Away

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced and English Standard 11-12 (2024) syllabuses (focus area: Texts and human experiences). The NESA edition is Currency Press, 1988. Away was on the 2019 to 2026 list for EAL/D only (Module C: Close Study of Text), in the same Currency Press 1988 edition (ISBN 9780868192116). It was not on the Advanced or Standard lists, so it is new to those courses: see the 2019 to 2026 text list if you sit the 2026 HSC.

Why this text suits Texts and human experiences

Away follows three families who leave home for a coastal holiday at Christmas 1967. Each carries its own grief, resentment or fear, and the holiday puts those under pressure. The play is built around a question the focus area asks directly: how do individual experiences of loss and change connect people to others, and can they be shared in a way that heals?

It is also a play about theatre. It opens with a school production and uses Shakespeare as a lens, so the text is conscious of how performance helps people make sense of their lives.

Structure and form

The play moves from the school and the families' homes to the holiday setting, then toward a storm and its aftermath. The movement from separate households to a shared place, and from closed-off feelings to open ones, is the dramatic arc. Pay attention to the seasonal and weather imagery that frames it, and to how the play places contrasting families side by side so that differences of class and temperament are visible without comment.

Analytic strand one: the Shakespeare frame

The play opens with a school performance and draws on Shakespeare's plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and, later, King Lear and The Tempest. Treat these as part of the construction. They give the characters and the audience a shared language for confusion, rage, forgiveness and renewal, and they set up the idea that a performance can change those who take part. Ask how each Shakespearean echo shapes the audience's understanding of what happens on the beach, not merely that it is there.

Analytic strand two: three families, three kinds of grief

The families are deliberately contrasted. One family is shaped by war and loss, another by ambition and anxiety about status, another by an illness that is faced with more courage than the adults expect. Rather than listing character traits, show how the dramatist uses dialogue, gesture, stage business and the placing of characters on stage to expose what each person avoids saying. The experience of grief is represented as private and awkward before it becomes shared.

Analytic strand three: Tom, illness and the young

The young characters, particularly Tom, are the means by which the play shows that the young often see more clearly than the adults around them. Examine how the play stages Tom's situation and how other characters respond to it. The audience's understanding of mortality is shaped by what is shown, what is withheld and what the other characters are unable to look at.

Analytic strand four: the storm and reconciliation

The storm is the play's turning point, bringing characters out of their private worlds and into contact. As a piece of stagecraft it uses sound, lighting and movement, and it echoes the storm episodes in the Shakespeare plays the script draws on. Argue what changes in the characters after it, and how the ending shapes the audience's final impression: hopeful but not simple.

Context as a driver of argument

Gow sets the play at Christmas 1967, a time of social anxiety, class division and a distant war that touched ordinary families. Use that context to explain the characters' pressures: the need to keep up appearances, the fear of speaking about death, the tension between duty and feeling. Tie each contextual point to a scene or a stage feature rather than offering it as background.

Common pitfalls

• Treating the play as a novel: always name stage directions, staging, sound, lighting, props or performance choices.
• Retelling the plot instead of arguing.
• Treating the Shakespeare references as decoration.
• Painting the adults as simple villains.
• Forgetting the Texts and human experiences focus: link every paragraph to how people experience loss, connection or change.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. Make a claim about how the play shows shared performance and shared grief as the route to understanding. Name the dramatic features you will use.

Body 1. The Shakespeare frame and the theatre as a way of making meaning.

Body 2. The contrasting families and how dramatic technique exposes private feeling.

Body 3. Tom and the young, and the storm as the point where experience turns from private to shared.

Conclusion. Argue that the play moves its characters from private grief to shared understanding through the storm and the theatre frame, and that this suggests healing here is something people do together, in a place where each family's loss can be seen by another.

Read the text

Away is in copyright. Borrow a copy from your school or local library, or buy the NESA edition from an Australian bookseller. The edition NESA prescribes is the Currency Press 1988 edition (ISBN 9780868192116); the play was first performed in 1986. If you can, see a recording or a production: the play is written for the stage.

The NESA details on this page were checked against its published HSC English prescriptions and the English Advanced Year 12 Texts and human experiences page on 7 October 2026.