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

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).

Williamson's families are middle-class Melbourne; Hibberd's Dimboola is country-town working class. The range matters.

Carlton, Surry Hills, the Snowy Mountains, the wheatbelt. The plays insist on the specific Australian place.