Issue Details: First known date: 1956... 1956 On Stage! Twelve Short Modern Plays
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Notes

  • 12 one-act plays grouped into four categories: comedy, drama, morality and religious experience.
  • Partial contents indexed; remainder pending.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Melbourne, Victoria,:Melbourne University Press , 1956 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
The Watch on the Headland, M. Barnard Eldershaw , single work radio play

Described as 'a dramatic incident from the earliest white history of New South Wales.' (See Riverine Herald below.)

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.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 29 Jan 2003 08:45:38
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