AustLit

A poignant drama centred on Jeanne, a homesick French war bride and her shell-shocked husband battling hardship and prejudice in a drought-stricken Mallee town.

The play concerns Granite Peak, a family run cattle station in the Northern Territory not far from the town of Katherine. A complex family history is at the centre of the story. John and Ellen Carmichael have reared their grandchildren, Kate and Roger, after their son was killed in the same stampede that severely injured John. Roger's and Kate's mother, who lives in London, has been absent from their lives since not long after their father's death. Roger is less embittered by her abandonment than Kate. The play opens with a letter arriving from London inviting Roger to visit his mother and acknowledging that Kate is unlikely to ever forgive her. To complicate matters for him, Roger has fallen in love with Rosie Fegan, a young woman thrust by circumstance upon the mercy of her grasping Uncle and Aunt, publicans in Katherine. A central figure in the running of the station is Charlie, the mixed race Aboriginal man, also bought up by John and Ellen Carmichael, who has graduated as a doctor and is about to leave for London to become a specialist physician. He and Kate are in love but navigating the social realities of the Northern Territory dooms the relationship as he plans to return to the Territory to practice and she would prefer to live elsewhere and avoid the opprobrium their marriage would rouse in the racist society in which they live. The dynamics of race, identity, family and land ownership, and, ultimately, the place of honesty, love and kindness run through the play.