AustLit
Texts
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y Constance Drinkwater and the Final Days of Somerset 2004 Fortitude Valley : Playlab , 2006 Z1197759 2004 single work drama (taught in 3 units)
'It is 1899 and only the resolve of Lady Constance Drinkwater has kept the Far North Queensland settlement of Somerset from crumbling. Beset by storms, ill-luck and a mysterious disease that has killed all but two of Constance’s children, it is the arrival of strangers - anthropologist Professor Cornelius Crabbe and his companion, Mr Hop Lee - that sets in motion the final catastrophic days of Somerset.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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y The Club 1976 (Manuscript version)x402003 Z1506538 1976 single work drama (taught in 14 units)
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y The Floating World 1974 (Manuscript version)x400870 Z498503 1974 single work drama (taught in 11 units)
Les Harding, onetime Japanese prisoner-of-war, takes a package cruise to Japan with his wife. As he draws near, long-repressed memories of suffering well up. A rich, ironic study of Australian xenophobia..
Source: Currency Press
(http://www.currency.com.au/product_detail.aspx?productid=210)
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Stolen Strawberry Hills : Currency Press Playbox Theatre , 1998 Z297208 1998 single work drama (taught in 7 units)
— Appears in: アボリジニ戯曲選 : ストールン; 嘆きの七段階 2001;Stolen is based upon the lives of five Indigenous people, who go by the names of Sandy, Ruby, Jimmy, Anne and Shirley, who dealt with the issues for forceful removal by the Australian government.
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y Mrs Petrov's Shoe 2006 Brisbane : Playlab , 2013 Z1262526 2006 single work drama (taught in 4 units) 'In the afternoon of 19 April, 1954 Evdokia Petrov, wife of a recently defected Soviet spy, was dragged, weeping and with one foot bare, across the tarmac at Sydney's Mascot Airport to be sent back to the USSR. Forty years later, in 1994, Helen Demidenko released The Hand That Signed the Paper about her experience growing up a Ukrainian Australian, to widespread critical acclaim - before being unmasked as not quite the person she claimed to be. The play revisits both of these startling events and explores Cold War Australia fears of Russian spies and 'Reds under every Bed'. Source: http://www.theprogram.net.au/giveawaysSub.asp?id=682&state_id= (Sighted 21/04/06).
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y On Our Selection : A Dramatisation of Steele Rudd's Books Helen Musa (editor), Sydney : Currency Press , 1984 Z174282 1984 anthology drama criticism biography correspondence autobiography (taught in 2 units)
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y The Golden Age s.l. : s.n. , 1980-1985 (Manuscript version)x401631 Z331846 1980 single work drama (taught in 9 units)
— Appears in: コシ. ゴールデン・エイジ 2006;'In 1939, a lost tribe of Europeans was discovered in the Tasmanian wilderness. They were a band of outcasts who had escaped the torture of convict life, scratching out an existence at the forgotten edge of the island, alone for almost a century.
'Inspired by this true story, writer Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) penned The Golden Age – an extraordinary play that blends historical fact, Australian folklore and poetic language to create a post-colonial myth for our times. Nowra’s outcasts have developed a culture and dialect all of their own, but their bodies are failing them and their very existence is in danger. Brought back into the fold of Australian society, what fate awaits this band of exiles?'
Source: Sydney Theatre Company (2016 revival).
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y Summer of the Seventeenth Doll 1955 London Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1957 Z522838 1955 single work drama (taught in 56 units)
'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.
'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'
Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.
Description
Aim
This unit aims to provide you with core understandings relating to Australian theatre history, as well as contemporary issues in Australian theatre and performance.
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this unit you should be able to:
1. Analyse key periods, plays, playwrights, directors and practitioners in Australian theatre
2. Apply knowledge of a range of Australian plays to the performance of rehearsed scenes
3. Extrapolate how the search for an Australian identity is articulated, explored and represented in the set play texts
4. Employ written and communication skills for Drama contexts taking into account academic writing conventions