Quick questions on Australian theatre context and history: HSC Drama core

Australian theatre before 1955 was overwhelmingly an imported product. The repertoire was English, the actors often visited from London and New York, and the local industry consisted of touring circuits run by J. C. Williamson Ltd ("The Firm"), which dominated commercial theatre from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (premiered Union Theatre, Melbourne, November 1955) is the conventional founding work of modern Australian theatre. It put cane cutters, a Carlton terrace, and a particular Australian male friendship onto the stage in vernacular speech. The Doll's transfer to London (1957) and to Broadway (1958) was the first commercial success for an Australian play.

The late 1960s and 1970s produced the most concentrated burst of Australian playwriting in the country's history. Two organisations matter most.

The big state-funded companies, founded or expanded through the late 1970s and 1980s, became the new homes for Australian playwriting:

The most significant development since the New Wave has been the arrival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander playwrights into the mainstream repertoire. Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving (Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, Brisbane, 1995, then to Belvoir Street, 1996) is the touchstone. Jane Harrison's Stolen (Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative, 1998), Andrea James, Nakkiah Lui (Black is the New White, 2017), and Leah Purcell (The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, 2016) are the next generation.

The Australian Drama and Theatre topic is built on the idea that the prescribed plays sit within a particular Australian theatrical lineage. A Section III essay that frames Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as the foundation of mid-century Australian realism, or that frames The 7 Stages of Grieving as the breakthrough work of Indigenous Australian theatre, will outscore one that treats the plays as isolated texts. Markers reward students who place plays in historical conversation.

APG was Melbourne, Pram Factory, more political. Nimrod was Sydney, more craft-focused. Both launched New Wave playwrights but the cultures differed.

Aboriginal storytelling traditions are tens of thousands of years old. Indigenous Australian theatre as a mainstream institutional presence dates from the mid-1990s, but its impact on the contemporary repertoire is substantial. :::