Cirrus@Austlit

The first Australian television drama was broadcast in 1956, within a year of the first production of Ray Lawler’s play, The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), which stimulated a revival of Australian stage drama. Literary critics have marked the production of the Doll as a significant turning point in the history of the national drama and accepted it and a handful of subsequent stage plays into an Australian literary canon, returning to them for analysis and reinterpretation. But television drama has struggled to gain literary status in Australia and it still presents challenges to any ongoing literary critical discussion. It confronts literary critics with a popular, ephemeral form with doubtful claims to artistic merit. Indeed, in Belonging: Australian Playwriting in the Twentieth Century John McCallum consigns the realist drama that flourished in the wake of the Doll to film and television: ‘After the early 1960s bush realism, country-town comedy-drama, slum realism and most of their related genres moved off, mostly into film and television’ (89). By the mid-1960s, television adaptations of plays by Lawler, Alan Seymour, Richard Beynon, Barbara Vernon and other prominent playwrights of the stage revival had been broadcast on the ABC or on the commercial network most committed to producing drama, ATN7 Sydney/GTV9 Melbourne, engaging a much wider audience for serious drama. In television’s early years, stage drama and television drama appeared to be part of the same literary project. '

Source: Abstract