AustLit

Set in Sydney during the early post-war years and with a working-class theme, A Hard God explores the trials and tribulations of three brothers, forced off the land and into the city during a drought. The screenplay is one of the first in Australia to present a homosexual relationship.

Telemovie adaptation of Kenna's play about a sixteen-year-old working-class Irish-Australian boy falling in love with his best friend.

'What do a transvestite, an ageing shearer, a retired prostitute and a famous footballer have in common? All find themselves in a cabaret venue late one night after the show – and all are looking for love. Peter Kenna’s masterful and touching one-Act play was first performed in 1975, and has lost none of its bittersweet emotion. By turns moving, funny and terrifying, this play is a powerful record of a time when love could not always speak its name.'

(Source: publisher's blurb)

'Determined to keep her family together after the strain of living for three months at the Endeavour Migrant Hostel, May Parker has rented a rambling bungalow in the Sydney suburbs. The Parkers must now settle down to their new life as ' Pommies Down Under.''

Source: Radio Times, 18 November 1976, p.45.

'The forcefully bullying Gloria flaunted her lover so blatantly before the eyes of her downtrodden husband, Clive, her enslaved spinster sister, Ada, and the neighbours that it was easy for the suffering pair to murder them both quite successfully. But Clive was not so much humble as spiritless, less meek than merely wet, so that before very long Ada almost in spite of herself became another Gloria.'

Source: 'Worms Vigorously Turning', The Times, 6 April 1964, p.14.

'Oola Maguire holds a party every St. Teresa's Day. The guests are the people she has quarrelled with in the past year, and there is only one rule–firearms must be parked in the hall.'

Source: Radio Times, 29 March 1962, p.49.