y separately published work icon Modern Short Plays anthology   drama  
Issue Details: First known date: 1951... 1951 Modern Short Plays
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Sydney, New South Wales,:Angus and Robertson , 1951 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Great Inheritance, Gwen Meredith , single work radio play (p. 239-258)
Spoiled Darlings, Edmund Barclay , single work radio play humour romance

Described in contemporary radio guides as 'a romantic comedy of other days.'

The Drovers : A Play in One Act, Louis Esson , Frank Brown , single work drama

"Life in the bush is hot, hard and not for the faint-hearted. Under the extreme sun of Northern frontier country a pack of itinerant drovers thrive in the land they call home. A freak stampede brings ‘Briglow’ Bill and his mates face to face with mortality and their masculinity and mateship are tested. All the while, Pidgeon, a young Aboriginal boy, watches the white fellows. He sees something the drovers cannot speak of and, for Briglow, this silence is as stifling yet as familiar and as comforting as the heat that surrounds them all.

The Drovers is a bush drama that is rich with tension, grim stoicism and heightened masculinity of the, notably, all-male characters. Clipped sentences and straight-talking speak of the no-nonsense attitude necessary to survive in the remote bush of the 1920s. The play draws us to the campfire where, in light and heat, we see the relationships the drovers experience: between each other, between white man and Aboriginal man, between man and land and, finally, the ultimate and unavoidable relationship: a man’s connection with life and death."

Source.

X