AustLit

Set in Malaya during the Second World War, A Town Like Alice tells the story of Englishwoman Jean Paget. When Paget is captured by the advancing Japanese army, she joins a group of women and children who are forced to march from prison camp to prison camp because the Japanese had devised no plan to deal with them. She later meets up with an Australian digger, Joe Harman, who hails from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Although a prisoner of war, Joe is occasionally allowed outside his camp to help his guards, and subsequently helps the group with medicine and food, which he appropriates from the Japanese without their knowledge. When Joe is eventually caught and tried for stealing the commandant's chickens, he is sentenced to death. After being forced to watch him being tortured, Jean and the group are sent once more on the relentless march to nowhere. When their sole remaining guard later dies, they seek refuge in a village, where they remain until the war ends. Shortly before she returns to England, Jean finds out that Joe's execution was stayed and that he is still alive. She later travels to Alice Springs to find him. Joe, in the meantime, has travelled to England in pursuit of her. They eventually meet in the Alice Springs airport lounge and are finally able to express the emotion they feel for one another.

From an original storyline by Ralph Smart, Bitter Springs is a pioneering drama that centres on the conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people over rights of access to water. In the early 1900s, the King family treks some 600 miles to take up the property they bought from the government. When they arrive, they clash with the local Aboriginal tribe. The waterhole on which the local people depend for survival is now part of the Kings' property. When one of the Kings is speared, the family decide to compromise rather than fight, and a deal is struck whereby both parties agree to establish a profitable sheep station around the waterhole.

The story is notably liberal in balancing the point-of-view of encroaching European settlers with Aboriginal claims for land rights, coincidentally contemporaneous with the emergence of the liberal, pro-Native American Hollywood Western with Broken Arrow (1950).

Set on a west Queensland sheep station (all the action takes place within a slab hut), the play begins with the return of the station nuisance 'Nosey' after a binge in Sydney. He has brought with him his new pal, the Pommy, dressed in a natty white suit and with a superior air. The pair are given a rough reception by head stockman Sollicker and the owner Myra O'Neill. A quarrel erupts and the Pommy soon afterwards joins the station manager, Larkin, in his attempt to swindle O'Neill. Larkin has been hiding sheep at a secret waterhole while the rest of the station's flock die from the drought. When the plot is discovered by Sollicker her thrashes both men. The Pommy later redeems himself by saving the station and in the process discovers love for its owner.