The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 19

LITERARY SECTION THE AGE, SATURDAY," JANUARY 23. 1960 19 Waiting the Silly SOME THOUGHTS ON THE MAKING 1 OF THE AUSTRALIAN PLAY Before Ray Lawler hit the jackpot with The Doll, the plight of the Aus- tralian playwright vised to be discussed with the wistful tenderness used of orphans and stray dogs. One pictured them scribbling away with rusty nibs and sending" their life's work to harsh business men who tore them up without reading therrr. I have even met young people who believed that nobody had ever written plays in this country before, but that anybody; i who took the trouble could write one now and get a Hollywood contract. The silly season for films' is with us.

January generally finds the best holiday releases' still packing them in-at some city theatres and unmitigated rubbish holding; the at the rest. One must just lean back in the cinema (preferably air-cbnditipned) and await the' coming of February, when the fjlm year begins in Vance Palmer was essentially social writer who tried to en- compass the whole field of Australian life. In his novels he wrote about the forces which he saw changing the course of people's lives, bringing them into conflict or shaping their personalities. They At The Theatre with Geoffrey' Hutton The peasant Pretender to his doom. A scene from the Soviet-made film.

The Captain's Daughter, showing at the Australia. the Clyde Company? 1 to End At The Cinema with Colin Bennett But over everything hangs the monumental presence of Ycmelyan Pugachov, and the wastes of the snows beyond the Volga graphically photographed. Seldom has snow assumed a more intrinsic role in a film. The nobles, swathed in their furs, stump through the blizzards, cling to their sense of Czarist honor; the- troikas gallop toward us with torches blazing through the gloom; Pugachov's-' motley, bearded army rumbles 'its way across the lpw hills. The peasantry gathers beneath a bleak unseen, gai-lows 'on the and, in an impressive finale, the Great Pretender goes to his doom caged and enchained with two fat stumps of candle grasped in his enormous hands.

At the Majestic is Gidget, a cross between a girl and a midget, in a picture that might be roughly described as a tusical. or teen agers' musical. The beachcombing set at Malibu. California, rag her, then make her their mascot. Theres an enormous amount of surfboard riding in the wide-screen blue Pacific.

A few harmless adolescent pranks are designed to prove that today's healthy beach generation is very different from, the beat generation. Columbia's wardrobe department supplies Sandra Dee, the squeak ing blonde In trie title role, with 19 cute changes of bathing suit. Columbia's orchestra supplies three hit songs, all of which sounded awful to me. And Gidget's Mom supplies the sentiment: Gidget will know when -true love comes along because she'll hear "little bells ringing in her heart." By the end of summer, the bells have pealed and Gidget is wearing her fraternity pin which should keep her happy until next year, when, ho doubt, we will be subjected to The Return of Gidget. Carry On Teacher (State) car ries on the successful British cycle of farces about sergeants, nurses, with a series of practical jokes at Maudlin Street Secondary School, where the masters endure glue on the seat, flour bags above the door and itching powder in the common room.

Every conceivable gag is worked in and the children seem to en toy Adults, on the other hand, may be left pining for the days of Will Hay and the Lower Fifth. Australian 1 historians, with very few exceptions, have an extraordinary talent for asking the wrong questions of this country's past. A whole series of such wrong questions stems from the incorrect classification of Australian history. As a member of a species, it is classed with those of England, France, the U.S.A., Germany, and the like, when it should be with the histories of Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. HIS VIEW -IS NO TRUER of the past than of' the present'.

I vwbuld; not hazard a Kuess at the number of plays which have been written in Australia, and -actually produced; before the films men used to earn steady writing melodramas for popular entertainment. There have been grand successes in the short term (some of my Instructors cannot even recall Rusty Bugles) and there have been modest successes and heaps of failures. That is the way plays and playwrights are made even in the cities which make a habit of producing their own. I have watched Sunday "CLYDE COMPANY PAPERS, VOLUME IV: 1846-50," edited by P. L.

Brown. (Oxford University Press; Australian price 63.) Reviewed by W. A. P. PHILLIPS.

to land leasing, road building' and the Scab Act. But it is the mundane activities that are the thing. These are what constitute the great bulk of the papers. They provide a real gold mine for the economic historian witn nigniy payaoie ore in tne snane of such things as prices of wool, tallow, food, labor, and materials; the interconnections between pro ducer and sales and shipping agents like Dalgety, Gore and the tie-up between the company and their financial agents in Scotland; the stability of the industry while Europe was rocked in 1847-48 by economic crisis and and the Internal organisation of such a concern as the And all through runs a very human story, which has to be sipped quietly and often to be fully appreciated. Australian historians can be grateful to the labor of love, the self-effacing efficiency, and the honest.

top-quality scholarship which Mr. Brown has brought to his task. His work gives the real stuff of Australian history. Those seeking melodrama will not find it in this book. For it Is Jane Austen, not Charles Dickens.

Recently, when "The Age" published a series on great Australians, with a true instinct for the flavor of Australia, it started with Don Bradman and Hans Heysen, and not with politicians. This would have won the scorn of the character Orson Welles played in The Third Man. He condemned three centuries of Swiss history for only producing the cuckoo clock. Nevertheless, this implies, to the sensible, some credit to the small nation. After all, the Orson Welles character was the nihilist villain of the piece, with his sense of values terribly awry.

might be social or economic issues, or they might be the country itself. They were always part of the Aus tralian environment. So In Prisoners' Country he wrote a play, not only about Australian but about Australia, about people a precise geographical and historical setting: a North-West cattle station. period immediately postwar. This scene faced him' with issue upon issue.

They crowd into the play tney would into a full-scale novel: the place of the white intruder in black man's country; the relatlon'of master and servant, of the settler, and the nomad: the nositinn of t.h half-caste caught between two. op- (juBing moaes or living: the clash between two generations, between the creator and the speculator. The old man becomes the centre of a whole series of conflicts: with the hard-faced younger neighbor who is buying up the district at sharp prices, with his wife' who yearns for the relaxed human relationships of equals hi Perth, with the wandering old stockman whom he holds the slave of aa unpayable debt. The accident of the war has multiplied these conflicts. The owner's son has returned from a Japanese prison to a country with its' own invisible bars.

The younger half-castes overseer and stockman's daughter nave been Jolted of the habit of servitude by living as white Australians in the forces. The complex explodes into sexual Jealousy, the death of the son is followed by the birth of the grandson. All the way the action has been carefully plotted to build in swiftness and impact after the initial problems of exposition. This is not a "literary" play In the sense that people discuss action instead of acting themselves. (There are soma traces of "writing" In the dialogue which could probably have been eliminated in the workshop op rehearsals.) It is a novelist's play rather in the over-abundance of ideas which are too profuse to be resolved.

The centre of the play shifts from one conflict to another, and many of the questions which have been' raised are left unanswered. Oddly enough, if tha play were not so obviously "constructed," this would not have mattered so much. Small successes are not to be despised, but this is a large and Intensely serious play (it has no oomio relief), which wrestles with a complex of themes. The climaxes are strong, and the action perhaps too tightly packed. It conclusion offers a kind of catharsis.

The old order changeth, the pioneers are in retreat, the young destroy themselves. We hear the wailing of a baby of mixed blood and the unbroken clacking of music-sticks as the cor- roboree goes on undisturbed. In the history of the Australian play. I think Prisoners' Country will be remembered. from bitter, tragic divisions in State and society.

Any lessons derived from this are worth knowing In these days of a world unskilled in brinkmanship. Indeed, they would be more worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize than many of the winning efforts. Because they refuse to admit such things, Australian historians inject false mythology into their writings. Even collections of documents are edited for high dramatic effect. Manning Clark's two collections, for instance, do this with the result that, read as a whole, each has the air of a succession of well-contrived anti-climaxes.

There is, however, 'one series of documents that has nothing at all theatrical about it. This Is the Clyde Company Papers, of which volume IV, covering the years 1846-50, has just been published. These papers plumb accurately the quie but vigorous stream of a small country's past, and help to chart the true map of Australia's comparatively peaceful, stolid history. The papers tell the story of one of the earliest sheep-raising concerns in western Victoria, centred on Golf Hill, near Geelong; and of George Russell, a dominating pioneer figure, who was the company's manager and became a respected and influential character in Victorian business and society. Like so many of the successful pioneers tn Victoria (as Trollope observed), George Russell was born In Scotland.

In 1830, aged 18, he emigrated to Tasmania, In .1836 he sailed to the newly opened-up Port Phillip district, where he was to act as manager to a new venture, the Clyde Company. All this (and much more) Is told in the volumes of the Clyde Papers, of which there are to be eventually seven, or eight if "The Narrative of George Russell" be included. They are all edited by P. L. Brown.

The present volume is beautifully produced. And is cheap at the price, when one considers the fine printing and publishing workmanship, the excellent plate illustrations, the superbly high standard of editing by Mr. Brown, and the wealth of material on early Australia contained in the' 600 packed pages. Volume IV spans the period between the crippling local depression remembered as "the bad years," and the dislocation brought by gold. These are the years of recovery and expansion, which (as Mr.

Brown points out) Rolf Boldrewood regarded as "the happiest of Victoria's pastoral age." The main problem, other than the all-important mundane activities of pioneering a new life and living, was labor shortage. This drove pastoralists to consider the resumption of transportation and even the Importation of labor from Singapore. Otherwise the outside world Impinged little, except through letters from Tasmania and Scotland, or through the actions or. inaction of Government in regard IT IS OF THESE NATIONS that "happy is the country that has no history" is said. And the same applies to Australia.

The Australian past is happily humdrum compared with the past of England, the most peaceful of the major European Powers. It has no invasions, no civil wars, no revolutions however many times you count and recount' the dead at Eureka. It has no vast Industrial Revolution, warranting capital letters despite Mr. Esslngton Lewis. And it has only a paltry modicum of the high drama of English politics despite the Chartist diggers, the Great Strikes, Conscription, and Dr.

It has none of the genuine Wild West of the American frontier days. Despite its turbulent convict beginnings, it has nothing to compare even with the violent history of Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus. Norway and Denmark under the Nazis, or Switzerland- fighting for independence in the 15th. and 16th centuries. And, even with Namat-jira-and white Australia, it has no malevolent racial conflicts of the order facing South Africa and the U.S.A.

Uncle Tom is here the nickname of a local Premier, and not of a stock figure in a racial drama. Australia's history, like Switzerland's and Scandinavia's, is worth study to understand In what conditions a nation can remain relatively stable, peaceful, prosperous and free wide, and was once 1000 feet deep, though much sand has since drifted In. The ridge around It is 200 feet high, and the adjacent plain was once littered with crushed rocks and boulders, some of them weighing 10,000 tons. It has been calculated that the meteorite responsible for this enormous scar weighed one million tons on impact with the earth. It struck at an angle of 60 deg.

Efforts have been made to locate the main mass, but it could be miles below the UCKILY, metus la unc new work The Cantata's Daughter (Australia) to arrest the attention, even the appetite, and re mind us that the screen ban still occasionally equate art with industry in the opinion of all save the Philistine fringe. The Captain's Daughter Is Soviet- made, from Pushkin's romance of love, duty ana nonor in min-cen-lury Russia. Now I understand that Hnllvwood also has recently adapted this story for the screen. Its effort Is called Tempest, has every star In the color, VistaVlsion, the lot We shall be seeing It later', when the silly season has passed, nd II. will make an -interesting comparison with the film now- at the Australia, meaiiwiuie my myiiey Is heavily on the Russians.

Pushkin It Is difficult to conceive of a more plctorlally. faithful presentation of In this way it resembles Thorold Dickinson's version, of. The Queen of Spades made some years ago (though Oliver Messel's designs for that film were far more, ornate) and the more recent German film of The Postmaster. The Captain's Daughter Is a portentous, measured, expressive film, edited in the style of Quiet Flows The Don, but more romantically Inclined as period drama. Director V.

Kaplunovsky and his team have read the classic advice to story-tellers "Start at the be-jinning, go on to the end, and then itop" and this they do. They use a wide, black-and-white screen (though apparently not quite as vide as the Australia's Cinema-Scope one, which; seems to stretch the image slightly and scalp some heads occasionally)'. On to it they put some Impressive grey Images, interestingly grouped and moved, often strikingly lit. And they tell Pushkin's romantic tale vigorously, with ah Innate sense of the drama of It and' the atmosphere of fate brooding over it. In this they are aided by strong brooding mime from a lot of genuine-looking peasant and aristocrat types, and, in particular, by the Imposing portrait the peasant Pretender, pugachov; given- by an ictor named Sergei Lukyanov.

As' the narrative inexorably progresses we watch 'tlie-nobleman hero Pyotr. grow from a beardless, effeminate youth into a man. This process Involves his dangerous duel with a vengeful fellow-officer, sus-pensefully pictured as a desperate affair of clashing steel upon steel his defence of the Czarist fortress from the rebel army and near-death at the hangman's hand; and his Journey back into the lion's den to plead, with the enemy he once helped, for the safety of his lady love. SECTION FOR SCHOOLS: THE ARABS WERE FINE astronomers, and they worked- out the apparent motions of the sun, moon, planets and stars with patient iccuracy. But meteors were quite beyond their understanding.

One of the explanations that the Arabs put forward was that meteors were torches which the angels flung it the wicked djlns who were trying to scale the walls of Paradise in the hours of darkness. Western astronomers did not really solve the mystery until the 19th century. Since meteors sometimes reach the surface of the earth, thoughtful observers might have connected them with the "bolts from heaven" which were occasionally seen and lelt In the daytime. But they do not appear to have established the connection. "Sky stones" have been known throughout history.

The Roman naturalist Pliny recorded one In his time as large as an ox-wagon. To the Orientals such meteorites were sacred, and the meteorite black stone at Mecca, known as the Kaaba, was worshipped long before Mahomet's birth. Compared with the total area of hid and water, the well-populated Parts of the world were insignificant until modern times. Even today the chance of a large meteorite falling on or near a town Is very small Indeed. Millions a day was not until 1803 that the fall 5' a large meteorite was seen in daylight.

This was In Normandy, nd French scientists recovered metal over several square miles, since then it has been worked out that pieces of iron and stone come atmosphere at the rate ol millions a day from at least beyond he planets. Our atmosphere serves many ital functions. It provides us with to breath; acts as a blanket against tha mt.mmM nf hat. anrl ld between day and night; gives a blue sky and beautiful clouds "iswaa or fire-illuminated dark ness during the daytime; enables "ids and planes to fly: and, not is a safety against "meteoric "moardment" from outer snnca. Abcit 80 miles above our heads air becomes dense enough to ocnous resistance to last- moving objects.

As they move at enormmi ud inHiM have their temperatures raised from "absolute zero" (more 'han minus 250 deg. 0.) to white 'st in a few seconds. Most of the meteors weigh less wan a pea, so they are burned Into In a short, time. Yet the glow meter weighing about a jound would be visible 100 miles Indeed most of th "shoot- Our Daily Visitors From Outer Space night try-outs at the Royal Court in Sloane Square and seen how close some of them have to a West End run, how many were better plays than the lucky ones. Ray Lawler put eight or nine plays away In a drawer before the Elizabethan Theatre Trust to risk some of its funds on The Doll.

The same organisation has helped the- Union Repertory Company to rescue Vance Palmer's play, Prisoners', Country, from, the oblivion which seemed to be its fate, and staged' it at the same trial house, the Union Theatre. Since he made his name by his novels and short stories, Vance Palmer is seldom associated' with the stage and I have never seen one of his plays performed before. But he had the stage very much tn mind, like many other writers who earned their bread in other fields of literature. For something like 40 years he tried his hand at writing for the stage, and in the early 'twenties' he joined with Louis Essen In a venture named Pioneer Plavers. His may Happy Family dates from 1922, and the list which follows it includes even a radio adaptation of one of his short stories, The Sea Hawk.

As far as I know, Prisoners' Country was his It Is the work of a man who had thought hard about the theatre. Who had seen that the discursive methods of the novel had to be cut away so that the underlying conflicts existing between characters can be exposed in a series of ascending climaxes. Vance Palmer was a practical writer, a man devoted to the craft, and free from the slapdash approach of the dilettante. So no doubt John Sumner is right pointing out in a programme note that if the author had lived he might have made some changes when he saw his manuscript taking shape on the stage. This is standard practice in tne tneatre (witn or without the' author's consent), and the best established playwrights will still get busy at rehearsal, hacking and rewriting to sharpen an effect, tauten the action or make a point clearer to the The last scene of.

The Doll, for Instance, changed shape between its first and second productions. To be a good playwright it is not necessary to be weaned on to greasepaint like Coward; Maugham and Wilde are examples, of writers who turned tne tneatre ana tamed it successfully, seemingly without effort. But we have no comfortable traditions of stage writing to rely on; Australian playwrights do not simply write plays; each one seems to be striving lo write an Australian play, a play which will establish a method of bringing our way of living on to the stage. The local stamp may He in the setting and the flavor, as they do In The Doll, or it may be the central theme of the play, as It Is in Richard Beynon's The Shifting Heart. Journalism, not to be imitated by startlng handle of a very reluctant car.

Although the advice to fire the reader's imagination quickly may be a sound one even to a beginner. It is fraught with danger to any-writer. For he must be sensitive t0 dnguSS betw an opening which is crisp and neat and one which Is merely a cheap flash. Some of the most celebrated essays In our language begin by diving in. Thus Bacon's essay on Truth: 'What is truth said Jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Or, again, on Revenge: "Revenge is a wild kind of Justice." And it is Bacon who wrote what is almost certainly the finest opening in our language.

His essay on Gardens begins: "God Almighty first planted a garden." In all these cases Bacon- goes back into history for his keynote, but he never lingers in the past. The essay on Gardens continues: "And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures." It is to be observed that after his deep and clean dive straight into his subject he comes quickly to the surface again, and we see exactly where he is going. G. K. Chesterton, most masterly of essayists, Tarely failed to attract irresistibly with his first words.

People still skim through the volumes of his collected essays for the sole pleasure of sipping his first lines, which often present his most stimulating paradoxes. An Example For example we can take the opening sentences of The Thing: "It taxes tnree to mane a quarrel, There is a need for a peacemaker. ine iuu potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until- a friend of both parties tactfully tries to neai tne oreacn. Chesterton was always determined to lay his readers Immediately under his spell. Few will ever forget the beginning of Orthodoxy: "Thoroughly wordly people never understand even the world; they On any night when the sky is clear a careful observer will soon see some "shooting stars," for they "fall" at an average rate of 20 an hour.

Every educated person today knows that. they are really fragments of metal from outer space, more correctly called "meteors," which have become incandescent in. the edrth's atmosphere. Once these "shooting stars'- mystified and terrorised us; now we are chiefly interested in them as one of the hazards of space flight. MAKING A GOOD BEGINNING J.

B. Priestley begins an essay On Beginning in this striking manner: difficult it is to make a I speak of essay-writing, an essentially virtuous practice, and not of breaking the Ten No one who has any sense of literary art has ever sat down to write with- out being acutely conscious of the importance of his opening words. It lies with the first few sentences to arrest attention, to capture interest, i to strike a keynote. 1 HE PROBLEM OF THE Beginning anects men oi and struggling school pupils alike. Today, good stylists, xneir opening sen-letters fences remind one of the laborious efforts of a motorist swinging the An even larger crater, filled with water and very considerably -wea thered, has been located in northern Canada.

It Is seven miles in It is much easier to recognise these craters from the air, and many more will eventually be discovered, so shallow that they are not noticeable from the surface. By far the most dramatic fall of meteorites in historic times occurred in northern Siberia in 1908. Owing to communication difficulties and the Russan Revolution, a full investigation was not made until 1928. rely altogether on a few cynical maxims that are not even true." His essay On Lying in Bed begins in this unforgettable way: "Lyinj in bed would be an altogether perfect and supremo experience if one only had a colored pencil lonj enough to draw on the Moby Dick Novelists were once permitted ta send a few pages in "warming up." Indeed, Scott and Thackeray were even allowed a few chapters. But more recent writers of Action are not so backward in coming forward.

Moby Dick, for example, puts th reader on most Intimate terms with the hero in the first three words: "Call me Ishmael." "Gone With the Wind" Is a very long novel that has been made into a very long film. But the authoress loses no time in introducing us to the heroine: "Scarlet O'Hara wm Zmm Professor Kullk found that meteorites weighing altogether 100,000 tons had devastated 300 square miles of forest land. If these had fallen on a large city it Is possible that not a single inhabitant would have survived. As it wa3, no one was living in the area. From' where do meteors come Some undoubtedly belong, to the solar system, either Intimately or with great sweeps into outer space, in the manner of comets.

In August there is a regular storm known as Perseids, and in November another known as the Leonldes. These certainly have orbits around the sun. Other meteors may be attached to planets. Some appear to be associated with comets-, also a part of our solar system. But some astronomers believe that the main swarms drift in from the dark, silent tracks of the universe.

These are visitors from infinity, whose vast numbers, fortunately, do not seem to be a bar to space travel. crater was made by a meteorite ago. It is a mile wide. not beautiful, but men seldom realised It when naiieht. charm as the Tarleton twins were." One of the best, "novel, tsi Am era during the senond wnrM- aroK am a lng stars" cease to exist 40 miles above the earth's surface.

A reliable estimate puts the "meteorite shower" (perhaps "deluge" would be a more appropriate term) at 20 million each day. All of them reach the earth's surface eventually, if only as dust. But if meteors average only 14 oz. in weight, adding tons ra tne earth's mass every year, it would still take 800 million years for a layer one inch thick to accumulate over the earth's surface I lame meteors may escape complete combustion In the few seconds taken to traverse our atmosphere, ana some oi mem uw the surface In a manner unmis-toiroMo tn those nearby. Meteorites have been collected from all over the world, one in America weiu 37 tons, and was brought from Greenland by Peary, the Arctic explorer, In 1894.

The very largest naturally. penetrate hundreds of feet below tne suriace, aim ever buried. Although many recovered meteorites are of mixed composition, not a few are of the purest iron. Here we have a direct connection between astronomy and the story of man. It Is almost certain that the first Iron to be discovered and worked in primitive times was from meteors.

No wonder iron was first regarded as a precious, heaven-sent metal. During Its long history, it is almost certain that the earth has been struck by some enormous meteorites. The craters of the moon, which Is unprotected by an air-blanket, must have been caused by meteorites. The moon has no ram, wind, or vegetation, so that there has been no "weathering" of the colossal scan made upon impact. Arizona By contrast, our planet has been subject to the most violent surface changes and continuous weathering, so that meteorite craters havs mistly suffered obliteration.

Nevertheless, one prodigious cavity can be plainly seen in Arizona, where weathering has had no time to efface It Rn from the Arizona's 6raSr closely resembles a lunar scar, it more than ever before, first im pressions may determine the success or failure of the whole. Robert Lynd wrote in his essay The Good Beginning: "There are some authors who seem to regard catching the reader's atten- tion at the very outset as a vice of U.4 Vvif thai must have welched on John Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down." It plunges straight into Its story with staccato speed: "By ten-forty-five It was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished." Not the least adept at beginnings is P. G. Wodehouse, whose brilliance as a stylist Is often forgotten In tha excitement of his humor.

could be better in Its way than the opening of "The Luck of the "Into the face of tha young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnlflque at Cannes there crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hang-dog look which announces that an Englishman la about to talk French." classroom "opening Slm? lmaffnry essays or rt lnes of es5aw on named subjects or novels on snecifted The writer will nofSJ forget a recent "winner" in th murder" Cynthia Montague-Stapleton was li Her body was in the tub; her h5 was in the wash-basin." 1 I "('- Meteor Crater (sometimes called Devil's Bowl) In This million tons at least 7.00 years.