AustLit

'Australian listeners will be forcibly reminded of the fact that Australian writers can write radio plays. The Australian Broadcasting Commission [ABC] is staging and Radio Drama' Week, on every night of which, a play written by an Australian' author will be produced at one of the studios and relayed to the other States. Each of the Eastern States will take its turn to provide the performance' ('Radio-Drama Week,' p.3).

The plays, place of performance (Eastern States) and broadcast order were:

1. Eureka Stockade (Barclay) Sydney, 2FC; 19 April.

2. Sending Granny Off (Simpson) Hobart, 7ZL; 20 April

3. Hester Siding (Turner) Sydney, 2FC; 21 April

4. The Black Horse (Palmer) Sydney, 2FC; 22 April

5. The Mingled Yarn (Barclay) Brisbane, 4QG; 23 April

6. The Footsteps After (Porter) Melbourne, 3LO; 24 April

7. The 25th of April (Hill) Melbourne, 3LO; 25 April

'In selecting the plays,' writes L. C. Rees, the ABC's Federal Play Editor, 'It was preferable that they should be essentially Australian. By that, I do not mean a self-conscious insistence on backgrounds in which koalas, boomerangs, billabongs, sheoaks, drovers, cricketers, gins, waratahs, surf beaches, scrubber cows, and big timber are prominent. Such atmospherics do not make a play Australian. What we rather looked for was a work which seemed to be written sincerely, eloquently, and basically out of a personal experience of Australian conditions, a play which might in its material be similar to any number of oversea plays (since the material of life is much the same everywhere), but which in Its method, temper, and outlook stood on its own legs, was free from derivation, either conscious or unconscious. A hard thing about which to lay down the law, but you know it when you see it' ('Australian Radio Drama Week,' p.6).

In its 'Radio Drama Week' article, Brisbane's Telegraph noted that the ABC was not suggesting that 'all of these plays [were] masterpieces but, with the exception of Vance Palmer's adaptation, all of the stories to be presented show the growing power of Australian writers in original work' (p.3). The Sunday Mail also suggested:

While it is little use pretending that there are as many listeners to radio plays as there are to the musical forms of broadcast entertainment, Radio Drama Week should do much to swell the growing body of listeners to whom the broadcasting of plays and dramatic sketches stand out among other programme items as important and notable ('News About Radio,' p. 28).

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