The Street Theatre's latest production, Flight Memory, delves into the life of David Warren, the Australian inventor behind the black box, and the obstacles he faced in making it a reality.

During Warren's time as a research scientist with Aeronautical Research Laboratory, the world's first jet-powered commercial plane, the Comet, went down in a mysterious crash. As one of the people investigating the cause of the 1954 crash, Warren concluded a recording of what happened in the moments before the plane went down would be useful. And so, the idea of the black box was born.

Like many new concepts in Australia, the black box was initially dismissed, and Warren ended up creating a prototype in his own time as an "unofficial project". It wasn't until 1958, when former British air vice-marshal Sir Robert Hardingham made an informal visit to the laboratory, someone aside from Warren saw the device's potential.

"What I found astonishing is that David Warren had this belief from somewhere, and that's what I wanted to explore," librettist Alana Valentine says.

"He didn't just think it would be useful in Australia, he said this is a global invention and he was going to put it on the world stage. I love the boldness of that.

"That's the sort of thing that we associate with American history and ideology, and I just thought, maybe Australians can as well."

Valentine says the dismissive attitude common in Australian culture was evident throughout the pre-production of Flight Memory and indeed throughout her career and those of fellow creatives, composer Sandra France and director Caroline Stacey.

The librettist found herself repeatedly having to explain why she was working on a piece about the black box and would often compare the work to that of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

"To me, Hamilton did something really different and everyone went great and in Australia, we go 'that's a bit odd, why are you doing that?" she says.

"We were laughing the other day because I was saying when Hamilton was pitched as an idea, I would have loved to have been a fly on that wall in that room where the producer was saying to someone 'Well it's about this obscure general in the American Civil War'.

"It's the same thing with us - people will go 'You're making a song cycle about an engineer. How are you doing it?'

"I try to use it as an example to be like, 'What it's really about - like Hamilton is about people of colour telling history - this is really about us as women artists looking at the big stories of Australian invention."

It wasn't just the subject of Flight Memory that raised eyebrows, but also because the story is presented as a narrative song cycle. Not to be confused with a musical, a song cycle is a collection of songs with a common theme linking them.

Flight Memory doesn't have assigned characters for each singer to sing like a musical would have, and in fact, each of the three singers takes on different points of Warren's inner voice throughout the performance.

Taking on another element of the song cycle style, Flight Memory doesn't have any acting and there are limited spoken sections. When the performers do speak it's to give background information for the song the audience is about to hear.

It was found during a development showing that if the performance was in a strict song after song format, details of Warren's story would be missed. This was particularly the case when it came to scenes such as the one dubbed the "family jewels" scene.

"The scene is when they were first testing the black box, the planes that they were using they would have to pull back the control and because they were planes for Dutchmen - who were much bigger - if Australian men pulled back the control too fast they would do some damage to their family jewels," Valentine says.

"Warren actually said in the recording, 'Up she goes and mind the family jewels' but they couldn't hear it. So we've written a song about that but we found that once people understood what it was that they were doing and saying, they liked the song better.

"You need to know things in some ways to empathise with the emotion in the song."

In case it wasn't clear from that scene alone, there is a certain playfulness that comes with Flight Memory and a lot of it comes down to the music style, with composer France taking a nod from jazz to add this sense of spontaneity.

"It's more a jazz approach than sounding like jazz," she says.

"All of the musicians are jazz musicians and we wanted jazz musicians because they can see, say B-flat, and go alright, I can play anything in that depending on what everyone else is doing.

"We needed that sort of open approach to playing what's on the score. They're way more comfortable saying, shall I just phrase this so it fits nicest, and they're very happy to do that."

It could be argued that the fact Flight Memory has three women at the helm is as unusual as the song cycle method used to portray David Warren's story. During the interview, the question is even raised about whether gender should be considered when it comes to giving opportunities in theatre productions.

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France, unsurprisingly, never set out to be a female composer. She set out to be a composer. But just like her colleagues, she says it doesn't mean her career has not been affected by unconscious gender bias.

"It's only when you get out into the real world and you start to see this person doing these things and you're like 'I remember them at uni and they were crap and they're that already', and you just stop and go 'Hang on, what am I? I'm nothing'," she says.

"That's when you start to see a little bit of it happening but it doesn't mean that as a composer or as an artist that we're not good, that we're not ready and able.

"Because we're women, and because that gender thing is at play without us even knowing it, we might miss out on opportunities. I don't think it's too much to bring up gender because it still needs to be addressed."

And France's story is not unusual.

According to Skipping a Beat, a report by The University of Sydney, women are "chronically disadvantaged" in the music industry, with women representing only one-fifth of songwriters and composers registered with the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA). This is despite the fact 45 per cent of Australians with a music qualification are women.

"There's a lot of talk and people start to go, 'Not that gender thing again' and that's why I think statistics are really useful. We're not just whining. It's actually statistically [happening]," Valentine says.

"It's really interesting to me that there is this idea that now we're going to start overcompensating and questioning if there is going to be enough talent and all of that. It's just about giving opportunities.

"Along the way Sandra and I talked a lot about this, and Flight Memory has to be about us, as much as David.

"Flight Memory is not a biography about David Warren, it's an engagement with the idea of what it's like to be in a country or in an artform that says, if you work hard you'll get there eventually, but it doesn't happen like that."

Part of what The Street Theatre sets out to do within its works is champion and raise the profile of female creators.

The Street Theatre's artistic director Caroline Stacey simply puts this down to the belief that what appears on stages and indeed in other areas such as workplace and governance, should reflect the world we live in.

"I like to go to the theatre, go anywhere really, and see the world that we live in reflected in my workplace but also our stages, whether it's music, theatre, dance," she says.

"They're reflecting ourselves back to us. They're inviting provocations, they're inviting us to consider where we are and where we want to be. They're also putting in front of us acts of transgression and difficulty, and forcing us to sort of face really difficult things.

"And it's not just to do with gender, it's also to do with cultural diversity. It's right across the spectrum. If we want to be strong as a cultural sector, we need to speak to the world that we live in."

Stacey says one of the roles theatre should play is to ensure silences that exist in society are broken. It's because of this role in particular that the artistic director says being a woman has proved helpful.

"Maybe if I had been a man, and been white, I wouldn't be as conscious of these things."

This same sensitivity to social injustices could also be part of the reason Warren's story was chosen to be portrayed.

As much as Flight Memory is about Warren's invention of the black box, it also poses the question about how and if Australians value the work scientists do.

"It's how we treat our scientists and artists, and anybody who strives to change the world and make a difference," Stacey says.

"David Warren's journey with the black box flight recorder is an inspirational story for anyone and all of us.

"And it's an absolute privilege to bring that story to life in a way that will be transformative for the audience, that will absolutely make them consider not only where we are at as a nation, but our individual responsibility within that."