AustLit

An adaptation of an episode from Ralph Rashleigh.

Radio version of Arthur H. Adams's play, adapted by Edmund Barclay.

According to the Age:

Premier William Power's career faces ruin when, on the eve of the introduction of a bill aimed against big land owners, it is discovered that Mrs. Pretty, a young widow, and one of the land owners likely to be affected, had spent the night In the Premier's office — the night when he himself had not gone home.

Source:

[Radio guide], The Age, 1 March 1951, p.3.

A romance of the gold rush.

'The Meeting of the Waters has been specially written for Anniversary Day by Edmund Barclay. It introduces the listener to a typical Australian family celebrating the Aniversary Day [sic] holiday.

'There is Grandad, a gentle-voiced, imaginative old man who glories in Australia’s colourful past, but is still vitally interested in her future; there is Mum, who lost her husband in World War II; there is Glenny, her younger son, still very much the schoolboy; and Douglas, her elder son, a young man in his early twenties, who is overjoyed because he has just landed a job as a surveyor on the Snowy River Scheme. Daphne, Douglas’ pretty but spoiled girl friend, is at first petulant when she learns that Douglas is going so far away to work.

'Her father has already offered him a good job. But Grandad, with his tales of the havoc wrought in the past by drought and flood, makes her see that Douglas will be taking part in a scheme that will help people create a happier and more prosperous Australia in the future.

'Australia’s past, present, and future are skilfully linked in this appealing play by a well-known Australian author.'

Source: 'The Week's Plays Over the ABC', ABC Weekly, 21 January 1950, p.26.

Little is known about the plot of this radio play.

A radio adaptation of Henry Handel Richardson's novel.

Described in radio guides as a mystery thriller, the play takes place in a small English village where eclairs are a popular treat.

Described in contemporary radio guides as 'a romantic comedy of other days.'

'Madame Curie, in collaboration with her husband, Professor Pierre Curie, was the discoverer of radium, a discovery which revolutionised many fundamental scientific theories and brought relief to suffering thousands. This play deals not with radium itself so much as with the story behind it all. It is a human story of love and hope arid triumph, of suffering and of penury, and of a final happiness that was shattered by a brewer’s dray. Marie Curie gave much to the world; perhaps no single person has given more. In return, the little which she sought for herself was taken away.'

Source: 'Play about Marie Curie', ABC Weekly, 5 February 1949, p.10.

'The fact that the British and the Australians at the Dardenelles in 1915 were repeating in the same theatre of war the deeds of the Greeks who beseiged Troy, as told in Homer's immortal 'Iliad,' has been noted a hundred times in modern literature. To Edmund Barclay, however, has fallen the honour of conceiving a 'fraternisation' of the ghostly heroes of old Troy with the spirits of the Anzacs who fell at Gallipoli. Mr. Barclay has written a radio-play in which the characters are a Trojan and a Grecian of some dim past B.C., and an Anzac, a Tommy, and a Turk of 1915. The wraiths of old time and of yesterday 'compare notes,' evidencing the same human nature, the same patriotic ideals, the same devotion to duty— and, perhaps the same sense of frustration.'

Source:

'Gallipoli and Old Troy', Illawarra Mercury, 21 April 1939, p.7.

'IN this, one of his best-known and more popular radio plays, Edmund Barclay takes the story of a girl, a natural aristocrat, who escapes from her own vulgar domestic setting and becomes the model for a rising portrait painter, Arthur Gride.

'The play is the first among those outstanding A.B.C. plays chosen for revival in the Jubilee Year.

'Though in general Arthur Gride is part of a fashionably arty set, he soon falls in love with Mary, whose inward as well as outward beauty has in spired him to paint the picture of his life and the “art sensation of the year.” There is sadness behind the face he portrays.

'“My life?” says Mary when Arthur begins to probe. “That’s just like this tattered glove I’m wearing isn’t it? The tattered glove you won’t let me mend.”

'The outcome of the relationship is unfolded with skill and feeling by Barclay in a story which was inspired by his looking at a famous painting, The Girl With the Tattered Glove, now hanging in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

'Barclay makes it clear, of course, that his reconstruction of the events leading to the painting of the picture is quite imaginary.'

Source: 'The Girl with the Tattered Glove', ABC Weekly, 30 December 1950, p.26.

'The story, written by Edmund Barclay, concerns the bitter fight between spies in Singapore and the British Secret Service. Leading character in the story is the Hon. Roger Milray, known to his friends as “The Egg,” and generally supposed to be the world’s prize ass. Glamor is supplied by American spy-girl Glenda Hendry, and the sinister touch by her associate, Mister Mee.'

Source: 'Thrills', Wireless Weekly, 30 December 1938, p.9.

Following the popularity and critical acclaim of their 1937 radio series As Ye Sow, Edmund Barclay and producer Laurence H. Cecil embarked on another ambitious historical project, Into the Light, 'a serial romance of the middle ages.'

'The serial begins in England in the year 1500 when the country still cowered exhausted from the brutal wars of the Roses, which, with the earlier plague of the Black Death, had spread a shroud of misery and fear over the land. Meanwhile the world around her was passing through changes more momentous than anything it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of the Roman Empire...' ('New Barclay Serial,' p. 9).

The first episode in the weekly series went to air on Monday 7 February 1938.

Known episode titles are:

• 1. The Black Monk
• 2. Burned at the Stake
• 3. The Crooked Smile
• 4. Doom Comes to Chilton
• 5. The Runagate Princess
• 6. Catherine Must Choose
• 7. The Wide Wide World
• 8. Cross or Crescent?
• 9. A Gentleman of Spain
• 10. Desert Justice
• 11. The Rogue Magnificent
• 12. Mona Lisa
• 13. Brother of Mankind
• 14. Trifles Make Perfection
• 15. Master of Italy
• 16. Paid in Full
• 17. Venetian Carnival
• 18. Catherine's Country
• 19. The New World
• 20. The Vast Unknown
• 21. Fountains of Youth
• 22. Slaves of the Lamp
• 23. Echo and Shadow
• 24. Aztec Empire
• 25. Onwards
• 26. Westward Ho!
• 27 Twilight of the Gods
• 28. Heresay
• 29.
• 30.
• 31. Rebellion
• 32. Never Again
• 33. The Philosopher's Stone (final)

'The story treats of Peter Lacklove's pilgrim search for a talisman at whose touch men become, as gods. The period of the serial is the end of the Middle Ages and historical characters who enter into this particular, episode Include Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, La Giaconda and Cesare Borgia' (Leslie Rees. 'We Shall Have Drama', p. 6).

The Huon and Derwent Times (Tasmania) provides additional insight into the play:

Lacklove, whose hopes for the formation of an Italian Utopia appeared almost to have been granted at one stage, receives a sudden check in his negotiations with My Lord Sesare Borgia, Duke of Romagna, who has been endeavoung to absorb the Republican city of Florence. Because of the machinations of a vindictive woman, Peter's ideals are crushed but, undaunted, he journeys to Venice in furtherance of his quest for the fabled philosopher's stone' ('National Broadcast Features: A True Pilgrim,' p. 2).

'Set in the South Pacific. Daubeney Carshott goes to Thursday Island to dive for pearls to present to Stella Raff, with the hope of winning her hand. He meets Craig, another diver and eventually they realise they are both pearl-diving for the same girl.'

Source: British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/40918). (Sighted: 11/9/2013)

Described in most radio programme guides as 'an Australian saga,' the Courier Mail (Brisbane) records that the play 'reviews the influences that have affected the development and the progress of the continent for a century and a half" (4 January 1937, p.15).

Known episode titles are:

• 1. Seed Time
• 2. Wavering
• 3. Crossing the Rubicon
• 4. Tillage
• 5. The First Australians
• 6. The Golden Fleece
• 7. Govenor Bligh
• 8. Over the Mountains
• 9. Broadacres
• 10. Gilbert the Second
• 11. Reap in Joy
• 12.
• 13. Evensong
• 14. The New Era
• 15. The Gold Rush
• 16. The Eureka Stockade
• 17. Ploughshares into Scales
• 18. Sydney-Siders
• 19.
• 20. Town and Country / or Black Wednesday
• 21. Reaping Iniquity
• 22. Many Waters
• 23. The Rift
• 24. Black Wednesday
• 25. The Last of the Old
• 26.
• 27.
• 28.
• 29. Prelude to War