Cirrus@Austlit

Set in the Post Office of the fictional town of Koorora a few years after the end of World War II. A desert settlement of some 67 people that exists mainly to support the building of the Trans-Australian Railway line (which crossed the Nullarbor Plain from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta), Koorora typifies the railway workers' joke that their trains 'stop at nothing.' The title is a reference to the local belief that birds, apart from the occasional crow, won't fly over or settle in Koorora because it too far from water.

Heinrich (Heine) Schafer is the town's new railway mechanic. He is also a new Australian - a German Jew who spent much of the war imprisoned by the Nazis. His arrival in the town creates new tensions - inflaming both anti-German and anti-semetic hatred among some locals and a romantic passion with the wife of Rick O'Hara, the locomotive engineer who befriends him. Nereai reminds Heine of his dead wife. Rick, a free-thinking socialist and unionist, is already questioning his worth as a husband to the much younger Nereai, and believes in his wife's right to determining her own choices. Their decision is not, however, left to them alone. The tensions between townsfolk over the impacts of Heine's presence are a vehicle for questioning and transforming the status quo in families and marriages. The play describes some of the worst traits of racist and xenophobic Australian society of the time.

The scenes, as determined in the manuscript from the Hanger Collection, in the Fryer Library at The University of Queensland, are:

Act 1

Scene 1: Post Office in the settlement of Koorora, Nullarbor Desert, South Australia.

Scene 2: One month later

Act 2

Scene 1: One month later

Scene 2: One month later

The version published in Plays of the 50s [Volume One] includes a third act, the scenes of which are:

Act 3

Scene 1: The following morning

Scene 2: The same morning

Characters

PEG 32, postmaster's wife and Nereia's sister

RICK 40

HEINRICH 34

MAJOR HARRY ROBINSON postmaster, and former 'Kipling soldier'

BARTLEY 50, owner of the general store and a 'miserable whining tyrant' 

NEREIA 22 

JUMBO TOLLIS 55, laconic, easy, philosophic - a Lawson bushman

CLIFFIE ROYCE 20, a big hansome lout

PETER BARTLEY 18, under his father's thumb

"Shipwreck, written in 1951, recreates the infamous mutiny that occurred after the Dutch ship Batavia foundered off the northwest Australian coast in 1629. It is a complex and literary play which depicts with sympathy the anarchic mutineers Cornelius, Huyssen and Seevanck." 

Source.

"This book 'Shipwreck: A Poetic Drama', was written by Douglas Stewart and illustrated with drawings and engravings by Norman Lindsay...The book is divided into three 'Acts'. which tell the story of the shipwreck of the BATAVIA."

Source: Australian National Maritime Museum http://collections.anmm.gov.au/objects/20202/shipwreck-a-poetic-drama;jsessionid=29E05D7347DA4C02D5CAB8860A347F0F 

Ralph Peterson's second play, dating from 1954, Night of the Ding Dong is a comedy set in Adelaide just after the Crimean War, when the locals feared a Russian invasion.