VOL 6.2, 2001:   editorial   |   inasa   |   executive   |   essays   |   conferences   |   news   |   publications
 
 Teaching Australian Drama in the 50th State
 
Dennis Carroll
Department of Theatre and Dance, University of Hawai'i
 
This paper will address the 'image' of Australia and its culture as it registers in Hawai'i through the microcosm of a small unit of Australian drama and theatre taught as part of a course in the Theatre of Oceania. I believe it throws light on the way Australia as 'country' is perceived abroad, in this case by a group of students both 'local' and also malihini, from both the mainland USA and abroad.(1) Most revealing, perhaps, are the difficulties Australia as country and culture encounters for non-Australian students in a specific location in which a closer proximity to Australia than mainland USA might be expected to produce some unique affinities.

Australia is perceived in Hawai'i as a large and largely unknown entity, a self-sufficient nation among a better-known and possibly less intimidating galaxy of smaller Pacific communities, and a better-known array of Asian nations. Dealings of the Hawai'i state government with Australia have not been as important as with Asia and parts of the central Pacific. The tourist economy, even in the face of the post-1997 decline, as well as the ethnic origins of the large Asian-American population living in Hawai'i, have always dictated more dealings with Japan, Korea, the Philippines and recently China. Moreover, Australia is perceived as largely a 'haolified' nation.(2) When attempts were made in the early 1990s to establish an Australasian Studies Center at the University of Hawai'i, one position paper realistically concluded that 'the center might be difficult to 'sell' to the State leglislature because the focus of it is primarily Western, rather than Pacific or Asian culture.'(3)

The major university in Hawai'i is the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, which offers a four-year undergraduate degree and graduate degrees in most disciplines and has about 17 000 enrolled students. Another four-year state university is located in the city of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai'i, and there are seven other two-year state community colleges in the state. In addition there are three private colleges of note on O'ahu: the Lai'e campus of Brigham Young University, run by the Mormon church; Hawai'i Pacific University in downtown Honolulu; and Chaminade University. In spite of the UH system's strategic educational emphasis on Asia and the Pacific, there have been no permanent courses listed in any university department for the last thirty years which have dealt exclusively with Australia or its culture.

Nevertheless, at UHM in 1990 there were 10% of the faculty who were involved with some teaching and research work related to Australia or New Zealand at 44 different departments, and many had histories of guest-teaching or research at Australian institutions.(4) In 1990, the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies and its Center for Pacific Island Studies offered a conference titled 'Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands' which dealt mostly with political and business interchange between these entities.

Later in the same year in 1990 a more ambitious 'Australia/New Zealand Project' was inaugurated within these organizations to serve as a forerunner of a full-fledged Australasian Studies Center. It had support from over one hundred faculty of UHM and monetary support from the University of Hawai'i and the Australian Consulate in Honolulu. A part-time administrative position was created for the Project, a newsletter Southern Crossroads was published, and a Distinguished Lecture Series, funded by BHP Petroleum Americas, was offered in 1992-93, dealing with a number of important cultural areas. Lecturers included Anne Summers, who delivered the inaugural lecture on US-Australian relations; Meaghan Morris and Ken Inglis, who dealt with White-Aboriginal relations historically and through cultural representation; and Patrick McCaughey, who dealt with Australian and American parallels in land exploration. This was a promising start, but at the end of 1993 financial difficulties within the university led to, among other cuts, the loss of the part-time administrative position. What was to have been a promising learning center for the study of Australian and New Zealand cultures could not be sustained for lack of staff and the means to hire them. Had the Australia & New Zealand Project continued, other topics and areas singled out as having special local interest would have included Australia's and New Zealand's historic relationships with Pacific Island communities and Hawai'i, common problems of Pacific people living in 'westernized' cultures, ethnic studies, native land rights, and environmental/ecological issues.(5)

Since the 1970s, Australian and New Zealand films have regularly screened at the Hawai'i Film Festival at the rate of 1-5 a year since 1980, when the Festival was established, and there have been the occasional short-term film series at UHM Summer Sessions.(6) By 1996 four Australian plays had been staged in Honolulu, by the UHM's Department of Theatre & Dance in Kennedy Theatre and by Kumu Kahua Theatre. The East-West Center, a Federal think-tank, had occasionally brought in an Australian or New Zealand dance company or cultural exhibit. In the UH system, there was an occasional course taught with a proportion of its content devoted to Australian or New Zealand issues, but, obviously, all this amounted to a miniscule representation of what might have been a flourishing area of study, given the proportion of interested and qualified faculty present.

The course I will be discussing here, Drama and Theatre of Oceania, was taught first in 1996, and cross-listed in both the Theatre and Pacific Islands studies programs. The course had as its stated objective 'to introduce students to the contemporary drama and theatre of Oceania which combines island and Western traditions.'(7) But as taught now, the course deals both with indigenous forms of theatre which have survived into modern times, as well as scripted plays after Western models. The section on Australian Drama and Theatre comes at the end. It is preceded by segments on indigenous theatre and dance forms of Oceania: the aroi of Tahiti, the fale aitu of Samoa, the rituals surrounding the han maneak su ('woman who plays the wedding') in Rotuma; the emergence of a modern popular form of indigenous theatre in Melanesia; the emergence of modern improvisational and scripted drama in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Hawai'i, and New Zealand. Hence the overall direction of the course is from a consideration of indigenous Pacific dance and performative forms to those of a later, more imposed and Westernized tradition of scripted and published plays in Oceania as a whole.

The greater part of the course, including the New Zealand and Hawai'i sections, is taught by Dr Vilsoni Hereniko, originally from Rotuma, a Pacific Islands Center faculty member and a playwright, filmmaker, and critic, with his PhD from Fiji's University of the South Pacific. He initiated the idea of the course, and the program co-operation which made it a reality. I teach the Australian section of five one-and-a-quarter-hour sessions. By 1996, the year the course was first taught, I had been away from Australia permanently for more than 30 years, but had had five sabbatical leaves there during which I had seen much Australian theatre and written two editions of my book Australian Contemporary Drama. The Australian unit was regarded as one quarter of the total course, worth 25 per cent of the grade.

To date, the course has been offered five times. The students each time have registered about evenly through Theatre and through Pacific Island Studies. The demographic make-up of the class of fall 1999 was in many ways typical. Of the 17 enrolled, seven came through the Theatre program and ten through Pacific Island Studies. Ten of the students were 'local' in the sense defined above; there were only two haole students, one a Film Studies major, the other a Theatre/Dance major from Germany studying hula and Hawaiian culture. There were two students from Samoa, one of them from American Samoa. Besides Theatre or Pacific Islands Studies students, there were also students majoring in Education and Anthropology. The group for 1999 had rather more 'local' students and fewer mainland and foreign students than the earlier class groups. And this time there was not a single Australian student in the group to act as informal facilitator between the instructor and the students!

The method of analysis of the plays was a standard Aristotelian-based structural one in which the chief activating theme of each play — what Stanislavsky called the 'superobjective' — was deduced from structural evidence, especially from that related to the climax and resolution of the plays. This method of analysis, of course, is 'theatrical' in that it privileges the structures of action of the plays as they manifest themselves in the time-space continuum of actual performance rather than the literary-verbal ramifications of the printed playtexts. So, even though the bulk of the assignments was the reading of printed playtexts, I sought wherever possible to expand on the performative potential of the plays, and to emphasise such things as mise en scene and details of production particularities from well-known productions of the plays, or productions I had myself seen.

As a short written exercise of two to three pages, each student was asked at the end of the unit to take an Australian play from the course or from outside the course, or an Australian feature film of their choice, and then define and argue what was 'universal' about the major theme. In other words, they were asked as a culminating analysis to go beyond the class work that had focussed on the Australian 'particularities' of certain plays and finally illuminate ways in which the overriding theme might relate or not relate to larger, more cross-cultural issues and relevancies.

Allowing the expansion to film in this final written assignment was also an invitation for students to experience the performative rhythms of Australian speech and behaviour in a way not possible from the reading of plays. The university library possesses videos of about 20 major Australian feature films. Early in the unit a brief clip from Gallipoli, illustrating the idiosyncrasies of Australian 'mateship,' the 'race to the pyramids,' proved an effective trigger to getting the students introduced not only to this custom but also made them intrigued about seeing other Australian films. This interest was sustained when, as a prelude to the discussion of the corroboree scene in No Sugar, I showed a brief Office of Aboriginal Affairs 1974 video of about eight different tribal groups performing excerpts from dances at the Lockhart festival in North Queensland.

With just five sessions available, a great deal of compact information had to be presented in the very first session. Before the unit even began, the students had been asked to read the first play, Louis Esson's The Drovers (1919), and the first 12-page chapter of Australian Contemporary Drama, in which I sketch the history and social and political context of Australia before the 'birth' of Australian contemporary drama in 1909.(8) During the first part of the first session, I elaborated a little on the information in the book. Using a map, I explained the crucial geography of the country, the vastness of which surprised even those students who had rationally noticed the facts and figures. An outline of the governmental and political system then made explicit comparisons with the USA. Lastly, a short history of convictism, settlement, invasion of the interior, and the major historical events through Federation, filled in the background prior to the first Esson short play to be discussed in class.

I also introduced four seminal cultural motifs which are significantly foregrounded in the first two Australian modern plays dealt with in the course, The Drovers and Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. These I identified as: (a) Man vs. the Outback; (b) 'mateship,' with its masculinist and racist corollaries; (c) Individualism vs. Group Consensus and its corollary of the 'tall poppy' syndrome; and (d) the Lawrentian 'withheld self,' and the quintessentially Australian characteristic of the deflection of declarativeness into irony.(9)

In the second session the development of Australian society and theatre was taken forward from 1919 to 1960, and the play analysed was The Doll. In session three, the sketch of Australian society and theatre was brought up to date, and in this and the final two sessions four more full-length Australian plays were studied. These were the mainstream, but far from typical, play by David Williamson, Travelling North, which deals with the romance between an elderly man and a woman in her late middle age; Louis Nowra's The Golden Age, which is an allegory of the dispossession of Aborigines by white representatives of an imported colonial culture and civilization; Alma de Groen's The Rivers of China, a feminist vision of a dystopia in which women rule and men are a slave underclass, and in which the spirit of the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield is hypnotized into a suicidal Australian male; and finally, Jack Davis's more directly representational drama of dispossessed Aboriginals in the Depression era, No Sugar.(10) Thus the plays provided a microcosm of very recent mainstream and alternative drama, encompassing facets of alternative drama with feminist and Aboriginal perspectives.

It has been fascinating to note that, over the last four presentations of the course, students have had similar difficulties coming to terms with certain aspects of Australian 'country' and culture as embodied in these plays. Firstly, the geography of the country caused problems for them. Even armed with a map, they found it difficult to grasp the differences between 'frontier' in Australia and that concept in America. The notion of 'bush' giving away to 'dead heart,' and the challenges of a vast and forbidding landscape, were especially alien to Pacific islanders and 'locals.' It was difficult for them also to grasp the huge topographic and climatic differences ranging from the aridity of the Barkly Tableland and the drive route (in The Drovers), and the south-west of No Sugar, to the rotting rainforests of south-west Tasmania in The Golden Age; or, even more crucial in a sense, the opposition between Cairns and Melbourne so central to the iconography of both Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Travelling North. The internal shift between Fontainebleu in 1923, the evocation of a 'real place,' and its contrast with a dystopic Sydney at some near-future date — in The Rivers of China — was easy by comparison.

Just as difficult for them, in a different way, were the four idiosyncratically 'Australian' sociological shibboleths summarised above, that are especially pervasive in the earlier plays. In The Drovers, for instance, as far as Man versus Outback was concerned, the unstated law that the cattle drive must go through in defiance of the obduracy and harshness of Nature is the implied premise the drovers live by — and which validates and makes comprehensible the decisions made and actions taken — but several in the class found this premise in the circumstances of the play difficult to accept. Secondly, the personal 'mateship' of the victim Briglow and the Boss, Alec, in the face of this imperative, provides the wrenching subtext of the play, but tends to be assumed, rather than fully dramatised, in their central scene. Thirdly, as far as the 'group' and the 'outsider' motif is concerned, there are two significant outsiders here: the city-bred novice jackaroo who has caused the fatal accident, excluded by the 'group' as much for his loquaciousness and lip-service to an irrelevant morality as for his mistake; and Pidgeon, the racially-excluded Aboriginal 'outsider' who nonetheless, in the coda to the play, movingly reconciles the fate of the dead Briglow to the timeless spirit of the land and the belief-system of the Aboriginals. Finally, the 'withheld self': the students thought that the refusal of the drovers to personally commiserate much with the victim, and to talk of divvying up his pay cheque for spending at the next stop, was heartless rather than simply honest. The class did interpret it as a rueful admission that the other drovers are unable to verbalise their feelings for Briglow as 'mate' and colleague and the respect they may have for him.

If several older Australianist shibboleths figure strongly in The Drovers, their problematization in The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll proved even more confusing to the students. In this play, the 'group consensus versus outsider' theme clashes paradoxically with the imperatives of a 'mateship' between the cane cutters Barney and Roo. Before the play, Roo has lost face in the insider-group of cutters by being displaced as physical top dog in the fields by a younger man, Johnny Dowd; he has walked off the job early and branded himself an 'outsider,' remaining one when the cutters eventually come to Melbourne during the layoff. Barney, his 'mate,' has had to remain with the group on the job, but in doing so has inevitably compromised his 'mateship' with Roo. This situation has created a very tense atmosphere between the two men as they realise the whole 'parity' basis of the 'mateship' relationship is crumbling — a very 'Australian-specific' subtext that the students found difficult to relate to.

In recent years, critical interpretation of how this 'mateship' and the Australianist assumptions on which is it based might affect the final dissolution of the romance between Roo and his long-time girlfriend Olive have been revised in Australian scholarship — largely on the evidence of the two prequels appended to the original play by Lawler, which the students did not read.(11) But what is interesting is that they found no difficulty with believing Olive's final rejection of Roo's marriage proposal, bolstering interpretations of Olive as a vitalist proto-feminist who has finally rejected Roo both as man and as Australianist icon. Interestingly, the students found it much more difficult to accept Emma's lack of morality in condoning a 'live-in' relationship under her roof of two couples for the previous sixteen years! Another major difficulty with The Doll proved to be the language — the Australian dialect of the 1950s proved to many to be a major hurdle. There were eighteen terms and phrases that our students were unable to understand — from 'up there Cazaly' (p23) to 'yer melon' (p89.)

It is perhaps a significant index of the increasing internationalisation of Australian drama since the 1950s that none of the more recent plays caused the difficulties of these first two. The plays by Williamson, Nowra, de Groen and Davis were far less perplexing — perhaps an indication of the recession of the 'classic' Australianist preoccupations of an earlier generation, when the country was more dominated by Anglo pejoratives of a colonialist, rural-based, working-class culture. Also, the Australian colloquialisms of the later period are far less idiosyncratic than those of the 1960s and earlier.(12)

On the other hand, a strong feature in all the later plays dealt with is the disempowerment theme. This struck strong chords in students who had grown up in, or been influenced by the context of, a Hawai'i which since the 1970's has seen the resurgence of Hawaiian language and culture, a new consciousness of the inequities which resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and the concomitant denigration of Hawaiian language and tradition. In The Rivers of China, the disempowerment centrally relates to the personality of Katherine Mansfield at the time of her death at the hands of her false-saviour Gurdjieff, ironically transplanted to the soul of a white male; but it also relates to the framing context, the comic-ironic disempowerment of male authorship in a dystopic Australia ruled by women. In The Golden Age, the allegory is one of disempowerment of the 'outcasts' in the vertical forests, exacerbated once they made the decision to let themselves be returned to 'civilization.' And, most directly, No Sugar deals with the cultural disempowerment of the Nyoongah Aboriginals of south-western Western Australia by whites headed by Protector A.O. Neville during the heyday of Assimilation in the 1930s. Even in Williamson's Travelling North, the traces of a societal disempowerment of older/elderly people is feistily combatted by the two protagonists.

The Rivers of China derives its impact from the ironies of a gender-based disempowerment, honed to razor-sharpness by a feminism that depends little on national particularities. There is pathos in that the 'real' Mansfield dies just at the time when she has been liberated for further personal growth in the face of knowledge of her 'place' in the menage run by Gurdjieff. And that pathos is accentuated even more in the dystopic story when the orderly Wayne opts to have the nameless patient die with the spirit of Mansfield inside him rather than live on without her. It is these climactic plot incidents, rather than the dubious strategy of 'luring' the male spectators into 'identifying' with Mansfield inside a man's body,(13) that made the play connect strongly with 'local' and other students in the class, even if none of them knew who Katherine Mansfield was.

Though the plot of The Golden Age is based on historical fact, any sense of documentary-like directness is eschewed — Nowra has sculpted his work as an allegory about dispossession, and the dramaturgy and exotic setting, Tasmania in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is strongly theatricalised. The two young hiker 'mates,' Francis and Peter, discover in the unexplored vertical forests of South-West Tasmania a group of people who have been lost in the wilderness since the 1860s. The family is in-bred, ill, and already dying and in decline. On being brought back to the 'civilization' of Hobart, they are isolated in an asylum by authorities who fear that they may be used to bolster Nazi propaganda about the effects of genetic in-breeding. Nowra is careful to pinpoint the significance of his allegory; characters compare them to the dying-out and dispossessed Aboriginals. The forest people's language is unintelligible on stage, as any sustained Aboriginal language would be to a modern mainstream Australian audience — one has to read a Glossary to understand its meaning. The white raisonneur of the play explains that these people have an authenticity denied to Anglo-Australians: 'at our heart is a desert. For their appalling ignorance and pathetic beliefs they at least have a real core, an essence' (Nowra 53). The equivocal denouement has Francis fleeing with his lover, the last surviving member of these people, back to the wilds of the vertical forests where her people were found: home for her, self-exile for him, and no solution for any future for either. The allegory for an audience in Hawai'i is clear, but the remote and exotic setting, as well as the heavily signposted and strongly heightened, almost contrived, key incidents, tend perhaps to overly distantiate the play for a non-Australian readership.(14)

The course play that the students could most strongly relate to was Jack Davis' No Sugar. Though set during the Depression of the 1930s and the height of the Assimilation policies, the play accessibly objectifies the themes of land and cultural dispossession of the original inhabitants of the country, the Aboriginals, now reduced to a minority and to marginal status, struggling for survival and cultural integrity in a landscape from which they have been dispossessed. In the premiere production by Andrew Ross, this state of affairs was further inflected through irony in the mise en scene. The playing space comprised an area of bare red earth in the center inhabited by the Aboriginal characters, while the powerful whites in Fremantle, Northam and Moore River were situated in flimsy-looking but nonetheless imprisoning and rectangular structures on the periphery.

The play directly engages two issues central to the cultural dispossession of Hawaiians — their dispossession from the land, and the ambiguities of faith resulting from decertification of the old belief-system and its replacement by Christianity. The major theme relating to the first of these issues is the determination of the Millimurra family to continue to inhabit the geographic area of their 'homeland' near Fremantle after they have been for political reasons re-located with other Aboriginals to the Moore River settlement. The action of the play restlessly embodies this as it traverses the distances between Fremantle, Northam, and Moore River. Hope for the future finally rests in the defiance of the young couple Joe and Mary. At the end, they flee for the second time with their new born to their 'homeland,' even though they have been specifically ordered never to return there. While this flight to a 'homeland' is similar to the ending of The Golden Age, it is more hopeful. There is the presence of the child, and there is the probability of continued engagement with and dissent from the white authorities on the part of the fresh young generation in their determination to keep inhabiting their homeland.

As far as the second issue is concerned, Davis's attitude to Christianity, as that of certain contemporary Hawaiians, is a lot more paradoxical than his attitude to land. In the climactic Australia Day celebration at the settlement, the playwright castigates hypocritical religion used as a shield for vicious expropriation, with the Aboriginals subverting the Protestant hymn 'There is A Happy Land' by singing new words of protest to it. But there is also a respect for some of the central myths of Christianity, which are used allegorically in the play. The most obvious is the connection between Joe, Mary and their baby to the Holy Family: their final flight to the south to escape retribution has clear and surely intentional allegorical import.

Just as can be the case in Hawai'i with certain works by 'local Hawaiian' playwrights, the equivocal attitude to Christianity present in No Sugar stems from the rapaciousness and greed of many whites who pay lip-service to it, and an awareness of the residual power of the old religion, and the old culture. In No Sugar, this emerges in the celebration of pan-Aboriginality in the central corroboree scene, when the camp 'policeman' Billy reverts to his tribal persona and joins with the Millimurra family, their differences temporarily set aside. Songs and dances are exchanged and demonstrated, including chants in the original Aboriginal languages which, so far, have been used only sporadically in the family exchanges. The images of the chant evoke the closeness of the Aboriginals to nurturing forces of the natural environment — in the crabbing and fish-drawing chants — but Billy also reminds them, and us, of the inhumanity of white man to black, as he finishes by recounting the events of the 1926 Kimberley massacre, one of the last large-scale massacres of Black Australians by Whites.

Strong parallels with the late-nineteenth century suppression of Hawaiian culture were evoked for many 'local' students when they read this scene. The dispossession of Hawaiians after the Overthrow are evoked in the arrogant policies of the Assimilationist era. In this play, the students in the course felt a more solid bridge of connection to Australia as 'country' then they had when trying to understand the more remote mythologies and — to them — more esoteric case-histories dominating the earlier plays. The equivocal and sad final chant of the aged grandmother character in No Sugar farewelling Joe and Mary provided a telling simulacrum for the frustrations, uncertainties and present lack of closure evident in the movement of Hawaiian self-determination and sovereignty, with its uncertainties and alternative strategies, which are currently unfolding in the fiftieth U.S. state.

References

Brisbane, Katharine, ed. Australia Plays. London: Nick Hern, 1989.
Carroll, Dennis. Australian Contemporary Drama. 2nd ed. Sydney: Currency, 1995.
Croggon, Alison. 'Exploring the Ruins.' Interview with Alma de Groen. Melbourne Herald 28 November 1988.
Davis, Jack. 'No Sugar.' 1986. Australia Plays. Ed. Katharine Brisbane. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989. pp 179-278.
De Groen, Alma. 'The Rivers of China.' 1988. Australia Plays. Ed. Katharine Brisbane. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989. pp 339-97.
Esson, Louis. 'The Drovers.' 1919. Plays One: Terra Australis. Ed. John Senczuk. Australian Playwright Signature Series. Wollongong: Five Islands, 1999.
Fitzpatrick, Peter. After 'The Doll': Australian Drama Since 1955. Melbourne: Edward Arnold, 1979.
Hooton, Joy. 'Lawler's Demythologising of The Doll: Kid Stakes and Other Times.' Australian Literary Studies (1986): check ref. Rpt. In Contemporary Australian Drama. Ed. Peter Holloway. Rev. ed. Sydney: Currency, 1987. pp 245-61.
Lawler, Ray. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. 1957. Sydney: Currency, 1978.
Nowra, Louis. 'The Golden Age.' 1985. Australia Plays. Ed. Katharine Brisbane. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989. pp 89-178.
Williamson, David. 'Travelling North.' 1980. Australia Plays. Ed. Katharine Brisbane. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989. pp 1-88.

Endnotes

1.  'Local' is the term used to describe non-Caucasian residents born and raised in Hawai'i. Malihini is a Hawaiian term meaning 'newcomer' to the islands.
2.  'Haole' is a term that originally meant 'strangers,' but now denotes Caucasians.
3.  Summary of discussion notes for November 2, 1990, ts.
4.  Pamphlet,'Australian & New Zealand Studies Project,' School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, n.d. [1992].
5.  Summary of discussion, November 9, 1990.
6.  For example, in 1990 for UHM Summer Session I curated a special retrospective of six 'New Wave' films from 1974 to 1987, in a series called 'Films From Down Under.'
7.  Proposal for course as submitted to UHM Arts & Sciences Cuirriculum Committee, 1996.
8.  I have argued in Australian Contemporary Drama that the 'birth' of such drama can be dated to 1909, when William Moore presented the Australian Drama Nights in Melbourne (11).
9.  The importance of the 'withheld self' and its manifestations in characterisation in Australian drama were first noted by Peter Fitzpatrick.
10.  These full-length play choices were partly, but only partly, dictated by economics: they all are part of the excellent anthology Australia Plays, edited by Katharine Brisbane.
11.  See especially Joy Hooton's 1986 article 'Lawler's Demythologising of The Doll: Kid Stakes and Other Times.'
12.  Australian playwright Jack Hibberd, for example, is strongly convinced that the Australian language of the 1990s has been so watered down by exposure to American TV and film that little 'local' individuality and idiosyncrasy remains. (Conversation with the author, Honolulu, 11 September, 1999).
13.  This spectatorial strategy was outlined by the playwright in an interview with Alison Croggon.
14.  Among them: the raisonneur , the increasing guilt-ridden father of Peter, immolates himself in a fire which destroys all records of the folkways of the forest people; two successive scenes present the asylum deaths of two of the people; Francis is 'disillusioned' by his war experiences and explains why in a hortatory speech to the audience.

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