Aussie Playwrights Before Streaming Won
Share
- David Williamson's The Removalists premiered at La Mama Theatre, Carlton, in 1971 and won the Australian Writers' Guild Award that year.
- Dorothy Hewett's The Chapel Perilous (1972) was banned in parts of Australia for its frank treatment of sexuality and mental illness.
- Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination (1972) remains one of the most-performed Australian one-person plays, a monologue set in a Mallee wheat paddock.
- Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, partly for plays like The Ham Funeral (1961), though his fiction overshadowed his theatrical work.
- As of July 2026, Patina's plays collection includes theatrical texts, performance theory, and Australian drama from the 1960s–1990s.
Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn from Life
The must-grab for anyone who wants to understand how Australian theatre mines the everyday. Bowerbird does what its title promises — it's a meditation on how playwrights collect fragments of lived experience and assemble them into performance, the way the bowerbird builds its elaborate nest from stolen trinkets. The book isn't a "how-to" manual; it's a philosophical investigation into the relationship between observation and dramatization, the gap between what happens and what gets staged. If you've ever wondered how Williamson turned a dinner party into Don's Party or how verbatim theatre extracts drama from transcripts, this is the text that explains the collection process — the ethics, the editing, the artifice behind "drawn from life." It's essential reading for anyone who thinks Australian drama is just "people talking in kitchens." Explore our current copy of Bowerbird: The Art of Making Theatre Drawn from Life Browse more Plays books at PatinaThe Illustrated Treasury of Australian Stories
The pre-theatre primer — where Australian voices came from before they hit the stage. This treasury gathers the bush ballads, coastal yarns, and Outback tall tales that fed into Australian theatrical language decades later. You can trace a direct line from Henry Lawson's laconic humour and Banjo Paterson's rhyming fatalism to the dialogue rhythms in Williamson and Hibberd — the deadpan punchlines, the understatement, the way a character will crack a joke about dying of thirst. The illustrations are pure nostalgia (sun-bleached eucalypts, men in Akubras, the visual shorthand of "Australian-ness"), but the stories themselves are tougher than the packaging suggests. They're about drought, isolation, class resentment, and the gap between what the land promises and what it delivers. If you want to understand why Australian plays sound the way they do — why the rhythm is different from British kitchen-sink drama or American realism — start here. Explore our current copy of The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Stories Browse more Plays books at Patina Australian theatre's golden age — roughly 1968 to 1985 — happened because writers stopped apologizing for sounding Australian. Williamson wrote arguments that escalated over beer and lamb chops. Hewett wrote women who swore and wanted sex and didn't die prettily. Hibberd wrote blokes talking to themselves in paddocks, which shouldn't work as drama but does because the voice is so specific it becomes universal. These weren't plays designed for export; they were written for La Mama's 60-seat black box or the Nimrod Theatre's crumbling Surry Hills warehouse. The miracle is that they've outlasted the subsidized theatre boom that produced them, because the voices — skeptical, profane, suspicious of grandeur — are still how Australians actually talk.Where can I buy secondhand Australian play scripts in Sydney?
Patina stocks rotating preloved copies of Australian play texts, performance theory, and theatrical criticism — scripts from Williamson, Hewett, Louis Nowra, and others surface regularly. We're based in Sydney and ship Australia-wide, so you don't need to hunt through Newtown's disappearing bookshops to find a dog-eared copy of The Removalists. The collection turns over constantly; what's on the shelf this month reflects what estates and theatre-school graduates are clearing out.
Why is David Williamson's work still relevant in 2025?
Because Williamson writes the specific anxieties of Australian middle-class life — status paranoia, cultural cringe, the gap between public egalitarianism and private ambition — and those haven't changed, they've just moved platforms. The characters in Don's Party (1971) arguing about Whitlam aren't that different from your relatives arguing on Facebook in 2022; the social dynamics are identical, the medium shifted. Williamson's plays age well because they're behavioural studies, not issue plays. The issues date; the behaviour persists.
What's the difference between Australian plays and British or American drama from the same period?
Australian drama in the 1970s was allergic to both British decorum and American self-importance. Williamson's characters don't deliver speeches, they interrupt each other; Hewett's women don't suffer nobly, they fight back messily; Hibberd's monologues are anti-theatrical, they resist "performing" even as they're performed. The rhythm is flatter, the humour darker, and there's a persistent distrust of anyone trying too hard to be articulate. It's drama that sounds like eavesdropping, not like literature.
Are Australian play scripts hard to find secondhand?
Harder than novels, easier than you'd think. Currency Press (founded 1971) published most of the major Australian playwrights in affordable paperback editions, so copies circulate — they just don't last long on secondhand shelves because theatre students and amateur companies snap them up. Patina's plays collection includes scripts that come through estate sales, university clear-outs, and closed theatre libraries. If you're hunting for a specific Williamson or Hewett title, check back regularly; these books move in waves depending on what's being staged or taught.