AustLit

'Catherine Shepherd's latest play is a story of University life, starting with the boisterous good humour of a students' social, but quickly moving on to the drama of a young woman's temporary loss of faith in life, due to too much association with a defeatist minded intellectual. As might he expected, Miss Shepherd sketches in with keen observation the details of a students' rag, followed by characteristically earnest discussion of life, and incidentally gives the very smell and musty-drab colouring of a third-rate lodging- house where .Christina West has her room. "I Saw the New Moon" is a symbolic title. This is a play in which humour and emotional crises alternate; the play ends with a vigorous thrust for "creative thinking." "The giraffe didn't sit beneath unattainable branches and say it was a pity that animals by nature had short necks. He stretched higher and higher in each generation, with the satisfactory results that you can observe in any zoo. We ourselves are mankind. If we, personally, reach for the stars, it is all mankind reaching for the stars."'

Source:

'I Saw the New Moon', Macleay Argus, 6 February 1940, p.6.