Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s. (Australian Playwrights Monograph)

Men at Play

Men at Play Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s Jonathan Bollen Adrian Kiernander Bruce Parr

Monograph 11 in the series

AUSTRALIAN PLAYWRIGHTS Series Editor: Peta Tait

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2357-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents List of figures Foreword by the Series Editor

vi viii

Author biographies

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Chapter 1: “What’s a man to do?”

15

Chapter 2: Fists, boots and blues

32

Chapter 3: The bully and the businessman

52

Chapter 4: Black men, white men

70

Chapter 5: In the theatre of war

90

Chapter 6: “Wog boy” moves

108

Chapter 7: Representing gay masculinities

125

Chapter 8: From father to son

146

Chapter 9: Between the sea and the sky

164

References

185

Index

201

List of figures Figure 1.1 Reedy River Figure 1.2 The Sentimental Bloke Figure 1.3 Lola Montez Figure 2.1 The Shifting Heart Figure 2.2 Bird with a Medal Figure 2.3 Gary’s House Figure 3.1 The Bastard Country Figure 3.2 The Bastard Country Figure 3.3 The Boys Figure 3.4 Essington Lewis: I Am Work Figure 4.1 Burst of Summer Figure 5.1 Naked Island Figure 5.2 Outpost Figure 5.3 G’day Digger Figure 6.1 The Heartbreak Kid Figure 6.2 Milk and Honey

Figure 6.3 The Young Wife Figure 7.1 A Fox in the Night Figure 7.2 The Boy from Oz Figure 7.3 The Last of the Rainbow Figure 8.1 The One Day of the Year Figure 8.2 Words of One Syllable Figure 8.3 The Jungle Figure 9.1 Half Safe Figure 9.2 James and Johnno Figure 9.3 Cloudstreet

Foreword by the Series Editor I would like to gratefully acknowledge the unique and important contribution to the Rodopi Australian Playwrights series made by Professor Veronica Kelly, and through her work as the series editor, to scholarship on Australian drama and theatre. As the new series editor, I take over a substantial list that encompasses the breadth of scholarship on drama, theatre and performance studies. I am delighted to introduce Volume 11 in the series, Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s, by Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr. This thoroughly researched book of scholarship is the first on this significant subject, and draws on a major study for its exploration of masculine identity over fifty years of Australian drama and theatre. At the same time it makes highly engaging reading for academics, students and general readers. Editorial note: year dates without brackets indicate the year of a play’s production, in contrast to publication dates given in brackets. Professor Peta Tait La Trobe University

Author biographies Jonathan Bollen lectures in drama at Flinders University in Adelaide. He trained in performance studies at the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney and undertook post-doctoral research at the University of New England. His research on gender, sexuality and performance has appeared in Australasian Drama Studies, The Drama Review and several anthologies. Adrian Kiernander is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. He is the author of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil for Cambridge University Press and has published widely on aspects of French, Australian and New Zealand theatre. He also researches in the field of Shakespeare studies. Bruce Parr has taught theatre studies at the Universities of Queensland and New England (Armidale and Brisbane campuses). He has published in the intersecting areas of theatre, gender and sexuality. From 2000 to 2004 he was managing editor of AUMLA, journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association. He is an honorary research advisor in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland.

Acknowledgements We would like first to acknowledge the grant from the Australian Research Council which made this book possible; research for the project was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0210510). As part of this grant, Jonathan Bollen was the recipient of an Australian Research Council Post Doctoral Fellowship. The Stage on Screen project, supported by the Australian Research Council’s Linkages funding scheme (project number LP0218607) which ran concurrently with this and which looked at materials in the archives of ABC Television and Channel Nine, has greatly informed much of the work in this book, and we are grateful to Mary-Jane Stannus, Sal Russo and Wendy Borchers of the ABC and to Jasmine Kelly and Jenny Guion of Channel Nine for their enthusiastic cooperation. Major thanks are also due to Jeremy Gadd and Mary Walsh, whose work on that project contributed greatly to this one. AusStage (www.ausstage.edu.au), the internet gateway and database for the Australian performing arts hosted at Flinders University, has been an amazing resource for the project, and we would like to acknowledge all those who made it possible, especially Joh Hartog and Jenny Fewster. This facility has been funded by the Australian Research Council under its RIEF and LIEF schemes (project numbers R00002742, LE0346553 and LE0775527). Our research assistants, Jeremy Gadd, Graham Seaman, Nicola Speden, Leigh Summers and Mary Walsh have uncovered quantities of unexpected and valuable materials which have enriched our knowledge and understanding of the field. We are grateful for the generous assistance we received from staff at Australia’s performing arts collections including Joanna Leahy and Patricia Convery at the Performing Arts Collection of the Arts Centre in Melbourne, Jo Peoples and David Wilson of the Performing Arts Collection of South Australia, Beryl Davis at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Mark Richmond at the University of Melbourne Archives, and Judith

Acknowledgements

xi

Seeff at the Sydney Theatre Company archives. The Campbell Howard Collection at the Dixson Library of the University of New England and the Eunice Hanger Collection at the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland provided invaluable access to unpublished play scripts. We are also grateful to staff at the University of New South Wales Library which housed the Wolanski collection, the Special Collections of the Australian Defence Force Academy Library, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives, the University of Adelaide Archives, and the State Libraries of New South Wales and Victoria. Stephen Orgel, Lawrence Senelick and Bruce R. Smith were all exceptionally generous with their time and knowledge while Adrian Kiernander was in North America on study leave in mid-1993 working on this project. Our workmates at the University of New England, Flinders University and the University of Queensland have listened patiently and generously to work in progress and provided useful suggestions and insights; special thanks are due to Michael Macklin, Gail Hawkes, Frank Bongiorno, Jane O’Sullivan, Anne Pender, Sue Fell, Andrew McCue, Julie Holledge, Murray Bramwell, Veronica Kelly and Bronwen Levy. The same is true of our friends and colleagues in the discipline of Theatre Studies throughout Australia and beyond, and especially the members of ADSA, the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies, who have given us invaluable support and feedback on conference papers at numerous conferences; much of the content of this book was explored in papers delivered at the ADSA conferences at the University of Tasmania in Launceston (2002), the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane (2003), Victoria University of Wellington (2004) and Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga (2005). Conferences organised by the Desmi Centre for Ancient Greek Drama in Greece (2004), the Gender Relations Centre at the Australian National University (2005) and the Centre for Research into the New Literatures of English at Flinders University (2005) also provided welcome opportunities for presenting our research. Some material in chapters 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7 has been previously published in three articles in Australasian Drama Studies 46 (April 2005) and in the anthology What a Man’s Gotta Do? Masculinities in Performance edited by Kiernander, Bollen and Parr (CALLTS: Armidale 2006).

xii

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In preparing this book for publication, we received generous financial support from Flinders University and the University of New England. We are grateful to Nena Bierbaum for editing the manuscript and Linda Brainwood for picture research. We particularly thank Peta Tait for her encouragement and advice as general editor of the Rodopi series. On a personal level we would like to thank Anne and David Bollen, Kent Laverack and Joseph Ting for their patience and encouragement over the past five years.

Introduction In The Lost Echo, an eight-hour adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis directed by Barrie Kosky for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, the role of Satirino was performed by the well-known actor Deborah Mailman.1 Satirino was played as a dishevelled late-adolescent schoolboy: aggressively macho and sexually assertive, he sports a two-day stubble and has a nymph perform oral sex on him. Mailman’s performance was so convincing that some experienced theatre-goers did not realise that the role of the young man was being played by a woman.2 Mailman later in the same production played the character of Philomela, a vulnerable and very feminine victim of rape, again with great conviction. These two performances immediately raise questions about gender, both on and off the stage. While masculinity is usually thought of as a quality pertaining to men, it is commonly accepted that some women can be more masculine than others, and indeed that some women are more masculine than some men—the term mannish applies almost exclusively to such women (Halberstam 1998). There can be little argument that the character of Satirino was masculine, even though he was being created in and by the body of a woman. Interpreting the theories of Judith Butler (1988, 1990, 1993), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) and others that gender is constituted through performative acts, it is possible to argue that Mailman’s performance did not just imitate masculinity but that it was an enactment of masculinity itself. In the same production there were numerous examples of male to female cross-dressing. Two of Australia’s well-respected senior actors, John Gaden and Peter Carroll, appeared in ball gowns as Teiresias and Cadmus in a reworking of Euripides’ The Bakkhai; and Paul Capsis, in a more complex and intriguingly theatrical inversion 1

2

The Sydney Theatre Company production of The Lost Echo by Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright opened at the Sydney Theatre on 9 September 2006. This observation was founded on conversations with audience members and confirmed in a personal conversation with the director.

2

Men at Play

of appearances, acted both as the goddess Diana, who appeared in the form of a gawky schoolgirl, and—wearing the same costume and makeup—as Jove, who was convincingly disguised as Diana. Theatre, like other kinds of representation, can reinforce stereotypes about gender and “help to reproduce (and therefore reinforce as normal) cultural configurations of femininity and masculinity as being naturally determined by sexual difference” (Allen 2002: viii). But it can equally reflect changes in the world outside. Theatre can seek to intervene in public debates about gender and contribute to the changes which are taking place. It can highlight aspects of gender which are worthy of attention, perhaps because they are in transition, or because they are residues of past behaviours which are now unacceptable. Gender as performance Masculinity is theatrical. It is constantly in the process of being watched and critically evaluated by its audience—an audience of men as much as of women. Michael S. Kimmel notes: We [men] are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men. Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance in to the realm of manhood. Manhood is demonstrated for other men’s approval. It is other men who evaluate the performance. (1994: 128)

Changes in theatre practice are a way of charting developments in society more widely. As social conditions change over time, so the theatre reflects developments in social attitudes. By studying theatre and the responses to it, we see what characters audiences will readily accept, what challenges to accepted characters may be tolerated, and under what conditions those characters may be changed. Theatre is created by writers, actors and directors whose careers succeed to the extent that they are attuned to the world around them. The theatre thus records, with the perspicacity of keen observers, how things are and their significance. It stages with dramatic clarity what the present is, and imagines what might be in the future. What is more, most plays set their characters and plots in a plausible dramatic world with some relation to the real world. Thus theatre engages with society by dramatising its characters in a social context. By creating gender, as it creates characters, using the bodies of actors, theatre takes an active role in social debates about gender, and comes to influence society’s attitudes. The shock of discovering that

Introduction

3

Satirino was played by a woman may well have jolted some members of the audience out of habitual ideas and feelings about masculinity. Marking masculinities This book explores the role of Australian theatre in public debates about masculinity.3 It charts the changes in Australian masculinity which are recorded by Australian plays, on the page and in performance, since the middle of the twentieth century. The book is based on dramaturgical analysis of play scripts and research into the production history of plays. We focus, in particular, on premiere productions and draw upon theatre reviews, publicity photographs, films and video recordings as evidence. To get a clearer picture of the changes which have taken place, we compare two distinct and significant periods of Australian theatre history, from the 1950s to about 1970, and from the mid-1980s onward. The earlier period has not often been revisited in recent studies of Australian theatre, yet it is an important time. The year 1955 was particularly auspicious. It saw the appointment of Ray Lawler as director of the Union Theatre Repertory Company (later the Melbourne Theatre Company), the first production of Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and the foundation of both the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the Adelaide Company of Players. The period also covers the first Adelaide Festival in 1960, the founding of the National Theatre Company in Perth in 1956, and the establishment of the Old Tote Company in Sydney in 1962. Towards the end of the period came La Mama (from 1967) and the Australian Performing Group (from 1968), both in Melbourne, and the Hole in the Wall (from 1965) in Perth. The period encompasses the emergence of a great many Australian plays, most of them now eclipsed by the stature of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. It saw the realisation of a national theatre movement, conscious of its contribution to the nation’s cultural life and fostered by public support and government investment (Bachelor 2002). It was during this period that many works of Australian playwrights, exploring narratives of Australian social life, were first staged by government-subsidised theatre companies. The period also 3

The contributions of American dramatists to debates about masculinities have been thoroughly explored in Vorlicky (1995), Savran (1992) and McDonough (1997). Mangan (2003) examines masculinities in British theatre.

4

Men at Play

coincides with the introduction of television in 1956 and the beginning of significant audiovisual records of Australian theatre productions. During the second period, from 1985 onward, the idea of an Australian national theatre and the clarity of its project became blurred. A diversification in theatrical production coincided with “a partial dissolving of the central theatrical narrative of ‘national identity’”, as the makers of Australian theatre began to engage with the nation’s cultural diversity (Kelly 1998: 8). With the strong historical links between the nationalist project and masculinity, it is no surprise that this blurring of national identity in the more recent period should also be manifested in the staging of gender. Defining masculinities Ideas about masculinity are constantly in flux. The word masculinity itself is inconveniently elusive in its meanings, with at least three common uses of the term. The first signifies the real way for men to behave, clearly differentiated from the ways that women behave. This perfect masculinity is unattainable for most men, on or off the stage. Kimmel makes the point, in the North American context, that [s]uch a model [of masculinity] is, of course, unrealizable for any man. But we keep trying, valiantly and vainly, to measure up. American masculinity is a relentless test. The chief test is contained in the first rule. Whatever the variations by race, class, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation, being a man means “not being like women.” This notion of anti-femininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood, so that masculinity is defined more by what one is not rather than who one is. (1994: 126)

The difficulties of attaining such status are implied in Erving Goffman’s description of the qualities that a North American in the early 1960s would have needed in order to be eligible for the status of ideal masculinity. He would have to be a young, married, white, urban, northern heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports […] Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior. (1968: 153)

Even when the status can be claimed, it is always precarious: it is a crown whose wearer is always uneasy in case it is usurped by

Introduction

5

someone else, or in case the rules defining its possession suddenly change. A second common meaning suggests that masculinity is a norm that men negotiate in common, distinguishing them from women. Judith Butler addresses the idea of gender as a social norm that produces the distinction between masculinity and femininity (2004: 40–56). This idea recognises that men and their enactments of masculinity may vary widely in relation to the norm. But there is a problem of imprecision. The qualities that make up the varieties of masculinity range widely depending on which men are regarded as embodying the norm. It may also marginalise those men who do not fit the mould. There is a further difficulty in that, as Sedgwick points out, sometimes masculinity has “nothing to do […] with men” (1995: 12), an observation which this definition has difficulty accommodating. A third meaning is that masculinity is a quality that men come to embody by virtue of their being male. R.W. Connell insists on this embodied aspect: “Masculine gender is (among other things) a certain feel to the skin, certain muscular shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of moving, certain possibilities for sex” (1995: 52–53). Something like this can be seen in action in Dick Diamond’s Reedy River from 1953, where the men seem almost indistinguishably masculine (see chapter 1). Under other circumstances where men are seen as a more diverse group, this version may recognise the embodiment of a range of different masculinities—gay masculinities, non-white masculinities and so on. The risk here is that masculinity fragments into so many different versions that the word becomes all but meaningless. It should be emphasised that almost all of the possible meanings of the word masculinity refer not to something that exists, but rather to a set of images and values which are commonly recognised, and valued or contested—what John Beynon calls “masculinity-as-a-text” (2002: 10). Understood in this way, masculinity does not describe a reality but is a conflation of myths, stereotypes and caricatures, and it probably works to influence, teach and encourage actual behaviours as much as it describes them. To the extent that a version of masculinity is admired, it will tell us something about the needs and aspirations of those who admire it, but it will not be a reliable guide to an understanding of how men do or should act.

6

Men at Play

One way around the definitional difficulties is to recognise, as Michael Mangan points out, that masculinity is always relational— that where it can be identified it exists in relation to other gendered behaviours (2003: 9). The relationship of masculinity to femininity is important, but any instance of masculinity is also relational to the gendered behaviours of other men. There is a constant process of comparison between the masculinity of any one man and those of others. Partly because of these instabilities of definition, and partly because it has been the dominant gender, masculinity has tended to remain an unmarked term. The dangers of this are that it then becomes the unexamined gender, against which other genders stand out as exceptions or aberrations. A focus on theatre for, by and about women in Australia has emerged in recent times in the scholarship of Michelle Arrow, Rachel Fensham, Helen Gilbert, Julie Holledge, Veronica Kelly, Carolyn Pickett, Elizabeth Schafer, Susan Bradley Smith, Peta Tait, Joanne Tompkins, Denise Varney and others. This focus on women and theatre brings into question the performance of masculinity on stage.4 No longer may masculinity be regarded as the unmarked gender, as unitary and timeless. We must see it, instead, as a set of gender options among others which change over time and vary from place to place. Australian masculinities This is not to say that masculinity has remained unexamined. Attempts have been made to define its qualities. One such attempt in the 1950s in Australia was a best-selling sex education manual for young men with the title The Guide to Virile Manhood. In its ninth edition in 1957, this publication claimed to have sold a quarter of a million copies. It was prepared under the auspices of the Father and Son Welfare Movement of Australia, a Christian organisation. The movement’s aims were to provide “accurate information”, “sound interpretation” and “definite inspiration” about sex and its place in the lives of men (Guide 1957: 2). The booklet stresses the need for a combination of physical and moral fitness as the basis of “virile manhood”, and lists six components of this fitness: muscular strength, 4

Varney and Fensham (1999) and Kelly (2000) explicitly address masculinity in Australian theatre.

Introduction

7

endurance (defined as the refusal to give in), energy (as much a moral quality as a physical one), will-power, courage and self-control. The guide provides an authoritative version of masculinity, approved by the establishment. It is more a list of techniques by which a young man should approach the status of manliness, than a description of what masculinity might look like if achieved. At the same time, masculinity came into focus as scholars were attempting to describe the myth of the Australian. The most wellknown attempt is from historian Russel Ward: According to the myth, the ‘typical Australian’ is a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others. He is a great improviser, ever willing to ‘have a go’ at anything, but willing too to be content with a task done in a way that is ‘near enough’. Though capable of great exertion in an emergency, he normally feels no impulse to work without good cause. He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion. Though he is ‘the world’s best confidence man’, he is usually taciturn rather than talkative, one who endures stoically rather than one who acts busily. He is a ‘hard case’, sceptical about the value of religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally. He believes that Jack is not only as good as his master but, at least in principle, probably a good deal better, and so he is a great ‘knocker’ of eminent people unless, as in the case of his sporting heroes, they are distinguished by physical prowess. He is a fiercely independent person who hates officiousness and authority, especially when these qualities are embodied in military officers and policemen. Yet he is very hospitable and, above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin, even if he thinks they may be in the wrong. No epithet in his vocabulary is more completely damning than ‘scab’, unless it be ‘pimp’ used in its peculiarly Australasian meaning of ‘informer’. He tends to be a rolling stone, highly suspect if he should chance to gather much moss. (1958: 1–2)

It is interesting to compare these portraits of the typical Australian with the male characters created by theatre practitioners of the time.5 In chapter 2, we explore how male characters in realist plays embodied aspects of the national myth, thereby exposing its assumptions about Australian masculinity to public recognition. Masculinity and its Others Masculinity has a racial aspect. The vast majority of male characters in Australian theatre of the 1950s are white and from English5

Another version of the stereotype was proposed by psychologist Ronald Taft in 1962 (see chapter 2).

8

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speaking backgrounds, though not all are Australian-born. To be other than white in an Anglo-European society like Australia may create gender problems, some so complex they are difficult to negotiate successfully. Other scholars note white attitudes towards black men, who are stigmatised as deficient in some aspects of masculinity while being feared as over-masculine, even bestial (Alsop, Fitzsimons and Lennon 2002: 150). Concerning these contradictory ideas about the black man in white culture, Lynne Segal asks, rhetorically, “Is he notman-enough, or is he too-masculine-by-half?” (1990: 185). This question continues to resonate in Australian theatre about Indigenous men (see chapter 4). Asian men have been regarded in white culture as threateningly unmasculine, on account of perceived racial differences in disposition, stature and physique (Segal 1990: 175). Asian (and especially Chinese) men, who have formed an important part of Australian society since the nineteenth century, have had only a small role to play in Australian theatre and elsewhere in Australian culture. William Yang’s solo shows like Sadness are an example of how one actor of Chinese ancestry has managed to bypass these difficulties in order to sustain a career and achieve success.6 Anxieties also surfaced about Italian and Greek migrants after the Second World War. Their non-English-speaking background made them marginal in comparison with Australian masculinity, and their perceived volatility and emotionality were regarded with suspicion. However, they quickly became a feature of Australian theatre, as in Richard Beynon’s 1957 The Shifting Heart (see chapter 6). The theatrical expressiveness attributed to southern Europeans may have made them more interesting dramatic subjects than the laconic and inexpressive Australian stereotypes which were notoriously difficult to put on stage (Fitzpatrick 1979: 10; see chapter 2). In the case of Indigenous Australians, the problem of masculinity is even more acute. Relatively few Indigenous adult male characters exist in Australian drama from the 1950s and 1960s. Those few, 6

Yang trained as an actor at the National Institute for Dramatic Arts (NIDA). As Willie Young, he was a member of Rex Cramphorn’s Performance Syndicate and acted in the premiere production of The Legend of King O’Malley. His successful solo shows began with Sadness, which premiered at Belvoir Street Theatre in 1989 and then toured extensively both within Australia and internationally. Other works include The North in 1996, Friends of Dorothy in 1998, Blood Links in 1999 and Shadows in 2002, and are collectively known as The Journeys of William Yang.

Introduction

9

portrayed in plays by both Indigenous and white playwrights, often appear weak and incompetent, as in David Ireland’s 1959 Image in the Clay and Robert J. Merritt’s 1975 The Cake Man. Chapter 4 discusses the problems of Indigenous masculinity in these and more recent plays like Roger Bennett’s 1990 Up the Ladder. Masculinity is also closely bound up with age and the need to be in peak physical condition. Young men in Australian plays are usually described as weak striplings not yet ready for the burdens of masculinity, and some are taunted with the slur of immaturity, as in Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country and Barry Pree’s A Fox in the Night, both from 1959. The plays sometimes imply that with hard work and some luck the youngsters might make the grade. If they do succeed, however, they are likely to end up competing for the top job with an older male, often a father figure, as in Alan Seymour’s 1960 The One Day of the Year and Tony McNamara’s 1996 The John Wayne Principle. This competition across generations and changing patterns of masculinity from one generation to the next can cause tensions in the father–son relationship (see chapter 8). Class has been an area of contention in the Australian context. Being poor, unemployed and therefore not able to support a wife and family is a clear disadvantage in some plays. Yet living a comfortable middle-class existence does not put a man adequately to the test in a world that values hard work and struggle. In many plays, workingclass battlers have an advantage in embodying gender conventions. Likewise, living in a rural area and working on the land encourage the development of an ideal masculinity more frequently than the softness and constraint of suburban life (see chapters 1 and 8). As well as physical strength, one of the distinguishing features of the battler is resilience in the face of adversity—what The Guide to Virile Manhood calls endurance. Resilience, manifested in part by a refusal to shed tears when things go wrong, is often coupled with a more generalised reluctance to show feelings of any kind, which can lead to a stifling of emotions. A destructive version of the emotionally straight-jacketed Australian man is the father, Clarence, in A Fox in the Night who persecutes his more emotional son in a way that brings ruin on the whole family. Like many aggressively masculine characters, he can be seen as a bully—a figure which recurs in the context of families in the earlier period but more often, in the later period, in the workplace (see chapter 3).

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Conformity to male culture was important in the 1950s. This culture valued mateship above all, in the sense of having one close male companion who could be depended on for support under any circumstances. The values of mateship were intensified by men’s experiences at war, as Ernie Boyle’s war-time mate recalls in Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla from 1962. It had been a time when masculinity was heroically on display, but in the twenty-five years since its end, the war became much more complicated as a symbol of manhood, as the ex-soldiers grew older and their exploits were seen as belonging to an outdated past. The One Day of the Year is the most obvious theatrical investigation of this phenomenon, but memories of the war leave their mark on many theatrical events of the time, and on the minds, bodies and behaviours of the men who lived through it. The plight of men returning from the war, adjusting to the domestic routines and relations of suburban life, is dramatised in works which set the bonds of homosocial mateship against the comforts of heterosexual romance (see chapter 5). Mateship celebrated the idea of men banding together, working hard, and keeping each other company outside working hours and away from home. Hence the importance attached to such communal manly pursuits as drinking beer after a hot day’s work, smoking, and the use of nicknames. But what The Guide to Virile Manhood refers to as “will-power” and “self-control” are important here: the ability to drink hard and to hold one’s liquor is often admired in the plays, but getting too drunk is disapproved of, or made to look weak, ridiculous and demeaning, as when the sons arrive back at the farmhouse after a night on the town in The Bastard Country or when Alf Cook comes home inebriated after the Anzac Day parade in The One Day of the Year. Even in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, excessive drinking creates problems for Roo and Barney. It leads to the collapse of the pattern of their lives and relationships, though not, significantly, of their bond of mateship. Homosexuality is the greatest disqualifier in the world of 1950s Australia, the almost unmentionable sin that would automatically cast any man beyond the bounds of acceptable masculinity. The Guide to Virile Manhood, licensed by its educational and scientific credentials, talks with unusual candour about the many unhappy men and women who have developed this preference for their own sex […] They have misdirected the drive of sex and cannot know the joy

Introduction

11

of marriage, home and family that should be the happy and satisfying lot of all who handle their life wisely. (Guide 1957: 25)

Characters who are clearly homosexual only emerge in the theatre at a later date, but the unspoken and unspeakable threat is still present in the background to the action of some of the earlier plays as a potential innuendo that can be used in various coded forms to attack and demolish any unfitting pretender to masculinity. Clarence’s insults to his son Michael in A Fox in the Night are coded with homophobic innuendo (see chapter 7). Even in some later plays this tendency lingers, as when Ricko in Nick Enright’s Blackrock half-jokingly calls his best mate a “queer dog” as a warning not to show too much emotion (1996c: 7). Homophobia is seen therefore as a defining feature of certain kinds of masculinity. Nevertheless, while homosexuality may automatically disqualify a man from masculinity, active heterosexuality may be optional. One of the signals of successful masculinity in these plays is getting the girl at the end. Yet a few seemingly adequate male characters are presented as celibate loners, content in their own company or that of other men. Most of the minor male characters in Reedy River fall into this category. One further indicator of masculinity in plays of the 1950s and 1960s is a tendency to outward movement. In the plots of the plays this is shown by the men’s habit of moving around, while the women are more likely to stay at home. Travel is difficult to represent, however, on the predominantly naturalistic stages of the 1950s, so the visible manifestation of this tendency to be on the move is represented by a parallel tendency toward outwardness: in dramatic setting—men often appear more at ease in outside locations—in the use of physical objects which are habitually thrown, flicked or tossed around the stage, and in gesticulation (see Kiernander 2006). It is also manifested in outbursts of physical violence, with the throwing of punches, lashing out and kicking when words fail and the frustrations of having to avoid tenderness overcome self-control (see chapter 2). Masculinity is not just a matter of brute force. It requires a delicate balance of qualities. While most of the problems associated with masculinity are to do with the perception that some men are not adequate, the problem of excess is also a danger. There exists the risk of going beyond masculinity into barbarism, bestiality and animality. Paul Hoch notes:

12

Men at Play Indeed the very concept of civilization was defined in terms of the achievement—by men of a particular class and race—of a level of culture, civility and order which was most sharply defined by its opposite— barbarism—the inherently disorderly and sexually rapacious level of villains, brutes and beasts. The breakdown of law and order, it was repeatedly argued, would result in an upsurge of lust, raping, brutality and villainy of all kinds—man would sink down to the level of a beast. (1979: 46)

Challenging masculinity For the most part, conventional masculinity was presented in plays of the 1950s and 1960s as something to be emulated, but there are scripts which begin to problematise male behaviour and invoke a debate about what aspects of masculinity are personally desirable and socially beneficial, and about the dangers of excess. The Bastard Country presents two contrasting versions of the ideal man: one personified by a traditional Australian farmer and the other by a Greek immigrant. At the beginning of the play they appear to have many things in common with each other (and with much of what is advocated by The Guide to Virile Manhood). But the plot reveals that the inflexible and emotionally paralysed Australian is less of a real man than he seems, and that it is the newer Mediterranean version of manliness, incorporating the possibility of emotion and tenderness, which prevails at the end. Theatre does not only reflect, record and critique masculine behaviours, it can also work as part of a social laboratory experimenting with and disseminating new ways of thinking about and performing gender. Alma De Groen’s dystopic The Rivers of China from 1988 includes, as one of its two parallel plots, the story of a group of people living in an alternative version of Sydney in the 1980s in which women have developed a power called the Medusa look. This enables them to cause severe pain, or even death, by just looking at their male victim in a particular way. As a consequence, women have become the dominant sex and have started to behave toward men in the way that some men have traditionally behaved toward women. They have appropriated the top jobs, repressed their male counterparts who occupy the most menial positions in society, and have refashioned literary history so that, for example, male poets have been excluded from the canon. The women have taken on the attributes of masculinity in the 1980s, and the men have become conventionally feminised and downtrodden. The perceived loss of

Introduction

13

traditional masculinity is increasingly commonplace, and chapter 9 charts the changing image of men at sea, once a place of prowess in the open air with fishing rods where fathers and sons could share experiences of masculinity, but more recently where aging men are seen as adrift and vulnerable. Changing masculinity continues to be a topic of fascination for theatre as performances chart and influence its transitions. The musical Keating!, by Casey Bennetto, canvasses the changing masculinities of Australian politics.7 It presents the former prime minister as the new Australian man, a working-class boy who has transformed himself into a visionary international statesman. A repeated refrain in one of the major songs in the show has the onstage band calling out to Keating, “Who’s the man? You’re the man!” The show pits him against a series of antagonists, all of whom are examples of competing masculinities. In the 2006 production at Belvoir Street Theatre, Bob Hawke, from whom Keating wins the leadership of the Australian Labor Party, was portrayed by Terry Serio as an old-fashioned larrikin. John Hewson, leader of the Liberal Party and Keating’s opponent during the 1993 election, was shown in Casey Bennetto’s portrayal as a professional accountant who was largely asexual. A later leader of the Liberal Party, Alexander Downer, also played by Bennetto, was an image of aberrant masculinity as he vamped, pouted and flirted his way up the aisle of the theatre wearing a fish-net stocking (a garment which the real Downer ill-advisedly wore for a fundraising event), a black lacy corset and high heels. John Howard, Keating’s greatest opponent and prime minister after he defeated Keating in the 1996 election, was portrayed by Terry Serio as mobilising all the traditional values of 1950s Australian masculinity. He was given a song which captured in one succinct quatrain several strands of conventional, populist Australian manliness: I’m a man, And not a boy. When they go “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” I go “Oi, oi, oi!”

7

Keating! premiered in Melbourne in 2005 and was revived, in an expanded form directed by Neil Armfield, by Company B at Belvoir Street Theatre in November 2006.

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Men at Play

This observantly links Howard’s version of masculinity with a valorisation of mature adulthood, an obsession with sport, conformist behaviour, and aggressive Australian nationalism. Many of the plays we look at indicate that major shifts have taken place in the theatrical depiction of Australian masculinity over the past fifty years, and some seem to suggest that masculinity itself is fading as an important feature of the lives and identities of men (see chapter 9), but the character of Howard in Keating! is a reminder that residual versions can linger on, and successfully stage come-backs.

Chapter 1 “What’s a man to do?” The 1950s was a period in which masculinity was in transition, from the extreme sexual segregation and homosociality of the experience of war in the immediate past, to the sexual liberation and the rise of feminism which were to occur throughout the 1960s. It was also a time when masculinity was arguably more aggressive in its performance than at any subsequent period. Despite contention over what masculinity should be, there was also a widely recognised consensus at the time about what it meant, and therefore about what men could and could not do if they wanted to qualify for the status of the masculine. This chapter examines the features of masculinity as they appear in musical plays from that period, and discusses the uses to which these depictions of masculinity are put. Its aims are, in part, to think about the relationship between the scripts of the plays and the time in which they were first performed, and to ask questions about how they worked in relation to changing possibilities for the performance of gender. We examine three musicals from the middle of the twentieth century—Reedy River (Diamond 1970; 1989), The Sentimental Bloke (Brown, Arlen and Thomson 1977) and Lola Montez (Stannard, Benjamin and Burke 1958; 1999)—showing how they have staged gender differently in attempts to advocate social change. Musical masculinities The musical is an important genre of theatre from the point of view of conventional masculinity. On the one hand it is highly suspect, even more so than most theatre, and has been traditionally linked with homosexuality, most obviously through the flamboyant figures of the chorus boy and the show queen. John M. Clum has written about the camp qualities of musicals in performance, drawing attention to their “heightened theatricality, their exaggerated, often parodic presentation

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Men at Play

of gender codes, and their lyrical romantic fantasies” (1999: 6; see also Miller 1998). Stacy Wolf (2002) has made a complementary argument for a lesbian reading of the genre. On the other hand, the musicals presented the kind of theatre that was seen by the largest audiences, which were the most mainstream, and therefore apparently the most normal. The “heightened theatricality” of the performance style was acceptable to many people because that is how musicals were done, and thus the genre allowed ways of enacting gender that would have been impossible in many other contexts. It is the apparent safety and the wide popularity of the musical genre which made it a suitable way to intervene in social debates about both gender and politics. The suspect quality of musical theatre performance may be responsible for the frequency of the word virile in descriptions of these works. The word seems to have been used more freely in the 1950s and early 1960s (see Introduction) than it is today, and without any of the current bawdy double entendre. The word was used in the straightforward sense of ‘manly’, and virility was used as a synonym for ‘masculinity’. It is used with reference to these productions to describe both the force of the male chorus in Reedy River and the plain working men’s songs that they sing. It was picked up as a marketing tool for Lola Montez when the show was being toured around the country by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT), in surprising (to us) combination with the words g a y, Australian and musical. Reedy River and working masculinity The popular Australian musical play Reedy River by Dick Diamond, using traditional folk ballads, was first performed in Melbourne in 1953, then in Sydney, and revived repeatedly by the New Theatres throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Newcastle (see figure 1.1). It had many other regional productions, and at least two productions in London. A conservative estimate as early as 1969 reckoned that it had already been seen, exclusively in amateur productions, by over 500,000 people (“Reedy River Again!” 1969). The play, written for the New Theatre in Melbourne during the Cold War, is a clear example of theatre being used as an intervention in national political debates. It is a celebration of the lives and values

“What’s a man to do?”

17

of working men, and in particular the trade union movement. It was written in the aftermath of major political changes in Australia, with the election of a conservative government, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, in 1949 and its repeated attempts to outlaw the Communist Party. The play seems to emerge out of a combination of confidence and anxiety about these events, simultaneously celebrating and defending the history, achievements and ongoing relevance of the union movement. Reedy River can also be seen as deliberately linking the values of unionism with those of traditional Australian male bonding as two compatible versions of mateship, which could be an effective means of neutralising any charge in the growing Cold War atmosphere (parallel with those made against the left in the USA by Joseph McCarthy) that the nexus of communism with unionism and left-wing politics might be anti-Australian. The literary historian David Coad argues that this kind of linking of male mateship and trade unionism was already well established in Australia: Unlike Europe and the United States, the Australian unionism of the 1880s was well organized and effective as it built on a pre-existing pattern of male solidarity, mateship of the Outback. According to W.C. Spence, a union leader: ‘[Unionism] had in it that feeling of mateship which [the bushman] understood already’. (Coad 2002: 87)

The script was proudly partisan, and resistant to the goals of the conservative federal government at the time. The New Theatre was considered radical and was monitored by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). According to the journalist Gary Smith there are reports of official surveillance by ASIO at the Sydney season in the Redfern Town Hall in 1955: New Theatre enjoyed several years of postwar prosperity, until the insidious smell of McCarthyism filtered into Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald refused to run the company’s advertisements and stopped reviewing its shows. […] In the cold war climate, with the authorities aware of New Theatre’s past links with communist and leftwing groups, ASIO kept tabs on it. As Field Officer B.1 reported to his superiors in a document dated May 25, 1955 “the performance [of Reedy River in the working-class area of Redfern] was well attended by what appeared to be local residents […] They roundly applauded the performance particularly when class struggle and the formation of the Shearers’ Trade Union was portrayed. It was obvious the majority of the audience was conversant with the dialogue and songs”. (Smith 2002: 28)

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Men at Play

The oppositional political engagement of the play’s creators and audience coincided with a timely revival of interest in Australian folk traditions and popular culture. Ian Turner, in the introduction to the published script, makes the point that after World War II, the labour movement captured some of that radical nationalism which had flowed through The Bulletin, The Boomerang and The Worker, the papers most favoured by bush workers. One part of this was a new interest in bush ballads. Dick Diamond’s play was in part a product of that interest, but as well it gave an enormous impetus to the ballads. Bush music groups and folklore societies were formed in the wake of Reedy River, to collect and perform songs such as those in this play. (Turner 1970: viii)

Reedy River is set in a rural community soon after the historic shearers’ strike of 1891. Banjo Paterson’s poem “Clancy of the Overflow”, published in 1889, contrasted the lives of men enjoying the freedom of the bush and its “vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended” against that of the city dweller working in a “dingy little office” breathing “the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city”. As the poem suggests, the bush has popularly been seen as a place of authentic and unfettered Australian masculinity. It is where men have been seen as able to act more freely, less confined and constrained in their actions than their city-dwelling counterparts, and where interpersonal relationships, both those between men and those between man and woman, have been less distorted by artificial external pressures. The plot of the play is constructed around two narrative goals, both involving the central male character Joe Collins, who returns to Reedy River in the first scene after having been imprisoned for his part in the strike. One plot line involves Joe’s part as a Shearers’ Union man in establishing acceptable conditions for the shearers who are about to start work on the property of the local squatter, Brodie. The squatter is under pressure from other big property-holders not to recognise the Union, but Joe ultimately manoeuvres the situation to a point where Brodie is compelled to accept the shearers’ demands. The second plot line involves Joe’s reconciliation with his wife from whom he had split during the strike—they had disagreed about the extent of his activism, and his divided duty to the Union and to his family—and whom he has not seen since his release from prison. In this agricultural setting, in a romanticised version of Australia, masculinity is unproblematic. This is partly a function of its location

“What’s a man to do?”

19

in the past, at a time when an authentic Australian masculinity uncontaminated by the tensions, distortions and the international influences typical of twentieth-century life might be more easily imagined. There is no crisis of masculinity evident in the play’s action, and, even under intense personal, social or political pressure, there is no point where any male character is accused by another of being deficient in terms of gender. All the men, on both sides of the struggle, are accepted as men by their friends and opponents. This unquestioning acceptance of a normative image of masculinity is part of the play’s necessary political strategy. The political context of the 1950s required the male characters of Reedy River to play their masculinity unquestionably and patriotically straight. While these shearers are active in their opposition to the values and policies of the federal government, the play avoids introducing any features which could leave the unionists in any way exposed to attack as anything other than good and decent Australian men. Loyalty to the nation and gender norms were closely linked. As Lynne Segal notes, the 1950s was a period in which there was a conflation of perceived sexual immorality (which in practice usually meant homosexuality) with treason: This was a decade when, as Jonathan Dollimore has reminded us in his study of the fiction of the fifties, senior Law Lord Patrick Devlin explicitly associated ‘immorality’ with treason, demanding the suppression of ‘vice’ as inherently subversive. Associations of this kind were consolidated in 1951 with the defection of British diplomats Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union, and the concurrent McCarthy witch-hunt against Communists and homosexuals in the United States. There was a dramatic increase in police activity against male homosexuality in both Britain and North America. (Segal 1990: 17)

Under these conditions, the male characters in Reedy River are extremely constrained and have to appear absolutely conventional in their performance of gender. It is for this reason that the script and the traces of performance it has left offer an ideal site for examining a strictly normative portrayal of theatrical masculinity. The play represents a kind of gold standard of manliness for its time. The play itself and its author have some of the generalised features which can be associated with conventional Australian masculinity: for Raymond Bowers, reviewing the premiere, the show was “uniquely Australian […] comradely […] home-grown […] ambling [… and] casually charming”. According to Bowers, Dick Diamond, who was

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Men at Play

reputed to have tossed off the script over the course of three weekends, is “embarrassed about routine sentiment”, preferring “to get quickly and thankfully back to the real business of teamster language, shearer-griping, and squatter-baiting”. The songs are described by Bowers as “rather more manly […] than the ones [Australia] imports today”. Praised for lacking conventional theatrical slickness and bluff, it shows a world populated with “unpretentious shearers, squatters and barmaids” who demonstrate “the rouseabout carelessness of mind which at once makes them hold firm to their principles, to the point of walking out of the sheds, and defer their retaliation, to the point of running out of credit at the nearest bush pub”. It creates an egalitarian place where “audiences and actors can hobnob across the footlights” (Bowers 1953). For Dorothy Darlington, reviewing a 1969 revival in Sydney, the “spontaneous” writing results in a play which is “no carefully tended, imported hothouse bloom but a lusty indigenous plant springing from virgin soil and blossoming in free air”. The male chorus “had tremendous force and virility” (Darlington 1969). Bushmen The characteristics of idealised masculinity depicted in the action of Reedy River include, by implication, the necessity to be adult, white, English-speaking, hard-working and more or less working class, loyal to fellow workers and suspicious of strangers. Generalised comradeship is valued, signalled in part by the use of affectionate or teasing nicknames, but close friendships between men are not depicted. Physical contact is largely avoided, both in the stage directions and in visual records of performances, even where it might be expected. A television program broadcast in 1970 shows two male chorus songs from a production probably staged in Sydney in late 1969.1 One is a convivial drinking song, the other a political anthem about solidarity among working men. While the singing is strong and the singers animated, there is hardly any physical contact between the men (Australia—Last of Lands 1970). The heterosexuality of the characters is assumed and unquestioned, but they do not have to actively practise it and, apart from Joe, the 1

This production of Reedy River, directed by John Armstrong for the New Theatre at Darlinghurst in Sydney, opened on 1 November 1969.

“What’s a man to do?”

21

men are apparently unmarried. The play initially recognises an alternative form of masculinity in the idea of the man alone, an image which encompasses a combination of asexuality and celibacy. Not surprisingly, masculinity is associated with activities like smoking cigarettes (rollies, of course) and drinking beer. More unexpected is the positive value the play and the male characters place on books and reading and on discussions of politics, religion, economics and philosophy. The conventionalised inarticulacy of rural male characters is represented in sometimes laconic, awkward or halting dialogue, especially when they are in the company of women, but is compensated for by singing and playing music, which Diamond describes as “good virile songs” (1970: x), by telling yarns, and through the use of inventive banter and insult. The characters value the Australian notion of the “fair go” (40), but while passionate about their beliefs, they remain generally in control of their emotions, restrain the urge to use physical violence, and never cry. Masculinity is associated with strength but is demonstrated less through the accomplishment of arduous physical tasks than through the ability to resist and endure in the face of defeat; in the play the shearers’ strike has already been broken, but the men have not succumbed. Nevertheless, physical strength and the practice of manual labour are suggested by the rolling up of men’s sleeves to the elbow, a feature which is revealed through stage directions (39) and photos of early productions. There are no youngsters and no foreigners from non-Englishspeaking backgrounds, but there are some older figures: Old Bob, an apparently contented “rolling stone” (11) who is still active and on the move, and the Elderly Character, represented as a selector at the end of a long working life, who is now reaping the rewards of stability in terms of prosperity, relaxation and contentment; there is no suggestion that his age has left him inadequate as a man. Even the squatter Brodie, the major antagonist to the shearers, is represented as a man with a personal tradition of masculine hard work and adequacy, just trying to do his best, though he differentiates his masculinity from that of the shearers, implying that to work as a shearer would reduce him to the level of an Indigenous labourer: BRODIE: Best part of my life’s gone into this holding, and my father’s before mine. But what’s a man to do? Shear the sheep himself? Work like a blackfeller on his own property? (31)

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Men at Play

Brodie can even laugh good-humouredly when Joe is open about his in-principle objections to working alongside non-Union labour. If he has a flaw as a man it is, as with many of the characters, an excess of masculinity, hardening into inhumane, stony strength. When opposed “he’s hard. Hard as granite, and ruthless” (29). Moving out In this world the action almost all takes place out of doors in open space coded as masculine. The ultimate image of the inside is gaol, which represents a loss of masculine freedom. Joe’s past imprisonment for Shearers’ Union activity is an extreme sacrifice he has made for the cause, at the possible expense of his own gender status. The men dislike interiors, even crowded pubs: THOMO: [entering from bar] All those bush pubs are the same— no brass rail and no elbow room. No immensities at all. If yer drink inside it’s so crowded yer likely ter pick up yer glass and shove it into some other bloke’s mouth. (14)

The first scene is set completely out in the open, away from any sign of buildings, and all subsequent scenes are set outside the shearing shed and the pub except for act 3, scene 1 which is inside the schoolhouse. This is an odd scene which adds relatively little to the plot development. Instead it explores, through the comical depiction of a “social” (11), a very tentative coming together of masculine and feminine in the context of a community song and dance, focusing especially on how far the men are prepared to go and what they are not going to give up to achieve accommodation with wives and families. This light-hearted conflict between genders is easily resolved in favour of the men; the real debate within the play is about variant forms of masculinity: that of the man alone, the man among men and the man and wife. The play makes a move away from man alone (Joe travelling alone at the start, Joe in gaol before the play begins) through the man among men (Joe and his Union mates), and (back) to the situation of a man and his wife (the re-establishment of the marriage between Joe and Mary, and the move back home to the selection). Along the way, space becomes gendered: in Joe’s absence Mary has been able to keep the house in order, but the land has got out of control with the fencing down and the grass knee high (27).

“What’s a man to do?”

23

The picture of masculinity in this play is very consistent, and almost all the men adhere to it closely. In contrast, the female characters, though fewer in number, display a much wider range of gender possibilities than the male characters, who are almost indistinguishable in their behaviour. But the picture of masculinity is not unproblematic, and there is a sense that some adjustment is going to have to be made to this almost exclusively male world if the possibility of marriage, in the form of domesticated heterosexual stability, is to become a reality. Settling down Within the narrow constraints of this regime of gender, what is a man to do? What are the problems and the options in terms of the enactment of masculinity? Reedy River is a narrative of male experience which explores appropriate new ways of being a man in the changing post-war context. The play begins with the hero uncertain about his direction or the reason he has returned to Reedy River where his estranged wife still lives: “When a man doesn’t know where he’s going, maybe there isn’t much else he can do” (8), but he nevertheless recognises that “a man needs a corner in life to call his own” (16). It is relatively easy for Joe to make the first stage of the transition, from being a man alone to a man among men, as he rejoins the shearers after his stint in prison. He has more difficulties about returning to his responsibilities and his wife. In the past, shown in a flashback sequence, Mary has demanded of him, “I’m only asking what every woman has the right to ask—that her husband be around to look after her when she has her baby”—and at that point he can only reply, “You’re the best wife in the world, but I reckon I don’t amount to much of a husband” (28). The trajectory of the play ultimately shows Joe how to be both a good husband and a good man.2 Joe needs to resolve the conflicting versions of masculinity, claiming that his solidarity with the men in the Shearers’ Union and 2

The first production of Reedy River anticipates by seven years a parallel treatment of the same situation in the film The Magnificent Seven (1960), where the youngest of the gunfighters (Chico, played by Horst Buchholz) decides at the end, after a debate which runs through the entire movie about traditional and new roles for men, to relinquish the man-among-men life and instead settle down in the village to marry the woman he has fallen in love with.

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his duties as a husband are compatible: “[…] you know what we’re fighting for. It’s for you and a million wives like you—and their kids—and the right to three meals a day and a decent life”, and the play ultimately demonstrates that this is possible. His last line, his task accomplished and the Union’s fight won, is “And now, Mary, we’re going home” (44). Joe is portrayed as the most successfully masculine of the men. As the casting notes make clear, he combines strength and decency with maturity (xi) and intelligence to produce a happy resolution to the conflict. He could have provided the model for Russel Ward’s generic description of the men of the Australian outback a few years later, characterised by “adaptability, toughness, endurance, activity and loyalty to one’s fellows” (Ward 1958: 81). The plot of the play can be seen as a series of tests which Joe has to pass to confirm his status as a man. His personal problems and self-doubts, combined with his lack of power after the suppression of the strike, are hurdles to be overcome. At the end of the play he has passed all these tests and comes as close as theatrically possible to the achievement of manliness. The play concludes at this point, partly because unquestionable manliness on stage is of little dramatic interest. His achievement is to have integrated the various demands of mateship and union activism with marriage and domesticity within a coherent (though constrained) model of Australian masculinity. Sentimental masculinity The shift from the itinerant masculinities of the man alone and the man among men to the more difficult masculinity of stable domestic life within marriage was an ongoing problem, captured in the oxymoronic title of the 1961 Australian musical by Nancy Brown, Albert Arlen and Lloyd Thomson, The Sentimental Bloke, based on the 1915 verse novel entitled Songs of a Sentimental Bloke by C.J. Dennis (see figure 1.2). It was first produced at the Albert Hall in Canberra in 1961, directed by the co-author Nancy Brown. It was given its first professional staging later the same year at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne, directed by John Young in a production by J.C. Williamson’s. This production was toured to Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland the next year. It has had many subsequent professional and amateur productions, the most recent being in Adelaide in 2005.

“What’s a man to do?”

25

The title of the musical creates a tension between Australian masculinity and romantic sentimentality. This tension provides the narrative drive for the main character who negotiates his way between the obligations of homosocial mateship and the entanglements of heterosexual romance. At the start of the play, Bill is an ordinary man among men, “a rough sorter bloke wivout any eddication, or perlite ways […]—not much chop at all” (Brown, Arlen and Thomson 1977: 28–29). He is an orphan who has no idea who his parents were and has survived in the harsh world of Melbourne’s Spadger’s Lane by the use of his fists and with the support of his male mates, especially Ginger Mick. His nickname is Billy the Kid, and he is known as the hardest hitter in the neighbourhood (40). However, even at his first entrance he is dissatisfied with his current situation: he is unemployed, having just lost his job as the result of a brawl with the foreman, and he has been snubbed by a young woman, Doreen, to whom he seems socially unworthy. She refuses even to speak to him because they have not been introduced. His sentimental side is expressed in the opening scene where he sings awkwardly about the “springtime craze” of falling in love. There’s little breezes stirrin’ in the leaves An’ sparrers chirpin’ ’igh the ole day long; An’ on the air a gay, sweet music breaves A bonzer song, a liltin’ sorter choon That some’ow seems like somethin’ that I ’eard In ’appy dreams. (8)

Bill’s quest is to find a way of enacting masculinity which will allow him to be a sentimental lover and responsible husband without becoming tame and effeminate. This path lies somewhere between two extreme cases—the careless cynicism of his mate Ginger and the successful womanising of Horace Smithers, the refined, smoothtalking and superficially gentlemanly Under Sales Manager at the pickle factory where most of the female characters work. When Bill is finally introduced to Doreen, Ginger describes him in terms of the kind of masculinity which is appropriate for the life Bill is contemplating—and the kind that he imagines Doreen is interested in: “Bill ’ere, as you can see, is a quiet refined sorter feller. Wouldn’t touch a drop or upset the cops, or go out wiv bad wimmin” (13). The description is obviously inaccurate, and when Bill gets to know Doreen a little better he offers to “give up fighting and swearin’ an’

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Men at Play

the grog’ an’ everything for you”. He vows, “I’ll start to be something fine an’ respectable for your sake—cross me heart” (29). Doreen insists at first on a gentle form of masculinity. When Bill threatens violence towards Smithers, she is revolted by Bill’s “brutal, back-alley stuff” (42) and she briefly develops an affection for the rival suitor. However, she quickly comes back to Bill and his sentimental ways, finding him a “dear, funny boy” (51). Bill gets the upper hand over Smithers but not by knocking him down in a fight, man to man; instead he takes on a paternal role and infantilises his rival, putting him over his knee in public and spanking him (53–54). The play’s tensions are resolved, significantly, by a street brawl where Bill is ambushed by accomplices of Smithers. Despite overwhelming odds, Bill and Ginger triumph over their assailants. Doreen realises that Bill is not to blame for the violence, and she is impressed by his prowess. He offers to mend his ways but asks Doreen, “Don’t try an’ change me too quick, will you?” She replies that she “wouldn’t want to change you in any way, ever” (72). The question of what kind of husband and father Bill will make is swept aside by the musical’s ending, based on the sentimentality of a happy wedding and the acknowledgement of true love which has taught Bill that happiness is simply about “givin’ and wantin’ to give, not takin’ and wantin’ to take” (75–76). It is a work which acknowledges the tensions in Australian masculinity between the competing attractions of the rugged, solitary manly life and the potentially tame and less masculine role of the domestic breadwinner and wage slave. The ending advocates the latter path, acknowledging the impossibility, for its hero at least, of remaining single, but it evades a convincing description of a way of sustaining married life which will continue to suit both Bill and Doreen after the wedding is over. It may not have been able to provide an answer, but it at least drew attention to a problem that was to preoccupy many Australians for years into the future. Lola Montez, or masculinity endangered In the 1958 Australian musical Lola Montez, by Peter Stannard, Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke, the political issues are again less prominent than in Reedy River and, with less at stake, the concept of masculinity can be freed up, played with, and in this case, to a considerable extent, queered (see figure 1.3). The script acknowledges

“What’s a man to do?”

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a wider range of masculine types and behaviours than was possible in Reedy River or The Sentimental Bloke. This was again a very popular work which is still remembered today by many people, even though its last professional performance in Australia, by the AETT, was in 1958. It had a subsequent production in Canberra in 1988. The title character is the famous nineteenth-century European performer and courtesan who had been the mistress of Ludwig II of Bavaria. The plot is based around a historical incident, while Lola was on tour in Ballarat (then spelled Ballaarat), where she publicly horsewhipped the editor of the local newspaper for defaming her in print. However, despite the title, Lola is not the main role. The musical is a romance between a young couple, an Irish lad, Daniel, who has been wounded in the Crimean War, and the object of his affections, Jane, an Australian nurse who nursed him back to health and has subsequently returned to Ballaarat. At the start of the musical, Daniel arrives in the town in search of the woman who has saved his life. Almost immediately after finding and proposing to Jane he discovers a gold nugget which enables him seriously to contemplate the practicalities of married life. Lola’s arrival is not an enabling device for the romantic plot; on the contrary, she is the obstacle in the path of true love, and one who comes darkly close to wrecking Daniel and Jane’s relationship, and, by extension, the domestic stability of the wider society. Daniel is a much more vulnerable figure in terms of gender than Bill in The Sentimental Bloke or any character in Reedy River. He is portrayed as immature. The stage directions specify that, although he is twenty-two, he should look even younger. Daniel’s task is to grow up and establish himself in terms of masculinity and patriarchal authority; this is certainly what happens by the end of the musical, but the journey takes some queer twists and turns along the way. Ballaarat is presented as a representative Australian masculine monoculture, a rough, tough working men’s town. The local characters are almost exclusively Anglophone and, though there are said to be many Irish diggers, the goldminers who appear on stage seem to be Australian. The arrival of Lola brings with it a proliferation of different voices. She herself is posing as Spanish, her maids, Gisela and Ilsa, have thick German accents, and her manager, Sam Vanderberg, is an American.

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The action of the plot neatly illustrates the seriousness of the anxieties voiced by the upright and moralistic townswomen of Ballaarat when they demonstrate publicly against the arrival of the outsiders. Anxious about the disruption to their domestic arrangements by the European intruder, they protest in the street with placards bearing slogans such as “Homes before Harlotry” and “Bavarians Go Home” (Stannard, Benjamin and Burke c. 1958: act 2, scene 1). The Australian men are surprisingly welcoming of this particular outsider coming into their midst, delegating to the women the normally male task of expressing the national xenophobia. Whereas the men in Reedy River behave impeccably in gender terms, the presence of Lola in Ballaarat has the effect of queering the male characters. Two readings are possible here. On one level, the eroticising presence of Lola in the town seems to work as some kind of guarantee of heterosexuality. One of the first commands made in Lola’s name, by one of her maids, is “Let there be men” (Stannard, Benjamin and Burke 1958: 16), and, as long as Lola is around, there are men. The heterosexual desire she provokes provides a safety net which allows room for greater freedom in the performance of gender by the men. Thus photos of the 1958 AETT production reveal uses of the male body which are unthinkable in the context of the unionist struggle of the world of the shearers. All the potentially oxymoronic references of the marketing tag for the production, “A gay […] virile Australian musical”, are clearly borne out in the performances where, because they are real men they can afford to camp it up. Half-naked male bodies are put on eroticised and feminised display, and, under Lola’s influence, plain Australian masculine manners are corrupted into excessive European politesse. The physical reticence of the Australian male is transformed into sensational enactments of corporeal extroversion, extension, flexibility and ostentation as the men celebrate the arrival of Lola in town, and conventional romantic affection is parodied in a same-sex mock coupling with a male character playing the woman’s part. In this reading, Lola’s presence allows the men to experiment with gender, without seriously endangering their reputation as heterosexuals. Their virility is taken for granted, but its limits are expanded and it is freed up under the “gay” influence of the unrestrained, exuberant and fun-loving entertainer, and by the nature of the musical genre itself.

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Female masculinity A more dangerous reading would see Lola as really queering the sexuality of the male world of Ballaarat. Read in this way, Lola herself is a queer figure, combining strong elements of both feminine and masculine attributes. In Sedgwick’s terms, she is extremely gender-y, scoring high on the scales of both femininity and masculinity (1995: 15–16). She is the object of male desire, and she uses femininity to make her mark. But at the same time she displays gender characteristics which, in the 1950s, were more often associated with men. She is active and dynamic, outspoken, sexually predatory, and is on the move. She stands up for herself, takes control, and is clearly dominant over her manager. Indisputably a woman, she is also more of a man than the male characters. The image of the spider, which is the theme of Lola’s big dance number, is appropriately ambivalent—spiders being coded female but in a predatory and unfeminine way. The threat that she presents to the males is made physically explicit in her onstage performance at the end of act 1, where she is discovered spread-eagled on a web, dressed in “a skintight costume running to six extra arms attached by cords to her own”. At the conclusion of this routine, Daniel, overwhelmed, leaps onto the stage from the box where he has been watching the dance, presents Lola with his newly discovered gold nugget, and in response she embraces him “in her eight arms” (33). The climax of the role comes later in the show when she takes the initiative after being insulted by the editor of the Ballaarat Times and publicly horsewhips him in the street. Her mastery of the whip, an obvious phallic symbol, is suggestive of masculine gender performance. In this second reading, based on Lola’s gender ambivalence and her ability to queer the world around her, there is no longer any gender safety net. Her arrival in Ballaarat is shown to disrupt the established norms of behaviour, forcing the respectable women out into the streets to demonstrate against her, and throwing the male characters into a state of somatic hyper-excitement which exposes the gender instability underlying their normal veneer of restrained masculinity. Lola’s performance in Ballaarat, in this reading, is a moment of dangerous and unlicensed carnivalesque inversion and excess which serves to expose already-present queer possibilities that are normally masked by conventional gender behaviour.

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These two readings of Lola’s role are not mutually exclusive. If the show is to work subversively in terms of a 1950s model of gender, then it is probably the former reading that will be evident for most of the performance, lulling the audience into a sense of security where they can accept images of butch men camping it up in normally unacceptable ways. But the second reading, which sees a genuinely queer aspect in masculinity, underlies the whole show and erupts at the show’s biggest theatrical moments. The potential contradictions in the marketing tag capture a crucial problem for the Australian theatrical entertainment industry at the time. Virility and masculinity were important ideals for Australian society which the theatre would need to stage if it were to relate meaningfully to the social world of its audience. On the other hand, Australian masculinity was not in itself inherently theatrical, and was, under normal circumstances, incompatible with the “gay” flamboyance of the musical. If the stereotypical Australian man was seen as physically restrained, emotionally controlled and self-effacingly laconic, this presents a problem for the theatre of popular entertainment which normally requires the opposite of these qualities. This is a problem that all three stage works sought to address, each of them influenced by their own social and political agenda and the kind of audience their creators presumably had in mind. Reedy River sidestepped it by emphasising the passions of political struggle and highlighting group solidarity. The Sentimental Bloke made use of the force of emerging heterosexual desire to bring the Australian male out of his inexpressive shell. In Lola Montez, it is the galvanising influence of Lola that generates and unlocks the potential for theatrical flair in Australian manhood. Musical challenges to masculinity Reedy River has to play masculinity absolutely straight because its task is to ensure that the slippage from unionist to communist to queer is resisted, and the play works hard to guarantee that there is nothing sexually suspect about the shearers. This involves a valorisation of the masculine as well as its strict and narrow definition. In the world it depicts, the play has to accept and promote this kind of dominant manliness without question, co-opting established ideas about gender as a tactic for advancing the rights of working men. One cost of this is

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a restriction of the ways men could perform masculinity in their own bodies and in their relationships with (the bodies of) other men. It could be read as an acquiescence to the Menzies government’s promotion of the suburban family, the separation of public and private life, and the increasing differentiation of male and female roles within those areas. The Sentimental Bloke repeats the same motifs but in the mode of light comedy where the struggle is made to look easier and the real problems are largely ignored; nevertheless, the dominant form of the masculine can be affectionately subjected to greater criticism and satire. Lola Montez on the other hand represents a different approach, neither tacitly confirming nor overtly resisting the conventional image of Australian masculinity. Using the destabilising influence of Lola, the show audaciously permits a freer play of gender—unusual in terms of 1950s conformity—which subversively allows alternative images of gender behaviour to be explored. The character of Lola is a carnivalesque figure, tentatively opening up the repressed and boring world of Ballaarat, and Australia, to emergent and more exciting possibilities for living and performing gender and sexuality.

Figure 1.1 Reedy River

A scene from the premiere production of Dick Diamond’s Reedy River, directed by Eric Grayson at Melbourne New Theatre, March 1953. (Reproduced by courtesy of the New Theatre and the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne).

Figure 1.2 The Sentimental Bloke

A scene from The Sentimental Bloke by Nancy Brown, Albert Arlen and Lloyd Thomson, probably from the original J.C. Williamson production at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, in November 1961. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.)

Figure 1.3 Lola Montez

Mary Preston (centre) in the title role of Lola Montez by Peter Stannard, Peter Benjamin and Alan Burke, produced by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, 1958. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the National Library of Australia.)

Chapter 2 Fists, boots and blues In his lectures on The Making of the Australian Theatre, the inaugural director of the AETT, Hugh Hunt, lapsed uncharacteristically into the local vernacular in declaring his frustration with the state of Australian playwriting: Conflict and emotions are at the heart of all drama, but conflict can only be expressed by articulate people. When realism descends to the inhabitants of the backyard, conflict has to be couched in monosyllables and emotions have to take the form of physical violence. It is difficult to think of any Australian play which does not end up with a ‘blue’. Passionate expression almost inevitably takes the form of fists and boots in a drama which cannot make full use of language. (Hunt 1960: 17)

Hunt shared with Australian dramatists of the 1950s a conviction that emotional conflict was the key to effective drama, but he expected that conflict to be articulated in eloquent language. A failure to express emotion through language may also be regarded as a masculine character trait, in which the force of emotion is channelled instead into acts of physical violence. Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1957) epitomises Hunt’s observation that physical violence substituted for eloquent expression in Australian theatre. Yet, in looking closely at stage directions in the play script and actual footage from productions, we can see how such acts as the “blue” between Roo and Barney or Roo’s smashing of the doll were occasions that were not simply where language gave way to inarticulate violence, but where male performers also engaged new techniques of realist acting for expressing emotion. Our focus in this chapter shifts from musical theatre to realist plays. We begin by considering an articulation of masculinity and nationality through the concept of the stereotype which informed the production and reception of Australian theatre in the 1950s and 1960s. We then analyse some scenes of violent action scripted for male actors

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in the realist plays first staged at this time, including Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart (1958), John Hepworth’s The Beast in View (1961) and Ru Pullan’s Bird with a Medal (1961). Our analyses reveal how theatre came to be used in Australia as a kind of laboratory for experiments in performing the masculinity of the national character. These were dramaturgical experiments in which playwrights varied the mix of actions and words in attempts at scripting characterisations resonant with national preconceptions about Australian men. The chapter may be read as a case study in a broader field of research on acting, emotion and gender (Tait 2002), although our approach to articulating the emotional aspect of theatrical sources—play scripts, prompt copies, production photographs, film footage and so on—derives its understanding of emotion from firsthand respondents such as Hunt, who found the theatrical expression of emotion a particular problem in productions of Australian plays. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Debra Oswald’s Gary’s House (1996), a more recent play which critically re-dramatises the emotional inarticulacy of an Australian man. The Australian character as masculine stereotype The life and character of the nation were topics of lively discussion in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. A raft of publications contributed to these discussions, including A.A. Phillips’ T h e Australian Tradition (1958), Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), J.D. Pringle’s Australian Accent (1958), Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960), Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), and Peter Coleman’s anthology Australian Civilization: A Symposium (1962). A notable feature of these books is their rehearsal of the character traits of the typical Australian, even if this was often undertaken in order to reveal the national character as a familiar yet inaccurate caricature. Although not the most well known, here is one such rehearsal of the national character, presented with some justification of its plausibility: There is a common and well preserved belief that the people who make up any particular nation have certain typical characteristics that arise by virtue of their national background, their cultural tradition, conditions of life and, very often, their biological heritage. These beliefs about national characteristics are seldom valid for the majority of the population and they therefore represent only stereotypes. In Australia these stereotypes are given more than usual

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Men at Play plausibility in that most Australians are in greater agreement about their own national characteristics than are people of other nations. What image is conjured up by the phrase ‘a typical Australian’? The popular image is that of a man of 30–40 years of age, dressed indifferently, speaking with an unmistakable Australian accent, bearing himself with a casual but confident air, friendly and wearing an easy-going expression, but betraying a ready propensity to become aroused by any attempt to dragoon him or to invade his rights to self-determination. His occupation and class are vague as he could equally well be urban or rural, skilled tradesman or whitecollar worker—it matters little as he is quite adaptable from one to the other. (Taft 1962: 191)

Whereas literary critic A.A. Phillips and historian Russel Ward had imagined the national character to be a myth or a legend with a difficult-to-determine and debatable relation to the nation’s history, the concept of the stereotype, as developed within social psychology and introduced to Australia by psychologist Ronald Taft, proffered a more precise method for investigating the social actuality of widely held beliefs about the national characteristics of the Australian people. Nevertheless, following the lead of Phillips and Ward, Taft proceeded to elaborate the masculine traits of the national character in familiar terms: his rural and working-class derivation and his anti-authoritarian stance; his emphasis on toughness and suffering rather than skill, vision, or success; his investment in mateship and an “exaggerated masculinity” (Taft 1962: 195). In the same volume, writer and critic Max Harris wrote of “the masculinity of Australian life” in an essay addressing the “Morals and manners” of the nation in which he accounted for a relation between national character and artistic expression in explicitly gendered terms. According to Harris, the Australian emphasis on “practical materialism”, on the pursuit of “practical unimaginative activity” and on a capacity to improvise and make-do, meant that “social life, manners, imagination, and the arts are bred into the culture later on (if they are bred into it at all” (Harris 1962: 60). Harris regarded this “practical materialism” as “an inborn interest in the male Australian”. On the other hand, he regarded Australian women as “very little individualised from their British counterparts” (62). It is as if for Harris, as for other writers at the time, Australianness is itself gendered masculine. Theatre played a role in these discussions about national character. Commentators and critics saw in the theatre of the late 1950s some of

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the traits of the national character that were being described and debated at the time. Taft noted how: the traditional myth is concerned mainly with masculine behaviour, but it has a place for two types of women, both typified by the half-prostitute, halfmother barmaids of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. (1962: 195)

And Harris recalled Alf from Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year saying, “I’m a bloody Australian. That’s good enough for me”, in order to demonstrate how, in secular Australia, “it is more realistic to essay the moral ideal of being a good national than a bad saint” (1962: 50; see Seymour 1961: 26; also chapter 8). The discussions about national character also provided a framework in which scholarship on Australian drama emerged. Peter Fitzpatrick (1979) and Dennis Carroll (1985), for instance, both cite Russel Ward’s more famous description of the typical Australian at the outset of their books, as does Leslie Rees (1973) in concluding his history of Australian theatre (see Introduction). In each case, an appeal is made to Ward’s synthesis of character traits as a yardstick with which to measure the Australian characters written by playwrights. P.H. Davison’s essay “Three Australian plays: national myths under criticism” (1963) and H.G. Kippax’s essay “Australian drama since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” (1964) both offered detailed, sustained, and explicit commentary on nationality and masculinity in their analyses of The Doll, The Shifting Heart and The One Day of the Year. In both essays, the discussion focuses almost exclusively on the male characters and their relations, troubled as they are in each play by differences of gender, ethnicity and generation. While Kippax offers a more sustained discussion of the plays’ literary nationalism, the introductory paragraphs of Davison’s article are indicative of the concerns with Australian masculinity in both articles: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The Shifting Heart and The One Day of the Year all say something about Australia and they say it well enough to have attracted attention outside Australia. These plays criticise aspects of contemporary Australian life and re-examine a number of Australian myths. Beynon, concerned with the relations of New and Old Australians and the supposed inherent superiority of the latter, says what he has to say, clearly, determinedly, and unsubtly. […] Seymour, in his dramatisation of the attitudes of old and young to Anzac Day, strips away the illusions of father and son in such a manner that the play ends, not with the bang we are earlier led to expect, but with a whimper of resignation. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll reveals, beneath its simple story, an awareness of the contemporary

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Men at Play significance of the legendary prowess, strength, masculinity, and exclusiveness of the Australian bushman. (Davison 1963; reprinted in Holloway 1987: 203)

Beyond their recognition of the playwrights’ contribution to the discussion on national character, Davison and Kippax both aimed at critically assessing the dramatic form of these new Australian plays and their effectiveness in the theatre. Their articles are, in fact, highly critical and urge Australian playwrights to learn from the shortcomings of their plays and to write ever more satisfyingly coherent, dramatically convincing and realistically Australian drama. Subsequent dramatic criticism in Australia differed in critical approach. Margaret Williams (1972, 1977), for instance, would dispense with the criteria of realism and the well-made play and take up the concept of stereotype in developing a response to the plays of the so-called new wave. At one time, to describe a character as stereotyped would imply criticism of the playwright for failing to develop a character with realistic depth. Criticism in these terms was directed at the new wave playwrights by critics such as A.A. Phillips who claimed that “the adoption of stereotyping […] usually shuts a dramatist off from the greatest achievement within the character” (1973; reprinted in Holloway 1987: 337). But in Williams’s writings, reflecting in part her research into the stock characters of nineteenth-century melodrama in Australia, the stereotype was re-evaluated as a critical term indicative of the social critique at work in theatre. Indeed, what became valued in the plays of the new wave was not their concordance with aesthetic standards of dramatic construction or theatrical experience, in the way, for example, that The Doll was held up as a model of the well-made play. Rather, what Williams and other critics writing in the 1970s valued in Australian plays was an effective application of theatrical conventions and vernacular language within a project of social analysis and critique invested in and troubled by the masculinity of the national character. Writing about Jack Hibberd’s White with Wire Wheels (1970) and Alex Buzo’s The Front Room Boys (1970), Williams argued that: the stereotype is not simply a satirical cartoon, or even a levelling device which reduces the characters to conforming anonymity; it becomes a defensive shell, a protective ‘front’ to cover insecurity and limited awareness, and it springs a deadly trap, locking its victims into their adopted roles through the very ritual patterns that seemed to afford security. It is surely a

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dramatic exploitation of stereotype which grows out of this most conforming of societies, where the pressure to act the universally accepted image is peculiarly strong, and where its levelling and deadening effect is most clearly seen in the repetitious evasions of the vernacular. (Williams 1972; reprinted in Holloway 1987: 329–330)

Such an analysis deployed not only a dramaturgical conception of the stereotype as a recognisable stock character, but a psycho-social conception of the stereotype as an ideological formation that stands in a determining relation to social identity and behaviour. In a similar way, Peter Fitzpatrick’s (1979) interest in the stereotypes of the bushman and the ocker was indicative of a concern with the social relations of Australian plays, with the way theatre models a relation between ideal character types and the actuality of living or failing to live up to them. In the work of both Williams and Fitzpatrick, there is an explicit interest in investigating how Australian plays, particularly those of the new wave but also those from the earlier realist phase, expose the psycho-social dynamics of Australian masculinity to critique. National inarticulacy as acting style One of the recognised traits of the national character was inarticulacy. “He is usually taciturn, rather than talkative”, wrote Russel Ward in his oft-quoted account of the typical Australian at the outset of The Australian Legend (1958: 1). Or as Brian Fitzpatrick wrote in 1956: [The] Australian approach to articulation is best indicated by a generalisation: utterance is better not done at all; but, if it is done, when it is done, it were well it were done slowly and flatly and expressionlessly, to betoken that the subject, any subject, is hardly worth talking about. (Quoted in Fitzpatrick 1979: 10)

For Phillips, this national tendency towards inarticulacy set a challenge for the arts and arts policy. “A country cannot achieve nationhood until it has achieved articulacy”, he asserted in The Australian Tradition (1958: 133). The task of national articulation presented a particular challenge for Australian playwrights and theatre critics. “In the disinclination of that stereotype of the Australian male to speak”, wrote Peter Fitzpatrick, “there are very considerable problems for the playwright who would put him on stage” (1979: 10). However, we note that these “considerable problems” assume a classical conception of theatre as a genre of imaginative talk, a theatre

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in which linguistic eloquence is the key to emotional expression and theatrical success. It is such a conception of theatre in which linguistic articulation is pivotal to the theatricalisation of emotion that underscored Hunt’s frustration with backyard realism, with the recourse to “fists and boots in a drama that cannot make full use of language” (1960: 17). Hunt’s frustration with the backyard realism of Australian theatre in the 1950s, with its dramatic conflicts “couched in monosyllables” and expressed in “physical violence” (17), thus articulated a linguistic distinction of national significance. Hunt was an Englishman, a man of the theatre, with a taste for the eloquent language of the classical repertoire. Hunt directed productions of Euripides’ Medea, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Hamlet, and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in his time as director of the AETT. Striking a clear contrast with the linguistic eloquence of British theatre, Australian-born theatre director Wal Cherry described Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as a play of “the inarticulate people” in which “actions speak louder than words” and “the inarticulate nature turns to violence, as it must” (Cherry 1956; reprinted in Holloway 1987: 186–187). He quotes Lawler as saying “These people feel emotions which are too deep for their expression” and diagnoses that “a major part of the tension of the play arises from the words which are not spoken, words which are expressed finally in action so tremendous that Roo’s life and Olive’s life are shattered beyond repair” (187). In acknowledging Lawler’s commitment to Australian realism, Cherry sought to recognise how violent action may, in some qualified way, substitute for linguistic eloquence as a means of emotional expression: Roo and Olive […] can never express their status, because they have no words of their own—only feelings too deep for expression and everyday words, whose roots do not twine deeply in their hearts. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll actions speak louder than words. The play is dominated by a sense of energy; energy suppressed or lost or dissipated. So much of the movement is carried by the fight on the canefields, the tremendous strength of Roo, the fight in the parlour, the vicious smashing of the dolls. But the commentary on this beautifully conceived movement lacks the finality, the deep penetration, which marks a great play. (Cherry 1956; reprinted in Holloway 1987: 187)

Tom O’Regan, a scholar of Australian television and film, recognised the significance of physical action as emotional expression

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in The Doll by suggesting a connection between Lawler’s play and method acting: The Doll was created by an actor. It is an actor’s play. A method actor’s play. If its dialogue emphasises seeing and being seen, its stage directions indicate a level of gesturality, a dimension of hystericisation, an excess of the body of the actor—which is more familiar within method acting. (1987: n.p.)

O’Regan’s suggestion is that method acting, a realist style associated with the work of Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio in New York, may have become known to Lawler in Australia through the films of Elia Kazan such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954). Unlike acting in the British classical tradition, the Method did not seek to express a character’s emotion primarily through the eloquent articulation of poetic language. On the contrary, inarticulacy—or, rather, an ineloquent way of under-performing the articulation of words and emphasising, instead, the paralinguistic aspects of utterance—became something of a hallmark of the style for male method actors on screen, as the performances of Marlon Brando and James Dean attest. The ineloquent masculinity that method acting lent to the performances of American and British actors in the 1950s and 1960s has been observed by others (Braudy 1996; Bracewell 1998). Film historian Leo Braudy describes how performances like Brando’s in On the Waterfront and Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause (1956) created a “theatricalized masculinity […] that demands an audience just as often inside the film as outside—yet is simultaneously crippled and manipulated by it” (1996: 292). The American actor Hayes Gordon introduced method acting to Australian actors in Sydney in 1958 at what became the Ensemble Theatre (Parsons 1995: 247; Lewington 2005). On the invitation to Gordon’s first production, which featured selections from the works of Tennessee Williams, one of the actors apparently wrote: “We haven’t a name yet. Yes, we admit to training—Strasbergian, Stanislavskian, Meisnerian, Gordonian etc and we emphasise what might be referred to as the ‘ensemble’ values in production” (quoted in “Company History” 2006). The slightly defensive tone of this admission may be responding to an attitude then prevalent that training betrayed a deficit of natural talent. Australian actors Michael Duffield and Dennis Miller of the Union Theatre Repertory Company (UTRC) (later the Melbourne Theatre Company), then under the directorship of Englishman John Sumner, spoke with hearty

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scepticism of the “Method” in a television broadcast in 1963 (In Vision 1963). As an actor with the UTRC, Ray Lawler performed the role of Barney in Sumner’s premiere production of The Doll, transferring to Sydney after opening in Melbourne in 1955, and then to seasons in London and New York under the auspices of the AETT. While it is unlikely that Lawler ever had an opportunity to train in method acting, it is plausible that an aspect of method acting evident in Kazan’s films—namely, the significance of physical action for expressing the emotions of male characters—informed the scripting of stage action in The Doll. “Blokes of the she’ll-be-right persuasion” Enactments of masculine violence abound in the realist plays of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Playwrights and performers used the emotionally charged methods of realist acting to generate moments of climax, in accordance with otherwise classically derived conceptions of dramatic form which, in particular, applauded playwrights who provided for a strong second-act curtain. The prominence of these moments of climactic violence for audiences at the time is evident in a Cinesound newsreel from 1957 which announced the transfer of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll to London (“Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” 1957a).1 The newsreel’s producer chose to film the fight between Barney and Roo at the end of act 2 as the scene with which to metonymically represent the whole play. “Barney and Roo, for sixteen years, journeyed south from the cane-cutting fields of Queensland and each year they give their girls a kewpie doll”, explains the newsreel announcer as Barney charges at Roo. Roo swings a stage punch at Barney, grapples him by the throat and wrestles him down onto the table. Olive rushes in, yelling “Stop it, Roo, stop it!”, followed by Emma (“Pair of flamin’ larrikins!”), Bubba and Pearl. Olive breaks up the fight, but the scene is set for accusation, admission and climactic revelation. Barney challenges Roo to admit they had “a rotten season up north”; Barney, with his 1

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was first performed at the Union Theatre, University of Melbourne on 28 November 1955 in a production directed by John Sumner. The production transferred to the Elizabethan Theatre in Sydney, in January 1956, and returned to the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, in July of that year. The AETT toured productions of The Doll around Australia from 1956 to 1960 and the play has been regularly revived since that time.

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arm held twisted behind his back by Roo, reveals that Roo “never had a bad back”; and Roo, after tossing Barney into a chair, reveals how many knock-backs from women Barney has had. “And Nancy”, yells Roo at Barney, who is cowering in an armchair, “after seventeen years, you couldn’t even hold Nancy!”. At this point, Barney reaches for a vase containing the kewpie dolls and swings it at Roo’s head, although it is Roo who, grabbing the vase, brings it crashing to the floor, smashing the vase and scattering the dolls. As Olive kneels among the shards and nurses the doll to her bosom, the announcer, leaping ahead to the end of act 3, condenses the whole play in this climactic moment: “The seventeenth doll is shattered, symbol of a broken romance. But for the cast it’s the end of another triumphant performance. And let’s hope there are many more like it, as The Doll goes overseas”. There were, indeed, many more like it—many more performances of The Doll, but also many more plays like The Doll, which created climactic moments from the violence of men. Following The Doll with its blue between Barney and Roo at the end of act 2 and Roo’s fit of pique in smashing the doll at the end of act 3, there were stage productions of: • Barbara Vernon’s The Multi-Coloured Umbrella (1961), from 1957, in which two brothers fight amid sexual jealousies inflamed by alcohol, one brandishing a broken bottle as a weapon, the other falling from a balcony in his attempt to retreat (see chapter 9) • Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart (1958), also from 1957, in which the narrative is impelled by violent acts represented on stage in a parade of physical injuries and domestic conflict: Gino’s slashed face, Leila’s black eye, and Clarrie’s smashed fist • Ru Pullan’s Curly on the Rack (1958), from 1958, in which a group of men come to blows over the spoils of war amid the tropical torpor and paranoid anarchy of post-war Rabaul (see chapter 5) • Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country (1963), from 1959, a revenge play set in outback Victoria, in which a Greek peasant avenges the war-time rape and murder of his wife by infiltrating the perpetrator’s family, killing their farm dog, marrying the daughter, and murdering (in self-defence) the crazed father (see chapter 3)

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• Peter Kenna’s The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day (1972), also from 1959, in which pandemonium breaks out, a man is stabbed, and another shot, despite Oola’s efforts to keep her annual St Teresa’s Day party free of the alcohol and weapons which are so often coincident with violence2 • John Hepworth’s The Beast in View (1961), another from 1959 (a good year!), in which a young man from the slaughter yards of an abattoir, at odds with the sexualised sophistication and alcoholic highjinks of his boarding house mates, bashes his girlfriend to death behind the couch • Oriel Gray’s Burst of Summer (1960a; 1960b; 1998), from 1960, a study of race relations in a country town, in which an AngloAustralian footballer blinds an Indigenous man with a broken bottle and attempts to take hostages with a shotgun (see chapter 4) • Ru Pullan’s Bird with a Medal (1961), from 1961, a study of youth culture in which a young man, confounded by femininity and heterosexual desires, stabs another young man with a garden fork to prevent him from prostituting his girlfriend. It was a winning formula: realistic enactments of masculine violence at moments of dramatic climax generated theatrical experiences that were socially compelling, distinctly masculine, and appropriately Australian. It was, in effect, a solution to the problems of staging “the masculinity of Australian life”. As Max Harris explained in his review of the premiere production of The Beast in View: It would seem as if Australian drama is going to develop steadily along the lines of realistic melodrama. It is being peopled with characters who are tough, sinewy, and resilient, but by no means as insensitive as they seem. If you think of ‘The Doll’, ‘Shifting Heart’, ‘Bastard Country’, and now ‘The Beast in View’, you will find the central figures are blokes of the she’ll-beright persuasion who have become lost and bewildered in situations where this rough and ready philosophy won’t work. (Harris 1959)3 2

3

Robin Lovejoy’s premiere production of The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day opened at the Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, on 11 March 1959. The play was also produced by the Melbourne Little Theatre (opening 26 October 1961) and the Adelaide Repertory Theatre (8 May 1962). On 23 May 1960, ABC Television in Sydney broadcast a studio production directed by Alan Burke. Production details on other plays are provided when they are addressed in this and other chapters as indicated. The Beast in View, directed by John Edmund, produced by the Adelaide University Theatre Guild (AUTG), opened at the Union Hall, on 20 November

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What troubled these “she’ll-be-right” blokes of the realist plays was their entanglement in shifting dynamics of gender and ethnic difference. Their response to the situations they blunder upon and become bewildered by was invariably and inevitably violent. This is how Harris describes, with some sympathy, what happens to the “she’ll-be-right” bloke of The Beast in View: Bodge, a 21-year-old slaughterman, [is] a ring-in from the espressos of the Cross, confused as a penned ox in this atmosphere of beat-up sophistication. Seduced by Elli [the boarding house landlady], and teased by a little tart from the Cross he has brought home, Bodge deals with his caged misery the only way inarticulate man or beast can […] by violence. He strangles his little tart. (Harris 1959)

The idea of entanglement as a way of describing the gender trouble that precipitates enactments of masculine violence arose from a survey of publicity photographs from productions of these plays. One kind of image that was generated in production and selected for publicity purposes depicted male and female actors in close physical contact, with their limbs crossing or entwined, and their musculature manifesting degrees of tension or strain (see figure 2.1). Textually, these moments of entanglement are structured in play scripts as oscillations between romantic affection and sexualised violence. One such moment is from The Beast in View. It reveals how such oscillation is textually composed from a sequencing of physical actions and verbal utterances. Bodge, who is also known as Joey, is at a cafe with his girlfriend, Kathie, who has just been evicted. Keen to help out, Bodge shows Kathie a one pound note that he had borrowed earlier from his landlady: KATHIE: And what do you think you can buy for that, boy? BODGE: You don’t buy outright these days, girl—no-one pays cash—it’s all time payment—and here’s our deposit on the whole world! KATHIE: Except for me, brother—except for me. BODGE: (still playing it light) Can’t you be had by installments? KATHIE: Strictly for cash, boy, and if that’s your offer it’s good for a shorttime—down in the park—bending over. (BODGE’S face is suddenly deathly white. He reaches his hands across the table and seizes her hands. She gasps, immobilised, but her neck stretching with the sudden pain.) BODGE: Don’t say that. 1959. It received two subsequent productions, in Richmond, Victoria, at the Arts Theatre in 1961 and in Sydenham, NSW, at the Pocket Playhouse in 1962.

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Men at Play KATHIE: (gasping) What did I say? … you’re hurting … BODGE: You’re not a tart—you’re just a kid—(shakes her) understand that! There’s nothing clever or smart about being dirty like that. KATHIE: (with playful defiance) And I suppose you’re just a clean-living boy … it’s just the dreams that keep you awake and give you bags under the eyes … you never played sniggle in the long grass on your way home from school. (BODGE shakes her) … You’re hurting. STUBBSY: (appears, laconically) Hey Joey! (BODGE relaxes his grip on her but does not turn around at STUBBSY’S voice.) I do not mind how my customers get their kicks—live and let live is my motto—but I am trying to run this as a family establishment—if you please! (Pause) BODGE: (speaking to KATHIE, not to STUBBS) … Sorry … STUBBS: (shrugs) Maybe it’s a way of life … (off) KATHIE: (massaging her bruised wrists) What’s this—the big strong male? BODGE: I’m sorry … KATHIE: Oh sure—that’s a way of making everything right, to say I’m sorry … BODGE: (his face whitening again) … what the hell else do you want me to say … ? KATHIE: I don’t want you to say anything … I don’t belong to you, boy … noone puts their hands on me … I don’t want anything from you. Stick it! BODGE: (on his feet, shivering with the effort to control himself) Right, doll. Go your own way … just keep away from me … (He turns to go. As he reaches the edge of the light, KATHIE calls.) KATHIE: Joey! (BODGE stops. Tormented, irresolute.) KATHIE: Joey. I’m sorry. (He turns slowly. And when he speaks it is almost beseeching.) BODGE: Don’t do that again, doll. I may not be able to walk away. KATHIE: (coaxing) Come back. (BODGE walks back slowly and walks behind her chair. He puts his hands on her shoulders. She is sitting straight and still. His hands linger lightly around her throat. One hand moves up and strokes her hair.) BODGE: Baby. (His inflection is oddly the same as ELLI’S in the first scene.) Don’t ever do that again. (Hepworth 1961: 1.2.3–4)4

The oscillation in this scene between romance and violence, affection and aggression is obvious enough. What is interesting is how crucial the stage directions are to this oscillation. It is overwhelmingly Bodge who is the subject of stage directions: it is he who visibly experiences emotions—his face whitens, he shivers; and it is he who acts upon Kathie: seizing her hands, shaking her, touching her shoulders, 4

Pages in the typescript are numbered according to act and scene. Slight alterations have been made to spelling and punctuation where necessary to correct errors in the typescript.

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stroking her hair. In contrast, Kathie’s fewer stage directions mostly qualify her speech—she “gasps”, she “coaxes”, she speaks with “playful defiance”. In just one instance, she is directed to attend to the impact of Bodge’s actions upon herself by “massaging her bruised wrists”. This imbalance in the way actions and words are textually apportioned between the actors culminates in one of those photogenic moments of entanglement. As Bodge places his hands on Kathie’s shoulders, one hand lingering lightly around her throat, the other stroking her hair, Kathie sits straight and still, tensed but otherwise doing nothing. It also makes for some distinctly gendered irony as Bodge inverts the imbalance and blames Kathie for instigating the scene: “Don’t do that again, doll … Don’t ever do that again”, beseeches Bodge. Indeed, Bodge’s abdication of agency in this scene and elsewhere in the play is consistent with the way inarticulate enactments of violence are made both sympathetic to an audience and symptomatic of masculinity. “I never even thought about—it just happened”, says Bodge of his affair with the landlady; “I didn’t mean to do it. […] I just meant to shake her … Then I couldn’t stop” says Bodge when Kathie’s body is later discovered (see also chapter 7). Depicting male characters as sympathetic victims in their perpetration of violent acts is not a straightforward task. One strategy that the realist playwrights took was to stage scenes of frustrated rage in which a male actor, overcome with emotion, lashes out with destructive futility and inflicts violence, not at other people but at other objects or the self. In a photograph from a production of Pullan’s Bird with a Medal, we see Georgie, played by Peter Oyston, stabbing at a comic book with a garden fork (see figure 2.2).5 The corresponding pages from a typescript of the play have handwritten alterations for an actor playing Georgie, with words struck out and inserted as indicated (bold) in the following excerpt. Jennie and Col have just exited to the bedroom of Jennie’s flat, leaving Marry and Georgie alone with a parcel of hot chips: GEORGIE (staring after them): Where does all this stuff go? MARRY: Who cares (moves a few plates to one end of table, puts the newspaper parcel on the clear space and unwraps it. GEORGIE starts to read comic.) What’s this? (finds garden fork) 5

Peter Randall’s premiere production of Bird with a Medal opened at Melbourne’s Little Theatre on 16 March 1961.

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Men at Play GEORGIE (taking it): It’s for them weeds. (MARRY helps herself to chip potatoes from the parcel. GEORGIE stands at table reading the comic, drumming a tattoo with the fork.) MARRY: That a new book? I’m beat … GEORGIE: I don’t know … I just seen it … look, Mary … here’s somebody on a bike … looks like Col. Marry … There’s a picture … man on a bike … looks just like Col … MARRY (glances at comic—shrugs): So … (GEORGIE digs at the comic playfully with the fork. At that moment J ENN giggles from the bedroom. He looks up quickly and begins to stab again and again at the comic until the movement is unmistakably vicious and out of his control.) JEN[N] (Off): Oh! Col. The curtain falls to indicate passing of fifteen minutes. At rise, the gram is playing loudly and MARRY and GEORGIE are standing at the table, eating fish and chips from the parcel. COL enters from the bedroom, doing up the zip of his pants … a moment later JENN follows him, wearing a loose shirt in place of bra. (Pullan 1961: 3.18)

The handwritten alterations to the typescript suggest that it was a difficult moment for the actor to perform, requiring not just a giggle off stage but an “Oh! Col” from Jen as the trigger to shift Georgie on from digging playfully at the comic to stabbing viciously, again and again and out of control. This action, which occurs some way into act 3, anticipates the climax a few pages later when Georgie actually does stab Col in the stomach with the garden fork. As an acting challenge, this scene makes similar demands of an actor to those made in similar moments of solo male violence in other realist plays. There is a scene in The Beast in View, where Bodge, alone in the cafe, sits sullenly through the waiter’s diagnosis of “doll trouble” until he can take it no more. The stage direction at this point specifies that “Bodge suddenly lifts his fists and smashes them again and again on the table” before jumping from his chair and rushing off left (Hepworth 1961: 3.1.2). And there is a comparable moment in act 3 of The Shifting Heart: it’s Christmas morning and Clarry finds himself alone in the backyard. His wife is upstairs about to give birth and he’s outside nursing a bruised and bloodied fist that got injured in a fight last night. CLARRY looks up at the window; moves wearily to the bed [on the veranda] and flops on its side, his head sagging uncontrollably. Silence. Then the sound of children—shrill with the excitement of newfound toys. CLARRY flings himself from the veranda. Offstage, the

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children laugh in high-pitched squeals. He sags against the fence R., turns to face it, supporting himself—arms outstretched along its top. Then he brings his right fist down and painfully, wilfully begins to punch, and punch the fence. Each new punch squeezing gasps of uncontainable pain from him. (Beynon 1958: 92; see chapter 6)6

For an actor playing Georgie, Bodge or Clarry, these scenes demand a capacity to sustain the trajectory of an emotional score through action alone, through a progressively sequenced emotional crescendo of otherwise senseless and repetitive action. Masculine violence as emotional expression In the realist plays of the late 1950s and early 1960s, intimate interactions between men and women oscillated between romantic affection and violent action. Sex and violence were dramatised as the flipsides of men’s response to their emotional entanglement in gender relations. In moments of intimacy that mingled violence with affection and in sympathy-inducing solo moments of frustrated rage, dramatists directed male actors to draw on a physical capacity for emotional expression, increasingly without recourse to linguistic expression. This emphasis on physical action afforded a more realistic, more masculine, more Australian mode of theatrical expression than the linguistic eloquence associated with British tradition of classical acting. In short, the men acting in these plays were required to get just as emotional as the women, and often more so. But they were also required to express emotion on stage, not with recourse to linguistic eloquence, but in realistic acts of violence which effectively theatricalised the “masculinity of Australian life”. There was no question, however, that Australian men should experience emotion and express it on stage; nor that enacting emotional experience should be the business of an Australian theatre—even when characters were required to experience emotions “too deep for their expression”, as must an actor playing Roo in performing that almost inexpressible affect prescribed by Lawler in a stage direction at the end of The Doll. His body sags as the tremendous energy sustaining him through this last effort starts to drain away. Swaying a little on his feet like a 6

The Shifting Heart premiered at the Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, on 4 October 1957; the producer was May Hollinworth. The AETT toured the production around Australia and to London in 1958 and 1959.

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Men at Play beaten bull, he slowly folds down on to the piano stool and buries his face in his hands. Something breaks deep within him, but there is no movement in his body, he is far too inarticulate for the release of tears. (Lawler 1957: 128)

Whatever the challenges of enacting emotional inarticulacy for an actor, there can be little doubt that audiences of The Doll enjoyed seeing male actors express emotion on stage. An audience member recorded his response to actor Kenneth Warren playing Roo at the Theatre Royal, Adelaide, on 9 September 1956: “I particularly liked the last scene where he ripped the 17th doll to shreds, and broke down in uncontrollable tears” (White 1956). Whether Warren did, in fact, cry uncontrollable tears in that performance or whether the spectator’s memory embroidered the emotional intensity of the scene, this memory-image of a man on stage overwrought with emotion is strikingly fresh. Examination of a prompt copy used for The Doll’s regional tour from 1956 to 1958 partially reveals two earlier versions of the final scene, both of which differ markedly from the published version in their apportioning of words and actions, particularly to Roo. In the prompt copy’s uppermost version, after smashing the doll, Roo “turns to Barney, speaking in a voice nakedly torn with frustration” and exclaims: “Well what are you waiting for—pack up! You heard what she said—we’re finished here. And there’s a whole bloody country out there—wide open before us!” (Thompson 1956: 3.28–29). In an earlier version, which is partially obscured, the scene has Barney delivering this line: “We’ll be on our own, Roo, making a fresh start—the whole bloody country wide open before us!”, and the play ends with Roo “repeating mechanically”, “The whole [bloody] country wide open before us … ” (Thompson 1956: 3.29). Evidently, during those early years of rehearsal and production, Lawler experimented with the mix of words and actions in finding the best way to resolve relations between Barney and Roo at the end of the play.7 What becomes apparent when comparing the different endings in succession is that spoken words are progressively withdrawn from Roo and replaced by increasingly elaborate directions for physical action. As Roo becomes less verbally articulate with each version of

7

According to Geoffrey Hutton, “[t]he last scene of The Doll, for instance, changed shape between its first and second production” (1960).

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the scene, his physical actions become more expressive of emotional affect. Reconceiving acts of masculine violence in the realist plays of the 1950s and 1960s as a theatrical mode of emotional expression draws into question popular ideas about Australian men, their emotional inarticulacy or immaturity and their recourse to violence. What has developed in the decades since then is a critical perspective on the way realistic portrayals of emotional drama in gender relations have, according to dramaturgical convention, naturally resulted in violence. Violent acts enacted by men continue to animate performances and attract audiences for such plays as Gordon Graham’s The Boys (1994), Nick Enright’s Blackrock (1996c) and Daniel Keene’s Untitled Monologue (2000a). But whereas such violent acts may once have indicated the natural expression of a man’s national character, they now come reconfigured within a marginalised disposition comprising youthfulness, unemployment, criminal delinquency and social disadvantage which men may potentially transcend (Butterss 1998). In Gary’s House (1996), Debra Oswald revisits the traditional inarticulacy of the national character.8 Gary is a practical man of action, a traditional bloke drawn from a vanishing Australia. He stubbornly tries to fulfil the traditional bloke’s dream of earning the right to fatherhood (his girlfriend Sue-Anne is pregnant) by building his own house on his own land. Emphasising Gary’s “practical materialism”, the house itself is built by the actor on stage as the first act progresses (see figure 2.3). But the landscape has changed. Having gone bush to salvage their lives from welfare dependency and suburban boredom, to eke out a life of their own on the margins of mainstream society, Gary discovers that the land is not his to build on alone (it is a joint inheritance with his sister, Christine). What is more, Gary’s recourse to inarticulate violence is no moment of climax at the end of the play. It is presented from the outset in the opening scene: GARY is working on the site, hammering down sheets of flooring onto the brick footings. He calls to the campsite offstage. [...] There’s no answer [...] he hurls the hammer down and stalks towards the campsite, winding himself up into a stiff-necked rage [...] until the 8

Kim Durban’s premiere production of Gary’s House opened at the Q Theatre, Penrith, on 1 March 1996, and later played for seasons at the Playbox Theatre, Melbourne, from 29 March, and the Gold Coast Arts Centre, Surfers Paradise, from 15 May.

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Men at Play sinews in his neck are snapped tight. The rage overtakes GARY physically, like a fit that he’s accustomed to handling [...] He stabs his head against the air, arms jerking to stop himself punching at nothing. He circles, trying to absorb the anger in constant movement. Finally he stops, sucking in short, sharp breaths. He consciously places his body in a controlled posture, to make his body act out the movements of a calm and reasonable person. He walks back to the footings. He starts nailing again, attacking the task fiercely, pushing the rage into each swing of the job. The rage subsides gradually. (Oswald 1996: 1–2)

In earlier plays, a propensity for inarticulate violence entangled men in their relationships with women, and here it is Gary’s girlfriend, Sue-Anne, who has the greatest capacity to wind him up. Where Gary’s House differs from the earlier plays is that the characters, including Gary, do not regard violence as natural, inevitable or excusable. Violence now figures as a cultural response which can be actively resisted: for the most part, Gary’s aggression is channelled constructively into the act of house-building. Gary’s character has also been influenced by changes in social attitudes to fatherhood. As a father-to-be, Gary cares for his partner and her unborn baby in a knowledgeable and nurturing way, which contrasts with Clarrie’s comparative indifference to his wife’s pregnancy in The Shifting Heart. Not that the problems Gary encounters in relating to Sue-Anne and his sister, Christine, are readily resolved. On the contrary, Gary’s relationship with Sue-Anne worsens during the first half of the play to the point where, shockingly and unexpectedly before interval, he shoots himself. The second half of the play explores the possibilities of more sustainable gender relations for the other two male characters who, though less aggressive than Gary, are no less inarticulate. By the end, they seem to have achieved this in strange but workable relationships with Sue-Anne and Christine. In a final action, wordless again yet emotionally articulate, Gary reappears as a ghost, a memory or fantasy of what might have been: [...] the door swings open wider. GARY is standing in the doorway of the house. CHRISTINE stands and stares at him, holding the crying baby. Then, on impulse, she hands the baby over to him. He pulls the baby in close to his shoulder, head cradled into his neck. He rubs the baby’s back soothingly, drinking in his feel and smell. The baby settles into silence within seconds. GARY and CHRISTINE exchange a smile. (86)

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Gary’s House stages a plausibly successful resolution to the problems encountered by Australian “blokes of the she’ll-be-right persuasion who have become lost and bewildered in situations where this rough and ready philosophy won’t work” (Harris 1959). It demonstrates the possibilities of men constructively expressing emotion and achieving sustenance in gender relations, even without linguistic articulation, eloquent or otherwise. But in bringing back Gary as a dead man to act out these possibilities, the play recognises that such solutions may not be straightforward or even possible in the social world of its audience.

Figure 2.1 The Shifting Heart

Frank Waters as Clarry Fowler, Dinah Shearing as Maria Fowler and Lyndall Barbour as Momma Bianchi in The Shifting Heart by Richard Beynon at the Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, October 1957. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust from Australian Theatre Year Book 1957, ed. Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire.)

Figure 2.2 Bird with a Medal

Peter Oyston as Georgie and Lorna Bollman as Marry in Bird with a Medal by Ru Pullan at the Melbourne Little Theatre in March 1961. (Reproduced by courtesy of St Martin’s Theatre, Melbourne, from Theatregoer 2/2-3: 37.)

Figure 2.3 Gary’s House

Shane Connor as Gary in the premiere co-production of Debra Oswald’s Gary’s House by Q Theatre Company, Penrith, and Playbox Theatre Centre, Melbourne, in 1996. (Photograph by Geoff Beatty, reproduced with permission and by courtesy of Currency Press.)

Chapter 3 The bully and the businessman The word bully, like the word masculinity, is treacherously slippery, and its meaning has changed surprisingly over time. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its early sense was positive, meaning ‘friend’ or ‘lover’, a sense which is retained in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The star actor among the amateur troupe of “rude mechanicals” is called, with admiration and affection, by one of his fellows, “O sweet bully Bottom!” (4.2.19). Interestingly, the term was originally applicable to both men and women, but was later restricted to men only. Gradually it shifted from meaning something like ‘a good fellow’, gaining the sense of ‘a swaggering braggart’, and from that to the ‘petty tyrant’ of today’s meaning. But if the modern sense of the word is relatively recent, the activity it describes has been in evidence for a long time. The scholarly literature on bullying is new, and tends to treat the phenomenon narrowly as a pathological or sadistic form of behaviour. According to one recent study, the first decade of research on the topic (up to about the year 2000) was concerned with definitional issues, incidence, causal factors, consequences and descriptive dimensions of the experience, and these mainly focused on the individual who had experienced the bullying. (McCarthy, Sheehan and Wilkie 1996: x)

This chapter looks at examples of the problem in Australian play scripts to think more broadly about bullying, and about its function in society. Australian plays tend to focus on bullying as a male activity, but there are examples in the theatre and in the world of bullying by women as well (see, for example, Charitable Intent below). Definitions of bullying have been notoriously contentious, but a workable one comes from Peter Randall’s Adult Bullying: Perpetrators and Victims: “Bullying is the aggressive behaviour arising from the deliberate intent to cause physical or psychological distress to

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others” (1997: 4). This is a good starting point, but it is helpful in studying the phenomenon in a theatrical context to add something about the abuse of power: bullying normally depends on the bullies knowingly taking advantage of their greater power, physical or otherwise, in order to cause distress to victims who are relatively unable to defend themselves. The charivari as bullying One of the earliest records of ritualised, theatricalised and institutionalised bullying is outlined by Natalie Zemon Davis in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975). Davis focuses on the phenomenon of the charivari, the dark side of the medieval carnival, which fits within the definition of bullying. The orchestrated activities of the bullies were part of a recurrent theatrical event, widespread throughout Europe, which included forms of popular entertainment: Real people were mocked […] in clamorous charivaris and parades for their real everyday behaviour: husbands beaten by their wives were led by a noisy masked and costumed throng through the town facing backwards on an ass [...], or if not the husband himself then a neighbour who shouted “it is not for my deed, it is for my neighbour’s.” Often the form in which this monstrous reversal of nature had occurred was acted out: thus a 1566 festival in Lyon included seven floats in which husbands identified by street and occupation were being beaten variously with tripe, wooden sticks, knives, forks, spoons, frying pans, trenchers and water pots: were having stones thrown at them; were having their beards pulled; and were being kicked in the genitalia [...] Nor were these the only victims of charivaris: widows or widowers remarrying were vulnerable, as were husbands deceived by their wives and husbands who beat their wives during the month of May (a special month for women). (100)

The staged and theatrical nature of some of these events is evident, with actors standing in for the original protagonists, and with the victims humiliated by proxy. Davis’s descriptions of the charivari focus on the policing of accepted norms and the punishment of social transgressions. A disproportionate number of the examples she cites involve norms and transgressions concerning gender behaviour. In these cases it is not the violent or unfaithful woman who is punished, but the husband who is insufficiently masculine to keep her under control. Thus the bullying of the charivari is designed not directly to discourage wives from being stubborn, wilful or headstrong (qualities which were routinely attributed to many women at the time), but to

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ensure that their husbands are encouraged to act in an appropriately masculine way when faced with female intransigence. As well as the sadistic or pathological pleasure that bullies derive from their actions, or the idea of mob hysteria which might be used to explain communal bullying on the scale of the charivari, bullying potentially contains an element of the enforcement of accepted social behaviours, and especially those connected with gender, in situations where there is little in the way of formal legal sanctions to be brought to bear on transgressors. Without the bullying, the transgressors might be able to keep on getting away with it. An example of bullying to police gender is found in Nick Enright’s Blackrock (1996c), a play which deals with the ugly side of teenage urban masculinity in the context of the rape and murder of a young woman.1 When the aggressively masculine character Ricko returns home at the start of the play, one of his mates, Jared, lapses momentarily into sentiment saying, “I’ve missed you.” Ricko’s response is, “What are you, a queer dog?”. The terminology is undoubtedly derived from homophobia, but the taunt is jocular and the two exit “sparring and laughing” (Enright 1996c: 7) after a brief exchange of friendly insults. It is not a serious accusation that Jared is homosexual; if true, that would be no joking matter in the world of the boys in this play. Rather it is Ricko’s expression of disapproval of what he thinks is inappropriately and worryingly unmasculine behaviour on his friend’s part. Domestic bullying Australian plays from the 1950s locate the brutal policing of masculine norms in the home. Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country (1963) features a brutal father figure who uses violently physical bullying tactics to enforce his own standard of masculinity on his two sons.2 This man, bearing the pseudo-phallic name of John 1

2

Blackrock was first performed by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) at the Wharf Theatre on 30 August 1995. This was followed by a production in Newcastle, where the events it refers to took place, in March 1996. It has had many subsequent productions in capital city and regional theatres. The Bastard Country was first produced at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown, Sydney, on 6 May 1959, directed by Robin Lovejoy. Under an alternative title, Fire on the Wind, it toured widely around Australia for the rest of that year, and was also given productions in Britain. It was adapted into an opera by Colin Brumby (c. 1990).

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Willy, is an ex-serviceman and widower living a rugged farming life with his two sons and his daughter, May, on the outskirts of civilisation. The other resident of the farmhouse is the housekeeper, Connie. John is a man who initially appears to be verging on the conventionally heroic in Australian terms; he is at the full peak of his patriarchal powers, in his mid-forties, and is described as “powerful” (Coburn 1963: 4). He is white and xenophobic; he smokes and drinks; he has no time for those who talk too much; and he betrays no sign of weakness, either physical or emotional. When we first see him, he enters the play with his sons after having spent the day fighting bushfires. One of the boys tells the women that John is a more effective firefighter than all the others combined: “Dad worked real hard terday. You should ’ave seen him. He done more’n the whole of the Brigade put together” (7). Starting with this apparently heroic image, the play confronts head on the patriarchal myth which underlies the portrayal of conventional Australian masculinity. The action of the plot progressively reveals John as weak and frightened underneath the hard exterior; finally it demonises him as a rapist and murderer and, perhaps even worse in the drought-ravaged land where he lives and works, as an arsonist (see figure 3.1). The boys are unpromising material, especially Billy who is “essentially gentle and well meaning […], pitiably unsure of himself [and] lives in fear of his father” (4). Although they are technically adults in their early twenties, they are infantilised—they are still known by their childish nicknames, Billy and Possum—and at the start of the play they are completely under the influence of their father. It is clear that the boys will have to learn to become like him if they are ever to achieve his respect, but as May says, the path is daunting: “It must be terrible bein’ a man” (23). At the end of the play, the two sons are alone on stage in the farmhouse kitchen. Their crazed father has been killed, and the drought outside the farmhouse has finally broken. Billy is unconscious after having been severely bashed by John, and Possum, the script says, “talks softly” to his brother: “It’s all over, Billy. All finished and done with … And the rain has come at last” (54). To understand what is “over”, it is necessary to read this passage alongside a speech by the housekeeper, Connie, explaining why she has stayed in the house after discovering that John had murdered his first wife.

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Men at Play I stayed because of you three kids. Now I’m glad I stayed. I got yer through ter men, you and Billy and yer sister ter marry a good man. (Indicates J OHN .) Whatever happens to him, now yer can run this place yerselves and make decent lives if yer want ‘em. (40)

The play reads as a growing-up story, an ordeal for the young characters through a difficult adolescence, which is represented by both the harshness of the drought-stricken environment and the bullying of the father, to the possibility of a more mature and humane adulthood. The boys are emblematic of a young male Australian nationhood, and the last scene of the play concludes a trajectory which preoccupies a great deal of the detail of the script. What is “over” at the play’s end is the harsh bullying which has blighted their lives and tried to distort them into an unacceptable and inhumane form of masculinity. The play identifies John’s negative qualities with the harshness and inhumanity of the Australian “bastard country” in which he is at home, especially the severe drought, and the bushfires which rage throughout the play as a consequence—like the drought and the heat, he is responsible for fires. A critic of the time noted the parallel: There is a symbolic analogy between [John Willy] and the fire, which, a distant menace at the beginning of the play, gets out of control and threatens to destroy them all. The murderous glare in the madman’s eyes, the very spit and crackle of his voice, his leaping gestures are suggestive of the flames. (Selby 1959)

John’s death is accompanied by the arrival of the rain and the extinguishing of the bushfires. The implication is that the bastard country and the bastard men who live in it are going to have to change. It is the sons rather than May who are featured in this story. They have to choose between two conflicting masculine role models—their father and the Greek immigrant Diargos who comes into their lives. Ultimately it is the gentler and more flexible humanity of the newcomer which wins out and is presented as the better path. The outsider, Diargos, exemplifies a kind of masculinity which combines the best of the traditional qualities with something new. To the theatre critic, Brek, he was, as played by Grant Taylor, “a solitary, sun-blackened statue of a man” (Selby 1959). He is described in the list of characters as “the biggest man in the cast”, and Connie’s first response when she sees him approaching the house is to say, “You

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oughter see the size of ‘im!” (Coburn 1963: 8). Like the other men, he smokes and drinks hard, and his physical power is made evident in his first scene alone with John. In a spectacular display of strength [DIARGOS] leans over JOHN. […] Suddenly he grips JOHN’s throat and chokes him. JOHN struggles and DIARGOS shouts. […] As JOHN’s struggles get weaker, DIARGOS lifts him right out of the chair and then lets go. He stands against chimney piece and lights cigarette watching JOHN struggling for breath. (14)

But he rejects the role of the bully. He is more inclined to gentleness than the traditional Australian of the stereotype—a production photo shows him lifting May off the ground affectionately (see figure 3.2)— and, unlike the grim Willy family, he has a sense of humour. His double position as outsider and hero involves the combination of contradictory characteristics, a feature which was commented on by a critic of the Sydney production: The audience were as aware as the other characters of the power and ascendancy of this man, implacable and stubborn, gay and tender, ruthless and wise, so calm and confident of the rightness of his actions. (Selby 1959: 119)

This new version of masculinity in a narrow, conformist Australian context does not have to be enforced by brutality. A Fox in the Night was a flash in the pan in Adelaide in 1959 by a young playwright, Barry Pree (1959; 1960; see chapter 7). It stages another monstrously masculine father, Clarence Turney, and his relationship with his nineteen-year-old son Michael.3 The father is described as “a colossal man, overweighted with fat and muscle” (1960: 26). He is violently aggressive to all around him, but especially his son who was described, in the first production, as having an “almost feminine sensibility” (Harris 1960c: 53). Clarence, a farmer, is proud of his own achievements in having tamed the land. He says that the land is tough, “but what’s a man get if he works soft, sloppy land all his life” (Pree 1960: 36). His pride in his land, and his own efforts in surviving there, are counterbalanced by his shame at his son 3

A Fox in the Night, directed by Barry Pree, was first performed by the Adelaide Theatre Group at Willard Hall on 28 May 1959. There was no subsequent production. Pree (1939–1992) was appointed playwright-in-residence (or apprentice playwright) with the UTRC in 1959. He adapted The Mystery of a Hansom Cab from the novel by Fergus Hume for the 1960 UTRC season. See Sumner (1993: 110). He left Australia in 1962 and died in Oxford, England. Thanks to Alan Seymour for providing some biographical information.

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whom he bullies mercilessly. “What is he?”, demands Clarence (27). He treats Michael as both immature and feminine, saying in Michael’s presence, “He’ll never grow up […] be like a blasted girl all his life! […] I want the boy to be a man” (27). A little later, when Michael has offended him, the bullying turns into a physical fight: “Clarence overcomes Michael with a blow in the stomach and the boy collapses into the dust writhing in pain and bleeding from the mouth.” Clarence then roars in triumph, “That will teach you who the man is around here! He’s me! ME!” (32). But in this play, time and age catch up with the patriarch. Attempting obsessively to prove his masculine vigour, he engages in a contest with his son for the affection of a young woman. She is interested in neither of them, and she ultimately leaves with the family’s life savings, which Clarence has been conned into giving her. In the course of another fight with Michael towards the end of the play, a rifle is accidentally discharged and Clarence loses his leg, ending his ability to work the land and the last traces of his masculinity. There are hints in the published version of the script that he wants to kill himself with his gun, which has now been (oedipally) appropriated by Michael, but he ends up physically and mentally broken and permanently hospitalised, having lost out to the weakling son whom he has goaded successfully into standing up for himself. (In a typescript copy [Pree 1959], which probably represents the production’s staging, the father does indeed suicide.) The policing of gender through bullying has worked in this play, but to the detriment of all the characters in the family. Peer pressure and gender policing The inherent violence of Australian masculinity was a favoured theme in plays of the ‘new wave’, such as Jack Hibberd’s 1967 White with Wire Wheels (1970), Alex Buzo’s 1968 Norm and Ahmed (1973) which deals with an encounter between a white Australian and a Pakistani outsider, and David Williamson’s 1971 The Removalists (1972) which features the savage beating of a defenceless man by two policemen. While some of these are not concerned with bullying in the conventional sense, it is possible to see Norm’s violent treatment of the physically weaker Ahmed and the fatal bashing of Kenny as an ineffective husband in Williamson’s play as punishments of gender behaviour which are deemed to be defective.

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Gordon Graham’s The Boys (1994) demonstrates the survival of bullying as a form of gender policing within the family, even if only in poor and deprived environments.4 The play revolves around three brothers, one of whom has just been released from prison, who progressively work themselves up into a misogynist rage where they commit a horrific rape and murder. In the world of The Boys, the oldest of the three brothers, Brett, is constantly and aggressively adjudicating appropriate masculine behaviour (see figure 3.3). One of the first issues which provokes conflict in the play is the gendering of cars. Brett is angry that he has been collected from prison in a Corolla—which he characterises as “A girlie’s car. A little girlie’s car” (Graham 1994: 45)—rather than his own, now repossessed, V8 Monaro (13). The importance of owning and driving an appropriate vehicle in order to perform proper masculinity is emphasised later when Brett goes out to try to buy himself a new car, “a car a man’d be proud to be seen in” (36), and rejects his younger brother Stevie’s suggestion that they could go to the car yards by bus: “Me?! Shit, you ever see a real man on a bus? Ever?” (37). Brett frequently bullies his brothers about the way they are treated by their women. Brett’s major problem is with Jackie, an outsider with middle-class aspirations who is the girlfriend of the middle brother, Glenn. Jackie unsettles Brett because she has appropriated something of the mobility and aggressive noisiness which, in Brett’s world, are the prerogatives of men. Her first entrance is heralded by “a loud knocking on the front door” (3) followed by her offstage demand for the door to be opened. Throughout the play she makes more entrances and exits to and from the property, often marked by noise, than do the other women. This adoption of the male privilege to move freely and intrude into the environment with aggressive noise is consistent with her assertive dominance over Glenn, which infuriates Brett. Brett’s response is to bully his brother into submission, by insulting Jackie and accusing Glenn of being subordinate to her. He accuses her of being responsible for Glenn’s loss of his own car: “After all the fuckin’ man-hours we put into doin’ up his Premier he lets his bitch twist his arm into trading it in on a little Jap shitbox” 4

The Boys was first performed at the Stables in Sydney in a production directed by Alex Galleazzi for Griffin Theatre Company on 28 February 1991. It has had subsequent performances in Victoria and Queensland, and was filmed in 1998.

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(12). He abuses Glenn for doing Jackie’s bidding: “Let the bitch wait. Since when do you let a chick tell you when you can come and go? […] That bitch of yours has got you by the balls. Pathetic!” (17). When the verbal bullying of the early part of the play fails to have the desired effect, Brett uses physical violence. Act 2 begins with a major brawl between the two older brothers, where Brett delivers a blow to GLENN’s head. He manages to get on top of GLENN, wrenching his arm behind his back and grinding his face into the dirt. GLENN groans in pain. (43)

He follows this up with more verbal abuse, explicitly challenging Glenn’s masculinity: “She’s got you by the balls! Jesus, if you was still any sort of a man you’d have backed me up” (46). When Glenn finally capitulates to Brett’s demands that he break off with Jackie, Brett’s tone changes to an approval which is still loaded with abuse: “So, you finally woke up to yourself, have you? Well, about time, that’s all I can say. Shit it hurt to see what was happenin’ to you. Me own brother” (68). Having finally got both of his brothers on side by relentless bullying—the youngest brother, Stevie, has been an easier challenge for Brett—and made men of them again, he turns his violent and aggressive attitudes outwards, and begins to talk about violence towards women as the proper way of achieving masculinity. When Glenn says he feels like “punchin’ [women’s] lights out”, Brett responds: I reckon that’s about all you can do, too, if you want to come out of it with any self-respect left. I mean, there’s a way a man deserves to feel, isn’t there, by rights, like a soldier in battle, he’s fought and won? A bloody warrior in the olden days, conquering! A hero! (68–69)

For these characters, bullying is an aggressive way of ensuring that an equally aggressive form of masculinity is encouraged and enforced. Peer-bullying among teenage boys is a theme that Jack Hibberd explores in Slam Dunk (1996).5 The play’s structure has parallels with Norm and Ahmed—an encounter between representatives of a dominant culture and someone who is an outsider, leading through various kinds of bullying behaviour to ultimate violence where the 5

Slam Dunk was first performed at the Napier Street Theatre in Melbourne on 22 June 1995, directed by Daniel Schlusser. It has had subsequent productions in Perth and at the Carlton Courthouse in Melbourne.

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outsider is physically attacked and, in this case, killed. Here the outsider is Australian, a country boy from a farming background, and white. But despite his name, Jock is explicitly accused by his attackers as being inadequate in terms of masculinity—he is mild-mannered, bespectacled and sensitive. In this play, however, the victim threatens the self-esteem of his attackers with his greater intelligence, education and articulacy. The attackers, who have nicknames suggesting gross corporeality—Beefy and Chuck—behave like grotesque parodies of aggressive young modern manhood. They work as a close-knit double act, with repeated motifs and catch phrases in their words and actions. They leer at and verbally harass passing women, re-enact violent sequences from action movies, boast about cutting down native Australian trees because they hate them and shoot a mother bird in her nest with an air rifle. After eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola, they ostentatiously belch and then fart in unison (Hibberd 1996: 29). They tease and abuse Jock because of his fondness for poetry, his rich vocabulary and his interest in classical music and “thee-ay-ter” (9). They also use his lack of interest in sport and rock music as a kind of taunt. At various times he is accused of being a “homo” (7), of having a small penis (12), and is degraded throughout the script as a freak, a hayseed, a cornball, a loser, “four-eyes”, and, punning crudely on his name, a joke. There are some features which make the play’s treatment of bullying and masculinity unusual. First, it is the sensitive and intelligent outsider and victim, Jock, who is more obviously associated with Australia; his mainstream aggressors are heavily influenced by American film and television culture, so the problem of anti-social youth is presented as an imposition from the outside, even if it has taken over the dominant position in society. Second, Jock is a more ambivalent and mysterious figure than he seems on the surface. He seems to build a fictional persona for himself—the glasses he wears have no lenses and seem like an affectation of a studious demeanour—and although he ends up getting beaten and killed, he is no submissive weakling. The end of the play requires an extensive fight sequence where Jock largely gets the better of his two assailants until he is overcome, defeated only because Chuck attacks him from behind with a baseball bat. The play suggests that the problem of excessive masculinity is no longer inherent in Australian nationhood

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and manhood but something alien to the culture and imported via American film and television. Workplace bullying Whereas violent acts and bullying may once have been considered the natural expression of Australian men’s national character, and the right, or even the responsibility, of authority figures within the family, they are often now portrayed as socially undesirable and dangerous, linked with features such as immaturity, unemployment, criminal delinquency and other forms of social disadvantage. In other recent plays, masculine aggression is transposed, abstracted and even in some instances idealised in the competitive bullying of the business environment. The figures of the bully and the businessman converge in a range of plays set in the workplace: John O’Donoghue’s Essington Lewis: I Am Work (1987), Stephen Sewell’s Dreams in an Empty City (1986), David Williamson’s Sons of Cain (1985) and Corporate Vibes (2001), and Tony McNamara’s The John Wayne Principle (1997). O’Donoghue’s musical play Essington Lewis: I Am Work begins with a song, the first verse of which sets the scene for an extended dramatic investigation of masculinity in Australia: Now the Lord God knows, When a man is weak, And the Lord God cares For the strong and meek; But a man must stand On his own two feet And work, If he wants to be a man. (O’Donoghue 1987: 5)6

This play, especially the first act, presents another young man’s growing-up story, similar to The Bastard Country (see figure 3.4). There are important differences, but as with the earlier play, there is an image of a youthful Australian male who is being forced to become a man under the harshly critical and abusive influence of a successful father who wants his son to be like him. The first image of the father, 6

Aarne Neeme’s premiere production of Essington Lewis: I Am Work for the Hunter Valley Theatre Company opened at the Civic Playhouse in Newcastle on 5 September 1981. Since then it has had numerous revivals and has been performed in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane.

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John, shows him “carrying a large Bible and stockwhip. He [...] sits erect, a stern, patriarchal figure; tough, rough and rhadamantine” (7). Unlike the earlier play, there is less emphasis on overt bullying behaviour onstage, but the process which is inflicted on the boy is nevertheless brutal and based on a typical abuse of power. In this play, however, the harshness of the father is intended not only to punish actual gender transgressions but also to instil a particularly machinelike and inhuman kind of manliness in his son. The play’s underlying narrative of masculinity, dealing as it does with the biography of a man who achieved fame as a managing director and board chairman of the giant Australian mining and steelmaking company BHP, is that men start out as unpromising-looking raw material for gender, and that true masculinity is something that needs to be artificially created under the extreme conditions of a social steelworks, just as the steel produced by BHP is smelted out of iron ore with intense fire and formed under huge pressure. As Essington Lewis says, “Life’s a rolling mill. You come in one shape and you go out another” (10). The play deals with the process of Essington’s development from an unlikely looking boy with tendencies towards softness and effeminacy—there are hints of a strong emotional and even sexual attraction toward a male friend—into a ruthlessly successful businessman, and the human cost of that transformation. The first act presents a series of bizarre ordeals that the youngster has to undergo. First, he is given the name of Essington in honour of one of his father’s achievements. When it is shortened to Essie at school, the boy is subjected to teasing and bullying as a sissy— something that he is required to endure and survive (9). His father insists that his son develop an emotionally repressed stoicism, and he is forbidden to cry when his mother dies. Then, to toughen him up, the wealthy father sends his son off to work on a property far out in the desert. The property is run by a crazed overseer called the Mad Prophet, an obsessive figure whose religious fervour is in constant struggle with his sexual appetites, and who keeps asking the young Essington, “Is your arse sore, boy?” and “How’s your bum?” (15–16). The son’s task in order to prove his masculinity, it seems, is to resist being seduced or raped by the Prophet while they are cut off from civilisation by floodwaters; his father’s voice urges him to keep his “back to the wall, son” (21).

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The play needs not only the father to help beat the boy into shape but also a surrogate father-figure called Delprat—played by the same actor as the father—who is so physically tough that he can crack walnuts between his finger and thumb. Under Delprat’s influence, Essington learns a kind of rote version of how to be a man. Part of this teaching involves Essington becoming other than a man for a time, as happens when he is strapped into the shafts of a cart like a draft horse (30). Sex is problematic in this narrow version of masculinity, and Essington’s first interest in women and his decision to marry are made for him by Delprat (27, 32). When he does take a wife, she remains an almost irrelevant aspect of his life. The play suggests that Essington could have had a much more interesting and fulfilled career as an actor in the company of the soprano Madge Elliot—and the play emphasises the contrast between the two options through the doubling of roles, with the same actor playing both the glamorous Madge and the unnamed wife—but he rejects this option for a life in industry. His sexual energies and interests are sublimated into his work for BHP: a crucial theatrical moment in the boy’s delayed growing-up is his participation in the tapping of the first BHP blast furnace in Newcastle, which is described explicitly in terms of sexual penetration (45). In the first half, Essington’s masculinity is something imposed on him by a rigorous and narrow upbringing which hardens him unnaturally—the Mad Prophet says he has been “refined in the furnace” (22)—and, in the second half, this old-fashioned form of masculinity becomes the basis for his brutal and bullying success in the world of big business. He is shown to be more complex and humane than his teacher Delprat who boasts about his own brutality and unpopularity as the boss of BHP when he presided over the company during a lengthy miners’ strike (81–82). Essington rejects this approach to industrial relations with the comment that “times have changed” (82), and he is shown as being closer to the lives of the workers than to the Melbourne-based industrialists he works with. He is nevertheless hard and vindictive, and he deliberately bankrupts a business associate who has insulted him (74–75). Politically, he is presented as a quasi-fascist who rails against “crazy socialist governments”, advocating “some kind of revolution to clear the air” and a “strong leader to set the house in order”. He demands, “What’s wrong with dictators? They get the job done [...] Democracy is an

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unmitigated failure” (74). Yet the portrait presented in the play is, ultimately, a forgiving and affectionate image of a man on his eightieth birthday who has earned the right to be satisfied with a long life and proud of his achievements. The personal cost to Essington of the life he has been forced to choose is highlighted, in part, by the opportunities he has to sacrifice, and also by the presence of an onstage alter-ego (or foil), the working man Taffy Williams, who remains at his side throughout most of the action. While Essington’s version of masculinity is created and exercised during the play, Taffy becomes, literally, less and less of a man, progressively losing an eye, an arm and a leg to battlefield injuries during both world wars and an industrial accident in the steelworks. Despite the injuries, Taffy seems, by the end of the play, to have been a more complete and humane man than Essington, with a greater sense of humour, a more spontaneous love of life, and a richer and more loving relationship with his wife. Essington’s life, by contrast, dwindles and diminishes to the point where he justifies the title of the play. Instead of the expected boast, “I am a man”, Essington Lewis and his achievements are restricted to the more impoverished protestant ethic, “I am work”. The question that remains to be asked is whether these ideas of work and masculinity are mutually constitutive, or whether the human cost of Essington’s life is such that they become exclusive of each other. A final point about this play is its historical setting in the late nineteenth century and early-to-mid-twentieth century. This may explain the play’s contradictory attitude towards its subject. It was first performed at a time when Australia was in economic transition, moving away from the industrial and manufacturing mode based on power and physicality which had made BHP legendary as the ‘Big Australian’, towards a service economy where aggressive forms of masculinity were less in demand than skills in communication and human relations (see chapter 8). The play’s sympathy for Essington and his world are part of a nostalgia—perhaps more keenly felt in places like Newcastle which had been built on heavy industry—for a bygone time when harsh men like Essington Lewis and Guillaume Delprat could be simultaneously hated and respected because they represented both exploitation and employment. Essington Lewis: I Am Work is an exploration of a mode of manliness which was starting to disappear.

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Boardroom bullies Traces of this kind of workplace bullying nevertheless survive in two significant plays with negative portraits of aggressive bullies as bigtime property developers. The two plays are different in their approaches in that one has a tragic and one a comic structure. The urban tragedy, Sewell’s Dreams in an Empty City (1986), presents a powerful business magnate, Derek Wiesland, who habitually achieves his goals through virulent verbal abuse and threats of violence and murder.7 Williamson’s Corporate Vibes (2001) deals more satirically with bullying in the workplace, and the script’s dominant character, Sam Siddons, is described as someone who could be elected unopposed as President, Secretary and Treasurer of the Federated Association of Bullies (Williamson 2001: 11).8 Both of these bullies are contrasted with other male characters who are more sensitive and, in traditional terms, weaker and less masculine. In both plays, the bullies express their contempt for those men around them whom they see as indecisive and timid, and both indulge in occasional homophobic tirades against certain characters. Wiesland is inflexible and irredeemable, and his high-risk stubbornness and dishonesty are instrumental in precipitating an apocalyptic stock market collapse. Significantly, he loses out to another businessman, a well-educated financier who collects art, quotes Camus and uses devious intelligence rather than brute force. Sam’s crash-through-or-crash mentality in Williamson’s play is presented at the start as a major part of the reason that the company is in trouble but, under the influence of the company’s new female, and Indigenous, Human Resources Officer, he ultimately modifies his bullying manner, learns to communicate with his staff and make decisions in a more consensual manner, and the company is saved. In Sewell’s tragic structure, masculine bullying is immutable and catastrophe is inevitable; Williamson’s comic structure suggests that masculinity can adapt to changing circumstances, find

7

8

Neil Armfield’s premiere production of Dreams in an Empty City for the State Theatre Company of South Australia opened at the Playhouse, Adelaide, 1 March 1986. It was subsequently performed in London at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and had productions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Robyn Nevin’s premiere production of Corporate Vibes for the STC opened at the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House on 30 January 1999. It has had subsequent productions in Brisbane and Melbourne.

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alternatives to bullying as a management technique, and continue to prosper. Williamson’s Charitable Intent (2002), part of the Jack Manning trilogy, is an unusual case.9 Set within the workplace, it deals with serious bullying perpetrated by a female chief executive officer. What makes the play unusual, both within the trilogy and in terms of other plays from the period, is that the bullying is not to do with the policing of gender but is a manifestation of a desire for power in its own right—a desire which is theatrically unmasked and shown in its true form at the end of the play. This is the only play in the trilogy where a character’s hidden villainous nature is revealed in a dramatic climax— the other two have figures who are the authors of violent actions but this is known from the start. To some extent, the conferencing format in which the plays are written works to humanise these characters and help the audience to understand something of their anti-social behaviour. Charitable Intent, however, rather than displaying the act of bullying as an example of gender enforcement so that the audience can observe how it works, seems to be a kind of charivari in itself, displaying, demonising and punishing a figure who has broken the rules of gender by being a woman in a position of power. Tony McNamara’s The John Wayne Principle (1997) deals with both the family and the workplace, and charts a turning point in masculinity from the bullying version of fatherhood in The Bastard Country, A Fox in the Night and Essington Lewis: I Am Work, to something incorporating features traditionally associated with the feminine—a more caring and nurturing version of fatherhood.10 The play is an obvious place to look for gender issues; the “John Wayne principle” in the title is, quite simply, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” (Dunne 1996a). However, in this play nothing is quite so simple because the play, set in the world of big business, is more broadly satirical in its criticism of brutal corporate and familial bullying than the others. 9

10

Charitable Intent was first performed in Melbourne in 2001 in a production for La Mama Theatre directed by Tom Gutteridge. The following year it was given performances in Noosa as part of the Long Weekend Festival, with the author appearing as an actor. In 2006 it was performed by the Perth Theatre Company and in Sydney at the Ensemble Theatre. The John Wayne Principle opened at the STC in a production by David Berthold on 15 May 1996. In the following two years it had productions in Melbourne and Brisbane.

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It spans both the workplace and the domestic sphere of the main characters, who are members of a wealthy business dynasty. The family includes the now familiar bullying father, who has been the head of the company, and his two children: a hard-bitten elder daughter, Serena, who, to some extent, takes after her father and displays many of the traditionally masculine business attributes, and a less-than-masculine (though thoroughly heterosexual) son, Robbie. In the past, the father has abused and humiliated both his children in the course of work, even slapping Robbie hard across the face in the middle of a meeting (McNamara 1997: 7). Robbie has been driven out of the world of big business by the actions of his father and is now living with his wife and baby son away from the action in Far North Queensland. But at the beginning of this play, almost as if picking up from where A Fox in the Night left off, the father has already tried (and failed) to blow his own head off with a gun, and he remains in a coma until the end; he is described by his two disrespectful children as a “hamburger with a pulse” (14). In the world of McNamara’s play, the epoch of the patriarch is already in the past, and we enter a new era of gender relations, and of bullying. Because there is no longer the same sense of rigorously differentiated gender to defend, and because the patriarch is incapacitated, there is no longer so much need or opportunity for that kind of bullying behaviour. The bullying after the shooting of the father reverts to being primarily about the indulgence in power over others for its own sake. This has been part of the father’s practice as well, when he hasn’t been attacking his inadequate son. We learn that one of his practices in the office has been to have his secretary, Sarah, hide under the desk during meetings and perform fellatio while he is doing business, as a way of indulging himself in his own power. During the course of the play, with the father comatose and on lifesupport, a struggle for control of the business develops between the two siblings. Ultimately, and unexpectedly given the history of the family, the sensitive brother and the more ruthless sister agree to share power, though one stipulation is that Serena should get the desk. In the penultimate scene she enthrones herself in her father’s chair, watched by the secretary. Serena announces that her pen has fallen onto the floor, under the desk. Sarah, compliantly, “throws a look to the audience, shrugs” (53), and the lights fade.

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By the end of the play, bullying as a habit of power remains; but as a means of policing and passing on business-style masculinity from father to son it has been explicitly rejected. Robbie stands beside his father’s hospital bed and explains that he is not going to demand the same kind of masculinity of his boy, Sam. He says: [...] you showed no restraint on people, did you? I have a son now. I look at him sometimes and burn with how much I want for him and from him, and then I remember how much you wanted from me. But I think I’d rather he knew me than was scared of me. (53)

Then, in a final rejection of the past, he switches off the life-support machine and Serena joins him to watch as the monitor flatlines. Serena says to Robbie, “He’d be so proud” (53). The bullying of the father is made complicit in its own destruction. Viewed as a variant of the charivari which has the effect of enforcing gender norms, the pattern of bullying in these plays suggests two things. First, it might explain the ambivalent attitude within Australian society towards bullying. Bullying is officially disapproved, but this is sometimes counterbalanced by a pervasive, tacit tolerance and even encouragement of the actions of the bully by forces of authority. This positive view of bullying as a way of encouraging strongly masculine behaviour could explain why people with an investment in traditional gender stereotypes (such as some school teachers) might be inclined to turn a blind eye, or even act indulgently towards the perpetrators. On the other hand, the changing pattern of bullying in plays provides evidence that, as gender distinctions between masculinity and femininity have become more blurred in recent years, the function of bullying in policing gender may be losing ground. Audiences may now imagine and accept a tough Serena and a sensitive Robbie without feeling that the gender lines or the boundaries of sexuality have been improperly transgressed. This diminishes the justification of a charivari of humiliation for the Robbies of the world in order to maintain the integrity of masculinity. It might explain the growing scholarly interest in bullying as a social phenomenon, and the greater willingness to take a stand against it. It might suggest that now is a particularly opportune time for society to tackle the problem.

Figure 3.1 The Bastard Country

Grant Taylor as Diargos and Patricia Conolly as May in Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country at the Elizabethan Theatre, Newtown, in May 1959. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust from Australian Theatre Year 1959/60, ed. F.R. Harvey, F.P. Publications, Sydney.)

Figure 3.2 The Bastard Country

Frank Waters as John Willy in Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country at the Elizabethan Theatre, Newtown, in May 1959. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust from Australian Theatre Year 1959/60, ed. F.R. Harvey, F.P. Publications, Sydney.)

Figure 3.3 The Boys

David Field as Glenn (left), Peter Lehner as Stevie and David Wenham as Brett in Gordon Graham’s The BoysIRUWKH*ULIÀQ7KHDWUH&RPSDQ\DW the Stables Theatre in February 1991. (Photograph by Lynettte Wallworth, reproduced with permission and by courtesy of Currency Press.)

Figure 3.4 Essington Lewis: I Am Work

Jonathan Biggins (left) and Vic Rooney in John O’Donoghue’s Essington Lewis: I Am Work, directed by Aarne Neeme at the Civic Playhouse, Newcastle, in January 1997. (Photograph by Newspix / Chris Pavlich, reproduced with permission.)

Chapter 4 Black men, white men Relations between white and Indigenous Australia are part of an ongoing and highly charged social debate which has been argued within theatre as well as other social forums. This chapter explores what theatre can reveal about the interaction of masculinity, fatherhood and authority in recounting the history and imagining the future of race relations between Indigenous and white Australians. It does this by comparing the enactment of Indigenous masculinities in plays written by white and black playwrights. It turns first to some of the white playwrights who attempted to portray Indigenous characters in three plays from the late 1950s and early 1960s—David Ireland’s Image in the Clay (1964), Oriel Gray’s Burst of Summer (1960a; 1960b; 1998) and Barbara Stellmach’s Dark Heritage (1973). The portrayal of Indigenous characters in these plays is compared with that in more recent plays—Richard Mellick’s Welcome to Broome (1998), Richard J. Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead (2002) and Katherine Thomson’s Wonderlands (2004). The chapter then considers how some Indigenous playwrights have sought a solution to the problem by drawing on the history of Indigenous involvement in the sport of boxing to stage narratives of generational succession, racial inheritance and masculine achievement for Indigenous men. In plays featuring white Australian characters, the tendency is for both boxing and the rugged, aggressive masculinity it implies to be seen as dangerous, anti-social and unhealthy; such plays tend to have a tragic structure. In plays by Indigenous playwrights, such as Roger Bennett’s Up the Ladder (1997), boxing has a more complex history which is tied in with the generally positive experience of many young Indigenous men who took part in the boxing tent shows entrepreneured by Jimmy Sharman and others. Here boxing and the troupes of boxers can provide surrogate family structures, and particularly an intense kind of father–son relationship

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which is often absent in other Indigenous theatre, and which allows traditional skills and knowledge to be passed down from one generation to the next. Boxing may provide both an escape from second-class-citizen status and an acceptable way for young men to achieve a masculine identity and respect which might otherwise be denied them. But as Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell’s Box the Pony (1999) illustrates, the sport can also represent the aggressive masculinity implicated in acts of domestic violence perpetrated by men against women. These plays reframe, from an Indigenous perspective, conventional gender-based critiques of boxing’s masculinist stance (Bollen 1996). “Sittin’ on the dirt and sleepin’ on the ground” Watched by an audience of sixty million people, a blonde girl skips out into the middle of a large open space. No doubt following the advice of her parents, before sitting down she takes the precaution of spreading out a towel on the ground to avoid sitting on the dirt. This is typical of the early training of white Australians. This image of Nikki Webster, the young white Australian girl performing in the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, establishes a contrast with the theatrical representations of Indigenous characters in Australian theatre, where contact with the earth is a recurrent image. The connection between Aboriginality and dirt is commonplace in older Australian society. Francesca Bartlett writes about an advertisement for “Nulla Nulla” soap from the 1920s in which “a white woman’s hand hits the head of a crudely drawn ‘black’ face […] and the text reads: ‘knocks dirt on the head’” (1999: 18). Many plays featuring Indigenous characters by white playwrights emphasise negative images of contact with dirt and the ground. An extreme example is Phillip Grenville Mann’s Day of Glory (1971).1 The play is set in colonial Newcastle in 1830 and based on historical events. The typescript opens with an image of three men. One white character is sitting at a table and working. A second white character is lying down 1

The Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) production of Phillip Grenville Mann’s Day of Glory opened at the Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne, on 7 July 1970. According to the program, “The play has a cast of 25 and is based on actual events in the colony of NSW in the 1830s. It tells the story of the murder of a young Aborigine, set against a background of corruption and idealism” (Day of Glory 1970).

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half-asleep on a bunk. “In a downstage corner, locked in a cell, crouches a naked aborigine, Jacko, aged about 20” (Mann 1971: 1). Jacko is sitting on the ground and remains there for most of his brief on-stage time. He never speaks, and eight pages later he is shot and falls dead. His body remains lying prone until page 11 when he is taken by the ankles and dragged away. Michael Boddy’s Cradle of Hercules made overt the European association of dark skin with dirt.2 According to Leslie Rees, the character of Bennelong in this play was made “the chief object of Governor Phillip’s experiment in civilising primitive man. Objecting violently, Bennelong is shaved, frontally naked on the stage, then bathed in a tub” (1978: 91). The association of Indigenous people with the earth is problematised in Richard Mellick’s more recent Welcome to Broome (1998), a play which contrasts white and Indigenous ways of life.3 Here all the white characters are male, and all the Indigenous characters female, with the exception of a minor character, an older man called Uncle Barney. An Indigenous female character, Chrissy, uses the image as ammunition in the course of an argument with her white partner, Rob. She accuses him and all white people of assuming that Indigenous people “like sittin’ on the dirt and sleepin’ on the ground”. She says aggressively, “that’s what you think, isn’t it?” (Mellick 1998: 33). Rob has already given hints that he harbours underlying racist attitudes by losing his temper and making Chrissy sit in the back of his ute, as she says, “like I was a dog, like I was a fucking dog”. He snaps back: “Well, you’re just a bunch of fuckin’ savages, anyway” (32). He later tries to explain to another character his discomfort about Indigenous customs involving the earth: I’ve never had to sit down with the men before. But I had to do what was expected. So I sat on the dirt with all the men. We all took our shirts off and these old men painted us up … white ochre down the chest … the arms … the face … I had no idea what I was meant to do … Chrissy wasn’t with me—all the women were somewhere else—so I just sat on the dirt with the men in the midday sun […] Some of the men began to lie down, on their stomachs or on their side, curled up in the foetal position, 2

3

Michael Boddy’s Cradle of Hercules was performed in the Drama Theatre of the Sydney Opera House in March 1974 in a production directed by George Whaley; its only production as far as we know. Welcome to Broome, directed by Michael Gow for the Black Swan Theatre Company and Company B, was first performed in Perth in May 1998. It then had a season at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney in June 1998.

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on the hot dirt. Sweaty black skin on the hot, hard ground. But I couldn’t lie down, I would’ve fried like an egg […] And then she tells me I’m supposed to sit down with all the men and drink. How could I do that? How could I? (37)

While the script at this point draws attention to the racist attitudes which underlie Rob’s attempt at a kind of reconciliation, it also reinforces familiar negative stereotypes by showing Uncle Barney, the closest character to a male elder, as a perpetual drunkard who is rolled onto the ground when Rob pulls his swag from underneath the old man while he is asleep, snoring and nursing a hangover (18). The problems of succeeding in a white world Three plays from the 1950s by white playwrights dramatised the problems that male Indigenous characters encounter in their interactions with white Australia.4 Image in the Clay by David Ireland was first performed in 1959.5 The title refers literally to small clay figurines which are made by one of the major characters, but it also associates the largely Indigenous inhabitants of the play with the earth. The characters are a racial mix, ranging from Gorooh, an elder of the local tribe; the main character, Gunner, who is described as a “half-caste” (Ireland 1964: 17); through to Gunner’s father and wife, both of whom are “white” (17). While a core group of characters (Gunner, his father, Gorooh, and Billy, the elder of Gunner’s two sons) spend a considerable amount of the play sitting about lazily on the ground, they are outdone in this by Joy, a fifteen-year-old “halfcaste girl” (17) who is constantly wallowing in the dirt. A few stage directions relating to Joy make it clear how explicit this is: JOY, a little girl again, drops to the dust in a paddy. (22) JOY is blubbering in the dirt. (22) She sprawls in the dust […] The girl does not get up. (22) She falls flat. (22) JOY has been squatting; now she has fallen backwards with the shock of the blast [of the shotgun]. (32) JOY (near BILLY, belly-down in the dust […]) (54)

4

5

Vance Palmer’s Prisoners’ Country (1960), another play addressing race relations from this period, is discussed in chapter 5. Image in the Clay premiered at the Pocket Playhouse in Sydenham on 12 May 1959, directed by Norman McVicker. It had subsequent productions in Brisbane and Perth in the 1960s.

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Joy is the only female Indigenous character. She is presented as being full of life but infantile, erratic, drunken, irrationally demanding, sexually indiscriminate, and doomed. Although the action of lying in the dirt is hers much more than it is the men’s, to the extent that they do the same they end up looking like her; thus they lose part of their masculinity as it is defined in the play itself, falling away from the ideal of manliness towards the feminine, the childish or the animal. Gunner makes it clear that the association with dirt is linked with a failure of masculinity: GUNNER: […] And I’ll tell you something else. (Lifts BILLY’S hand and points to his skin.) You think that’s the sun and the colour of your skin; but sonny, it’s not. I’ll tell you what it is: It’s dirt! Grimed-in, smelly, lousy, stinkin’ dirt! That’s how they look at it. They don’t want to touch you or stand near you. They can deny it but it don’t do no good […] We try to think their skin is wishy-washy and soft like the skin of a festered sore, or like the naked, helpless skin of a skinned rabbit, but it doesn’t work for long. There’s always the feeling that—well—they’re on top, maybe they’re better than us; maybe white is the only colour to be. What does that make us? … I’ll tell you what it makes us! It makes us not quite men. (49)

Similar views are repeated at length by Gunner’s well-educated and city-dwelling second son, Gordon, when he comes back home from the city to visit his family. Despite being described as physically impressive and “a man” on his first entrance—rather than the “skinny little runt that Billy has led us to expect” (60)—he admits that he is stigmatised as sub-human in the city because of his dark skin which people see as dirt (88–90). Elsewhere, Gunner’s wife, Mary, emphasises that Gunner, Gorooh and the others in her life are failures in terms of masculinity; she says to them, “I haven’t seen a man for many a long day, let alone spoken to one” (46). In many plays featuring Indigenous characters, images of dirt and the failure of masculinity are combined with problems to do with fatherhood, and father figures are conspicuously absent. Image in the Clay problematises the role of the father not by omission but by multiplication and fragmentation. The character who emerges as dominant by the end of the play, the “quarter-caste” Gordon (17), has

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three ineffective potential father figures. There is his “half-caste” biological father who is a braggart and layabout; his aging white grandfather who owns a timber mill that he is no longer able to work himself; and Gorooh, the tribal elder who has outlived his influence and usefulness and who is constantly complaining that the old no longer have influence or prestige among the young. All three are, in different ways, inadequate as role models. Oriel Gray’s 1960 A Burst of Summer has three Indigenous characters.6 One is a film actress who has just returned to her home town (based on Lismore) where she meets up with her long-term friend and sweetheart, Don. He is a lawyer who has also returned home to practise law after achieving first-class honours in a law degree in Sydney. This unusually high level of academic achievement suggests some kind of wish fulfilment, since there were very few, if any, graduates with Indigenous backgrounds anywhere in Australia.7 The third character, Eddy, is a more stereotypical figure with little education, who has a degrading job washing dishes in the kitchen of a café (see figure 4.1). The play associates him with laziness, lackadaisical good humour, and a fondness for dancing and playing music. One of the establishing images of race relations in the play happens when Eddy clumsily drops and breaks some crockery he is drying. As he goes on hands and knees to pick up the pieces, he finds himself kneeling at the feet of the play’s most obvious racist, Mervyn Holmes. The stage directions confirm that this position on the ground is one which Eddy finds humiliating: “Eddy is on the floor, almost at Mervyn’s feet as he picks up the china. He is aware of his abject position” (Gray 1960b: 6). Later in the play Eddy is blinded by a broken bottle wielded by Mervyn in a racial skirmish outside the café, and in tending to him, both of the other Indigenous characters (but none of the white characters) kneel down. Surprisingly, there is no reference to either Don or Eddy having a father. The script might 6

7

Irene Mitchell’s premiere production of Burst of Summer opened at Melbourne’s Little Theatre on 20 February 1960. A television adaptation directed by William Sterling was broadcast by ABC Television, Sydney, on 30 September 1961. A stage production directed by Murray George for the Adelaide Repertory Theatre opened at the Arts Theatre, Adelaide, on 15 October 1966. According to the Macquarie Encyclopedia of Australian Events, Charles Perkins was “the first Aboriginal to graduate from an Australian university” in 1964 (Fraser and Atkinson 1997: 9).

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seem more positive about their future as Indigenous men if there were a role model they could turn to for advice about how to live their lives. Barbara Stellmach’s Dark Heritage (1973) picks up the problem of paternity which Burst of Summer ignores.8 It uses both the trope of the absent father and the image of abjection on the ground, though in some unexpected ways. The pivotal character is Neil Harrison, who is described as being a “quarter-blood” Aboriginal (with a note to the production to go easy on the make-up) but nevertheless as sufficiently dark to suffer from racial prejudice. He was born on “a big property up in the northwest” (Stellmach 1973: 58). The play is extremely complex in terms of fatherhood. Neil’s birth father is a white man, the brother of the owner of the property, “a good-looking, spoilt young intellectual who used to visit the station occasionally”, who has “rather cruelly seduced” his Indigenous mother (58–59). An old man called Joe Harrison, who is hovering on the outskirts of the play, may be Neil’s mother’s Indigenous husband. He is looking for the boy he brought up as his own son for the first three years of his life, until the child was taken away by the authorities to be brought up and educated in white society. Neil’s history fits with the boy’s, and he may be the old man’s lost son, but he refuses to have anything to do with Joe. He is an early example of the stolen generation on stage, and it is clear that Neil’s separation from his Indigenous father is something that has damaged him in terms of his sense of identity, his “dark heritage”, even while it has allowed him to achieve material success in white society. Like Don in Burst of Summer, Neil is exceptionally well educated, and is a qualified and successful doctor—successful to the extent that the racial prejudice in the world of the play will permit. He is married to a young white woman, Sue. Significantly, there are no directions for Neil to sit, crouch, kneel or lie on the ground in the script; on the contrary, the only such reference comes at the dramatic climax of the play, at the end of act 3 (of four acts), when Neil, goaded into a state of exasperation both by Sue’s racist mother and by the unsettling proximity of the man who might be his Indigenous father, strikes his wife (as Othello does Desdemona) and sends her sprawling onto the 8

Dark Heritage was first performed in Brisbane in 1964 by the Villanova Players, directed by Kevin Ryan. It was produced by the Adelaide Repertory Theatre, directed by Harold Minear, later the same year. By 1973 it had been produced in every state in Australia and had been broadcast by ABC radio in 1966.

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floor. The shocking brutality of the domestic violence is here aggravated by racial issues, including both the stereotypical resort to incoherent violence by a “black” man towards his white wife, and further because it places the white woman in the physical position that in these plays is usually reserved for Indigenous characters. In their time, Image in the Clay, Burst of Summer and D a r k Heritage were progressive plays; they sought to criticise prevailing racial attitudes and promote concern for Indigenous people among a presumably white audience. Yet they also indicate pervasive attitudes towards Indigenous men at the time. The plays seem unable to present on stage the image of a mature, competent and successful Indigenous male character who acknowledges his Aboriginality and who embodies traditional knowledge and cultural practices—a character who has learned aspects of a specifically Indigenous masculinity from his own father, and who is in a position, as father in his turn, to act as a role model to future generations of Indigenous boys. This is aggravated by the recurrent trope of “sittin’ on the dirt and sleepin’ on the ground”, a move which is associated with the link between dark skin and dirt and a failure of masculinity, at least in the white versions of it. The success of a more recent play by a major playwright, Louis Nowra’s Radiance (1993), where the three Indigenous characters, all of them female, end up sitting in a tidal estuary covered in mud, suggests that something of these tropes survives into the present.9 One play by a white playwright which shows an awareness of this trope is Katherine Thomson’s Wonderlands (2004).10 This play initially rehabilitates the idea of sleeping on the ground as something nostalgically associated with youthful white rural masculinity. Lon, a white farmer “in his 40s or 50s”, reminisces: You think back to those stock camps. Sleeping on the bare ground. I probably wouldn’t get up again these days […] Still it can feel like a mattress when you’ve done a hard day’s work. Until about three o’clock in the morning when the Bundy wears off. (Thomson 2004: 3) 9

10

For more detailed analyses of Radiance and Nicholas Parsons’s Dead Heart (1994), see Kiernander (2003). Wonderlands was commissioned by HotHouse Theatre in Albury Wodonga, and produced by the company at the Butter Factory Theatre. The production was directed by Marion Potts and opened on 13 June 2003. It subsequently played at the Riverina Playhouse in Wagga Wagga from 25 June, and at the Stables Theatre in Sydney from 16 July. Angela Chaplin directed a production for Deckchair Theatre Company at the Victoria Hall, Fremantle, which opened on 7 June 2007.

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The play is a collection of different relationships with the earth. For the white characters, the land quickly becomes harsh and dangerous. The racist Lon, who owns the property where much of the action takes place, “kicks his heel into the soil” and declares it “hard as iron” (3). His wife, Cathy, is conducting an extra-marital affair with the bank manager; their assignations take place outdoors on the river bank, and to avoid the dirty ground she carries a picnic rug (33). Alice, who appears as part of a flashback sequence set in 1931 when she was the owner of the property, is a more sympathetic character. She is recording evidence of local Indigenous families, histories and culture based on her own memory and her father’s journal, but she dies as a result of a fall from a horse onto the hard ground (16). Between the time of her accident and her death, she spends much of the play sitting or lying helplessly on the earth (58). By contrast, an Indigenous character, Jim, in the flashback scenes, is constantly inspecting the earth with great care as he moves around—to him, it is not dirt but a source of different kinds of ochre which he is trying to collect for his uncle who fears being sent away to Palm Island (24). His relationship with it is one of knowledge, nurture and concern. But he, too, recognises that the days of traditional Indigenous masculinity are in the past. He laments: But you know what gets up my goat? Why they aren’t putting up a fight. Yirralong used to be warriors. Blood should be flowing in the river, fight to the death before we get taken away. (30)

The play finally stages a tenuous link back to traditional ways, and to a history which has been almost forgotten, through the survival of Alice’s notebook and her father’s journal into the present day. At the end of the play they are entrusted to an Indigenous woman, Edie, by Cathie. The books in the hands of the women provide what hope there is for the future, but by this time Jim is long dead, Lon is incapacitated by repeated heart attacks, and his would-be son-in-law, Tom, has had his hand blown off in an explosion. If there is a hope for a more harmonious future, it is one which will be worked out without much input from the male characters.11

11

Alison Lyssa (2006) sees the ending as utopian, and reads into the play an underlying series of metaphors which, despite the script’s eloquently expressed sympathies for the Indigenous cause, reveal that it is written from a non-

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Missing fathers The absence of the father in much dramatic writing by Indigenous playwrights may be a response to the lived realities of Indigenous life in Australia, where disproportionate numbers of adult men are taken away from their families by illness, early mortality, drugs, alcohol or prison. The women are there, caring, nurturing, struggling, fighting and surviving, but not the adult men. The trope features prominently in Robert J. Merritt’s The Cake Man (1978), Box the Pony a n d Radiance, and in Jack Davis’s The Dreamers (1982), Eva Johnson’s Murras (1989) and What Do They Call Me? (1996), Jimmy Chi and Kuckles’s Bran Nue Dae (1991), Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving (1996) and Dallas Winmar’s Aliwa (2002). It is also a feature of recent films such as Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds (2002) and Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (2002). The absence of the father and husband throws a spotlight on the role of motherhood within Indigenous society, and celebrates the work of women in ensuring survival, at least in a material sense, as the mothers cook, clean and keep house for their families—or in some cases, like Box the Pony, fail to do this. But in many of the plays, the absence of an older male is associated with a loss of leadership. Consequently, there is a loss of a sense of specifically masculine traditional knowledge and spirituality, ignorance about how to behave in the world in order to prosper, and the absence of a sense of continuity bringing important aspects of the past into the present and, by implication, into a more successful future. No father, no future seems to be the motif. Traditional images of Indigenous masculinity are demeaned and denied. One of the few remaining images of the traditional Indigenous man as warrior and hunter in Australian culture is the familiar, miniaturised, suburban garden ornament, reduced to harmless, if offensive, decoration. Richard J. Frankland’s Conversations with the Dead (2002)12 deconstructs a significant detail of Australian life

12

Indigenous point of view. She points out that, unlike the white characters, the Indigenous characters are not accorded the status of tragic heroes. Conversations with the Dead was first performed in a co-production by the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative, Playbox and La Mama at the Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, directed by Richard Frankland in February 2002. It was given a second production in July of the following year at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, directed by Wesley Enoch.

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which exposes these negative underlying attitudes toward Indigenous masculinity: UNCLE: But everywhere you go you have the label. (JACK looks at him.) Black … like that two-dollar coin you talk about in your speeches. You know, the 1860 Aboriginal Protection Act, where we were seen as sub-human. Every coin […] has an animal or plant on them. On the $2 coin there is a blackfellow, a plant or an animal? (Frankland 2002: 248)

This play elsewhere uses the images of the hunter and the passing on of traditional knowledge as positive solutions to the problems that the main character, Jack, is having as an isolated Indigenous man working with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.13 He recalls an old man who has given him advice based on traditional knowledge: JACK: He said […] to close my eyes and imagine a man throwing a spear: he said the feet touch the ground for strength and balance; the legs for balance; the hips to turn so the spear will travel fast; the lungs for air; the arm and elbow for more leverage; the spear shaft so it will fly straight and true; the woomera for distance and power; the eye to aim; and, the spearhead to penetrate. (271)

Movements toward reconciliation between Indigenous and white Australia may remain hampered until the emasculating link between skin colour and failures of proper manliness is broken. We need to accept the cultural significance of contact with the earth without importing inappropriate connotations of dirt, animality, abjection or gender trouble. In addition, we need to envisage widely agreed and satisfactory versions of Indigenous masculinity, including the image of the traditional hunter or warrior, who are able to perform Aboriginality, and can take an equal place in our society as individuals with rights and agency. One of the few places where performance in Australia has attempted this was, to return to the beginning of this chapter, in the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympic Games, where Djakapurra Munyaryan played the part of a traditional guide to the history of pre-European Australia. The problem here is that the immediate beneficiary of this knowledge was

13

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established in 1987 to investigate the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the custody of prison, police or juvenile detention institutions in Australia (Johnston 1991).

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not future generations of Indigenous Australians but a blond girl in a pink dress. Yet sport is an interesting arena for considering enactments of Indigenous masculinity in contemporary Australian theatre. The sporting achievements of Indigenous men and women are celebrated in public life. A moment of particular prominence was Cathy Freeman’s role in lighting the flame at the 2000 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony which anticipated her success in winning the 400 metres sprint. Another prominent Indigenous sportsperson is Anthony Mundine, who announced in May 2000 that he was retiring from rugby league to pursue a career in world title boxing. Mundine’s story is of particular interest because it articulates a desire for generational succession from father to son. “I told my dad when I was five years old, ‘I want to get that title you didn’t’”, Mundine explained in an interview on ABC television (“Mundine on his boxing future” 2000). Anthony’s father, Tony Mundine, who was to become Anthony’s boxing coach, is an Australian boxing champion himself and narrowly missed winning a world boxing title in 1974. There is drama in this story of Anthony ‘the Man’ Mundine turning away from a career in rugby and turning towards his father, to follow and train with his father, indeed to succeed his father, in pursuing a world title in boxing (which, in fact, he achieved in 2003). A similar story is dramatised in Roger Bennett’s play Up the Ladder, which had productions in Adelaide in 1990, Melbourne in 1995 and Sydney in 1997.14 Boxing from father to son In Bennett’s play, the main character is Johnny, who becomes a world-champion Indigenous boxer. He appears in flash-forward scenes as Old Johnny, a coach and mentor for young Lionel who is training for an upcoming fight. Young Lionel bears an unmistakable resemblance to Lionel Rose, who in 1968 became the first Indigenous 14

Roger Bennett’s Up the Ladder opened at the East End Market in Adelaide on 28 February 1990 in a production directed by Bob Maza for Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. Susie Dee’s production for the Melbourne Workers Theatre at Napier Street Theatre in Melbourne opened on 17 November 1995. Wesley Enoch joined Dee as co-director for a Melbourne Workers Theatre and Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts co-production which opened at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on 24 September 1997 as part of the Festival of the Dreaming, the first of four cultural festivals held prior to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.

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Australian to win a world boxing championship. While Johnny is a fictional character, the play pays tribute to Bennett’s own father, Elley Bennett, another Indigenous Australian boxing champion who toured with Jimmy Sharman’s boxing tent show during the 1940s and 1950s. According to Richard Broome, Indigenous men’s involvement in boxing is a long tradition, dating as far back as the 1830s (1995: 173). According to Richard Fotheringham, on the other hand, it is a tradition largely overlooked by those dramatists who have sought to incorporate aspects of Australian sporting life into their work. For instance, race relations between white and Indigenous Australians are not apparent in Jack Hibberd’s The Les Darcy Show (1976), which celebrated the short-lived career of an Irish-Australian boxer with productions in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth in 1974 and 1975.15 Writing of the 1970s new wave of Australian playwrights and their investment in sporting myths, Fotheringham indicates how an articulation of racial difference could run counter to an ideological function served in the dramatisation of sport: The nationalistic function of sport was internalised to the extent that it could be used as a symbol of the fundamental union of all Australian men and, through the absence or easy assimilation of other groups, of an Australian nation. In this communion of mates, where conflicts of class, race and politics were thought to be transcended, sport by chauvinist self-projection became the basis for a universal brotherhood of men. (Fotheringham 1992: 201)

Nor did Fotheringham, writing in the late 1980s, perceive much scope for alternative articulations of sport in Australian drama: he concludes that “black and multicultural writers have also chosen to ignore sport” (1992: 208). Since that time, however, at least five new Australian plays that incorporate aspects of Indigenous men’s participation in boxing have been staged. In addition to Up the Ladder, there have been productions of: • Garrie Hutchinson’s Shadowboxing from 1989 in which the African-American boxer Jack Johnson tours Australia in the 1900s and fights, among others, an Indigenous man

15

Boxer Les Darcy is also the subject of a music theatre work: The Flight of Les Darcy by librettist Robert Jarman and composer Raffaele Marcellino opened at the Newtown Theatre in Sydney on 19 March 2001.

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• Owen Love’s No Shame from 1995 in which Jimmy, an Indigenous man and former boxer, befriends a street kid (Harris 1995; O’Brien 1995) • David Milroy and Geoffrey Narkle’s King Hit (2007) from 1997 in which Geoffrey, forcibly removed from his Indigenous family, leaves his adoptive home to join a boxing troupe (Townsend 1997; Griffiths 1997) and • Scott Rankin and Leah Purcell’s Box the Pony, also from 1997, in which boxing serves as an enacted metaphor for the experience of domestic violence.16 These productions from Australia’s recent theatrical past recuperate the tradition of Indigenous involvement in boxing and articulate Indigenous desires for generational succession. Relations between fathers and sons are also relations of race. Between Tony Mundine and his son Anthony, between Elley Bennett and his son Roger, are enacted familial relations in which oral history and corporeal practice are transmitted between generations along the bloodlines of race. Such a relation and transmission are also enacted in Up the Ladder as Old Johnny trains young Lionel to box. Although the two characters are not related as father and son, Lionel calls Johnny “old man” in all three of their scenes together and, at the end of their third scene, Johnny places his hand on Lionel’s shoulder and says to him “Come on, son, let’s call it a day” (Bennett 1997: 70). As sons turn to their fathers and learn how to box, and as fathers transmit boxing as a practice of aspiration and desire to their sons, the scenario of racial inheritance and generational succession is repaired. It was not always this way. According to historian Richard Broome, relations between white Australian bosses and Indigenous boxers in the troupes

16

Greg Carroll’s production of Shadowboxing for Melbourne Writers Theatre opened at the Carlton Courthouse in Melbourne on 11 March 1989. Bob Maza’s production of No Shame for Mainstreet Theatre opened at Tandanya Theatre in Adelaide on 18 October 1995. David Milroy’s production of King Hit for Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre opened at the Dolphin Theatre in Perth on 25 October 1997 and transferred to the Princess Theatre in Brisbane for the Energex Brisbane Festival in September 1998. Sean Mee directed Purcell in the Performing Lines production of Box the Pony, which opened at the Sydney Opera House Playhouse on 12 September 1997 as part of the Festival of the Dreaming; Purcell has since toured the work nationally and internationally.

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which toured the country during the twentieth century were both pedagogical and patriarchal: The troupe owners had the power of bosses, but also the authority of ‘fathers’ and managers. They acted as daily guardians of the boxers under their care for months on end, mostly out of concern for the needs of their business. The boxers slept in, ate in, and fought in their tents, obeyed their rules, and asked them for pocket money to see a show or attend a dance. […] The boxers both respected and feared these men, and depended on them like fathers when hundreds of kilometres from home. (Broome 1996: 11)

Johnny’s father in Up the Ladder is initially a presence of sorts in the play, until Johnny leaves home to join the boxing troupe and comes under the care of boxing promoter G.W. Sedan. In scene 6, entitled “Family”, Johnny’s mum and his Indigenous girlfriend, Beryl, have not been getting on well with each other, while Dad sits by reading the newspaper. Johnny mentions that he’s “thinking of going away for a while” (44), Mum accuses Beryl of “giving him ideas about leavin home” and Beryl talks back at Mum (48): MUM (looks at DAD for support): Dad you going to say anything … you going to let her talk to me that way? (DAD lowers the paper, looks at MUM , sighs, shakes his head then quickly raises the paper again and starts to hum.) MUM (angrily): If you don’t stop that bloody humming, I’ll put it right up your you-know-where. (DAD stops humming. MUM , getting out of her chair, causes DAD to duck, thinking she was going to hit him, but MUM steps towards BERYL, who steps back into a fighting stance.) MUM: Just let me at her … I’ll teach her. (BERYL shapes up to fight. JOHNNY jumps in between them.) BERYL: Come on … come on … you always sticking your nose into other people’s business. MUM (to DAD): Are you going to do something? BERYL: Johnny don’t need you. MUM: Oh, don’t he now. BERYL: Look, if he wants to join the tents and take me with him that’s his business. MUM: What tents? (JOHNNY looks at DAD. MUM looks at DAD.) DAD: I think I’ll go and make that cup of tea now … (DAD exits) MUM: (to JOHNNY) What tents? JOHNNY: The boxing tents, Mum. MUM: So that’s what you gonna do. (Bennett 1997: 48–49)

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Whatever may be said about the role of Dad in this scene, his one decisive action is to exit when Johnny’s plan to join the boxing tents is announced—for Johnny’s announcement provokes the likelihood of a family argument in which Dad might be forced to take a stand. Two scenes later the boxing promoter G.W. Sedan arrives, introduces himself and offers Johnny a contract which Johnny accepts. By scene 10, in which Johnny trains with his Indigenous mate, Sid, the terms of address between Johnny, Sid and Sedan render the formation of a new boxing family. Interrupting the scene, Sedan says to Johnny, “I wanna talk to you, son”. Johnny keeps training, so Sid says to Sedan, “Hey Unc, you gotta have an appointment to talk to this young fulla”, and then to both Johnny and Sedan, “He gonna be the next world champion, eh brother?” to which Johnny replies, “Not a worry, Siddy boy, not a worry” (59). A father to Johnny and an uncle to Sid, Sedan displaces Johnny’s own father and more or less usurps his role (60).17 The displacement of Johnny’s father by Sedan suggests that the absence of Indigenous fathers should be understood in relation to the history of paternalism and protectionism that has determined racial policy in Australia. In other words, the policies and practices which absented Indigenous fathers from their families and usurped their roles as providers were of a kind with those which resulted in the stolen generation of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families. Boxing black against white The disenfranchisement of Indigenous fathers and their displacement by white authority figures textured the everyday backdrop of race relations against which the spectacle of Indigenous boxers fighting white men stood out as remarkable. In discussing the history of the

17

Sedan’s own role as a paternal provider is itself partly usurped by the state. Sedan’s news in this scene is that he’s “just come from a meeting with this bloke from the Aborigine Department and … he says that all your money … both of yah’s money’s gonna be handed over to them and they’ll dole it out to ya. Bit at a time” (Bennett 1997: 60). State governments did withhold the earnings of Indigenous boxers. In 2003 members of Roger Bennett’s family went to court in an attempt to recover Elley Bennett’s sequestered earnings from the Queensland government (“Boxer fights from grave” 2004). The application to proceed to trial was refused by the Supreme Court of Queensland and subsequent applications to appeal the decision were dismissed (John Dalungdalee Jones 2004, 2005).

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boxing troupes, Broome is unequivocal on this point: “race infused all aspects of boxing” (1996: 15). For instance, it was an agreed practice in the game, that where possible you matched black against white. It was claimed that two Aborigines would not fight hard as they were mates. Even some Aboriginal boxers agreed with that proposition despite the evidence of ‘ding-dong’ all-black battles to the contrary. Ern McQuillan, the Sydney trainer of Jack Hassen, Tony Mundine and many other Aboriginal fighters stated in 1978: “I’ve run a lot of fights, I used to be match-maker at the Sydney Stadium for years, and I’ve never put two Aboriginals together, they don’t try as hard, but put them with a white man, you know, they show out more, plenty of fire”. (16)

Up the Ladder does, in fact, dramatise a fight between two black men; so, too, does Garrie Hutchinson’s Shadowboxing. In Up the Ladder, Johnny and his mate, Sid, fight the second fight of the play, coaxed into the ring by a spruiker after an argument in which Sid expresses his jealousy of Johnny’s relationship with Beryl (35). And they fight again in a scene called “Gammon Fight” in which Sid, pretending to be a member of the audience and masquerading as an Italian immigrant, takes up the spruiker’s invitation and challenges Johnny, now known as the “Black Bomber”, to a fight (53–55). In Shadowboxing, a match between the African-American Jack Johnson and an Indigenous boxer, Peter Felix, is described by the spruiker as “the weirdest fight of the century” (23). However, in both plays, the main fights—those which advance the narrative of each play and build the careers of Johnny and Johnson— are those which successfully pitch black man against white. In a television review of the original production of Up the Ladder, Bennett and director Bob Maza addressed the racial significance of Indigenous boxers winning fights against whites. The boxing tents, according to Maza, were “a place where a black could stand up and be king”: “You didn’t have the money to get into the golf clubs or the tennis clubs. All you needed to get into the boxing ring were a pair of shorts and you were on” (“Up the Ladder” 1990). Success in the boxing ring could overcome racial discrimination, as Bennett explained: When you became a champion, no matter whether you were white or black, you’re accepted. It doesn’t matter who you are. So if you become a champion, and you’re black, and you get accepted, I mean, you know, and you get idolised by people. Well that’s it. You break the barriers and you’re treated differently. Champions always get treated differently, no matter what. Race,

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colour, religion, no matter what. A champion is a champion and that’s how you see them, eh? (“Up the Ladder” 1990)

As Bennett and Maza are interviewed, the review presents archival film of a fight in a boxing tent between a young Indigenous boxer and a young white Australian, which then dissolves onto a segment from the performance of Up the Ladder in which the actors playing Johnny and his white opponent fight. In a later segment, we see Johnny’s opponent knocked out for the count and the white umpire declaring Johnny the winner by holding his gloved fist high. The spectacle of a black man fighting a white man—in particular, the spectacle of a black man standing up as a “king” of the ring after defeating a white man—may conjure from the past cultural anxieties about racial competition in the midst of a multicultural present. Interviewed by Maryrose Casey in 1997, Maza recalled a more critical aspect of Bennett’s interest in boxing: According to Maza, Bennett wanted to show that ‘if anything it destroyed the lives of Aboriginal people. This is what they offer us. We belt shit out of ourselves for other people’s entertainment. That’s how we make our living. First the bastardisation of our culture, now the bastardisation of our lives, our bodies’. (Casey 2004: 240)

Maza told Casey that the first draft of Up the Ladder included a critique of boxing’s violence in which, as Casey writes, “the play ended with the lead character Johnny celebrating his win, jumping up and down in the strobe light, then realising with horror that the other man was dead” (240). This action is not included in the published script. Boxing’s implication in masculinist violence is explicitly addressed in Box the Pony, Leah Purcell’s solo work co-written with Scott Rankin (1999). Central to the design and staging of this work is a punching bag: Purcell’s boxing interaction with the bag enacts her experience of growing up with violence in an interracial milieu. Purcell grew up in south-east Queensland, daughter to an Indigenous mother and a white father—a butcher and a boxing trainer who had another family, a white family, “so he sort of wasn’t around”. Her teenage years, from age fourteen, were characterised by violence: “the beatings just became a normal process of the relationship”, Purcell explains (“Queen Leah” 2002). On stage, the punching bag becomes both the source of violence in Purcell’s life and a target for its

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catharsis. Purcell’s fight with the punching bag enacts a critical encounter with the interracial history of boxing in Australia. Performing Indigenous masculinity Australian theatre is still finding ways to present images and narratives of Indigenous masculinity which draw upon the authenticity of Indigenous cultures and reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous men. This has become particularly apparent since the mid-1990s with the success of Indigenous women’s monodramas—such as Purcell’s Box the Pony, Deborah Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving, Deborah Cheatham’s White Baptist Abba Fan and Ningali Lawford’s Ningali— which were brought together in 1997 for the Wimmin’s Business season of the Festival of the Dreaming (see Casey 2004: 251, 253, 257; Rankin and Purcell 1999; Enoch and Mailman 1996). Indigenous masculinity is being explored in dance and physical theatre. The involvement of Djakapurra Munyaryan in the practice of the Bangarra Dance Theatre, where he has been both a performer and a consultant on traditional dance forms and cultural knowledge, is important. So, too, is the involvement of Indigenous men such as elder Thompson Yulidjirri in the development of Marrugeku’s Mimi from 1996, and performer Trevor Jamieson in Marrugeku’s Crying Baby from 2000 and Burning Daylight from 2005. These physical theatre works, which draw on Indigenous cultural traditions and contemporary experience, have toured widely in Australia and overseas. In 2004 the Life Times Three season at Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney brought to the stage three autobiographical monodramas by Indigenous men: Noel Tovey in Little Black Bastard, David Gulpilil in Gulpilil and David Page in Page 8. Tovey’s production was first seen in Melbourne and Darwin in 2003; its season in Sydney followed the publication of his autobiography (Tovey 2004). Gulpilil had its premiere at the Adelaide Festival in 2004 and, with Page 8, was also presented at the Brisbane Festival that year. Page 8 has been touring since 2004, with seasons in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne during 2005 and an overseas tour to New Zealand, England and Scotland, as well as to Canberra and regional towns in New South Wales and Victoria during 2006. Trevor Jamieson’s Ngapartji Ngapartji, a performance in the Pitjantjatjara language, was developed with Scott Rankin and Alex Kelly for the 2005 Melbourne International Arts

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Festival and has since been presented in Alice Springs, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide in 2006 and 2007. The recent success of these works in the theatre, alongside that of the film Ten Canoes (2006) which features Gulpilil as narrator and his son Jamie in the lead role, are indicative of an emerging repertoire of creative roles and dramatic characters for Indigenous men in Australian theatre.

Figure 4.1 Burst of Summer

Max Bruch as Joe (left), Eric Colladetti as Merv and Denis Jones as Eddie in a scene from Oriel Gray’s Burst of Summer for the Melbourne Little Theatre Guild, February1960. (Reproduced from the Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 February 1960 by courtesy of Australian Consolidated Press and the Arts Centre, Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.)

Chapter 5 In the theatre of war Memories of men at war are prevalent in Australian theatrical production after the Second World War. From Sumner Locke Elliot’s 1948 recollections of war-time homosociality in Rusty Bugles (1980) and Russell Braddon’s depiction of Australian prisoners of war in Naked Island (1960) to critical reflections on war memorialisation and suburban repatriation in Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1961) and Patrick White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla (1965), an array of post-war theatrical productions sought to articulate men’s experiences at war and back home. Surveying these and other productions like the 1946 all-male Kiwis revue company, Beth Dean’s television ballet G’day Digger (1958) and John Cameron’s television play Outpost (1959), this chapter explores the propagation of gender anxieties in performance during the post-war period of suburban expansion when the lives of Australian men were tending inward to marriage, family and domesticity (see chapter 1). In contrast with more recent productions which have sought to celebrate the survival, ingenuity and achievements of Australian men at war, productions from the post-war period were less overtly nationalist and less assertively masculinist. Remembering men’s wartime experiences of disarticulation from the comforts of suburban domesticity and heterosexual desire, post-war productions celebrated less the heroism of men at war than the nostalgia of their returning home. Turning to Vance Palmer’s Prisoners’ Country (1960), the chapter concludes by considering how the experiences of Australian soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese during the war have been dramatised to complicate the convergence of masculinity, nationality and whiteness at home.

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Gender, memory and war In introducing their anthology, Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi observe how “despite the rhetoric which claimed that masculinity found its best expression in war, war engendered a crisis in masculinity” (1995: 11). War presented men with challenges to prove their manhood through feats of bravery, fortitude and determination amid lifethreatening adversity. Yet physical injuries and psychological trauma were manifest forms of masculinity in crisis both in the theatre of war and when soldiers returned home. Underlying these observations on the gendered dimension of men’s experiences at war and back home are a series of conceptual oppositions. Lake and Damousi contend that these oppositions have structured the gendered meanings of warfare, such that relations between “home front/battle front, passivity/activity, weakness/strength, private/public, staying/departing, [and] defended/ defenders” become self-evidently aligned with an opposition between femininity and masculinity (3). As Stephen Garton explains at the outset of his contribution to Lake and Damousi’s anthology: War represented the attainment of an ideal manliness, physical action, bravery, self-control, courage and, more importantly for many, male comradeship. […] The point of contrast, of otherness, that helped define this masculine world was home, the place of women, domesticity, constrained masculinity and ‘the shirker’—the non-man. (1995: 191)

Working from this gendered perspective located between war and home, we seek to assess the contribution of Australian theatrical production to the task of remembering men’s experience of war and its aftermath during the two decades from the end of the Second World War in 1945. Surveying an array of theatrical productions across various genres of performances, we will see how prevalent and pertinent was this task of remembering the war in Australian culture of the period. To see how particular was the contribution of theatrical production we must distinguish the task of remembering from the more evident task of memorialisation. Whereas memorialisation sought to consolidate and perpetuate historical significance through the erection of war memorials and monuments and through the annualisation of ceremonies and parades, the task of remembering as taken up in theatrical production seems more contingent, more attuned to present circumstance and to the propagation of gender anxieties of the time.

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We must also distinguish theatrical depictions of men’s experience of war and its aftermath in productions of the post-war period from those in more recent productions. Julia Mant (2000) foregrounds the task of memorialisation in considering “how memory is enacted on stage” in productions like Nigel Triffit’s The Fall of Singapore from 1987 and Richard Davey’s A Bright and Crimson Flower (1994) from 1992, which were both revived in association with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995.1 This is particularly evident in Mant’s analysis of The Fall of Singapore where she saw the performers’ bodies actually enacting the mythologisation of the prisoner of war: “as the bodies are put through torture and hard labour, they become mythical figures of survival and strength” (100). Mant concludes that “what is enacted by Triffit […] is not the history of prisoners, or the fact of the historical past, but the memory of that past” (101). The memorialisation of Australian prisoners of war in terms of their spirit, strength and survival enrols them in the project of “diggernationalism” wherein the militarism of white masculinity has come to embody the face and figure of the national character (Nicoll 2001). Theatrical production during the post-war period took part in a different project. For instance, Fiona Nicoll’s historical analysis of “digger-nationalism” affords a prominent place to The One Day of the Year as the first of two events which “illustrate the increasingly contested status of the digger since the 1960s” (Nicoll 2001: 2–3).2 But whereas Mant overlooks earlier treatments of the prisoner of war experience on the Australian stage,3 the prominence that Nicoll 1

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3

The Fall of Singapore opened at the Melbourne Town Hall on 10 September 1987. It also played at the Festival Theatre, Adelaide, from 5 May 1988. Triffit revived the production in conjunction with the STC for a season at the Footbridge Theatre, Sydney, from 8 November 1995. A Bright and Crimson Flower was first performed at Princes Wharf No. 1, Hobart, on 15 October 1992, where it played for two weeks before transferring to the Launceston Showgrounds from 30 October 1992. The production toured during 1993, playing in Adelaide, Melbourne, and the regional Victorian towns of Echuca, Hamilton and Bendigo. It was revived at the Mt Nelson Theatre, Hobart College, in August 1995. Both productions were videorecorded (The Fall of Singapore 1995; A Bright and Crimson Flower 1995). The other event contesting the status of the digger was a debate triggered by the publication of Inglis (1965). Mant refers to the British productions of Naked Island but omits mention of its five Australian productions (see footnote 5).

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affords The One Day of the Year and its critique of the Anzac tradition only perpetuates the significance of that play. The contributions of earlier theatrical productions in depicting the experience and aftereffects of the Second World War thereby recede from view. Not that these earlier productions were much engaged by the project of “digger-nationalism”, in either celebration or critique. Rather, these productions were engaged as much if not more by the project of repatriating soldiers into suburban life back home. Garton describes the process of soldier repatriation as “cultural work aimed at ensuring the recovery of manhood in all its connotations”, although he notes how repatriation after the Second World War became more “a problem of individual psychology” (1995: 200–201): Instead of a direct challenge to be independent, the World War II repatriation information was full of warnings that there would “be problems in civvy street”. It warned of the potential dangers of depression, loneliness, disillusion and apathy, acknowledged that soldiers would inevitably be different and alienated from civilians, advised of the potential for marital discord and the difficulties of relating to women who now had different expectations of life after their own war effort, and it forewarned of the psychological difficulties of re-entering the workforce, the family, the club and old friendships. (196)

If these were the psychological warnings addressed to individual soldiers on their return to civilian life, they were also among the anxieties animating the cultural work of post-war theatrical production in Australia. For whatever meanings were being generated elsewhere during the post-war period, it seems clear that Australian theatrical production of the period was not participating at that point in the task of war memorialisation. The performances we survey here were not celebratory events, glorifying warfare and the attainment of manhood through feats of bravery, fortitude and determination amid lifethreatening adversity. Rather, they partook in a more subtle task of remembering with affection the complexities of disarticulation between men’s experiences at war and their longing for home. Remembering the war in post-war theatrical production We begin our survey with the Kiwis Revue Company, a New Zealand Army entertainment unit which formed during the war and toured major cities in Australia and New Zealand for eight years from 1946 (Capern 1995). The Kiwis featured female impersonators among their all-male cast of trained soldiers and their revue recalled the glamour

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and comedy of variety performance from before the war. A program for a season at Sydney’s Empire Theatre commencing in July 1949 includes an item called “Back to the Twenties” in which female impersonators John Hunter and Ralph Dyer played “The Flappers”, while the ensemble played their “Boy Friends”. Other items reminiscent of a pre-war European past include “Robin Hood”, “Songs of Scotland”, “Neapolitan Serenade”, “A Memory of Schubert” and “Primrose, or A Simple Village Maid”. In the same program, gender transitivity rendered domesticity strangely humorous in items such as “Soldier For Tea” with Dyer as “The Hostess”, “Children’s Hour at 2NBG” with Dyer as “Auntie May” and a solo performance from Hunter simply entitled “Home—An Impression” (Tripoli 1949). In this regard, the Kiwis Revue might best be described as engaged in the task of forgetting the war, as a diversion from the memory of life during the war. That task—remembering the mundane actuality of the experience of war—was taken up by Locke Elliot in Rusty Bugles, which he described as a “documentary” and “not strictly a play” (1980: vii). With its all-male cast, khaki costumes and knockabout characters, Rusty Bugles was first staged in October 1948 at the Independent Theatre in Sydney where it was initially banned on account of its robust language. With some expletives deleted, it subsequently toured Australia and New Zealand until 1952, playing for six months in Melbourne from April 1949 just months after the Kiwis had transferred their show to Sydney (Brisbane 1995). During the decade from the end of war in 1945 the Kiwis Revue Company, promoted by J.C. Williamson’s, and Rusty Bugles, promoted by entrepreneurs Kenn Brodziak and Garnet H. Carroll, represented the memory of war for Australian audiences on the popular stage. Nevertheless it is important to record that neither play actually staged the experience of being at war: the Kiwis Revue skipped between before-the-war glamour and comedy back home, while the soldiers in Rusty Bugles, stuck at a remote ordnance depot in the Northern Territory, were neither at war nor at home. In the years after the Kiwis Revue and Rusty Bugles stopped touring and prior to the revival of Rusty Bugles at the Independent Theatre in 1964 and its adaptation for television in 1965, other plays with all-male, or predominantly male, casts sought to present in documentary-like realism the experiences of men in the armed forces

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up north. Outpost, a television play by John Cameron about five Australian men holed up in a remote outpost in New Guinea in September 1943, was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (later Corporation) (ABC) in November 1959.4 Naked Island, one of three Australian plays chosen for the inaugural season of a short-lived venture at the University of Sydney, was presented in January 1962, after British premiere seasons in Liverpool and London during 1960 (see figure 5.1).5 And Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959), a British male-cast play set in the Malayan jungle during the Japanese advance on Singapore in 1942, was given localised productions in Sydney and in Adelaide in 1960, after seasons in Edinburgh and London in 1958 and 1959. Other playwrights of the time turned their attention to civilian life in the post-war period, seeking dramatic potential and narrative complications in the legacy of war-time experience and the return of servicemen. Ru Pullan’s Curly on the Rack (1958), set in post-war Rabaul, animated the anxieties of a war cripple reliant on others to retrieve buried treasure hidden during the war.6 Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country (1963) played out a revenge narrative with its origins in a war-time atrocity committed by an Australian soldier in Greece (see chapter 3). John Hepworth’s The Beast in View (1959; 1961) drew drunken humour and bittersweet cynicism from Pren, a former prisoner of war (see chapters 2 and 7). Vance Palmer’s Prisoners’ Country (1960) diverted the lines of a farming family’s inheritance through the son’s post-war malaise and miscegenation. 4

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6

Outpost may be the earliest extant television play in the film archives at the ABC. We are grateful to Jeremy Gadd for bringing to our attention Outpost and G’day Digger (discussed below). Braddon’s Naked Island, initially known as You’ll Never Get Off the Island, was first performed at the Liverpool Playhouse in England on 1 March 1960. It was also performed at the Arts Theatre in London in September and November 1960 and at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry in May 1961. Its first Australian performance was on 15 January 1962 at the University of Sydney’s Union Theatre in a production by the AETT. It was subsequently performed in Canberra by the Canberra Repertory Society at the Canberra Repertory Theatre in November 1962; in Melbourne by the Independent Players at the National Theatrette in November 1963 and at St Martin’s Theatre in March 1964; in Perth by the National Theatre at the Playhouse in June 1964; and in Adelaide by the Adelaide Repertory Theatre at the Arts Theatre in April 1966. Curly on the Rack was directed by Nigel Lovell for the AETT at the Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, in a production which opened on 3 September 1958.

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White’s The Season at Sarsaparilla generated sexual scandal out of suburban repatriation when a mate from the war intrudes on the Boyle household. And marking an end to this series with a shift in focus from remembering the war to critiquing its memorialisation is Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, which was presented at over sixty venues around Australia in the decade after its premiere in Adelaide in 1960 (see chapter 8). Between war and home Considering this array of theatrical productions and how it remembers men’s experiences at war and back home, we propose that the theatrical contribution to the propagation of gender anxieties in the post-war period was a drama that animated narrative arcs of masculine memory and heterosexual desire between here-and-now and thereand-then. What this means is that, in the context of theatrical production, those traditional alignments of war with masculinity and home with femininity became convoluted and intertwined. For what seems distinctive about the capacity of theatrical production to rearticulate the gender relations of war-time experience is the invocation of homely desires in the midst of war and the eruption of war memories among the comforts of home. An invocation of home memories amid the actuality of war is evident in Braddon’s stage directions for the opening scene of Naked Island: The entire action of the play takes place in a small courtyard leading down from the cell block at Changi Jail, Singapore. The year is 1945. […] A small jail courtyard with steps from the cell block behind it. Five men are about their routine jail chores: JACKO sits shaving, MUM is knitting, KEN is busy rolling a cigarette, OSCAR marks up another day on his impressive tally of days spent in jail and MAGPIE studies an Italian grammar. (Braddon 1960: 127)

Mum, as he is known throughout the play (and we never do learn his proper name), is characterised as “a stolid, out-back type” with a “most improbable talent for knitting” (124). Brek, in his review of the production for Nation, recalled “a fatherly soldier (‘Mum’) fussing over the youngsters’ welfare” (1962). Yet, beyond a joke about Mum stealing a sweater from a Japanese guard, unravelling it and then selling it back to him knitted up as socks (132), there is not much more to Mum’s knitting; nor is much made of his name. To mess with

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a metaphor, we could say that Mum’s name and his knitting were inventions of the sort to which necessity is the mother. Practical ingenuity in the face of necessity is demonstrably valued by Jacko, Ken, Oscar, Magpie and Mum—the five prisoners of war who, at this point in the play, have just assembled a makeshift radio out of a clothes line, an aerial flown in from the fly-tower, and various components kept hidden in the lavatory. A capacity for making-do amid deprivation and hardship was a recognisable aspect of the national character, that configuration of qualities and capacities that at the time were regarded as distinctly Australian and resolutely masculine. In that well-known passage, historian Russel Ward described the “typical Australian” as “a practical man” and “a great improviser, ever willing to ‘have a go’ at anything, but willing too to be content with a task done in a way that is ‘near enough’” (1958: 1). Noting “the inordinately high value set upon practical unimaginative activity” in Australia, critic Max Harris continued the theme by explaining that “making-and-doing and improvising are the essential tasks that confront a new nation” and “this practical materialism survives as an inborn interest in the male Australian” (1962: 60). From this perspective on masculine practicality, Mum’s name may be taken as an indicator of the way his knitting traverses a gendered division of labour. Yet as an instance of making-do, of making the most under difficult circumstances of a “most improbable talent”, Mum’s knitting may be accommodated within the “practical materialism” with which Harris characterised “the masculinity of Australian life” (60). If we do not see in Mum’s knitting a subversion of normative gender roles, we may see instead how the motherly connotations of the character’s actions and name could have engaged memories, both on stage and beyond, of the relational warmth and habitual comforts of home. John Cameron’s Outpost from 1959 offers a more troubling example of the way gendered memories of home were invoked amid war. In an early scene, Steve McCudden, a flight sergeant from the air force played by Paul Karo, shows photographs of his girlfriends to soldiers in the army outpost to which he has just been assigned (see figure 5.2). The photographs facilitate talk of women back in Australia and establish a contrast of locale with the all-male camp sorely lacking in the comforts and desires of home. “What a dump!”

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exclaims McCudden when he first arrives on the scene, upsetting the soldiers by reminding them of what they’re missing—for the soldiers have worked hard at making themselves feel at home in this place (Outpost 1959). In the opening scene prior to McCudden’s arrival, we see Signaller “Tiger” Lyons (Sydney Conabere) lashing the frame of his makeshift camp bed, as Corporal “Mitch” Mitchell (Dennis Miller) wanders over to help out. Mitch wonders whether they should “knock up a bed for the air force bloke” since “he’s coming straight from the mainland” and will “probably expect to be issued with all mod cons”. Tiger declines, reckoning that “it’ll do him good to sleep on the ground for a while the same as we had to”. Of course, when Tiger returns from his watch to find McCudden lying on his bed, the scene is well set for confrontation. Later on, after McCudden’s murdered body is found, the drama reveals how goings-on back home intrude upon the soldiers’ homeaway-from-home to complicate the relations between men. Mitch reads in a newspaper that a Brisbane woman has died. The woman is the wife of Sergeant “Happy” Adams (Keith Eden) and, at this point, Happy shares with the men the contents of a letter he received in the mail McCudden brought. The letter informed Happy of his wife’s suicide and the circumstances of her death: she had been having a relationship with another man and, when relatives found out and threatened to write to Happy, she committed suicide. As with the photographs of McCudden’s girlfriends—one of which, Happy later confesses, was a picture of his wife—the newspaper and letter are indicators of home. They mediate arcs of heterosexual desire that incorporate what has happened back home into the action that is unfolding here—or as Tiger puts it, collapsing the distance between the two: “If we hadn’t been stuck up in this god-forsaken hole all of this might never have happened.” At the time that Outpost was broadcast in 1959, the ABC had been producing television plays for just on three years. In doing so, it drew, to a large extent, upon the genres and skills of local theatrical production. It is indicative of the derivation of Outpost from theatrical genres of playwriting that the plot is entirely set in New Guinea—for playwrights of the time usually observed the economy of a single setting. Ballet, on the other hand, may have offered a more flexible performance genre for representing different places and times. Beth Dean’s G’day Digger, a made-for-television ballet with music by John

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Antill, premiered as a television broadcast by the ABC in February 1958. It tells the story of two Australian soldiers, initially during the war in a bunker in Egypt and then later back home at a pub in Sydney. In some respects, G’day Digger conforms to the conventional alignments of the men going to war while the women—and a couple of unsoldierly men—stay at home. Indeed, the two unsoldierly, stayat-home men are clearly differentiated in their style of movement from the two diggers. The “Elegant Inebriate” is a drunk who stumbles and totters around, while the “Bodgie” is an excessively stylish young man who preens his appearance and prances about. What is more interesting about G’day Digger is the way in which the choreography performed by the soldiers, firstly at war and later at home, convolutes the two locations. It is home as recalled when at war and the war as recalled when home that comprise the central choreographic concerns of each locale. When the soldiers are at the front, the actions of war are temporarily displaced by a friendly encounter and recollections of home. Swimming at the beach, drinking beer and dancing with women are among the actions mimed by the two dancers to recall life back home, before the war reasserts its presence in the choreography and the dancers dive and tumble in response to an attack (see figure 5.3). Back home in Sydney, the soldiers meet up at a pub and, predictably enough, fall in love with the barmaid and her friend. In publicity for the ballet in the Sydney Morning Herald, G’day Digger was described as “a light-hearted fantasy” (“Antill Ballet” 1958). But at certain moments the choreography of romance is disrupted by untimely recollections of war, making the memory of war an ongoing presence in ways which the soldiers did not anticipate in their wartime evocation of the good life back home. Disruptive and disturbing memories of war are clearly evoked in a sequence danced by Alex Crethar, the Digger’s Mate who has just been knocked out in a fight with the Bodgie. At this point, Antill scores some twenty-two taped sound effects of urban and industrial noise into an interlude of “concrete music”, while Crethar’s movements become abstract. His actions are off-balance and repetitions are disrupted in a dance which the H e r a l d described as “representing the workings of his subconscious mind” (“Antill Ballet” 1958). Elsewhere, the choreography enacts the soldier’s shattered nerves: at one point, when

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the Inebriate accidentally drops his bottles of beer, Crethar jumps into a fighting stance, startled by the noise and rigid with fear. The disarticulation between men’s experiences at war and their longing for home is fondly remembered in The Season at Sarsaparilla when Ernie and Nola Boyle’s suburban routine is disrupted with the arrival of Rowley “Digger” Masson, Ernie’s mate from the war.7 Welcoming Digger into the kitchen, Ernie “suddenly and shyly, touches an invisible object”, a talisman of suburban living and domestic convenience: “That’s the Mixmaster”, says Ernie, “Got everythink now”. But Digger is unimpressed: “Somehow I never thought of you in a set-up like this”. Ernie explains how “You gotta make a place decent for the missus”, but Digger is soon lost in his memories of their time together in the war: “Blokes were close to each other then”, he says to Ernie. Then, after a silence, “I reckon you forgot all that. You got sold on the bloody Mixmasters” (White 1965: 111). Digger’s accusation is that in embracing the feminised modernity of suburban living, Ernie has forgotten the masculine homosociality of war. Ernie rejects the accusation but later insists that Digger accommodate his bodily functions to the convenience of suburban sanitation: “‘Ere, you don’t ’ave to go outside, not in my place. I’m not emptyin’ the cans for nothun. We’re a septic area ’ere” (112). Memories of war and anxieties about gender also circulated around other satirical treatments of post-war suburban life in the theatre. “I did not know it then”, writes Barry Humphries about his first performance as Sandy Stone in 1958, “but with this tribute on the altar of Mnemosyne Australian Nostalgia was born” (1981: 15). It is an audacious claim, quite characteristic of Humphries, but one worth taking seriously—especially if we recall that nostalgia is another name for ‘homesickness’. For Sandy Stone is so ensconced in his suburban home at 36 Gallipoli Crescent, Glen Iris, that he could never suffer from feeling homesick again. Not that it is certain he did go to war or to which war it was if he went (195–196). All we may know is 7

John Tasker directed the premiere production of The Season at Sarsaparilla which opened at the Union Hall, University of Adelaide, on 14 September 1962. John Sumner’s production for the UTRC opened at Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne, on 16 October 1962. Tasker restaged the play in Sydney in a coproduction between the AETT and J.C. Williamson’s, opening at the Theatre Royal on 22 May 1963.

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that a “nice night’s entertainment” at the local Returned Services League club figured prominently in Sandy’s suburban routine (14–18), that he had an extensive collection of war pictorial books, one for each year of the war (49–55), and that visits to the Repatriation hospital were to become more common as his health began to deteriorate (109–113). Two images of Humphries in performance from the early 1960s clearly contextualise his critique of Australian suburbia within the period of post-war reconstruction (26–27). On one side we have Sandy Stone, a faded man in striped pyjamas, indoors in an armchair clutching a hot-water bottle for comfort, and on the other side is Edna Everage, the good neighbour of Moonee Ponds, standing proudly on Humoresque Street beneath a sign that proclaims “T HIS IS A WAR S AVINGS S TREET ”. Taken together, these images suggest that the entire project of post-war reconstruction and suburban expansion was motivated by a masculine aversion to feeling homesick. At the very least, this is what motivates Mum and the boys back in Changi, who, in the closing scene of Naked Island, conjure visions of a return to home, hygiene and hot water at the end of the war—to “a nice big hot bath” with “soap that stinks of perfume” and “real toothpaste” instead of charcoal for cleaning their teeth (Braddon 1960: 210–211). “The stimulus of failure” When Australian audiences were attending productions of Naked Island in the 1960s, the post-war project of soldier repatriation and suburban expansion was progressing into its second decade. With such wistful reveries to the conveniences of suburban modernity characterising their homecoming, the psychological traumas of returning Australian soldiers and prisoners of war may have seemed less appetising to audiences at the time. Displacing the experience of repatriation by a generation, Ric Throssell’s For Valour (1976) reflected the life and death of his father, who fought in the First World War and returned a war hero with a Victoria Cross, but who struggled with the transition to civilian work, suffered financially during the Depression years, and took his own life in 1934. The Canberra Repertory Society gave For Valour its premiere production in August 1960; to our knowledge, the play has not been revived. The play script was published with a commentary, entitled “The Hero in Defeat”, by historian Manning Clark. “One of the paradoxes in the history of

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Australia”, writes Clark, “is the stimulus of failure to the creative imagination” (1976: v). The “stimulus of failure” is certainly apparent in Vance Palmer’s Prisoners’ Country. This play was given its premiere production by the UTRC in 1960.8 A reviewer for the Bulletin attributed the play to a persistent theme in Palmer’s writing: “Time and again in his novels he shows us men […] vainly exhausting their energies in battle against the inescapable confines of their lives” (A.S.J. 1960: 23). Palmer died in 1959. The posthumous production was not judged a success. Like For Valour, the play has not been revived. The Bulletin lamented that Palmer had not had the opportunity to revise the play during rehearsal and that, “due to a natural reluctance to tamper with the last words of a man who has meant so much to Australian letters”, director John Sumner “allowed the script to speak more-or-less for itself; and where it sags the production sags with it” (A.S.J. 1960: 24). Geoffrey Hutton of the Age attended sympathetically to the structural problems of a “novelist’s play”, diagnosing “an overabundance of ideas which are too profuse to be resolved” yet recognising the play’s significance. “This is a large and intensely serious play”, writes Hutton, noting parenthetically that it offered “no comic relief” and commending the play to the nation: “In the history of the Australian play, I think Prisoners’ Country will be remembered” (1960). The play is set at a homestead in the remote north-west and opens with the return of a son from the war. An aging Indigenous stockman, Duggan, is sitting on the veranda tending his ingrown eyelashes with tweezers and a broken piece of mirror. It is evening and “from the blacks’ camp across the creek comes the faint rhythmical chant of a corroboree” (Palmer 1960: 1). When Duggan’s wife enters, we learn that the corroboree is to celebrate the return from the war of “young Floyd”, the son of Bart Cunningham, the white owner of the property. Cunningham had “thought the Japs had done in young Floyd” (1), and, with no son to take over, there had been talk of selling the property (4). However, Floyd survived as a prisoner of war for four years in Java. “D’you think I’d want to throw in the towel when my boy’s just come home to run the place?”, objects Cunningham when a neighbour enquires about his intention to sell (4). Thus the corroboree celebrates not only Floyd’s survival and return home, but also the 8

John Sumner’s production of Prisoners’ Country opened at the Union Theatre, University of Melbourne, on 18 January 1960.

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future in which he will take over the station. The “fellas from sandhill country” have good reason to celebrate. Floyd was “brought up among them” after his mother died when he was three (6): “My father and I were never very close to one another”, explains Floyd to his stepmother Thea; “an old gin named Ruby was more of a mother to me” (13). Floyd is thus close to the Indigenous characters and has enlightened ideas about race which differ from those of the neighbour who enquired about buying the property (7). But Floyd is no longer the man who went off to war, as Cunningham explains: They gave him the works, those Nips in the camps they made in Java. Fed him on nothing but muck; bashed him if he turned a look on them like they couldn’t bash the fellows in Changi. Got him, the Nips did, when he was on special mission, running in planes for the Dutch. And cut off all those years from his mates in Malaya. Records all balled up and no one to know whether he was alive or dead. Easy to understand if he finds it a bit hard to shake down now he’s come back. (7)

Floyd is “different since he came back”, he has a “look in his eyes” and a “mind a thousand miles away” (6). He is moody and rude to the neighbour and his vision of the future is bleak (7–8). He was married before the war, but has now fallen out with his wife, who had once thought him dead (1, 12). He also expresses strong reservations about the plan that he inherit the property: “My inheritance, eh? Spinifex, sandhills, cattle—a handful of human beings black and not so black … It’s a responsibility I don’t want” (12). For the most part, the characters are reticent to discuss Floyd’s experience as a prisoner of war and they are taciturn when they do. When Thea wants to “go in and see what’s upset him” and “try to jolly him up a bit”, Cunningham orders her to “leave him alone” (7). Floyd himself “won’t talk about it” (4) and likes to be alone (21). When Cunningham injures himself in a contest of strength which he loses to Duggan (11), Floyd has no choice but to take control of the property. While Cunningham convalesces in a hospital on the coast and goes on a holiday with Thea to Java and Singapore, Floyd institutes some managerial changes on the property. He prioritises trust by refusing to lock up the office (23) and he strikes Duggan’s debts from the property’s accounts (31). Floyd’s experience of humiliation as a prisoner of war has given him insight into the experience of Indigenous men; he claims to understand how

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humiliation “can ride a man” (24). When Cunningham returns, Floyd discusses the property and its Indigenous workers with him: FLOYD: Well, then, let’s look at it with a cold eye, Dad. You’ve built a little world here for yourself. Not many men could have done it; you can take pride in that. But the making of Karoola and the running of it was your idea of a free and satisfying life—it wasn’t Duggan’s. CUNNINGHAM: Don’t tell me that old no-hoper had a better one. FLOYD: Perhaps not. But we all have different ideas of what a free life is. Duggan’s may have been cock-eyed, but it was his own part of his pride in being a man. (34)

Drawing moral insight for the future from his psychological trauma, Floyd’s war-engendered appreciation of “pride in being a man” provides a basis for reconfiguring race relations on the property. At this point, Floyd announces his intention to accept the inheritance and take over the property (34). Responding in turn, Cunningham acknowledges how “Floyd sees life more easily through the eyes of an old camp black than he does through mine” (37). Indeed, Floyd and Duggan’s daughter Warrie have quietly grown close, creating tension for Cooney, the station overseer. Floyd is injured in an accident, fatally as it turns out, when the horse that he is riding—selected and saddled by the jealous overseer—falls while they are working in the cattle yards (38). Lying on a bed, “feeling nothing” and waiting for the Flying Doctor to arrive, Floyd reveals that Warrie is pregnant with his child (40). In the final act, Warrie gives birth to a boy of mixed race, although, since Floyd has died, the future for race relations on the property remains uncertain. The boy’s grandfathers, Cunningham and Duggan, find reconciliation as they retire, while the neighbour, moving in to take over the property, complains about the blacks behaving “as if they owned the country” (45). Prisoners’ Country is worth remembering for the way it charts, however sketchily, the psychology of Floyd’s humiliation as a prisoner of war. Palmer’s insight was to discover in that psychology some leverage for dislodging the monopoly that white men have held over the future of the nation. Early in the play Floyd challenges the neighbour, asking “What does the future mean to you? How do you see the world when you look ahead?” (8). The neighbour talks of “new country being opened up, new sources of wealth tapped” and “progress, scientific advance on all fronts” leading to “a big improvement on the world we know now”, but Floyd is scathing of such “newspaper-talk about the white man and his glorious future”

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(8). Floyd’s counter discourse anticipates an indigenising process whereby white Australians seek to synthesise a postcolonial specificity by hybridising elements from Indigenous and Asian cultures (Tiffin 1984; Gilbert 1998: 205). This indigenising process is emergent in Prisoners’ Country, embodied by the mixed-race baby boy but compromised as long as white men own the land. As for Asia, “it wasn’t any good”, says Thea of the trip she took with Cunningham to Java and Singapore, “the only thing that interested him was finding the camp where Floyd had been imprisoned by the Japs” (Palmer 1960: 29). The whiteness of humiliation Since the time of Prisoners’ Country, the psychological trauma of those Australians who were captured and imprisoned by the Japanese has been well rehearsed. Helen Gilbert’s comparative analysis of John Romeril’s The Floating World (1975) and Jill Shearer’s Shimada (1989) reveals how playwrights have deployed memories of the humiliations, deprivations and indignities suffered by prisoners of war and gender anxieties about bodily violation, sexual submission, feminisation and castration to dramatise the character psychology of those Australian men who were affected by the war (Gilbert 1998: 207–218). Shimada opens with a striking image of submission. Eric and Clive, who team up after the war to run a bicycle factory, are first seen in a jungle clearing in 1945, kneeling “face to face, barechested, in tattered shorts” (Shearer 1989: 1).9 A Japanese soldier, Shimada, “stands upstage”, “looking down” at them, and orders them to lower their heads as he unsheathes his sword (1). Shimada is characterised as particularly sadistic. In one scene, he repeatedly kicks Clive who is trying to explain the meaning of “humane” (27–28). In another scene, Shimada kills the prison’s transvestite entertainer with a single blow to the neck, then takes the “combpin” from the entertainer’s headdress and drives it into Clive’s stomach and orders him to sing (41–42). Such violence feminises the prisoners of war and renders them 9

Simon Phillips’s premiere production of Shimada for the MTC opened at the Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne, on 25 April 1987. David Bell directed a production for the Queensland Theatre Company (QTC) which opened at the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane, on 5 July 1990. Phillips revived his production at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York, in April 1992 (see Shearer 2002).

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impotent. Shimada’s accusation that haunts Eric to his death is “You Australian soldiers soft” (47). These images of the Japanese soldiers committing war-time violations of Australian men resonated in the 1980s with anxieties about Japanese business interests and property acquisitions in Australia (Radic 1987; Thomson 1987). The play alternates scenes of the prisoners of war from the past with scenes from the present at the bicycle factory, which is about to be taken over by a Japanese firm. The actor who plays Shimada in the war scenes doubles as Toshio, the Japanese businessman negotiating the takeover of the factory. Similar images and anxieties have re-appeared in other productions since. In a scene from Nigel Triffit’s spectacle The Fall of Singapore, an Australian prisoner kneels centre stage while a Japanese soldier lifts a sword behind him and strikes him down. The Australian prisoner, who is naked except for a slouch hat, is then tied with ropes and strung up by his feet (The Fall of Singapore 1995). In A Bright and Crimson Flower, Davey’s epic work of documentary theatre, the prisoners of war are from the outset victims of repeated physical abuse. The violence of the Japanese guards is evoked through voiceover and the prisoners’ physical reactions (A Bright and Crimson Flower 1995). Such scenes of young Australian men being taken as prisoners of war and cruelly treated by Japanese soldiers were also dramatised in John Doyle’s ABC Television mini-series Changi (2001; see Garton 2002). In the two decades after the end of the Second World War, men’s experiences at war were remembered in performance with warmth and affection that suffused their return to the comforts and cleanliness of suburban life. The home to which Mum and the boys in Naked Island longed to return from their imprisonment was clean, sweet-smelling and well-lit at night. Like the toothpaste that Magpie knew would taste so much better than the charcoal he had been using to clean his teeth, home in their nostalgic imagination was luminously white. Only in Prisoners’ Country, where Palmer sought to channel the prisoner of war experience into an indigenising transformation in which the white man would disappear, did the Australia of the post-war future appear as anything but white. Susan Robinson describes the emergence since the 1960s of strategies whereby white men in America have come to mark themselves as visible, as particular and embodied subjects. One such

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strategy that Robinson identifies is the exhibition of the injuries and woundings that white male bodies have sustained. Robinson explains the significance of white men becoming visible in this way: Invisibility is a privilege enjoyed by social groups who do not, thus, attract modes of surveillance and discipline; but it can also be felt as a burden in a culture that appears to organize itself around the visibility of differences and the symbolic currency of identity politics. (2002: 4)

The recent circulation of so many quasi-ritualistic images of white Australian men suffering prisoner of war abuse in productions like Shimada, The Fall of Singapore, A Bright and Crimson Flower and Changi is designed, it seems, to honour an Australia that is passing or has passed. Yet in the face of the indigenising relations with the nation’s Asian neighbours that are now programmed onto arts festivals stages, this is an Australia that was once but is no longer indicatively masculine and white.10

10

For example, Sandakan Threnody, a collaboration between Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen and Australian composer Jonathan Mills, used international crosscultural collaboration to complicate the telling of a story about Australian prisoners of war who died on a forced march from Sandarkan in Borneo. The production premiered at the Singapore Festival in July 2004 and was subsequently presented at the Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals (Grehan 2006).

Figure 5.1 Naked Island

Jon Dennis (left) as Magpie, Alan Tobin as Yamomota and Ron Haddrick as Jack in Russell Braddon’s Naked Island directed by Ronald Denson at the Union Theatre, University of Sydney, in January 1962. (Reproduced by courtesy of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust from F.R. Harvey, Theatre, Arts in Australia series, Melbourne: Longmans Green, 1965.)

Figure 5.2 Outpost

Paul Karo (left) as Flight Sergeant Steve McCudden and Keith Eden as Sergeant ‘Happy’ Adams in John Cameron’s television play Outpost, transmitted on ABC Television in Sydney on 18 November 1959. (Reproduced by courtesy of the National Archives of Australia: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, series SP1426/4, control 163, 1956-1969.)

Figure 5.3 G’day Digger

Colin Fitzgerald (left) as the Digger and Alex Crethar as the Digger’s mate in Beth Dean’s ballet G’day Digger, transmitted on ABC Television in Sydney on 11 February 1958. (Reproduced by courtesy of the National Archives of Australia: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, series SP1426/4, control 99, 1958.)

Chapter 6 “Wog boy” moves Since the mid-1980s, Greek-Australian actors have led the cultivation of a transnational style of masculinity in the theatre and on the screen. This transnational masculinity is recognisable in performance as an energetically assertive style of wog boy attitudes and expressions. The style draws on the experience of men born in Australia to parents who migrated from Greece and other parts of southern Europe. We trace its emergence to the period of post-war migration and to concerns about migrant men disrupting the gender order of Anglo-Australian life. Indeed, performances on screen by actors such as Alex Dimitriades in The Heartbreak Kid (1993), Head On (1998) and La Spagnola (2001), Nick Giannopoulos and Vince Colossimo in The Wog Boy (2000) and Paul Fenech, Paul Nakad and Tahir Bilgic in Fat Pizza (2003) are only the most recent mediations of a masculinity which has been cultivated in contexts of live performance for some time. On the stage, the wog boy style came to prominence in comedy shows like Giannopoulos’s Wogs Out of Work from 1987 and its sequels, and in plays like Richard Barrett’s The Heartbreak Kid (1988) and Greg Andreas’s Milk and Honey (1992). Yet even in the 1960s, concerns about the transnational masculinity of migrant men were animating the performance of some new Australian plays such as Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart (1960), Theodore Patrikareas’s The Promised Woman (2000) and David Martin’s The Young Wife (1966). In exploring the emergence of a wog boy style of masculinity in Australia, we trace its migratory departure from the patriarchal masculinity of the homeland. We also consider how an erotic interest in the masculinity of migrant men from Mediterranean Europe encountered an Anglo-Australian investment in the classical aesthetics of Greco-Roman culture. In Australian vernacular, the term wog was once—and, in certain circumstances, still is—a denigrating term of ethnic designation used

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by Anglo-Celtic Australians to mark migrants’ cultural difference from the hitherto predominantly Anglo-Celtic mores of Australian life. Initially the term applied to migrants of non-Anglo-Celtic origin, although in the post-war period its usage focused in particular on those migrating from Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. Following a pattern which saw the transformation of other terms of denigration into identifiers of difference, the term was subject to strategic reclamation in the 1980s. Researching the cultural politics of Australian comedy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Mitchell describes the transformation of the term wog into a “defiantly positive” term of “self-description” (1992: 130). Mitchell cites Hilary Glow’s review of Wogs Out of Work as pivotal to this transformation: “It is no small part of this show’s success that ‘wogs’ become the subject of celebration rather than denigration” (quoted in Mitchell 1992: 131). Indeed, Jane Warren, conducting research into the sociolinguistic phenomenon of wogspeak in Melbourne in the 1990s, attributes this reclamation in large part to “the success of stage shows such as Wogs Out of Work, Wogarama and […] Wogboys” and the work of “wog comedy” performers Giannopoulos, Mary Coustas (“Effie”) and George Kapiniaris (1999: 89–91). Likewise Pieter Aquilia, in an essay on the “exploitation of ethnic elements” in Australian film and television drama, observes how Alex Dimitriades’s successful career switch from film heart-throb [in The Heartbreak Kid] to prime-time commercial television [in the spin-off series Heartbreak High] had a significant impact on teenage attitudes to non-Anglo protagonists, and his popularity saw a new breed of adolescent take up the banner of ‘wog’ pride. (2001: 105)

The sociology of the term reveals a more complex pattern of usage than the notion of proud reclamation implies. Scott Poynting, Greg Noble and Paul Tabar conducted a study of masculinity and ethnicity among young men and women living in suburban south-western Sydney in the 1990s. A group of young men of Lebanese background interviewed in the study reported that wog was simultaneously active in their social world as a term of solidarity and abuse—as is evident in one young man’s claim: “if anyone called me a wog, they wouldn’t be speaking to me alone” (1998: 79). For these young men, “wogs” was what they had “in common” with an extended group of friends which included others from Lebanese, Greek, Italian and Arabic back-

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grounds (79–80). But they also experienced wog as a term of insult and abuse, used against them by “Aussies”, particularly at school (84). It is evident that both the history of the term and its current usage were active in shaping the young men’s experience of masculinity, especially in defining the tone of their relations with young AngloCeltic Australian men. These young Lebanese-Australian men experienced racism not so much as an “offence to their humanity” but as “an affront to their manhood” (88). Some commentators have drawn comparisons between the style of masculinity in The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza and the Anglo-Celtic Australian ocker masculinity evident from the late 1960s in works like Jack Hibberd’s White with Wire Wheels (1970), David Williamson’s The Coming of Stork (1974) and Don’s Party (1974), and the films, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (1974) (Pulford 2002; Speed 2005). Lesley Speed lists the commonalities that wog boy masculinity shares with the ocker style: the use of the broad Australian vernacular with its sexist vocabulary (mates, chicks) and outspoken profanities, its “self-satisfied vulgarity, uncouthness, bigotry and male chauvinism”; an “inordinate attachment” to cars; the sexual objectification of women; a “utopian re-modelling” of mateship across ethnic division; and “a linking of vulgarity with social class” (141–142). Speed recognises that “the behaviour of protagonists in wog comedy films has clear affinities with ocker masculinity” (141), yet overlooks one crucial difference in gender style: unlike ockers, wog boys can dance. Wog boy style at speed Our first observation about the masculinity of wog boy style is its physical energy, its mobility and speed. Wog boy performances are energised through the characters’ interactions with the technologies of dance music, fast cars and illicit drugs. Speed, of course, is a colloquial term for amphetamines, a group of illicit drugs which stimulate the central nervous system and generate effects of increased alertness, confidence and energy. The drug features prominently in the comedy of The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza. In The Wog Boy, Dominic is a thirty-eight-year-old chemist who lives with his mother and sets up a speed lab beneath his shop to help pay off gambling debts, but the plan backfires when the speed lab explodes. In Fat Pizza, two Lebanese men, Sleek and Habib, are driving down the street when

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they are stopped by police; Habib panics and, fumbling with plastic bags full of drugs, ends up spraying white powder over Sleek’s face. Later in the film, Davo, a dope-smoking Anglo-Australian pizza delivery boy, discovers a backyard speed lab run by a gang of bikers and, as in The Wog Boy, the speed lab accidentally explodes. Speed is even more prominent in the film Head On, where depictions of its usage fuel the film’s narrative drive. Ari is an unemployed young man born to Greek parents living in Melbourne. Over the course of the film’s twenty-four-hour narrative, we see Ari buying speed from a kitchen hand at a kafenion, injecting it into his arm, selling a bag of it to his cousin Joe, and snorting it on several occasions with his cousin Betty—once in her bedroom at home, a second time in a toilet cubicle at a Greek club and a third time off a table at a gay club. Amphetamine usage in the film serves to accelerate and intensify the energy with which Ari moves, as he walks the streets, travels in cars, listens to music and dances in clubs (McMahon 2001). Importantly, Ari’s amphetamine-fuelled mobility out and about on the streets of the city inscribes an orbit which threatens to exceed the gravitational inertia of his family’s home and its Greek cultural heritage. It is this orbit, in particular, which traces the trajectory of earlier wog boy performances on stage. Alex Dimitriades, who plays Ari in Head On, first came to prominence in The Heartbreak Kid, a film adaptation of the stage play first performed in Sydney in 1987.1 Written by Anglo-Australian playwright Richard Barrett, The Heartbreak Kid tells the story of Nicky, a Greek-Australian teenager who falls in love with a Papa, a young Greek-Australian woman who teaches him at school. Set in a high school and written with a school-age audience in mind, the play’s scripting of mobility and speed is achieved without recourse to illicit drugs. Rather, for Nicky and his mate Con, it is their school-yard bravado, boisterous classroom behaviour and high-energy soccer routines that energise their embodiment of wog boy style beyond the confines of the classroom and their homes (see figure 6.1). The opening scene of the play establishes a tension between the physicality of soccer and the requirements of study at school. Con is playing with the soccer ball, while Nicky 1

The premiere production of The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Peter Kingston, opened at the Stables Theatre, Darlinghurst, on 29 July 1987.

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Men at Play crouches over pen and paper, working something out. He concentrates, ignoring CO N . CO N aims the ball, and heads it into NICKY’S lap. NICKY: What the … Nicky grabs the ball, tosses it away and immediately goes back to his work. Con chases the ball and dribbles it around. CON: (imitating a commentator) Patikas passes it to Katholos. Katholos is within striking distance. What’s he going to do with it? CON runs into NICKY, pretending to have been tackled. Oh! Oh! He falls to the ground melodramatically. That must be a penalty! That must be! NICKY: Are you going to help me? Or piss off? CON: (holding his ankle) He’s hurt! He’s definitely hurt! NICKY: Get up! CON: (appealing) Well, what is it, ref? Is it a penalty or what? NICKY: You heard me! CON jumps up smiling. (Barrett 1988: 1–2)

But our initial impression that Nicky is trying to concentrate on school work is mistaken. Nicky is drawing up plans and enlisting players to convince the Anglo-Australian sports teacher to set up a competition for the boys who would rather play soccer than rugby (3–5). The choice of sport is ethnically marked—Anglo-Australian boys play rugby; the Greek-Australian boys want to play soccer—and the distinction is embodied by the actor playing Nicky. Three scenes later, after we have learnt that Nicky is not doing well with his homework (19–21), Papa is talking with another teacher, Graham, as they watch Nicky play soccer. She wonders aloud: “It’s strange, you know. They sit there day after day, and you just don’t realise”. And then, after a pause, “But look at him move” (29). Papa’s appreciation of the way Nicky moves when playing soccer is immediately recognised by Graham and eroticised for the audience in the conversation that follows: GRAHAM: Look at you. Your eyes are nearly dropping out of your head. PAPA: I just like the look of him. GRAHAM: You can say that again. PAPA: Well? Don’t you? GRAHAM takes another look at NICKY. GRAHAM: Mmm. I see what you mean. But he’s not my type. (29)

The erotic attention given to Nicky’s body and the way that he moves is replayed in the following scene. Nicky, Con and Steve are in their respective bedrooms, in front of imaginary mirrors, getting dressed to

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go out for the evening. The manner in which the boys get ready differentiates the three along a gradient of self-confidence in their desirability: They take off their shirts. They look again in the mirror. They reach over and put on aftershave. CON starts tentatively, dabbing a bit here and there, eventually covering himself with it. NICKY is extravagant. STEVE thinks about putting some on but decides against it. (33)

It is a set piece, recognisable as an adaptation of a well-known scene in Saturday Night Fever (1977) in which John Travolta dresses for a night out at the disco, although, in this instance, it is “rock music” that is playing, “perhaps AC/DC” (Barrett 1988: 33).2 Instead of going to Orbit, their regular night spot, the boys are heading out to the Exchange, a pub on Oxford Street in inner-city Darlinghurst. It is a bit of an adventure: “Try something new for a change”, says Nicky, who thinks it “sophisticated” and “different” (34). The pub is playing disco music when they enter. But it’s too much for Steve: “I told you. Wallto-wall poofters.” Nicky points out a woman but Steve isn’t staying: “I’m getting out of here before some guy kisses me” (34). Nicky and Con persist, although the night is not a success. They are outclassed by the inner-city sophisticates they encounter (37). Nicky almost starts a fight and Con thinks they “would’ve been better off at Orbit” (38). Their night out, however, is indicative of the self-confidence, social mobility and sexual agency which characterise the wog boy trajectory away from family, home and heritage. Tracing a trajectory … The Heartbreak Kid provides an interesting point of convergence in the history of wog boy masculinity. Nick Giannopoulos, the lead actor and script-writer for the film The Wog Boy, once directed and played the role of Nicky in a production of The Heartbreak Kid. This was in Melbourne in 1989 following the hugely successful stage show Wogs Out of Work which launched Giannopoulos’s career in 1988. Since that time, Giannopoulos has worked on a series of stage shows— including Wogarama from 1993, Wogboys from 1996 and Wog Story from 2001—where he has appeared alongside actors like Alex Dimitriades, Vince Colossimo and Paul Nakad who have since gone 2

A disco scene in The Wog Boy also makes explicit reference to Saturday Night Fever.

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on to appear in films like Head On, The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza. Indeed, to look across the cast lists of these stage productions, feature films and related television shows such as Acropolis Now (1989– 1992), Heartbreak High (1994–1999) and Pizza (2000–2005) is to trace almost two decades of interaction and collaboration between male performers in cultivating and disseminating the wog boy style. Arguably, however, the history of the style is older than this. The 1966 film They’re a Weird Mob offered what was, in its time, perhaps the most prominent of early images of wog boy style. Based on the 1957 novel by John O’Grady (who published pseudonymously as Nino Culotta), the film tells the story of Nino, an Italian immigrant who arrives in Sydney to discover that the job as a sports writer he had lined up with his cousin has fallen through. He takes a labouring job instead, building houses in the suburbs. The building site affords director Michael Powell an opportunity to put actor Walter Chiari’s body on display in a manic montage of energetic labour. However, as the film progresses, the distinctive qualities of Chiari’s gestural style are subject to modification and diminution as his character learns on the job to mimic the behaviours of Anglo-Australian working-class men. Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart, first produced on stage in 1957 and later adapted for television in 1968, offers another antecedent of wog boy masculinity (see also chapters 2 and 8). It tells the story of an Italian migrant family living in a working-class suburb of Melbourne. The dramatic action of the play centres on Gino, the youngest and only son of the family, who is first described by Leila, the Anglo-Australian next-door neighbour, as “the big boy” and a “lover boy, too, from what I hear. Collingwood’s Casanova” (Beynon 1960: 11). When Gino comes home from work, he invites the married next-door neighbour out to the dance with him. But she declines: “Don’t think me old pins’d stand up to it, Gino” (13–14). As in The Heartbreak Kid, Gino goes to get changed. Appearing at the upstairs window, he asks his mother: GINO: […] Momma, you gonna change? MOMMA. Change? What for? GINO: For Christmas, Momma… MOMMA: So’s Christmas; we still gotta eat. GINO [cajoling]: Come on; for today, that’s all … make yourself beautiful, uh? MOMMA: You make yourself beautiful if you like … (17)

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Gino goes to take a shower despite his father’s protestations that he had already “washed this morning” (24). Gino is insistent: “Poppa, I work since this morning. I smell. I STINK! I gotta have a shower” (25). While Gino is in the bathroom, his brother-in-law Clarry arrives on the scene. Clarry has been talking to his wife, Maria (Gino’s sister), and has some questions for Gino who answers from the upstairs bathroom window. We learn from Clarry that Gino got into a fight at the dance last weekend (26). We also learn what going out dancing means for Gino’s movements in the future: CLARRY: […] what else did you tell Maria? GINO: Nothing. Like I say … ? CLARRY: About Collingwood. You told her you hated it. You wanted to move. Go somewhere else. GINO: Me? No—I don’t tell her that. Why should I tell her that? ’Cos I don’t want to move. I like Collingwood. I like it, plenty. Ooooh … maybe I say I don’t stay here for always. Maybe someday I meet up with a nice girl, and … [He grins.] I don’t wanna be an uncle all my life. Someday I be a poppa, like you, Clarry … and teach my boy English; real fair-dinkum, like you teach me. (28)

But the conversation ends there. “I got a lot to do”, says Gino. “Like dolling up for the dance?”, jibes Clarry. Gino “nods enthusiastically”: “But tonight’s no dance; tonight’s something big; something special. Something REAL special. [He grins.] I gotta look pretty” (28). Such talk about looking “beautiful” and “pretty” and such high spirits— Gino “laughs” (13), speaks “gaily” (13), “nods enthusiastically” and “grins” (28)—mark the pleasure of Gino’s appearances at the upstairs window, and interruptions to his plan to shower provide opportunities for the actor playing Gino to appear undressed (13, 17, 24, 36). These opportunities are taken in the television adaptation where the role of Gino is played by Allen Bickford. Instead of Gino coming down to the veranda, perhaps in a towel, as would be necessary on stage, the conversation with Clarry takes place in the bathroom itself as Gino has his shower. Some tight framing as the camera pans up Bickford’s body, some careful work from Bickford with a towel, and some averted eyes from Tom Oliver who plays Clarry enable the viewer to imagine that Bickford is fully naked as he takes his shower. On the stage, the audience is left to imagine what happens when Gino goes out to the dance. In the first scene of the second act, Gino initially returns home unexpectedly early (51). He “moves disconsolately”, “dropping on to the stool” down stage (52). At first

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Clarry asks, “What’s she playing hard-to-get, is she?” but he then realises that Gino has again been in a fight and “indicates [Gino’s] injured cheek” (53). Gino, “with a vague, lost smile”, replies, “I guess I … ran into another door” (53). But Clarry does not appreciate the joke. Gino is defiant, “I’m just as good as you … or anybody else”, and Clarry threatens to “settle” Gino “right bloody smart”. “Go ahead, hit” is Gino’s challenge to Clarry, but the moment is defused as “the fist comes slowly down” (54). Maria enters and offers Gino a CocaCola, but Gino “shakes his head”, and says “Good night” to Poppa. “Ooh, Gino, you don’t be sad”, says Poppa, “She turn you down tonight … [Naughtily.] ‘S always tomorrow”. “Tomorrow’s too late”, says Gino, exiting from the scene and heading back to the dance, “I got to catch up with today” (54). At the end of the scene, Gino returns home once again: […] staggering into the light comes GINO. Clothes torn … clutching the fence for support … his eyes seek out MOMMA. His head slowly turns, and it is only then that we see the red, bloody damage to the upstage side of his face. Stunned almost beyond comprehension, an animal moan is forced deep from MOMMA’S stomach. He staggers and falls … but before she reaches him … THE CURTAIN HAS FALLEN. (64)

In the next scene, we learn that a fight had broken out when Gino was refused entrance to the dance on account of his ethnicity. Policeman Lukie, who arrives to check some facts, explains to Clarry how “New Australians” “like to dance” and “some of them’re not bad”, but the “trouble is, they don’t get their way, they go all temperamental” and “start breaking things up” (71): Rules are rules. They explained nice and peaceful; they told him the first time, and he was sensible; bit of a skirmish … but he went away. When he came back again he wasn’t so sensible, they tell me. Tried to hack his way in with a knife. (71–72)

With his mobility out of the family home and into the world offstage and with his keen interest in pursuing the pleasures of dancing, Gino’s narrative trajectory inscribes an orbit which anticipates that which the camera traces in tracking Ari’s trajectory in the film Head On. Indeed, the television adaptation of The Shifting Heart includes scenes shot at and outside a discotheque. As young Anglo-Australians dance excitedly inside and Gino’s Anglo-Australian girlfriend waits for him outside, the bouncer refuses Gino permission to enter, claiming there are no tickets. When Gino objects, three blond Anglo-

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Australian men surround him and the bouncer repeats, “No tickets. That’s final”. The violence itself is not shown, but the menace of violence and its ethnic basis are clear. … beyond patriarchal authority Gino and Ari retrace on an urban scale a trajectory of their family’s migration. Leaving the family home behind, they head out into the city. In both the play and the film, the father is located at home and aligned with the homeland in a manner which contrasts with the urban mobility of the son. In The Shifting Heart, Poppa plays songs from the homeland on his harmonica. When he tries to play the Australian folksong “Waltzing Matilda”, his “playing has a plaintive sadness about it; an error of adjustment” (Beynon 1960: 8). Like Poppa, Ari’s father in Head On is first seen in the backyard. He is working in the garden. It is the morning and Ari has come home after a night out. His father is angry and wants to know where Ari has been. Later, when Ari is dancing to an old rock and roll song in the kitchen with his mother, Ari’s father comes into the kitchen, changes the music to a traditional Greek song and challenges Ari to dance a tsiftiteli. The choreography of the dance conveys something of the power dynamic of their relation: Ari’s father kneels while Ari dances. In dancing for his father, Ari recognises his father’s authority to command participation in the traditions of Greek culture, but the image of his father kneeling (when recalled alongside images of men kneeling for sex) indicates how, in Australia, the life that Ari lives beyond the family home threatens to exceed the patriarch’s authority. Noting differences in parents’ attitudes to the sexuality of teenage girls among Italian, Greek and Lebanese parents, Poynting, Noble and Tabar suggest that the “traditional disciplining of the sexual activity of adolescents, brought with the culture of the homeland, cannot be sustained much beyond one generation of immigration” (1998: 90). This has consequences for ethnic masculinity and immigrant fathers, in particular: We conjecture that their senses of themselves as men—as providers, as heads of families—undergo critical changes in the processes of immigration and settlement, as the effects of the labour market and the commodity society drastically impinge on traditional familial relations, disrupting the family balance of forces and rearranging identities. (90)

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Greek-Australian playwright Greg Andreas illustrates the transformation of masculinity from immigrant patriarch to wayward son in his absurdist farce, Milk and Honey (1994).3 According to Andreas, the play “deals with the collapse of the Australian dream for a particular migrant family” and is to be performed at a cracking pace with characteristic energy. “When the characters speak to each other, they must speak as if there is an exclamation after almost every word”, instructs Andreas in a note to the director; “they must respond to each other almost immediately” so that “the language almost overlaps itself” (Andreas 1992: ii). Pivotal to the collapse of the family is the fact that the father is dead. His ashes (or what we are led to believe are his ashes) sit in an urn on the mantelpiece. The father’s migration to Australia is an auspicious story of self-sacrifice and hard work, but it has been told to the son Georgie so often that it no longer generates the intended appreciation and respect: MOTHER (bitter and angry): Your father … your father came to this country—! GEORGIE: I’ve heard all this crap before— MOTHER: And I’m going to tell you again! Your father worked like a dog in this country. Do you know what a dog is Georgie?! (Andreas 1992: 5)

The circumstances of the father’s death are suspicious. For Mother, her husband was killed in the line of patriarchal duty: “he worked his fingers to the bone, right down to the bone until that day of judgement when that tragic accident took his life” (5). However, Georgie, who identified the body, harbours suspicions: “I don’t call six bullet holes and two stab wounds to the heart a tragic accident, do you?” (5). The father apparently made a portion of his fortune less than honourably. Georgie wants to take over his father’s business empire, but his Mother is refusing to hand over control. Georgie had a car accident and the “violent part” of his brain is “playing up” (5). According to Mother, the doctor says Georgie “react[s] spontaneously without any clear thought or direction” (5). Mother tells Georgie: “you need time to recover and settle down and become the man you once were” (5). But Georgie wants to speed up: “I got out of hospital and I said I’m 3

Take Away Theatre’s premiere production of Milk and Honey, directed by Nicholas Papademetriou, opened at the Stables Theatre, Darlinghurst, on 27 January 1994. Christina Totos directed a production at La Boite Theatre, Brisbane, which opened on 29 June 1996.

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going to live hard and fast ’cause I’ve been given a second chance at life!” (7) As the conversation unfolds, Georgie is packing a suitcase with “fifty thou” for a drug deal. Mother is disapproving: she is trying to marry off her daughter to a man who has recently migrated from Greece and is concerned that “illegalities” in her house will create an unfavourable impression. But Daughter, as she is named, falls pregnant well before marriage and her suitor is less than desirable. First he tells lies about the wealth of his father and then cons Daughter into giving him large sums of money; later we learn that he already has a wife back home in Greece who has just given birth to a son. The play lurches from one out-of-control scene to the next. Along with the marriage plans, Georgie’s drug deals go awry. “I think I’m losing control”, he confesses at one point. “Don’t lose control” is Mother’s futile reply (44). In the final scene, Georgie announces that he is about to marry Pepsi, a Filippino bargirl he has brought back to his room (55). Mother is outraged, Georgie exasperated. He issues a threat, “I’m going and then when I come back I’m going to kill the whole lot of you”, then exits never to return (56). Georgie is a caricature of wog boy masculinity (see figure 6.2). His manic speed and hyperactivity are palpable; his speech is littered with exclamations and expletives. In his first scene, “he wears a silk white shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, a pair of navy blue pleat trousers, a gold ring of Alexander the Great and a thick gold chain” (4). In later scenes, he appears in states of undress: with no pants after a drug deal has gone wrong (39) and then, as Daughter is introducing her fiancé to Mother, Georgie enters wearing underpants, carrying a gun in a holster, and “freaks out a little” (50). Milk and Honey anticipates the madcap comedy of Fat Pizza, in which the boys, likewise, have anxious mothers, but no apparent fathers. Seeking to articulate the play’s relation to the experience of Greek immigrants and their children, the director of the play’s premiere production, Nicholas Papademetriou, drew a generational distinction that marked the play’s departure from the values of traditional Greek families: We have a need to be our own people, a need to express ourself and do our own thing, rather than adhere to older values that have been brought over and held onto more steadfastly than their contemporaries (in Greece). They’ve come to this isolated environment and they haven’t progressed. (Quoted in Buchanan 1994)

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Milk and Honey generates much of its comedy from the way the energy, speed and mobility of Georgie’s wog boy masculinity exceeds the limits of the family home whose patriarch has passed away. Sexual agency, gendered ethnic Our final observation about the wog boy style of masculinity concerns its overtly assertive sexuality. In their depiction of sexual acts, the films Head On, The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza are remarkably explicit and characteristically energetic. That the sexual acts performed by Ari in Head On are with both men and women should avert us from too readily imposing a gendered analysis of heterosexual masculinity and its propensity for sexual violence. For the most part, sexual agency in these films is gendered masculine, but it is also gendered ethnic, if we may describe it that way. Sexual desire in The Wog Boy is energised by ethnic difference between Anglo-Australian women (Lucy Bell, Abi Tucker and Geraldine Turner) and the wog boy men (Giannopoulos and Colossimo). During the course of the film two Asian-Australian men (Hung Le and Trent Huen) adopt the wog boy style to increase their sex appeal. In the world of Fat Pizza, there are two kinds of “chicks”: “hot chicks”, who are typically Anglo-Australian, blond and the willing recipients of sex; and then “ethnic chicks”, who are depicted as undesirable yet active in desiring the men. Indeed, three “ethnic chicks” whom Sleek ignores at the dance club later exact their revenge by spiking his drink, taking him home, drugging him with Viagra and having sex with him all night. For Ari in Head On, it is sex with the Anglo-Australian man Sean at the end of the film that generates the film’s most intensely violent depiction of sexual agency as an act of defiance in the face of romantic affection. However, this energetic and excessive sexual agency of wog boy masculinity does not simply act out contemporary relations of gender and sexuality. The men in Head On, The Wog Boy and Fat Pizza, roaming the streets of the city in search of sex, are activating anxieties which first emerged during the period of post-war migration. The problem of ‘lonely migrant men’ in the mid-1950s is one indicator of the extent to which the process of migration and its marking of ethnic difference exposed heterosexual desire to unprecedented levels of public anxiety and governmental administration. “Migrants without girls” announced the headline for a newspaper article about the

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troubles young migrant men were having in finding girlfriends in Australia (“Migrants without girls” 1955).4 Such was the perceived problem that by 1956 the Australian immigration authorities had established programs of assisted passage for single women from Italy and Greece to address the gender imbalance (Murphy 2000: 165). A related phenomenon was marriage by proxy, whereby young migrant men arranged to marry women from back home, meeting their bride for the first time when she arrived in Australia. Two Greek-Australian plays from the 1960s told stories about migrant men and their socalled proxy brides. The Promised Woman from 1963 and The Young Wife from 1966 both demonstrate how migration exposed heterosexual desire to public scrutiny, and both plays fail to resolve persistent erotic anxieties about young migrant men.5 The Promised Woman by Theodore Patrikareas was first performed in Greek in 1963, under its original title Peta tee Fyssarmonica, Pepino (Throw Away Your Harmonica). In 1974, it was translated and adapted for film as The Promised Woman (1975) and since 2000 it has had several successful seasons in a new English translation by Sydney’s Sidetrack Performance Group.6 The play is set in a boarding house, run by a Greek couple in Newtown, an inner-city suburb of Sydney. The most recent resident is Tellis, a smartly dressed thirtyyear-old Greek man who has contracted a marriage agreement with Antigone, a woman from Greece whom he has never met. When Antigone arrives, Tellis is disappointed that she is older and less attractive than she appeared in the touched-up photo her sisters sent. He wants to send her back to Greece, but she decides to stay. Three months later, in act 3, Antigone has made a home for herself in the boarding house and made friends with the boarders, while Tellis skulks in the background, jealous of Antigone’s new-found 4

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The same edition of the Sun also carried the headline “Afraid of Italian husband: wife is told to return” for an article about a court case between an AngloAustralian woman and her Italian-born husband. Similar stories of migration from Greece and marriage have been staged in more recent works, in Tes Lyssiotis’s The Forty Lounge Cafe (1996) and Andreas Litras’s Odyssey (1998). Chris Mantourides directed the Hellenic Theatrical Group’s premiere Greeklanguage production of Patrikareas’s play at the Anzac Auditorium, Sydney, in 1963. It was later staged in Melbourne and Adelaide, and in South Africa and Greece. Don Mamouney’s English-language production opened at Sidetrack Theatre, Marrickville, on 21 March 2000.

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independence and friends. The play climaxes in act 4 with a fight between Tellis and Antigone, in which he tries to strangle her but is prevented by other boarders. The play ends with Antigone leaving the boarding house to start a new life. But there is no real ending for Tellis. With the fight over and Ken, the Anglo-Australian boarder, threatening to ring the police, Tellis “runs to the front door and exits, with a groan”. Ken yells after him: “Run away, you bloody wog. It won’t be long before they catch you and send you back where you’ve come from” (Patrikareas 2000: 272). The Young Wife was first performed in Melbourne in 1966, David Martin having adapted it from his 1962 novel of the same name.7 Martin was born Ludwig Detsinyi in Budapest and migrated to Australia at the age of thirty-four in 1949. Set in an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, The Young Wife tells the story of Yannis Joannides, a Greek man in his forties, who runs a fruit stall and owns a club. The play opens on the morning after the wedding of Yannis and Anna, the young wife of the title whom he brought out to Australia to marry. A delivery boy from Cyprus, Criton Evangelides, calls in to deliver the wedding photos and Anna recognises him: they had met on the ship to Australia. Criton is young, attractive and before long he is very much in demand—among Yannis’s friends at the club as a soccer-player, as a scenic artist, as an English tutor for Anna, and as a romantic young man with a mysterious past (as a student in Cyprus, he was a member of EOKA, the Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston or National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters). Anna and Criton soon become close friends and the plot slowly circles in on Yannis’s growing jealousy of their friendship. Discovering one of Criton’s paintings and assuming incorrectly that Anna has modelled nude, Yannis confronts Criton and, in the fight that follows, Criton is shot and killed (see figure 6.3). Like Tellis in The Promised Woman who is described as a “carefully, almost foppishly, dressed man [whose] movements are carefully studied” (Patrikareas 2000: 223), Criton’s appearance and kinaesthetic qualities are clearly marked in the script of The Young W i f e . Criton is described as “reasonably good-looking, with a sensitive, intelligent face. His movements are nervous but controlled. [And] he wears a suit that is too warm for the season” (Martin 1966: 7

John Sumner’s production of The Young Wife for the UTRC opened on 12 April 1966 at the Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne.

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9). Criton catches Anna’s eyes when he first arrives on the scene and Yannis’s brother Alexis draws attention to his good looks (18), but it is his seduction by Patricia that draws most attention to Criton’s appearance and erotic energy. Patricia is an Anglo-Australian woman in her late thirties or early forties. Formerly an actress, she is now a producer of amateur theatre and she soon finds roles for Criton and Anna in her upcoming production of Euripides’ Alcestis. In fact, Patricia’s love of Greek culture ranges well beyond the theatre. Before taking Criton as her lover, Patricia was the lover of Yannis’s brother Alexis. She was also once married to an Englishman, a Greek scholar, with whom she lived in Athens and the Greek islands, prior to his taking a chair at the University of Sydney and leaving her for one of his students. As Elena, Alexis’s wife, dryly observes, “she’s very keen on Greeks and Greek things” (57). Described by one reviewer as a “man-hungry divorcee” (Standish 1966), Patricia at one point “takes [Criton’s] hand, kisses it and lays it against her breast”, exclaiming “I want you to take me away. […] We’ll go to Greece. Or to Cyprus—to Famagusta. We’re there now. We’re walking through those narrow lanes by the Cathedral. It’s night—no one knows us” (28–29). But Patricia’s romantic evocation is lost on Criton. “They know me in Famagusta”, he quickly reminds her. “I have only just to come to Australia. I’m not leaving again. Certainly not to go to Cyprus” (29). In this conversation between Patricia and Criton—or rather, in this confrontation between the neoclassical romance of Patricia’s love for all things Greek and the brutal realities of Criton’s experience of war in Cyprus—we can see how young men from the Mediterranean could unwittingly become repositories for misplaced Anglo-Australian erotic fantasies. Patricia’s plight records how a theatrical passion for the classics of ancient Greece once afforded educated Anglo-Australians an opportunity to transcend the ordinary of Australian life. It was, for instance, with this theatrical sense of ancient Greek culture that the city of Adelaide imagined itself an “Athens of the South” when it hosted Australia’s first international Festival of Arts in 1960 (Harris 1960c). In the next chapter, we discuss C.R. Jury’s The Administrator (1961), a curious experiment in neoclassicism produced in Adelaide in 1955. Photographs of the production show actors in Grecian robes arranged on a set featuring elements of classical architecture. The script, written in semi-metrical verse like a nineteenth-century English translation of

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ancient Greek drama, discretely treats with erotic interest a story of friendship between Damon and Pythias, two young men from the Mediterranean world. We also discuss Michael Gow’s Live Acts on Stage (1996a), “a witty 90-minute romp through the mythology of the Greeks” (Hoad 1996), which first played during the 1996 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras arts festival with a homoerotic image of a near-naked Greek warrior on the program cover. As Australian theatre-makers continue to invest their evocations of ancient Greek culture with erotic interest, we may wonder whether taking pleasure in a play like Gow’s perpetuates the Grecophilia of Anglo-Australian high culture without confronting that culture’s erotic investment in the transnational masculinity of wog boy style. On this point, we conclude this chapter with a scene from Fat Pizza where Sleek is seen dancing at a night club. Described earlier in the film as “one of them bothosexuals” (i.e. bisexual), Sleek is momentarily transfixed by a blond, Anglo-Australian man who is dancing on a podium and showing off a muscular, gym-toned torso of the kind modelled on classical Greek sculpture. In this brief moment, as Sleek gestures lewdly across the dance floor signalling sexual interest in the man, Anglo-Australian gay culture, in its own way Grecophilic, almost gets the wog boy loving it deserves. It serves to remind us how the trajectories that young migrant men have been tracing in performance extend well beyond traditional, patriarchal patterns of masculinity and are continuing to transform the gender order of Australian life.

Figure 6.1 The Heartbreak Kid

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Figure 6.2 Milk and Honey

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Figure 6.3 The Young Wife

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