y separately published work icon The Dead Heart : A Play in Two Acts single work   drama   - Two acts
Issue Details: First known date: 1991... 1991 The Dead Heart : A Play in Two Acts
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.

Latest Issues

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Edward John Eyre, celebrated in Australia as our greatest inland explorer, damned in Jamaica as a mass murderer. Bringing together these two sides of a man - protector of Australian Aboriginal people, killer of Jamaicans - to a single focus, the play explores the pressures that might cause such kindness and cruelty, heroism and panic, to be contained in one human being. (The Australian Script Centre).

Notes

  • Based on the explorations of Edward John Eyre.
  • Author's Introduction: ...The Dead Heart is an attempt to reconcile explorer Eyre - a man of great courage, a man far ahead of his contemporaries in sympathy and interest in aboriginal Australians - with the Governor who illegally hanged the Reverend Gordon, the voice of negro and mixed race Jamaicans in Jamaica's National Assembly, the Governor whose troops put down a minor rebellion with unrestrained butchery....Graham Sheil Melbourne, July 1991.(pp.5-6).

Production Details

  • First produced by New Theatre at the Organ Factory Theatre, Melbourne, 16 August 1991.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

      ca. 1991 .
      (Manuscript) assertion
      Note/s:
      • Typescript at Australian Script Centre.
Last amended 15 Jul 2019 13:15:03
X