'This provocative new study of Australian theatre focuses on women writers who have changed our ways of seeing Australian culture. They include Hannie Rayson on the sisterhood, Joanna Murray-Smith on generation f, Jenny Kemp on desire, Katherine Thomson on working girls, Jane Harrison on the stolen generation, Leah Purcell on black chics and Beatrix Christian on miscegenation. Drawing on the title of the ground-breaking Australian play of the 1950s, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney explore the social and imaginative transformation of Australian theatre in the last twenty years.' (Publication summary)
'This chapter focuses on Katherine Thomson as a playwright who utilises the conventions of social realism and naturalism to write plays that dramatise the effects of social and economic change on the lives of fictional but realistically-based characters.' (p.158)
