Quick questions on The 1970s New Wave: HSC Drama core

The Australian Performing Group (APG), based at the Pram Factory in Drummond Street, Carlton (Melbourne), 1968 to 1981. The Pram Factory was an industrial building turned theatre by Betty Burstall and the group around La Mama (founded 1967 in Carlton as a small experimental space). APG operated as a co-operative: members shared duties, shared profits, and made collective decisions about programming. The work was politically left, often pacifist, anti-Vietnam, and committed to original Australian writing.

David Williamson. Born 1942. Trained as a mechanical engineer. His first major plays at the APG were The Removalists (1971) and Don's Party (1971). The Removalists shows two policemen forcibly removing a woman's belongings from her marital home and beating her husband to death.

Vernacular speech. The New Wave plays put Australian English on stage without apology. Williamson's Carlton suburban talk in Don's Party, Hibberd's country-town speech in Dimboola, Buzo's Sydney casual racism in Norm and Ahmed.

The late 1960s and 1970s were politically convulsive in Australia. Vietnam (Australia's involvement from 1962, conscription from 1964, moratorium marches from 1970), the Gough Whitlam Labor government (1972 to 1975) and its dismissal (the Constitutional crisis of 11 November 1975), second-wave feminism, the Aboriginal land rights movement (Tent Embassy 1972, Mabo decision much later in 1992).

The Pram Factory closed in 1981 after a Melbourne City Council dispute and internal conflicts. The Nimrod moved to Belvoir Street in 1984 and then dissolved in 1988, with Belvoir continuing as a separate company. By the mid-1980s the institutional centre of Australian theatre had shifted to the state-funded companies (STC, MTC, QT, Belvoir, STCSA), which absorbed many of the New Wave playwrights.

If Australian Drama and Theatre is your prescribed pairing, the New Wave is often one of the two studied movements. The pairing of the Doll Trilogy (mid-century realism) with the 1970s New Wave shows two distinct moments in Australian theatre: a polite naturalism becoming a vernacular, political, formally experimental movement. Strong essays explain the shift.

Born 1942. Trained as a mechanical engineer. His first major plays at the APG were The Removalists (1971) and Don's Party (1971).

Born 1940, died 2024. The most formally experimental of the New Wave playwrights. Dimboola (1969) is a participatory play structured as a country-town wedding reception with the audience as guests.

Born 1944, died 2006. Norm and Ahmed (Old Tote, 1968) shows a casual late-night conversation between Norm, a white Australian, and Ahmed, a Pakistani student, that ends in racist violence. Coralie Lansdowne Says No (1974) and Macquarie (1971) followed.

Born 1923, died 2002. The Chapel Perilous (Stables Theatre, 1971; the first full Stables production at the Hayes) is a feminist epic following a young woman's sexual and political coming-of-age. The Man from Mukinupin (1979) is a verse drama for the bicentenary built on Western Australian small-town life.

Born 1950. Inner Voices (Nimrod, 1977) and Visions (Nimrod, 1978) showed a colder, more European-influenced Australian voice than the Pram Factory's vernacular comedy. Nowra was the bridge from New Wave to the 1980s institutional era.

Steve J. Spears (The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, 1976), Barry Oakley (A Lesson in English, 1968), John Romeril (The Floating World, 1974). Patrick White wrote Big Toys (1977) and Signal Driver (1982) in this period, though White was older and never of the movement.

The New Wave plays put Australian English on stage without apology. Williamson's Carlton suburban talk in Don's Party, Hibberd's country-town speech in Dimboola, Buzo's Sydney casual racism in Norm and Ahmed.

Vietnam, police violence, the 1969 and 1972 elections, casual racism, gender politics. The New Wave wrote into the political moment.

Naturalistic realism (Williamson), participatory comedy (Hibberd's Dimboola), monodrama (A Stretch of the Imagination), feminist epic (Hewett), darker chamber pieces (Nowra).