A recent series of Crikey articles looked critically at the content of the Macquaire PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Guy Rundle singled out dramatic literature as a particular omission.
So after nearly 40 years of public support for our literature, dramatic literature is still the poor relation. Let me endorse everything that Guy Rundle has said. Among the 300 authors represented — and twice as many extracts — 10 plays have been chosen. Some 27 of the 300 wrote for the stage and might have been considered. Scores of equal contenders have been rejected.
The selector, Kerryn Goldsworthy, claims that a motive for selection was to encourage a wider study of our literature in schools. And for not including more plays that they are too difficult to extract. What rubbish. Our plays have wonderful “arias” as Peter Kenna called them and his play A Hard God is full of them. David Williamson’s tall story about the football star’s family in The Club is famous.
Jim McNeil’s prison yarns in The Chocolate Frog are revelatory. The closing tale of the eurie woman in Robert Merritt’s The Cake Man I still can’t read without weeping. And so on. Dr Goldsworthy also seems to think ripe Aussie language would demean an anthology of Australian literature. There’s cultural cringe for you.
And as for the school lists, the “F bomb” can be found (if you bother to look) in the following plays, but they are only a sample of those plays which are veterans of the school lists: Bombshells by Joanna Murray-Smith; Brilliant Lies by David Williamson Property of the Clan by Nick Enright; Diving for Pearls by Katherine Thomson; Stolen by Jane Harrison; Cosi by Louis Nowra; A Beautiful Life by Michael Futcher & Helen Howard; Cloudstreet adapted by Nick Enright & Justin Monjo; Norm and Ahmed by Alex Buzo and Inheritance by Hannie Rayson.
Another popular author is Jack Davis. Why is his entry confined to poetry? Why are Marcus Clarke’s, Ray Mathew’s, Patrick White’s, Douglas Stewart’s, Katharine Prichard’s, Richard Frankland’s plays not acknowledged? Not to mention other clumsy choices made. David Williamson represented by one of his least enduring.
And where is our history? What about The Currency Lass (1844), a convict-written play and the first to be professionally produced in Australia? No plays from the 19th century are there, though some playwrights are.
When we founded Currency Press in 1971 it was with the aim of building a dramatic literature in print and returning the Australian accent to the stage. And by degrees we succeeded. But still our playwrights are excluded from high-profile recognition. And we are going backwards. Even this year the new directors of the Sydney Theatre Company announced a policy of exporting Australian actors in the classics as a contribution to our global status.
Do we need to imitate our cricketers? Literature is not a competition, it’s an assertion of our right to be ourselves. When will we recognise our own canon? I applaud Macquarie’s aim to get Australian literature back into the schools, but let it be to celebrate who we really are.
So instead of complaining, why not put together an anthology of those extracts and pitch it to Allen & Unwin?
Katherine, please don’t misrepresent, distort and deliberately take out of context things I have said, and please don’t misrepresent my editorial role. I was not ‘the selector’; Prof Elizabeth Webby was Section Editor for the period 1788-1900 and Dr Nicole Moore for the period 1900-1950, as is clear to anyone who has read more of the book than its Table of Contents. General Editor Nicholas Jose, along with the rest of the editorial team, made an early decision to include a limited amount of drama in the anthology for reasons you and Guy would obviously reject, but Suzanne’s suggestion above is an excellent one.