'At the funeral of the scandalous Daise Morrow, Daise herself wanders amongst the mourners, hovering between memory and rumour. Over the fence two young dreamers take their first tentative steps into love.
'In Brink’s richly theatrical and immersive adaptation, The Aspirations of Daise Morrow is storytelling filled with music and light; a poignant evocation of the wonders of small beginnings, the complications of compassion and the grace and majesty of love.' (Production summary)
Settled by white convicts and often by people with few prospects in the Old World, Australia was sometimes thought of negatively as a dumping ground of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. This paper traces how, post-war, this perception was challenged in the fiction of Patrick White and David Malouf, which depicts local versions of the outcast artist in actual rubbish dumps and the creative, regenerative transformations that can occur there.