AustLit

Set in the Post Office of the fictional town of Koorora a few years after the end of World War II. A desert settlement of some 67 people that exists mainly to support the building of the Trans-Australian Railway line (which crossed the Nullarbor Plain from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta), Koorora typifies the railway workers' joke that their trains 'stop at nothing.'

Heinrich (Heine) Schafer is the town's new railway mechanic. He is also a new Australian - a German Jew who spent much of the war imprisoned by the Nazis. His arrival in the town creates new tensions - inflaming both anti-German and anti-semetic hatred among some locals and a romantic passion with the wife of Rick O'Hara, the locomotive engineer who befriends him. Nereai reminds Heine of his dead wife. Rick, a free-thinking socialist and unionist, is already questioning his worth as a husband to the much younger Nereai, and believes in his wife's right to determining her own choices. Their decision is not, however, left to them alone. The tensions between townsfolk over the impacts of Heine's presence are a vehicle for questioning and transforming the status quo in families and marriages. The play describes some of the worst traits of racist and xenophobic Australian society of the time.

Characters

PEG 32, postmaster's wife and Nereia's sister

RICK 40

HEINRICH 34

MAJOR HARRY ROBINSON postmaster, and former 'Kipling soldier'

BARTLEY 50, owner of the general store and a 'miserable whining tyrant' 

NEREIA 22 

JUMBO TOLLIS 55, laconic, easy, philosophic - a Lawson bushman

CLIFFIE ROYCE 20, a big hansome lout

PETER BARTLEY 18, under his father's thumb