Actor, translator and cultural consultant, Paula Delaney Nazarski, a Ngugi woman from North Stradbroke Island, hasn’t yet been to the famous Alice Springs Beanie Festival, but next year is the 20th anniversary and she says: “I’d like to be there”.

Craftspeople from remote areas and The Alice turn beanies into artworks, often decorated with seeds and fibres in wonderful shapes, textures, colours and patterns that have cracked the tourist market.

The play, by Alana Valentine, premiered at Darwin Festival in 2010 and has so far raised $60,000 in after-show donations to the Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation’s Purple House, which runs a mobile dialysis unit.

That’s relevant and Paula tells “CityNews” of the women who come in to Alice Springs for renal care and dialysis. To pay for their expenses in the big town so far away from country and family, they sell the beanies.

“I play Tilly, a pretty feisty old girl who doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” she tells me, “but she has a few problems” – and she’s running out of time to finish her new beanie for the competition.

Enter Nessa, played by Annie Byron (“Muriel’s Wedding”), a Sydneysider who’s run away to the Red Centre to escape her own problems.

“This tourist woman, this white lady shows up in Alice Springs and they strike up an unlikely friendship,” says Paula.

“At the beginning of the show you look at them and you ask how would they ever become friends?”

The women converse while they crochet, but as Paula points out: “What really is interesting is that we don’t talk about men, although sons do get a bit of a mention.”

“On opening night, a group of men from the Men’s Shed came along because of their wives and absolutely loved it,” she says.

“The amazing thing was that they came on a Friday night, footy night.”

Best of all is her working relationship with “the incomparable Annie Byron.”

“I feel she brings me to a whole new level of being as an actor – I’m so in love with this sister,” she says

“Head Full of Love”, Queensland Theatre Company, The Street Theatre, July 3-4, bookings to thestreet.org.au or 6247 1223. Donations directly to the Purple House at westerndesertdialysis.com/the-purple-house