(pr. 1874) had its replications in Francis R. C. Hopkins’sAll for Gold (pr. 1877), Dampier’s The Miner’s Right (pr. 1891), and his and Kenneth MacKay’s To the West (pr. 1896). Some imaginative dramatists attempted to fuse British, American, and Australian elements, so that Euston Leigh and Cyril Clare’s The Duchess of Coolgardie (pr. 1896), set in the Western Australian goldfields, could have an Aborigine’s lines written in an approximation of South Carolinian Gullah dialect and an implausible cast and improbable plot. Yet the play was successful: It was performed in Drury Lane Theatre, printed in London, and imitated by George Darrell’s The King of Coolgardie (pr. 1897).

The increasing nationalism at the close of the century became a feature of all forms of Australian culture. With federation in 1901, chauvinism became less strident yet no less apparent: Australia’s participation in the Boer War, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Treaty sustained the sense of national identity. In drama, William Moore (who organized a writers’ theater) and Louis Esson, who had met William Butler Yeats and been advised by him to write “Australian plays,” accepted responsibility for the encouragement of an Australian drama.

Esson’s Three Short Plays (pb. 1911), which included The Woman Tamer, Dead Timber, and The Sacred Place, helped establish the one-act play as a national norm and influenced the choice of theme and characters. (The one-act play became the dramatic equivalent of the short story in Australian fiction; Esson’s role was thus similar to that of Henry Lawson.) Esson redirected the play from the melodrama of his forerunners to social realism, represented both city and country issues, and included the attitudes, problems, and antipathies of the several social classes. Accordingly, some critics have noted the influence of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw rather than of Yeats, John Millington Synge, or Lady Augusta Gregory. In The Woman Tamer, Esson explores interrelationships in a slum household; in Dead Timber, he reveals the monotonous struggle for existence and for love in the Outback; and The Sacred Place suggests that slum life has its own morality and that this is justified. Impressive as these plays are, they have not been as popular as The Drovers (pr. 1923), in which an injured drover is of necessity abandoned by his mates and cared for by an Aborigine whose eerie wails accompany the drover’s death and enhance the pathos. In this play, the influence of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (pb. 1903) seems obvious. Later plays, such as Mother and Son (pr. 1923), which reexamines the loneliness of bush life and the disconcerting effects of an inhospitable environment, and The Bride of Gospel Place (pr. 1926), a study of city violence, demonstrated that Esson was adept in the full-length dramatic form. His place in Australian drama is secure, though his plays are infrequently staged. His satiric, sardonic, yet sympathetic approach is largely representative of the national ethos, and his themes and subjects are at once historical and regional, continuing and universal.

Compared with Esson’s plays, those of two of his contemporaries are inferior, yet they have earned a niche in Australian dramatic literature. Vance Palmer ’s Hail Tomorrow (pb. 1947), about the 1891 shearers’ strike, uses characters and issues dear to the Australian heart, yet the play suffers from an inadequate comprehension of dramatic conventions. Like John Steinbeck, Palmer was a fine fiction writer but was unable to work with ease and conviction in drama. Sydney Tomholt’s Bleak Dawn (pb. 1936) is a praiseworthy study of the divorced working-class woman living in a male-oriented society.

The role of women in Australia, which has increasingly become the focus of sociological studies, has been explored with understanding and feeling by several competent dramatists, among them Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland, and Dymphna Cusack. Prichard, author of twenty-four published novels, also wrote seventeen plays, eleven of which were produced in Australian little theaters. Only one, Brumby Innes , which won a drama contest run by The Triad magazine in 1927, was published (1940); it remained unproduced until 1972, possibly because it had been expanded into the very successful novel Coonardoo (1929). Set in the Outback, Brumby Innes is a mature investigation of black-white and male-female interrelationships, which, it suggests, follow a course from affection and accommodation to sensuality, dominance, and brutal imperiousness. Brumby Innes, in its analysis of alienation, self-doubt, domination, and denigration, perhaps reflects the influence of Eugene O’Neill.

Roland ’s The Touch of Silk (pr. 1928) has continued to hold a unique position in Australian drama: It was published by a university press and continues to enjoy readership and discussion, unlike Roland’s later, more propagandist plays, the best known of which is probably Are You Ready, Comrade? (pr. 1938). The Touch of Silk is a study of the difficulties of a sensitive young French woman, Jeanne, in adapting to the cultureless and unaesthetic Outback, with its materialism, crudities, and primitive possessiveness, predicated on the unequal roles and status of men and women and resulting in the very denial of love. After Jeanne buys lingerie from a traveling salesman and goes to a dance with him, she pretends that she has had an affair: The illusion is a necessary balance for a loveless life in an unbeautiful and isolated environment.

Cusack ’s full-length plays Red Sun at Morning (pb. 1942) and Morning Sacrifice (pb. 1943) deserve greater recognition than they have gained. The first has as subject matter the flight of a mistress from an overbearing military officer and so treats a continuing Australian phenomenon, the pervasive authoritarianism in society, while also examining interpersonal relationships outside marriage. The play’s historical setting (1812), however, and the improbability of the means of escape militate against its success. Morning Sacrifice has a wider appeal. It is set in a girls’ school, where the students are conditioned “to accept all, question nothing and grow into nice, well-behaved yes-girls”: The indictment of the national educational-social outlook is forceful, the examination of teacher-supervisor roles is perspicacious, and individual weaknesses and ambitions are carefully scrutinized. The simulated sincerity, frustrations, jealousies, and ambitions of the teachers become paradigmatic of society; the badinage and ripostes suggest the depth of animosity that underlies surface compatibility. The minuscule society of the school tragedy is a metaphor for life itself.

During the 1940’s, other dramatists developed their art. Max Afford wrote and adapted plays for radio: His Lady in Danger (pr. 1944), a well-constructed, popular comedy-thriller, has retained its enthusiasts, though it is subliterary. Sumner Locke Elliott , author of Interval (pr. 1942), a sophisticated piece set in London that demonstrated his mastery of dramaturgy, achieved fame with Rusty Bugles (pr. 1948), “a play of inaction” as one critic termed it, which has no principal characters, includes the coarse language characteristic of soldiers stationed in an isolated ordnance camp, and engages its characters in antiwar discussions. After the success of Rusty Bugles, the playwright moved to New York, where he regularly wrote and adapted plays for Studio One, Sunday Night Playhouse, and other broadcast series. He adapted his first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, into a successful film in 1984.

The radio dramas and verse plays of New Zealand-born Douglas Stewart gave indications that he was properly to be compared with Louis MacNeice and Christopher Isherwood as a major dramatist in these forms, but the virtual eclipse of radio drama after World War II, the growth of theatergoing, and the demise of verse drama combined to deflect attention from Stewart’s very remarkable plays. In an environment in which even standard English was a rarity, Stewart’s language (with its finely turned phrases and impeccable nuances of diction) clearly created an impression, but where the predisposition of the public was for musical comedy, operetta, and the domestic comedy, his expressed interest in the creation of national myths from legendary individuals established barriers to the realization of his goals. It is therefore noteworthy that he continued his course and gained wide popularity.

Stewart’s principal dramas are Ned Kelly (pr. 1942), written in both stage and radio versions, a study of the legendary bushranger and archetypal antihero; The Fire on the Snow (pr. 1941), a moving radio play treating the unsuccessful polar expedition of Robert Falcon Scott in 1912; and Shipwreck (pr. 1947), another historical play, which treats the 1629 massacre of a majority of the passengers of the Batavia while the captain, Pelsart, was in search of help. In each of these plays, Stewart reexamines the popular concept of the dreamer, the visionary, the leader, with his illusions of invincibility, showing also the relationship between national legends and cultural archetypes.

Considerable attention has been given in histories of Australian literature to Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll , which was staged in London and New York to critical acclaim. There is a consensus that this overseas recognition resulted in a resurgence of playwriting in Australia. Certainly it provided a helpful fillip, but it should be remembered that the themes of alienation, physical isolation, mateship, and country-city and man-woman interrelationships had long been the very substance of the national drama. Yet Summer of the Seventeenth Doll did add dimensions to established materials: It explored with understanding the inevitable disillusionments of middle life, the disintegration of friendships, and the decreasing importance of hollow ritual and token remembrances. It played an equivalent role in Australian drama to the role John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (pr. 1956) did in British drama, in that despite possessing only moderate artistic merit, it opened up new possibilities and alternatives for subsequent playwrights and for the field of drama as a whole, while also permitting the expression of a wider range of feeling and behavior onstage. Lawler’s subsequent play, The Piccadilly Bushman (pr. 1959), examined the reactions to and of a returning expatriate (a common Australian experience, treated most memorably by Henry Handel Richardson in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, one of the classic Australian novels, in 1917).

Richard Beynon’ s The Shifting Heart (pr. 1957) is yet another treatment of the perennial Australian confrontation with nonnatives, whether they be Aborigines or Europeans. Better than most of its genre, it shows the depth and suggests the causes of this xenophobia, exclusiveness, and even small-mindedness that is finally disappearing. Alan Seymour ’s The One Day of the Year (pr. 1961) used the artificial camaraderie of Anzac Day (the national veterans’ holiday) to deflate myths, to explore the concept of mateship, and to show the irrelevance of some myths when seen across the generation gap. This play was a timely reassessment of subjects of national importance.

After 1960, Australian dramatists attempted most of the modern techniques of the theater and wrote in other than realist terms. The influences of absurdism, expressionism, and symbolism could be noted. Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Dürrenmatt became as influential as Shaw and Ibsen, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. As a consequence, a narrowly nationalistic and dominantly realist drama became cosmopolitan in the widest sense. The transformation was aided by the establishment of drama schools and professional theaters, extended university education, overseas travel, and the surcease of blind adherence to outdated and overused dramatic modes. Among the important new playwrights to develop were David Williamson, Alexander Buzo, Jack Hibberd, Ric Throssell, Dorothy Hewett, and Patrick White .

With four plays produced between 1961 and 1964, White—best known as a novelist—established himself as a dramatist of some stature. The Ham Funeral (pr. 1961), which is informed by Ibsen’s theory that illusion is essential for equanimity, shows that there is poetry in even circumscribed, dreary lives. The Season at Sarsaparilla (pr. 1962), a patently expressionist play subtitled A Charade of Suburbia, is a devastating comedy of conformism. The main characters lead lives not quite of quiet desperation but ones in which “there’s practically no end to the variations of monotony.” A Cheery Soul (pr. 1963)—based on one of White’s own short stories—explores the artificiality of a voluble, self-satisfied suburban do-gooder, while Night on Bald Mountain (pr. 1963), a darker play, subsumes all the themes and essential character-types of the author’s earlier work to stress the sterility of the proud, the detached, and the intellectual. Toward the end of the play, Professor Sword says, “You and I are here on the edge of the world, and might so easily slip over, into this merciless morning light . . . along with the illusions of importance and grandeur that we had.” The theme of the play is summed up in Sword’s later aphorism, “Failure is sometimes the beginnings of success.”

David Williamson ’s Don’s Party (pr. 1971) and The Removalists (pr. 1971), Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination (pr. 1972) and A Toast to Melba (pr. 1976), and the several plays of the prolific Buzo are among the more inventive, substantial, and likely to survive as both literature and theater. Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed (pr. 1968) is one of the most affecting treatments of xenophobia; The Front Room Boys (pr. 1969) lays bare the sterile life of the office worker confined to the routines of the large corporation. In both, there is the sure touch of the playwright who has an ear for the speech and interests of the common person and the analytic methodology of the sociologist. Williamson’s output has been astonishing, as have been his range and his development over three decades. The Removalists is an excavation of the “ocker” stereotype, what in the Untied States would be called the “redneck”—the ill-mannered, often violent working-class male. Don’s Party is a depiction of the social and sexual turbulence of the early 1970’s middle class, which also takes a serious look at Australian political immaturity. Travelling North (pr. 1979) is a moving depiction of an older couple who have devoted their lives to a misplaced commitment to hardline communism. Dead White Males (pr. 1995) satirized “political correctness” in academia, whereas Heretic (pr. 1996) took on anthropology’s romanticization of Pacific Islands peoples. However, it is a mistake to see Williamson as merely a topical or thematic dramatist. Emerald City (pr. 1987), about an younger man’s love for an older woman, a father’s love for his son, and the corrupting effects of widespread wealth in the new “Yuppie” leisure class, assays perennial questions in a resonant fashion. By the end of the twentieth century Williamson had become the best-known Australian dramatist worldwide, and his plays became a collective social and cultural record of the Australia of his time.

Hibberd ’s outrageous inventiveness, formal unconventionality, and sheer Australianness have led to his prominence on the Australian stage. His wedding farce Dimboola (pr. 1969) became a staple of performance in Australia, not only for its rowdy display of bad behavior but also for its subtle insight into social behavior patterns. It is one of the most frequently performed plays in Australia, and its rendering of the wedding reception of Morrie and Reen McAdam has become beloved despite its side-splitting critique of Australian suburban society. A Stretch of the Imagination is a monodrama whose protagonist, Monk O’Neill, is at the end of his rope both physically and cognitively, but whose struggle to achieve a genuine sense of life is tremendously moving.

By the mid-1970’s, professional theaters could present local texts without suffering at the box office; an annual National Playwrights’ Conference, first held in Canberra in 1971, established a link between the development of solicited works and commercial production; and the fledgling film industry achieved international success with films such as Gallipoli (1980), Breaker Morant (1980), My Brilliant Career (1979), and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1981).

The demand for published plays, stimulated by their inclusion in academic drama courses, was met by a new company, Currency Press, founded by Katherine Brisbane, which was associated with the established publisher Methuen in 1982. The women’s movement, the development of Aboriginal scripts, and the emergence of a new and vigorous community spirit—giving voice to the workplace and specific geographical areas—have challenged the beliefs and practices of established theaters. Chief among the new playwrights are Alma De Groen, whose Rivers of China (pr. 1990) challenged the way people at the margins attempt to speak at the center; Michael Gow, who in Away (pr. 1987) examines the coming-of-age of his teenage protagonists and deals with a 1960’s society on the verge of political and social self-realization; and Stephen Sewell, who explores the domestic turmoil of a fascist politician new to the Australian order in Hate (pr. 1988). Gow’s drama has become a staple of contemporary Australian theater, with his later work exploring his place within Australian gay male writing. Sewell has become a leading politician playwright, and his Dreams of an Empty City (pb. 1986) foreshadowed the themes of globalization and economic rationalism that were to become predominant in Australian culture in the 1990’s.

Louis Nowra ’s extraordinarily various and resourceful talents of imagination are a major asset for the contemporary Australian theater. Nowra’s masterpiece is The Golden Age (pr. 1985),[B] [W0]concerning a tribe of isolated whites in Tasmania, long lost to the outside world, who take on contours of Aboriginality. Nowra explores contrasts between the civilized and the primitive, the cultured and the earthy, nostalgia and perseverance. Inner Voices (pr. 1977) concerns the Russian czar Ivan VI, deposed at the age of two and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Nowra is less interested in the historical details of Ivan’s life than the dilemmas and refractions of consciousness that ensue from his predicament, especially the flawed tutelage he has absorbed from his malevolent instructor, Mirovich. The Temple (pr. 1993) examines the effervescent entrepreneur, and The Incorruptible (pr. 1995) scrutinizes the other side of the Australian social coin, the working-class charismatic politician. Così (pr. 1992) concerns issues of insanity and the imagination as it posits a young director staging a play in a mental institution in 1970, and Radiance (pr. 1993), concerning three Aboriginal women in the aftermath of their mother’s death, continues Nowra’s rare insight into various states of social being and consciousness; it was adapted into a film in 1998 by the Aboriginal director Rachel Perkins. The Language of the Gods (pr. 2000) examines the disintegration of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia.

Drama by women, and drama with explicitly feminist concerns, became far better known in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Dorothy Hewett ’s The Chapel Perilous (pr. 1971), concerning the quest of an unconventional woman to realize her potential, notwithstanding the obstacles placed in her way by social accretions and male authority figures, was already a classic (though it was banned for decades in the author’s native state of Western Australia for fear of libel). In later decades of the twentieth century, Hewett continued to produce buoyantly, Golden Valley (pr. 1981) and Song of the Seals (pr. 1983) being good examples. De Groen’s Rivers of China, about the life of the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, became the touchstone for feminist drama at the end of the twentieth century. Sandra Shotlander’s work depicted affirmative images of lesbian identity in an experimental mode; Is That You, Nancy? (pr. 1991) is considered her major work. A more conventional, but very interesting, dramatist is Hannie Rayson, whose Life After George (pb. 2000) concerns the death of a veteran leftist politician in a plane crash and the way his image lingers in the perspectives of those who knew and loved him. In 2002, the play was produced in London to positive reviews.

Another growing area of Australian drama in this era was plays by writers of migrant background. Ron Elisha’s Two (pr. 1983) concerns the partition of Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews in 1948 as a sounding board for illustrating general motifs of division and duality. Work that exploded the boundaries between drama, poetry, and dance also proliferated, with the collaborations of Richard James Allen with his wife, the American Karne Pearlman, serving as but one example.

An interesting aspect of contemporary Australian theater is a maturity of vision that gives recognition to the work of Aboriginal dramatists, in particular Jack Davis (No Sugar, pr. 1985; Honey Spot, pr. 1985) and Robert Merritt (The Cakeman, pr. 1988; Women of the Sun, pr. 1989, a television series). They have pioneered a drama seemingly free of colonial and imperialist thought.

Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman co-wrote The Seven Stages of Grieving (pr. 1995), which is a collaborative work incorporating traditional Aboriginal devices. The Seven Stages of Grieving veers away from the idea of dramatizing the problem of “race” for a privileged, white-liberal audience. Questions of Aboriginal identity and Aboriginal land rights have moved to the forefront of Australian cultural discourse in the modern era, and in contemporary accounts of Australian drama, Aboriginal works are increasingly finding substantial discussion and analysis.