WOMEN playwrights from 22 countries gathered in Galway last week to discuss their work, exchange ideas and attend performances, workshops and readings of some 90 plays from five continents.
The theme of the Fourth International Women Playwrights' Conference was "national identity within a worldwide context".
Ironically, few Irish women playwrights participated or sent submissions. Their response was described as "disappointing" by the conference organiser, Maire Holmes.
The performances were held in UCG and Galway Arts Centre and included Coming and going at Sundown by the Korean writer, GilCha Hur, a powerful monologue based on eyewitness accounts of sexual slavery during the second World War.
Others included a reading of Emma Donoghue's Trespasses, based on a 17th century witch trial; and Child, a play from the Magdalene Project in Wales.
The Australian writer, Kate McNamara, spoke of a sense of place as being intrinsically connected to "the wellspring of elusive ideas" which form our sense of identity, personal, artistic or collective.
"Australians have a curiously dislocated sense of place, and this is not merely a result of our geographical isolation," she said.
"The tyranny of distance which once confined us has collapsed under the onslaught of new technologies, information superhighways and the simple economics of cheaper airfares.
"Our sense of dislocation resides in more complex and elusive areas such as the distortions that shape our history, its dark myths and secrets, our sense of spirituality and the almost indefinable nature of our national psyche.
"Of the western developed nations we are one of the youngest, our population is a little over 18 million yet we live in a vast and often inhospitable land.
The bulk of the original white population, victims of a brutal British penal code, arrived here against their will and the foundation of our nationhood was, and still is, based on the systematic genocide of the indigenous people who lived here in peace and relative tranquillity with the environment for thousands of years before the coming of the white invader.
"It is not at all surprising that we have an uneasy relationship with the body of the actual land itself. Much of our early prosperity rested on the backs and off the sweat and exploitation of imported labour from China and other countries.
"More recently, subsequent waves of immigrants from all over the world came to the so called lucky country to find fame and fortune, only to be faced with bigotry and cultural disenfranchisement.
"We emerged into the late 20th century with a notion of being a polyglot community mouthing a blithe rhetoric about multi culturalism and land rights for the indigenous peoples which belies close inspection," she said.