AustLit

'Australian theater has indeed come of age since Ray Lawler's The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was performed in Melbourne in 1955, which corresponds to John Osborne's performance of Look Back in Anger, also performed in 1955. This has led many critics of Australian theater to divide its history into two neat parts: pre-Lawler and post-Lawler drama. Early dramatists were busy imitating the European models, and the frequent staging of sentimental plays and vaudeville cannot be ignored. Early drama since 1833 was mostly concerned with the life of the bush rangers, which is roughly equivalent to the US Wild West. The Aboriginal cause has also been a topic in the hands of David Burn, whose Bush Rangers was performed in 1829, after he wrote a considerable portion of the same in Tasmania. Though David Williamson (1942–) belongs to the "First Wave" of such dramatists, he was active in the 1990s as well and is associated with a literary phenomenon called the "New Theater" in Australian drama.' (Introduction)