Mali Harkin-Noack is obsessed with writing; so much so that the 16-year-old, Narungga woman describes it as her “natural state of being”.

“I would finish assignments early so I could write during school,” she says.

“I was writing after school; I was writing at night when I should have been asleep.”

This obsession works in Harkin-Noack’s favour: she is a poet, a creative and now a playwright, with an in-development production titled Tell Me Something being performed as part of Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSPACE Program.

“We’re incredibly lucky to have gone through inSPACE and I’m incredibly grateful,” Harkin-Noack says.

“It’s given us the opportunity to really sit down through all of this and just be given the time and money to work on something we all really love.”

Harkin-Noack describes Tell Me Something as semi-autobiographical, dreamlike and fantastical, blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction.

“It’s based on memory and although the main storyline is surrounding childhood trauma, it also weaves in details of love of family and love of my childhood and love of Aboriginal Country,” she says.

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“It’s many, many aspects of my life and it’s not just a story about trauma; it’s also a sort of a love letter to many things in my life.”

When discussing creative influences, Harkin-Noack says she immersed herself in the work of English playwrights Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill while she was writing Tell Me Something.

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“We came in with those two women, their trauma stories and how they write that, which is also very fantastical,” she says.

As with all Harkin-Noack’s work, culture is threaded throughout this production. The playwright says her identity as a Narungga woman is so deeply intertwined with who she is as a writer, that sometimes themes of culture unconsciously appear in what she’s created.

“I was about halfway through writing this play last year, and I went, ‘Oh my goodness, there’s so many themes of Country, and memory and blood memory that I didn’t even consider’,” she says.

“As a saltwater woman, there’s so many themes of healing through the ocean, and being on country that have come through in not only this work, but lots of my other works.”

While Tell Me Something is now part of inSPACE, it was first developed with the support of Carclew and the City of Adelaide. Over time, it’s also received funding from CreateSA, ActNow Theatre, and The Mill – support that Harkin-Noack describes as ‘vital’.

In a reading with ActNow Theatre in April last year, Harkin-Noack saw Tell Me Something brought to life for the first time by performers Katherine Sortini and Timothy Mackie.

“Katherine and Tim, they’re really, really talented and so receptive and really respectful of me as a young person but also respecting me as an equal in the in the dramatic space,” says Harkin-Noack.

“To watch two trained, talented, loving actors perform a work that I am so personally close to, to see people really put their all into something that you once put your all into, it’s mesmerising.”

Harkin-Noack is surrounded by a tight-knit team who are all working to bring Tell Me Something to the stage: her mentor and long-term writing mentor, Nathan Troisi-Karagiannis, is on board as the production’s facilitator, while her aunty, Alexis West, a Birra Gubba, Wakka Wakka, and South Sea Islander woman currently starring in State Theatre’s Logan Street, is the dramaturg.

The technical director is Stephen Moylan, who will be mentoring Harkin-Noack when it comes to lighting, sound and projections.

Directing and producing are new pursuits for Harkin-Noack and ones that, at times, she’s found quite challenging.

“It’s easier for me to write a scene than to think about where people will be standing in that scene or what kind of props they’ll need in that scene – that’s definitely a new muscle in my brain that I’m working on,” she says.

“But it’s also been incredibly rewarding.”

As a young person in creative spaces, Harkin-Noack says collaborating with others hasn’t always been straightforward but working with the cast and crew of Tell Me Something has made her feel like a creative equal.

“I have come across people in my writing adventures who kind of treat me strangely, I guess because they haven’t worked with a young person before,” she says.

“They [the Tell Me Something team] respect me and they respect that as a minor, I have to have some boundaries, but also treat me like an equal with equal creative input, which, you know, is necessary as the writer and director.”

At a time of great uncertainty, which brings with it great anxiety, Harkin-Noack says welcoming young people into creative, intergenerational spaces, is more important than ever and can be a source of hope and new perspectives.

“It’s kind of all seeming a little bit ‘doomsday’ right now,” she says.

“We should be listening and uplifting the voices of young people because we seem to all think very differently than the adults who are in charge of us.

“Giving us that opportunity means creativity can be continued, and there’s that mutual respect [across generations] – I think is really necessary right now.”

Tell Me Something will be performed the Drama Rehearsal Room at Adelaide Festival Centre on Saturday July 18 at 2pm and 3pm