meaning.

1993 Gio Australia Perth Theatre Trust Script Award

One Small Step - Heather Nimmo
Unpublished film script