Apocalypse and After: Historical Visions in Some Recent Australian Drama

The year 1983 saw the premiere of three Australian plays dealing with apocalyptic themes. All use extensive and deliberate intertextual allusion, gaining ironic effect by their juxtaposition of Australian history with past European consensual certainties, be they theatrical classics, high bourgeois art-forms like opera, or the Christian myth. These plays are The Kid by Michael Gow, Sunrise by Louis Nowra and The Blind Giant is Dancing by Stephen Sewell. The work of these writers, along with Dorothy Hewett's and Patrick White's drama and David Maloufs Blood Relations (1987), represent the main achievements of what can be distinguished as a major mythopoeic tradition of theatre writing which has come to prominence in the last half-decade.