Cirrus@Austlit

The sacrifices made by a mother allow her family, Polish refugees, to reach Canada.

A review of this production in the Times notes:

The setting is Adelaide in the eighteen seventies. The placid community there are becoming slightly inflamed by the whiff of jingoism from the home country. The hero–a schoolmaster–is firmly turned down as a suitor for the hand of a colonel's daughter. No: education must give way to defence. The colonel's big chance comes when a Russian gunboat is rumoured to be lurking round the coast; supported by a politician, a newspaper editor, and a building contractor he sets about whipping up public enthusiasm for a standing army.

'The solitary gunboat is magnified into a whole flotilla, and slogans such as "Arm for peace and prosperity" begin to engage the community in industrious preparation which sweeps the financial speculators towards wealth and the colonel towards an eminence far above his position at the head of a Saturday afternoon cadet force.

'There is no savagery in this satire; and what follows is pure farce. The alarm sounds one night and the army march off to do battle, only to find that they have been mistakenly alerted and that during their absence they have been legislated out of existence.'

Source:

'Night of the Ding-Dong', The Times, 3 February 1958, p.12.

Musical set among the migrants working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Yeldham notes on his website that

'Before I went to England I was a 23 year old radio writer concerned with shows like 'Nightbeat', 'Famous Trials' and a thriller called 'The Long Shadow', when out of the blue came an offer to write the script of a musical. It was to be a story of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and a convoy of cars containing production crew, technicians, director, composer and me; we drove to Cooma on the first stage – research for a musical about the greatest project since the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

[...]

'Back in Sydney I started work on the script; the composer got busy, and then came the third calamity. The promised money to fund the show had fallen through. The musical about the Snowy was cancelled.

'When things like that happen in our business you shrug and get on with something else. Little did I realise at the time how valuable that few weeks of research would be. About six years later, now living in London, I was asked to write a television play for Armchair Theatre. I wrote 'Thunder on the Snowy' drawing on the miners and characters I’d met at Guthega.'

Source: http://www.peteryeldham.com/featured-book-tide/ (Sighted: 17/10/2014)

The lives of the Hunter family are shaken up when they take in a young female lodger.