Former prime minister Julia Gillard is yet to come and see the one-woman play inspired by her famous speech.
But Justine Clarke, the actor who plays her on stage, wishes she could be in the audience just once, to hear people around her gasp and groan in the lead-up to the now immortal words.
"I would love for her to hear that and to witness that ... the audience and their response, for me would be the thing I would just love her to feel," Clarke says.
She's gearing up to bring Julia, a co-production of the Canberra Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company back to Canberra, where it debuted to sell-out crowds in 2023.
Written by acclaimed playwright Joanna Murray-Smith and directed by Helpmann Award-winning Sarah Goodes, Julia tells the story of the life and career of Julia Gillard in the time before she addressed the Federal Parliament with the words: "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever."
It's a speech that has, 12 years on, taken on a life of its own, not that anyone could have known its future impact at the time.
When Clarke first heard Gillard's words, she was in the throes of motherhood with young children - a snippet in the regular nightly news.
As time went on, Clarke, along with legions of Australian women, came to realise the speech was a defining moment in Australian history.
"It's really interesting now looking back on it, how as we get further and further away from it, how significant it really was and how undeniable its impact was," she says.
In recent years, the speech has been the subject of countless TikTok videos, with young users mouthing the words as they dance into the camera. Some even have "not now, not ever" tattoos.
It's a dynamic that fascinates Goodes.
"The younger generation of women, or people in general, have a very different relationship to the speech and that's what was exciting and sort of frightening about approaching it," she says.
Her 17-year-old daughter has been to see the show. When Goodes asked her what she thought of it, she was shocked to hear her daughter didn't know much about the speech.
"We assume that the history that we have is the history and the perspective of history that each generation has, and they don't," she says.
"And that's what's great about the piece is that it's brought people together over a shared history."
Clarke's own daughter was a university student by the time the play came out, and came to see her mum on stage with some of her classmates.
Though they were literally children when the speech was first uttered, she and her friends already knew the words better than Clarke, thanks to social media.
"They were very moved by the play in a way that I can understand, but I can't feel in the same way ... from their own perspective and their own relationship to her, which is different," Clarke says.
While the play is about Ms Gillard's life, and the speech originally intended as a political statement, Clarke says it now goes beyond politics, and speaks to all women.
When Joanna Murray-Smith was writing the play, she interviewed Ms Gillard herself but the script is purely fictional and includes no direct quotes. At the time, Ms Gillard said she would support the play but wouldn't endorse it.
In the year since Julia has toured the country, the former prime minister has not come to see the play or publicly expressed her thoughts of it.
The show has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback, but Goodes says people's responses have been surprising.
She recalled sitting in the audience one night, and when the crowd stood up to applaud, an older man stayed seated. Goodes assumed he had not enjoyed the show, but then noticed his expression had changing.
"He was really deeply moved by it and he was crying ... this is the mystery of theatre when you put it in front of an audience," she says.
- Julia is showing at the Canberra Theatre July 31-August 11. canberratheatrecentre.com.au
