Cirrus@Austlit

'Pankhurst's play uses the anti-conscription argument that while men are fighting overseas, cheap foreign labour will be imported to take their jobs....Dealing with the selling out of Orry (Australia) by its leaders to international interests, Betrayed depicts the plight of the workers in this militarist state. Tricked into fighting in a foreign war for the government's cause, the workers cannot win their own battle for better conditions. Soldiers from England are brought in to put down trouble at election time when a champion of the workers warns: 'Men and women of Orry, you've got to choose now whether you'll be free men or slaves', (act 4, scene 1, p.67) echoing an argument of the advocates of a 'no' vote in the referenda. When the battle against the English troops is unsuccessful the workers turn against their leaders who are executed or imprisoned by the government.

In keeping with Pankhurst's concern for women, Betrayed also highlights poverty and prostitution and looks at conditions for women in factories. Five years after the quelling of the rebellion in Orry, most of the men are out of work while women have to compete as workers with cheap indentured Chinese labour; some even have to sell their bodies to the Chinese. The play ends on a pessimistic note with the workers blaming the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, not the government, for the arrival of the Chinese and for their poor working conditions, just as they had done in Reaping the Whirlwind in 1909.' Susan Diana Cullen 'Australian War Drama: 1909 to 1939' (1989).